Tough Love

by Susan Rice

  Most notably, upon instructions from Washington, I cast the sole veto of the Obama administration to block a 2011 Arab- and Palestinian-sponsored resolution that would have declared Israeli settlements “illegal.” Like each prior U.S. administration for over forty years, Republican and Democratic, the Obama administration deemed Israeli settlement activity “illegitimate” and counterproductive to peace. Committed to doing our utmost to try to broker an ever-elusive Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement, we viewed U.N. intervention as an unhelpful diversion that could set back efforts to press the two parties to negotiate directly and forge a two-state solution. In an effort to maintain international unity, the U.S. counterproposed a softer rebuke of settlements through a lesser legal instrument of the U.N. Security Council—a presidential statement. When the Palestinians rejected that compromise offer and insisted on bringing their resolution to a vote, the Obama administration decided to oppose it. In my White House–drafted speech explaining the U.S. position after the vote, I stressed that “Our opposition to the resolution… should… not be misunderstood to mean we support settlement activity. On the contrary, we reject in the strongest terms the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlement activity,” which “has undermined Israel’s security and corroded hopes for peace and stability in the region.”

  Despite our extraordinary exercise of the veto in order to protect Israel and the peace process, I was surprised to find my statement criticized as harsh and gratuitous by some in the American Jewish community. The expectation that we were supposed to veto the resolution and sugarcoat U.S. opposition to settlement activity struck me as excessive, even though I agreed with the necessity to veto.

  Throughout my time as U.N. ambassador, I was proud to fight hard for Israel’s legitimacy and security. Historically, many U.N. member states have displayed a distinct bias against Israel, stemming in part from their anticolonial orientation. In its worst form, this bias is tinged by noxious, barely disguised anti-Semitism. Along with racism, homophobia, and other forms of prejudice, I was determined to battle anti-Semitism wherever it surfaced in the world body.

  While at the U.N. I was grateful to receive the praise and thanks of many pro-Israel groups for my strong defense of Israel. Better still, throughout my time in the Obama administration, I could always rely on one phenomenal Israeli man to be in my corner: Shimon Peres. Former prime minister and president, founding father, visionary peacemaker, and global statesman, Peres became my cherished friend. I first met him in 2009 at a luncheon in his honor in New York hosted by the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. I spoke briefly at that event, as did he. At the end, he held me by my shoulders, looked deeply into my eyes with his piercing blues, and thanked me for my words and my service.

  Later that year, Peres invited me to Israel to speak at the annual Israeli Presidential Conference, called “Facing Tomorrow.” I began my speech with a little Hebrew, “Todah rabah. Erev Tov”—thank you very much and good evening. I affirmed, “an essential truth that will never change: the United States of America remains fully and firmly committed to the peace and security of the State of Israel. That commitment spans generations and political parties. It is not negotiable. And it never will be negotiable.” After the speech, President Peres pulled me aside to counsel: “That was a great speech, very well done,” he said, “but you must pause long enough to allow the audience to exhaust its applause.” Marveling at my comparative inexperience, I hugged him and thanked him warmly for such kind wisdom from a true veteran. Lesson learned.

  In the coming years, Peres and I met in Israel, Switzerland, and the U.S. He would write or call when he sensed from afar that I might need moral support. Peres, who had met every U.S. president since Kennedy, loved President Obama like a son, and saw in him so many qualities of greatness, as he often told me. He worried about Obama’s security and political fortunes and cared deeply for those of us close to him. He was generous with his incomparable wisdom and experience. Peres was warm, energetic, charming, funny, and, all told, the sexiest senior citizen I have ever known. I loved Shimon Peres like a father figure but can only imagine what a devil he might have been in his prime.

  My first major test at the U.N. came from North Korea. The isolated Stalinist regime greeted President Obama with a ballistic missile launch on April 4, 2009, the day of his historic speech on nonproliferation delivered in Prague on his first overseas trip as president. North Korea has a habit of creating crises to test the reaction of new U.S. administrations. Ours came on a Saturday night, so the next morning after appearing on the Sunday shows, I dashed to New York from Washington to join the Security Council closed-door debate on how to respond. Obama had declared that fresh sanctions on North Korea were needed to build upon the regime of initial sanctions imposed in 2006 under the Bush administration. It was my job to obtain those sanctions as quickly as possible.

  The task was complicated. Russia and China, which wield veto power, opposed any new sanctions resolution, fearing it would drive North Korea away from the (dormant) negotiations known as the Six Party Talks. In the UNSC, Russia and China also argued that the launch did not explicitly violate prior resolutions because it carried a satellite, not a missile. The U.S. view was that any launch using ballistic missile technology, as this launch did, was banned and must be punished. Japan and South Korea, which are directly threatened by North Korea, given their proximity, were deeply rattled and demanded their ally the U.S. achieve a strong result. Their insistence only hardened Chinese and Russian resistance.

  After a week of haggling, we reached a compromise: we would adopt a presidential statement (known as a PRST), a less formal form of U.N. action than a resolution, but still a legally binding one, and use that vehicle in a novel way to impose fresh sanctions on selected North Korean companies and individuals. The statement also affirmed the U.S. position that any launch of any payload using ballistic missile technology, whether satellite or warhead, is a violation of U.N. resolutions and international law. The PRST was a clever threading of the needle that, while imperfect, was satisfactory and afforded me a dry run for the much tougher, more consequential negotiations to come.

  In late May, after formally pulling out of the Six Party Talks, North Korea conducted its second nuclear test, conveniently timed to coincide with Memorial Day. I rushed up to New York yet again to attend an emergency meeting of the Council where, with little Russian or Chinese resistance, we swiftly condemned the North Korean test and agreed to work on a new sanctions resolution. Then the hard work began.

  Negotiating high-stakes, high-profile resolutions under the persistent glare of the press, daily prodding from Washington to hurry up (while trying to manage their expectations), and the near hysterical anxiety of my Japanese and South Korean counterparts, made for a stressful mix. Not even six months into the job, enmeshed in intense negotiations at the U.S. Mission or small conference rooms at the U.N., I faced the toughest and most important test of my early tenure. I had to achieve a strong new sanctions resolution in the face of Chinese reluctance to hit their traditional ally with more than symbolic penalties. The Russians, ever potent opponents, traditionally joined the Chinese position on North Korea; so, the challenge was to move China while keeping our European and Asian allies on board, even as they chafed at largely being kept in the dark.

  As always, my toughest customer was Russian ambassador Vitaly Churkin. When I arrived at the U.N., Vitaly, who started there in 2006, was an experienced veteran and a diplomatic force of nature who variously charmed and intimidated all comers. I was charmed, on occasion, but never intimidated. The two of us fought with legendary ferocity, variously with sarcasm, humor, or just pure venom; yet we also became friends. Vitaly was ever the worthy opponent—razor-smart, a skilled communicator, equally adept as an obstructionist and a problem solver, by turns maddening and great fun. I used to joke with my staff that a victory in the Security Council never felt fully satisfactory unless it involved besting Vitaly.


  He and I tangled over issues large and small, publicly and privately. Vitaly was the only U.N. ambassador ever to object to my bringing my son into the U.N.’s nonpublic sessions. From age eleven onward, Jake loved these meetings and could sit for hours mesmerized by the debates. He was always silent and well-behaved, but Vitaly couldn’t stand the idea of a child in the Security Council. He repeatedly threatened to halt the meetings and insisted on Jake’s expulsion. We nearly came to blows one day after such a session, in Jake’s presence. Vitaly yelled at me, “Do you allow your son to watch pornography?” “Of course not,” I said. He rejoined, “Then why do you let him watch Security Council debates?”

  On North Korean sanctions, at this early stage in 2009, Vitaly was a little more rational than he was about Jake. When it came to North Korea, however, my most important counterpart was the Chinese ambassador. I worked closely with Zhang Yesui on my first of several extended U.S.-China bilateral negotiations over North Korea. Ambassador Zhang is a measured, thoughtful man whom I found to be straightforward and true to his word. Unlike some Chinese counterparts, Yesui had a good sense of humor, an easy manner, and an earnest desire to do business constructively without superfluous bluster or drama. We spent countless hours in closed-door negotiations, usually with a small team of advisors on either side. When we reached the critical endgame, however, sometimes it was just the two of us—a format the Chinese typically avoid with Americans, preferring the protection from Beijing that a note taker provides.

  As became a pattern over the coming years, the negotiation began with me presenting an ambitious menu of proposed sanctions and demanding that China accept them. China would balk, and after days of internal negotiations in Beijing, come back with a meager counterproposal. I would dismiss their offer as wholly inadequate and press for many of the most important measures on our original list. Days later, they would counter. And so on, until either we reached an acceptable outcome that Washington believed substantially increased the pressure on North Korea or fell short. If it fell short, and I felt I could not get any more out of the negotiation in New York, I had two tactical options: erupt with the Chinese ambassador in frustration and threaten to take a U.S.-drafted resolution straight to the UNSC and dare China to veto it (something it never wants to do on North Korea); or, I could ask President Obama to call the Chinese president and press our position at the highest level. If the first move failed, the latter course usually yielded some incremental give from Beijing, often enough to get us over the finish line.

  This pattern repeated itself as we negotiated three major North Korea sanctions resolutions during my tenure. Each new resolution was harder and took longer to obtain than the last, as it had to exceed the previous in how much added pain it imposed on North Korea. China is North Korea’s major trading and diplomatic partner, so each additional turn of the screw also adversely affected Chinese banking or economic interests and required difficult consensus building in Beijing.

  However, this early North Korea negotiation was my most challenging. There had not been new U.N. sanctions imposed on North Korea since the first round in 2006. The Japanese and South Korean ambassadors were nervous, wanting in on the action but able to add little value. The Japanese press corps was in my face everywhere I went for two weeks, such that a DS agent had to get a bit physical with one particularly pushy camerawoman outside our office building. To make matters worse, I was not familiar with intense negotiations with the Chinese. I hadn’t yet discerned the rhythm and style of their approach and how to assess if we were close to collapse or to comity.

  For nearly two weeks, sleep eluded me as I worried much of the night about whether we would get where we needed to with China, whether I would disappoint Washington and fall short in the eyes of my new team. As the deliberations with the Chinese drew out, South Korean and Japanese anxiety grew. I could feel them wondering—Is this new Obama team up to the job? Would the Americans sell us short? Can we trust them? The U.K., France, and Russia, fellow veto-wielding members of the P5, are unaccustomed to being left out of the room in any consequential negotiation. Understandably, they hated being treated as afterthoughts who could be counted on to go along with whatever the U.S. and China agreed. Still, the Europeans understood that the outcome was going to be determined by Washington and Beijing; they would grouse but only balk (perhaps publicly) if they thought we cut a weak deal. More pressure to perform.

  To keep all sides on board, I met bilaterally with each of the P5, plus South Korea and Japan, and hosted occasional negotiating sessions with all those players together. On one such occasion, I invited all six of the other delegations to meet with the U.S. team in our modest main conference room at the temporary U.S. Mission, which we occupied until the completion of our new, more secure building across the street from the U.N.

  In this particular conference room, there were photographs hanging on the wall of every prior U.S. ambassador, in order of their tenure—as is customary inside U.S. embassies. As the difficult discussion progressed, things started to get heated. Russian ambassador Churkin was typically stubborn and obnoxious. The Chinese were hiding behind the Russians, opposing the tough proposed sanctions on our list. And the others were adding little value in moving us forward. Sensing an opportunity to shake up the negotiation and seize the initiative, I stood up suddenly, interrupting the conversation. I moved to my right and dramatically ripped a photograph off the wall. I sat back down and banged the framed photo on the table so that it faced my colleagues as I faux-raged: “We can either do this the nice way or the hard way. It’s up to you. But we are gonna get this done.”

  The photo I had selected was of John Bolton, the most widely disliked of my recent predecessors. All my colleagues at the table knew who he was, and many had had the displeasure of working with him. My stunt first silenced and then lightened the room but made a clear point: I was not playing, and we were not going to tolerate a lame outcome.

  In the end, after barely two weeks, we achieved a milestone resolution, codified as 1874. It strengthened the existing arms embargo, authorized a range of financial sanctions, granted states the authority to search, seize, and dispose of suspected banned North Korean cargo, and froze the assets of targeted North Korean officials and companies. This resolution significantly increased the pressure on North Korea and laid the basis for even more impactful sanctions in years to come. Its unprecedented elements, particularly the cargo inspection and financial provisions, also established a template for subsequent strong sanctions on other countries, including Iran and Libya.

  Drama, I learned, can be a useful negotiating tool, if sparingly employed. More importantly, my intimate dealings with the Chinese over the course of my U.N. years gave me critical insight into how their system operates, what their interests and fears are, and how to negotiate with them effectively. I found that pushing back relentlessly in the face of Russian obstruction and Chinese resistance was the key to success in the Security Council. Particularly as a rookie and the only woman among the P5 ambassadors, I realized that I needed to consistently show confidence and resolve and never let them see me sweat. Thus, with the counsel and support of a first-rate team at USUN, I passed my first major test as U.S. ambassador, while gaining valuable experience and confidence as a negotiator.

  13 High-Stakes Diplomacy

  My first meeting with the Iranian ambassador began in broad daylight one afternoon in New York City but was meant to achieve maximum discretion. Rather than find a quiet corner at the U.N., which would raise eyebrows, or host him at the U.S. Mission, which was frequented by journalists, it was agreed I would visit him at his residence.

  Diplomatic Security dropped off me and Puneet Talwar, the top Persian Gulf expert on the NSC staff, just around the corner from the Iranian residence, an elegant old town house on Fifth Avenue across from Central Park. We walked casually up to the door and rang the bell—as normal as can be. The ambassador’s assistant answered, and the ambassador greeted us in plain sight at the bottom of
the stairs. I stuck my hand out to shake his, as I did scores of times a day at the U.N., but he demurred, awkwardly placing his hand on his chest. Then I recalled, religious Iranian men won’t shake a woman’s hand. The same custom prevails with ultra-Orthodox Jewish men.

  The Iranian ambassador was Mohammed Khazaie, a U.S.-educated former member of the Iranian parliament and representative at the World Bank. In public, he was a firebrand and perfectly apt representative of his neanderthal president; in private, the ambassador was soft-spoken, urbane, and respectful. To establish contact between us and open up the channel, Puneet, who had prior experience with Khazaie, joined me in our initial encounters.

  In the numerous meetings that followed over the years, Khazaie and I met upstairs in his front parlor. Dates, pistachios, and fruit were proffered in abundance. Coffee and tea as well. It was always civil, if formal. After the first few encounters, Puneet stopped coming to New York, and I met Khazaie alone, following up by providing back-briefings to a tight circle of White House and State Department colleagues. Conscious that I would be vulnerable should he attempt anything untoward, I was a bit wary of visiting his house solo, as were the DS agents, though they never interfered. Yet my instincts, which were validated, told me that he would not cross any lines.

  While I came to trust my physical safety in Khazaie’s presence, I was surprised to learn that the FBI did not trust me. Soon after I started meeting with Khazaie, the FBI came to the U.S. Mission to meet with my chief of security and with my deputy, Alex Wolff. They never asked to see me. In virtual whispers, the FBI told Alex that they had seen me go in and out of the Iranian ambassador’s residence and were suspicious of what I was doing. While it is the FBI’s job to conduct counterintelligence operations on U.S. soil and to be concerned about Americans who may be compromised, I was dismayed that they would think I might be among them. Alex told them to buzz off, assuring them that what I was doing was fully authorized. Fortunately, Alex was one of the very few people on my team who was read into this private channel. “Thank you for handling this as skillfully as you did,” I later commended Alex, who laughed when I said something to the effect of, “Otherwise, I would have had the FBI all up in my grill for years to come.”