unintentional asmr Q&A With Victoria Nuland ,soft spoken interview

[Music] this week on q a our guest is victoria newland u.s ambassador to nato [Music] victoria nuland u.s ambassador to nato what do you find people in this country know about your your your job in the nato organization well brian uh i'm really grateful to you to have a chance to talk about today's nato here with you today i think when when most americans and particularly americans of a certain generation think about nato they think about that static cold war organization bunkered down in brussels which performed its initial mission brilliantly which was to keep us safe from the soviet union i think what they don't know is that today's nato includes 26 countries spanning all of north america and a lot of europe that we last year deployed our peacekeepers and our humanitarian relief soldiers on four continents of course our main big mission in afghanistan where nato's taking over the major peacekeeping role and allowing some of our u.s forces to reduce we are also we also delivered a huge amount of humanitarian relief to pakistan last year our first humanitarian mission we are training iraqi military in cooperation with the coalition some 2000 soldiers trained by nato last year and now we are also working in darfur to strengthen the african union very much in a support and training capacity and we helped deliver humanitarian aid from from europe to the gulf coast of the us after the hurricane katrina last year so nato is a rich diverse community that is providing security in a multilateral way all around the world today and americans should be very proud of it and proud of how it's developing how long have you been ambassador i've been there about a year uh i came last august and what does it mean what's the job for you the job is a little different than other embassies around the world where you're representing the united states to a country nato is still very much like it was at the founding it is a big round multilateral table we i like to think of it as knights of the round table where each of the 26 ambassadors represents their country in an effort to work together to solve common security program problems i'm currently the only the only woman at that table the other countries are represented by uh by by guys so i like to say it's it's me and my 25 north american and european boyfriends trying to figure out how we can together help make make this world a little bit safer and do it multilaterally is it any different do you think being at that table and being a woman uh i think it's i think it's terrific i think you know sometimes as as diplomats women here a little better we're certainly in our families always trained to be consensus builders and nato is all about building consensus consensus among the 26 nations about how to work together how to be safer how to provide security for our people so i think it's an advantage located where in brussels in belgium if we saw the whole operation how many people work at the headquarters uh well each of the 26 nations has its own national staff and then like the un there is a staff for nato as a whole so i would guess at the headquarters there are probably some 2000 but obviously we represent all of our soldiers men and women who are deployed afghanistan iraq kosovo darfur all around the world and we represent our governments how does the military side of this work in other words is there i know the un's got blue helmets how does nato work and how many are there how many how many militaries um you know a lot of people think that nato has its own army that it's sort of sitting out in the parking lot waiting to be called that's not the way the alliance works we are 26 sovereign nations each with our own militaries and when we decide we're going somewhere like afghanistan each nation contributes troops from its national forces so altogether we have you know 1.5 million men and women in arms it's a question of how many we have deployed at at any given time the military side of it works uh very much the same way we have a a committee just like mine of our senior military representatives so if we the the ambassadors representing our heads of state our foreign ministers our defense ministers decide we're going to expand in afghanistan then we throw it over to the military committee and our military experts decide how we should do that and they give us advice and then we bring it back to the political table and we say yes no let's change it this way and then we provide the political support for the military operation how do you pick the secretary general of nato and who is it uh the current secretary general general is a terrific guy a former foreign minister of the netherlands named yap da hope skeffer he has to be he or she we haven't had a woman yet but he or she has to be somebody who truly believes in strengthening that transatlantic community truly believes in binding us together to work well also somebody who can build consensus there have been many terrific and famous secretaries general are our one prior to to yap was george robertson who was a former defense minister of the uk like all decisions at nato uh countries volunteer candidates and then all 26 of us have to come to consensus on who would be best why did you call george robertson the former secretary general one of your mentors uh i first went to nato in 2000 as the deputy at the u.s mission there and george was the secretary general then and a year later september 11th we were at nato headquarters and i think you and the american people will remember that nato was the first international organization to offer support to the united states invoking article 5 of the nato charter an attack on one is an attack on all george robertson was the man at the helm he was the man driving that big round table that day he was enormously courageous and supportive he's also as a diplomat he's a mentor of mine because of his terrific touch with people and his ability to create a sense of common interest and a sense of common purpose he uses humor sometimes he's tough but most of the time he's warm and he's hilariously funny and he also came up with absolutely the best line about nato which is uh to describe what's happened he had a t-shirt that said this ain't your daddy's nato which i liked a lot go back to the 60s when mr de gaulle pulled out uh the military from france what was that crisis about and how did the nato group handle that uh de gaulle decided that he wanted to be politically involved with nato but not militarily that he wanted to go his own way and partly this involved the french nuclear deterrent their own nuclear forces he didn't want to play with the rest of us on on that aspect of things so for a long time the french would sit at at the table that i'm at and that secretary rice is at and that the president is at that political table but they would not show up when secretary rumsfeld and his counterparts for example would sit you know that was in the old days so they would only play on the political side over the course of the 90s beginning with bosnia and then going to kosovo the french clearly shared our security interest in kosovo and in bosnia and wanted to do more with us so even though formally today they are not reintegrated as a political matter into the military structure the truth is when our military committee sits they sit as a full partner when we deploy they carry their weight in the alliance in kosovo they're getting ready to deploy troops to kabul so today it is um more of a political statement than a military reality today where are nato troops right now in the world operating as a unit they are today in afghanistan all over the northern half of the country and they are beginning to deploy into the southern half of the country we will have some 17 000 troops there by the time the summer is over and fighting hard as well as providing lots of support to local governors to counter narcotics efforts to the rebuilding of that country we are also deployed in kosovo continuing to maintain peace and stability at this particularly important moment as the united nations works with kosovars works with serbia on the final status there how many troops now still on the ground there in kosovo some some 16 000 we are deployed both in addis ababa and in al fashir sudan working with the african union to strengthen their capability in darfur we are in iraq right outside baghdad we have a nato training mission training some 2000 iraqi officers the next generation so that iraq can someday provide security for itself and we are patrolling the mediterranean in nato's operation active endeavor which provides uh security and and is a counterterrorism mission to keep the med free from nefarious activity i'm sure i'm forgetting something but those are the those are the big operations and then we have military headquarters around around the european continent what's the command structure in other words who who runs nato from a military standpoint from a military standpoint uh a four-star u.s general always the the tradition in nato is that the political head of the organization the secretary general is always a european and the military head is is always an american and that provides that essential transatlantic link and partnership but down below general jones in some of the subordinate commands are senior officers from all the countries of the alliance basically representative of how many forces they put into our operations i read that there are 37 different countries with military represented in uh afghanistan are those all under nato there are currently 42 nations operating in afghanistan 36 37 one of them may not be military so at least 36 of them are under nato command today and then how many americans still have troops there are they are going to get out completely and leave it all to nato well brian remember there's something very important to remember here the united states is a member of nato so whenever nato is active the u.s is participating in that operation so it's not a matter of the u.s coming out and nato coming in what is happening in afghanistan is as as nato takes over more and more of the mission moving south and then potentially moving east more of the u.s forces will be working under the nato hat rather than under the coalition hat and as we bring more europeans more canadians into the operation we'll be able to do a smaller percentage of the overall afghanistan mission because nato brings us lots of friends lots of allies lots of help as the ambassador from the united states to nato what kind of um who do you answer to first of all i answer obviously to the president all ambassadors overseas answer to the president but my direct lines of authority are to both secretary rice and secretary rumsfeld because this is a political military alliance and both of them come out to nato two or three times a year to meet with their counterparts in meetings that we the ambassadors prepare for them and don ramsell used to have your job don rumsfeld had my job in 1975. somebody has said do you want to follow his career i think no thank you for the moment uh i'm very happy where i am but you as you sit there do you ever find yourself in the middle of a clash between the secretary of state and secretary of defense and how do you sort it out then that is a great question my mission my embassy if you will includes state department staff and defense staff both defense civilians and military staff so we are a small interagency if you will and it is our job to bring state and defense views together and send back to washington a unified view and if we do our job right they don't fight back at home because we've presented them with something that both state and defense can agree to so we're very much a policy embassy if that makes sense when did you first get involved in the foreign affairs i joined the foreign service at age 23. it was sort of a lark in those days i took the exam when i was in college and surprised myself got in and ended up out in china and i thought well you know this is fun i'm getting out away from home i'll do this for five years and that was 21 years ago and where did you go to school i went to brown and i always thought i'd go back to school but i ended up in the foreign school of life instead foreign service school of life what did you learn from china when you were there china was my first tour we all go out and stamp visas the first time out i was there 1985-86 before the tiananmen difficulties it was an amazing time to be there as an american because the society was really just beginning to open some of the economic freedoms that we take for granted now were just beginning to happen i was very young so i had lots of chinese friends and i traveled all around the country and what i learned i think is that everybody really no matter what their cultural background at core wants the same thing they want to live a happy life a productive life they want to have personal freedom as much as they can and they want to get along with each other and that if you listen to people well and you put in the time you can really create a lot of common interest and a lot of common purpose so doing that that street work at the ground level with real people real young people and learning to listen to them i think helped me later as a diplomat did you have any ambition when you were in china starting out in the foreign service to be an ambassador someday no sir i i often i just thought you know i've never really planned this career i've always just said let me do the most interesting and challenging thing out there and what will be will be i've always been interested in foreign policy and certainly security policy but i never sort of said you know if i do x and y i'll end up at z after china where'd you go after china i went back to washington and i worked for the assistant secretary for asia a wonderful guy named gaston seeger who ran the whole asia region for the state department under george schultz and that was a great experience because i was still very young but i got to watch a senior person work on a whole region at once deal with the congress deal with the press deal with a lot of different countries deal with the secretary deal with the president so i learned a lot about how the sausage gets made from a very wonderful man so at that stage after having been in china and back to washington what are you saying about the foreign service or being involved in foreign affairs that you saw as difficult uh what was difficult what about what seemed difficult at that time as you're saying this is you know you begin to have your your joys and your frustrations but being in that business uh what did you learn that was difficult about it i think what i learned that was most difficult was this effort to create a common purpose in a in the big bureaucracy that is the united states government the interagency process to let's all let's all get marching in the same direction is is uh it seems obvious but it's not always obvious different agencies have different different interests sometimes and i also learned i think particularly that first time working back in the building that no matter how much you prepare no matter how hard you work to come up with the perfect policy events on the ground are going to buffet you and it's never going to be exactly the way you plan so you need to be flexible you need to be creative and you need to be able to adjust you grew up in what town i grew up in new haven connecticut what did your parents do my dad was then a surgeon he's he's now a writer but he was professor of surgery at yale my mom was a homemaker and also a music teacher a writer of what kind of writing my dad quit surgery at about 60 and started writing about medical history and ethics he wrote a very well-known book called how we die which it's not the kind of book you can give as a christmas present but it went on to win the national book award and it talks about clinically what happens in a way that's told through human stories and a lot of people i think were helped by that book is his first name sherwin newland and his the title of his book how we die did that have any any impact on you uh he wrote that book in 1984. i think the impact it had on me was not different not that different than the impact that my dad had on me throughout my life which was that you should follow your passion at any given moment even if it's not clear where it's going to take you and if you if you have integrity and if you're speaking to human need and if you are generous that it'll ultimately be very fulfilling and for him it wasn't clear to any of us when he made that transition from surgery to writing that he would succeed at it but he was passionate and he turned out to be extremely good at it and he's also a guy who really believes in giving to other people and i think that's how certainly influenced me to go into the public sector i think what's he doing now he's continuing to write in fact coming over on the plane from brussels last night i was reading the manuscript for his next book which is on aging and it's coming out next year and your mom she's still into the music yep she does she does some teaching and and she's she lives on a a beautiful piece of property and does a lot of a lot of gardening and a lot of traveling she likes to come around the world to visit her grandchildren she's got some in brussels and she's now my brother is in china in shanghai so she likes to go out there too speaking of grandchildren i want to show a video clip of a prior interview that someone you know pretty well uh was involved with he'd written a book he sat in the same chair there let's watch this and get your reaction to it why belgium why brussels uh because of my wife she she's a u.s diplomat and she serves in the u.s mission to nato which is in brussels does that help or hurt you in your work i'd say it both helps and hurts it it helps in the sense that i i benefit from her enormous wisdom and insight into these matters i mean she's a real working professional who gets things done every day at nato she's not like i am you know sitting around theorizing uh it hurts in the sense that i'm not allowed to use anything that she tells me in any way and i write a monthly column of the washington post and i'm always very careful i can never really write about the subject that she happens to be working at the time we have to keep a kind of firewall between us when when we when we talk but but mostly i would say it's positive in the in the intellectual stimulation where did you meet bob kagan i met bob kagan in george schultz's state department he was a george schultz's speech writer and i was a freshly minted baby diplomat and we we had some friends in common and we ended up at a one of those nerdy wonky lectures in the basement of state department and uh and sort of were interested in each other and it went from there where is he now he's with me in brussels he uh he also has a big book coming out this fall so he continues to write out there and he's also starting to work on his next book which is on china so i said to him you can write on anything but europe this time so as a foreign service officer are you supposed to be nonpartisan of course yes you need to be able to work for whomever the people elect and you work for vice president cheney as his advisor on the national security council or on security issues i was his deputy national security adviser now how does that work when you're nonpartisan well i've also worked for senior democrats i worked for strobe talbot for four years uh both when he was assistant secretary of state and when he was deputy secretary of state that's what foreign service officers do we're very much like soldiers we work for whom ever the american people elect and our job is to give them our professional advice and and also to provide continuity so i enjoy that i enjoy um i enjoy working in that in that way do you find yourself thinking the way they do when you work for them or do you just give them advice based on some kind of a generic that you know well obviously you need to understand the mandate from the people that they came in with and you need to understand how they want to interpret it in policy application and you need to then provide advice that ensures that they as an administration and we as a nation can be as successful as possible and sometimes it means saying in the context of a peacekeeping operation well have you thought about x or y or z based on a previous experience that you had sometimes it involves broadening suggesting that the conversation be broadened when they're talking to a certain group of people and you and you know that there are more people who have input that might be valuable um and sometimes it's simply a matter of taking an administration or a group of people who have strong political support but don't know how to make the sausage inside a government and implementing what it is that they want to do you worked for the vice president what years 2003 to 2005. so those those first years when we were on the ground in iraq also got the enormously exciting experience to to work with him when some of the colored revolutions were going on the orange revolution in ukraine and then the the the lebanese revolution so that was uh very very exciting as well nato before and nato afterwards um what's the difference by the way from being the deputy to being the ambassador uh i think anybody who's ever been a deputy knows that uh it's often much harder to be the deputy why is that um because you have to ensure that that all the trains are running on time and and that nothing falls through the cracks and as the boss you're involved in in setting the big vision and in driving that big vision um so uh but i've i've enjoyed both jobs uh this is my yes i've enjoyed both jobs ask you about the de gaulle thing in the 60s what about the most recent dispute among nato the turkish dispute over whether or not nato would protect turkey in the event that they were involved in the iraq war what what happened there i was at nato at that time as a deputy it was a very uh difficult and painful moment the the back story or the the starting place there was that as you know um a number of allies disagreed strongly particularly france belgium germany with our decision that saddam had not met his obligations to the un and that we were going to have to use military force in the context of that war planning turkey a nato ally one of our 26 at the table invoked article four of the treaty which is a request for assistance when it feels threatened it was turkey was concerned that as we moved into iraq the iraqis might use some of their weapons against turkey so they asked for nato support and you know it's one of the sovereign principles of the treaty that if anybody feels threatened all of us need to respond and because some of the nations disagreed with the underlying action we had difficulty getting agreement around the table that nonetheless turkey our ally deserved to be protected if she felt insecure and france uh never agreed to protect turkey so we invoked this other aspect of the treaty you talked about it the fact that france isn't a full member of the integrated military structure which allows the rest of us to occasionally and rarely operate without france and in that case we we did that we used the defense policy committee which is the subset without france of nato to protect turkey and was there any are there any other countries besides france well at the beginning we had some difficulty getting getting a couple of others on board but but ultimately everybody but france came on board because of the fundamental principle of alliance that you have to come to and that's what alliance is you have to come to an allies aid when they feel the need um so it's a very important moment for nato that that we succeed and that we protect turkey how much does it cost to fund nato's operation for a year nato multilaterally as compared to what each of us spends on defense is just a tiny a tiny pittance i must tell you i don't have all the numbers at my fingertips because we have we operate six different budgets there's a military budget there's a building budget there's a civil budget but in general it's a for the united states it's a very very small fraction and we pay we the us are the biggest the the shares of what you pay is based on your gross domestic product we're the biggest shareholder we pay about 22 of nato's bills but the fabulous thing about nato is that you know smaller countries the the lithuanians pay 1.2 percent so they get to um contribute globally uh by paying the share that that is appropriate for their size nation so which of the 26 nations provides no military iceland is a country with no military but they contribute in other ways they provide for example air traffic controllers they're very good at they provide those in in afghanistan and in kosovo they do a lot of the civil military things search and rescue those kinds of things luxembourg which is a country of uh i don't remember some 300 000 people less than a million has a military of a thousand guys ten of whom i believe are in afghanistan so everybody contributes something uh in some way that's what alliance is about go back to 97 when you added the czech republic um also um hungary and poland i'm hungry in poland uh and then since then you've added others yes how many so altogether we have 10 new members since the since the 90s most of the former warsaw pact nations of of eastern and central and what and are you committed as a group the nato group to protect each one of those countries now absolutely once once a political decision is made to invite a country then all the parliaments including the u.s senate have to ratify the treaty again because it is a solemn treaty commitment to protect all those countries that you're taking in so yes so you have estonia latvia slovenia slovakia bulgaria and romania lithuania i can't remember who else you forgot there but uh totally up there who were the first original members and what year did they start in nato 1949 started with 12 countries then then later we we we grow from there across spain and portugal and turkey and and onward so the the wonderful thing about nato is it is a an organic organization it grows with the times both in terms of its missions and in terms of its membership and i've seen references lately to israel to japan to australia i mean it is the north atlantic treaty organization that's right what does all this talk about bringing these other countries in um you know there was a proposal by a former president of spain uh osnar that some of these countries become members of nato frankly our treaty doesn't allow for that as you say it is the north atlantic treaty organization but what our treaty does allow for is uh strong partnerships with countries around the world that share our security interests share our values want to work with us and in fact nato does have partnerships with some 40 countries and one of the things that the us is pushing along with the uk within nato as we go to our next heads of state and government meeting at the end of the year in riga is that we should strengthen our global partnerships we should be able to do more with countries like australia japan south korea with afghanistan with algeria morocco these kinds of countries and even with countries who don't currently have a relationship with nato so from our perspective it's not a question of making nato itself global but it's a matter of nato being able to operate with global partners and in fact we do that today you know some 400 moroccans serve in nato's operation in kosovo we're going to have several hundred australians serving in nato's operation in afghanistan so we need to have a political relationship with those countries too of those two in kosovo and in afghanistan where you say there's 16 000 troops in kosovo and 17 000 in afghanistan right now are americans soldiers are a part of that part of both part of both how many and you know what the percentage is in both cases uh in kosovo today we have about 1800 americans it's the texas national guard at the moment serving very proudly just went and visited them a few weeks ago um in uh in afghanistan the mission is a little bit more complicated because you know nato currently uh manages about half of afghan territory and the u.s led coalition manages the other half this summer nato takes over three quarters of the territory so us has will have this summer about somewhere around 2000 troops in the nato mission but we also have some 10 000 additional in the east which nato has not yet taken over when nato moves east which will probably be later later this year or early next year then all of those u.s forces become or many of those u.s forces become part of the nato mission we talked about you being in china for five years and then back here in the united states what other countries have you lived in i've lived in ulaanbaatar mongalia i went out there and helped open our first u.s embassy out there in 1988 when we first reestablished relations and put up the flag i've lived in moscow i bob and i were together in moscow 1991 to 1993 and i was a political reporting officer and i was responsible for reporting at that point on the government of the russian federation within the soviet union that was the job i was assigned to within six weeks of arriving the pooch against gorbachev happened in that summer of 1991 and you remember yeltsin came and stood on a tank and uh and we were there and my job was to and then you remember that the the white house was surrounded by tanks and some two hundred thousand russians came to to defend the white house from being attacked well my job as a political reporting officer at that point was to go and talk to the yeltsin folks and and find out what they were planning to do and to interview all these demonstrators out there and find out what was motivating them and it's just a terrific terrific time to be there in a time that really gave us a lot of hope in the human spirit when you paint the picture of nato and you go all the way to bulgaria and romania and estonia and latvia and all these countries lithuania then you bump up against ukraine and russia what do they think about this ukraine want to be a member of nato ukraine has wanted to be a member of nato uh as you know the ukrainians just had an election and they're uh forming a new government now and uh um the many of the the politicians who will probably make up this government are very pro-nato and would like to to get on that membership track what's it take it takes a being a strong clean democracy it takes uh besides that it well essentially what happens is we have a thing called the membership action plan so when a country declares its interest in joining nato if the members of the alliance are interested in getting that country on a track to come towards us to get ready we offer them the membership action plan and then we begin working with them to strengthen them politically economically in crime and corruption strengthen their military there has to be civilian control of the military military has to be non-partisan it has to be clean has to be deployable so that it can join and contribute to our missions defense spending has to be appropriate but most importantly that nato application and that membership action process which can last you know in the case of albania and macedonia it's taken some nine years in the case of poland hungary and the czech republic it took you know five years with ukraine it's hard to know how long it would take it gives nato a very strong tool as a mentor and a magnet for positive change in these countries so it's providing a security service in that part of the world even before the country becomes a nato member what about georgia and kyrgyzstan and you know you just go uzbekistan and tajikistan are they interested well the first step is countries got to be interested georgia is the only one of those at the moment who has expressed an interest so we're currently looking at looking at georgia with with with that in mind um i want to just tell you that i don't know if if you know this but nato also has a strong partnership with russia it's called the nato russia council that's my next question is does russia feel threatened by this you know at various times various russian politicians have opposed nato enlargement um but i think the reality of it is today that when the countries on russia's border are more democratic more open more western they are also more stable and they make better neighbors and i think if you look at russia's relationship with poland today where you know a decade ago russia was violently opposed to the notion of poland becoming an ally their relationship today is uh as strong and and workmen like and there is no security uh threat to russia from poland today or at least they don't they don't feel that way but but in terms of nato and russia what we have uh done since the late 90s and we strengthened it some four years ago is created this nato-russia council where the 26 members of the alliance and russia can work together as equals it actually has 27 chairs around that table and we've done a huge amount of good stuff together for example the nato-russia council sponsors uh counter-narcotics training for afghan and central asian officials because we haven't shared interest in stopping the drug trade in that part of the world we've done a lot of work together in consequence management you know if there were a nuclear accident or something like that so it's a very important part of what nato does as well is this work with russia how many troops do we have in europe right now how many u.s troops stationed in europe i must tell you i don't have the exact figure but it is uh down about 70 percent from what it was in the cold war because in those days you know you had all these these static forces so it's the biggest number still in germany biggest number still in germany a lot in in italy it's uh you know 20 25 000 something like that we have been interviewing a lot of people who participated in a movie called why we fight and there are some strong views on both sides of why we fight one of them was our last q a a man named chalmers johnson who's a professor out on the west coast and he said some very strong things about the future i want to run a clip of that and then get your perspective from where you said the third book is done and it's called nemesis the subtitle is the last days of the american republic uh it's to say i don't see the way out any longer that the congress or that is a separation of powers is clearly broken down the president has achieved virtually anything he might have wanted to do in that area i don't think the political system will save us uh the military could conceivably take over they have threatened this but i don't think so for reasons that i think are pretty obvious above all the fact that no enlisted only enlisted men have been convicted in the in the prison torture scandals none of the officers the result is that within the armed forces today enlisted men are extremely sensitive to illegal orders saying you're going to take the wrap for it not us and there's no more illegal order than to take over congress so that the the officers i just don't think believe the enlisted men would would follow their orders today so my wife keeps saying to me come up with something optimistic and i come up with bankruptcy it's that looks like might be the thing that will bring the republic to an attic he painted about and he continued to paint an even bleaker picture if that's possible what's your reaction when you you've been in this government for what 20 years now yeah i i hate to be extreme but the notion that the u.s military would take over the government strikes me as delusional we have and i'm proud to serve in one of the strongest democracies on the planet i think if you look at what's happening in congress today which is a very very vigorous debate about our iraq commitment that is a demonstration of the power of our democracy that we allow folk of all stripes and with all experience to participate in the forming of policy and and that it's fundamentally rooted in this very powerful electoral system that we have i don't know a single military officer or enlisted man or woman who wants to or believes in the notion that the military ought to take over the government i think that they are extremely proud to serve under civilian control and as somebody who works every day in that civilian military relationship it is a superb relationship and it's and it's very very important so um i i feel sad for mr charmers that he's so so negative i i'm an optimist on the united states what is a day like for a u.s ambassador to nato oh a day can be anything from uh going going to that big round table i talked about and having an intense conversation about how we in practice help the african union get stronger in darfur is that open to the public by the way no no no no all these meetings are private yes we have to do them at a classified level so that we can share the intelligence about you know what the ginger wheat is up to what the other players are up to but then after we make our decisions then we then we talk about it and obviously we talk about what we're working on we just don't give the the the detail so so maybe we're going to go to the nack table and do that maybe we're going to have a visit from the japanese foreign minister as we did who's going to come and talk about wanting to strengthen relations with nato maybe i'm going to be down in uh down in paris having bilateral conversations uh with with the french on how we strengthen nato or going on french tv and trying to build more popular support for nato maybe i'm going to be as i will be next week flying down on a c-17 to cape verde to see the demonstration exercise of the new nato response force maybe i'm going to be out in afghanistan visiting our troops and checking how our provincial reconstruction teams are working and meeting with president karzai it's a it's a very rich and exciting life but is people look at you outside they see your u.s ambassador to nato but they see also maybe that you're a pipeline to dick cheney i mean do you find yourself dealing with that all the time uh i i an ambassador serving overseas is first and foremost a pipeline to the president but also a pipeline to the vice president to the secretary of state to the to the secretary of defense that's my job is to help my government understand uh what how europeans are feeling about security to try to create common interest among us and to explain to europeans and north americans my neck colleagues why it is that the u.s feels certain action is needed and and to have that conversation with them about about how to do it so if i weren't a conduit to dick cheney george bush condi rice and don rumsfeld i wouldn't be doing my job what's the biggest problem ahead for nato i think the biggest problem ahead for nato is ensuring that that we continue to fund and support uh all of these missions that we have taken on um because a lot of european governments in particular are not spending enough on security nato has this sort of unofficial floor that two percent of your gdp should be spent on on security and if we don't all spend the money then we're not going to have the equipped and ready troops to go together and then too much of the burden falls on countries like the us where we're currently spending 3.1 so i think maintaining that common commitment that if you want to have security you've got to spend for it and you've got to make the commitment i think that's one issue the second issue is the one that we started with that i think too many people you know an organization like nato a multilateral organization built on democracy requires the support of its people and i think too many uh at too many kitchen tables uh people don't know what's going on at nato and therefore they don't support it they think of it as yesterday's organization when to my mind it's very much tomorrow's so getting nato from the summit table to the kitchen table getting a younger generation committed to what we do together and to the strong multilateralism that nato represents is very important what kind of riff was created in nato around the iraq war and has it been healed um it was very profound at nato over iraq because a couple of our biggest allies were opposed germany and france yes i would say to you and i would say to the american people that i thought it was unfortunate that a couple of countries opposition sort of hijacked the image of europe as a whole for the united states but you know nonetheless the other kinds of things that nato was involved with first and foremost afghanistan but also moving on with darfur and other things continued because we had common interest i think when after the president's re-election when he made his first overseas trip of the second term to brussels went to see nato met with his 26 call with his 25 colleagues and also went to the european union and called for the strongest possible transatlantic relationship i think that really helped the healing process and the other thing that obviously continues the healing is when we do good together and when we can be proud of it together as we are doing in afghanistan how does nato interact with the un and the european union and particularly from a military standpoint how does nato and the u.n when they do their peacekeeping how do we fit into all that that's a that's a great question it's something we're working on at nato because our relationships with the un and the eu have been somewhat ad hoc that said that you know the nato un relationship since the 90s has been very strong remember that when we when nato first deployed in bosnia it was essentially to rescue the u.n because its mission on prefor was beginning to fail we in kosovo where where nato stopped a genocide we ended up working for the u.n thereafter and in afghanistan we operate under under u.n mandates so uh on the ground and all the way up to the political level nato and the u.n need a very strong relationship nato and the eu uh have a more formal way to work together we have a nato eu council where we go and the and sit together all together we're 32 nations because 19 are members of both organizations and we're trying to strengthen how we actually work together on the ground we're together in darfur we're together in afghanistan we're together in kosovo and we're trying to strengthen those linkages so you know effective multilateralism involves not just strengthening your own organization but its relationship with the other major organizations involved do you ever talk about things like the future of china and the military we do what's the take right now you know i think um all of us all the 26 members of of nato and i would say the 32 members of nato and the eu want to see china's rise happen peacefully stably want to see china develop as an increasingly responsible and positive partner in the international community so that's the direction that we're working on together that's the nature of our dialogue with china and i think it's a very positive step that as we work on iran now and the nuclear weapons question china and russia have joined the transatlantic consensus on this very generous offer to iran if it will renounce its nuclear weapons ambitions who takes the lead in the iran thing the u.n nato european union how's that all coordinated the iran diplomacy is is being handled primarily in in a very small channels secretary rice manages this for us with her eu3 counterparts germany uk and france they're operating on behalf of the the european union uh and then in the uh security council context we're bringing in russia and china we're also talking about iran in the g8 negotiations heading towards st petersburg and we also talk about iran at nato although nato is not the instrument for dealing with iran but it's an important instrument for ensuring that we all have the same analysis of the situation you know if you listen to all these different organizations you're talking about how do you keep track of it and again going back to where's the frustration when somebody else is all i mean you know you've got the bureaucratic frustration and all this how do who sorts all this out well each you know each national government has to ensure that it's working well in our all organizations and i think this is this is part of uh you know among the reasons that i'm i'm home this week is to work with my own government on who does what best but you know in today's world with with so many security challenges out there we need the un performing strongly nato performing strongly the eu performing strongly uh the g8 performing strongly and it these things work best when each of these organizations does what it's best at um nato is a very good multilateral security provider security trainer um and and builder of political consensus so that's the piece that i do i want to run another clip from chalmers johnson because he talks about the military and the bases and stuff you said 737 military bases around the world that's the pentagon's count do you trust that no why well i just know it isn't true i mean they don't there's a lot of bases they don't include for various political reasons i mean they don't include adid air base and qatar well that was the headquarters for our assault on iraq but they don't do so in order to not embarrass the emir of qatar they don't include any of the espionage bases we have a wonderful old arrangement with britain so that most of our bases in britain of which there are quite a few are disguised as royal air force bases there aren't any americans on them things of this or so if you if you've got the full count it would be hard to do i doubt that anybody knows the really full count i doubt mr rumsfeld does but he'd probably go up over a thousand defense spending is running three quarters of a trillion dollars a year which we aren't paying for we're putting it on the tab it's being financed by savers in china and japan who ship capital to america the rate of two or three billion dollars a day as you can see he paints a an again a bleak picture he talks about 750 billion dollars a year on defense a bigger defense budget than all the rest the country of the world combined does it feel that way when you're representing this country over there with nato and do they feel that way in europe well the american taxpayer is putting 3.1 of every dollar he or she contributes towards security today i'll tell you as a mom i think it's important to do because we we know that it is a dangerous and difficult time in the world so as an american citizen i am i am pleased that we have the means and the capability to defend ourselves around the world i think as we as we said earlier um it would be a good thing if more of our allies spent at the same rate because that would allow more of them to be more capable and to share more of the burden but that's uh that's what we do all day at nato we try to make that case we try to create ways for all of our defense euros and defense dollars to go further and to create the ability for for more countries to contribute uh better to to our security who has veto power at nato every single country we can't do anything that we don't have 26 nation consensus over so if little luxembourg or little iceland don't want to go to afghanistan we don't go but the flip side of that is that when we do go it has the power of 26 southern governments saying this is the right thing to do this will keep us safe and doing it together is the right way to go we talked about the turkey situation but has there ever been a time where one nation was able to hold up nato from going in anywhere not not from deploying because generally if it it it's very rare that you get to the point of being 25 to 1 or 11 to 1 on a deployment but there have been plenty of things that that we wanted to do that we had to work pretty hard to to bring that last member aboard and you know we we try to keep the confidences inside the room until the consensus is built but uh building consensus is not is not always easy you talked about being a mother how many children i have two kids how old are they they are uh eight and almost ten and how did that work in your career i mean did you have to take a lot of time off and where were you when you had those children well as you saw my husband is a is a writer which is a fabulously flexible and wonderful lifestyle so you know he uh he pulls a huge amount of weight at home um he and he's been a terrific partner i have also at various times taken taken time off twice when my kids were young i i took a year and got off the fast diplomatic track and went and did some writing and some work at the council on foreign relations which were they were very generous to let me do that which allowed me to spend more time at home but there have been some wacky moments i remember uh i remember when i was uh breastfeeding my second one being on uh on a long negotiation with secretary albright and i was and at one point we got off an eight-hour flight this is a little bit uh intimate but uh just gives you a sense of things and she wanted to go right into a pre-brief and i said madam secretary i think uh it will be a good thing if i uh take 10 minutes in the bathroom to to pump here before we go into this briefing and she was terrific about that so there were there were days where i was carrying carrying breast milk around around europe in little bags but it was well worth it what is your personal goal my personal goal i have i have one of the one of the the best the best lives i can think of i i have a job i love and i feel committed to i have a terrific family and i have a a wonderful intellectual partner so i just want to um i want to be a good mom and i want to be a good representative of our great country and i want to make nato as as strong an organization for all of us as it can be what's the normal thing that happened to save you now an ambassador to nato do you go on and become continue to be an ambassador would you come back and work in the state department or will you've had enough time that you can retire uh we i i could retire after this um i i don't know you know generally at at this level it depends on what the the senior people the secretary of state um national security adviser the the president want us to do so uh i don't i generally don't don't think too far ahead i've still got two more years out in brussels and i want to serve them well and and then we'll just see see what's what comes our way victoria newland we're out of time thank you very much thank you brian it's been terrific [Music] for a copy on dvd or vhs tape call us at q a 1-877-662-7726 org q a programs are also available as c-span podcasts [Music]

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Length: 56min 15sec (3375 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 13 2021