At the end of the evening, Lavrov told me that he would deliver to Hamas our message: “Find a way to accept the Quartet’s conditions.” In an afterthought he asked, “What will you do if they comply?”
I thought about it for a second. “If they do,” I answered, “the United States will have to reconsider its position too.” Only the President and Steve ever knew that the message had been passed. We would have had a difficult decision to make had Hamas accepted the conditions. But it didn’t. Several months later I received a rambling letter from Ismail Haniyeh, the putative leader of Hamas. Perhaps it was supposed to be a response to Lavrov’s entreaty. But it said nothing about the Quartet’s conditions. I let the matter drop and didn’t answer. We never heard any reply at all from Khaled Meshal, the real power within Hamas, who was in exile in Syria.
Though the Arabs refused to acknowledge their support for the Quartet’s conditions publicly, the Egyptians and Saudis made clear privately that they would tailor their aid so that it could not reach Hamas. We’d achieved the isolation of Hamas. But with that came new problems. Gaza, Hamas’s stronghold, would become economically paralyzed, a growing humanitarian concern, and a place of escalating militancy. And the cutoff of aid to Hamas created an opening for Iranian assistance. Though the Palestinians, like all good Arabs, were deeply suspicious of the Persians, a more radical element of Hamas grew closer to Tehran, accepting arms and alms from it and turning Gaza into a terrorist wasteland that would explode repeatedly over the next three years.
A Strategy for the Iranian Problem
THE QUARTET’S CONSENSUS on Hamas was not the only good news of the London trip. The effort to harmonize our policies toward Tehran with those of the Europeans was succeeding. The Europeans (in particular France, Germany, and the United Kingdom) had agreed with us that any further refusal by Iran to negotiate should lead to referral of the case to the UN Security Council (UNSC), requiring the cooperation of the Russians and the Chinese. I was in London for a conference on Afghanistan. The Europeans and I decided to invite Sergei Lavrov and the Chinese foreign minister, Li Zhaoxing, to join us at U.K. foreign secretary Jack Straw’s official residence, Carlton Gardens, on the evening of January 30. This group became known as the P5+1—the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany. Germany, France, and Great Britain had been negotiating on behalf of the European Union since 2005. Britain and France, along with the United States, Russia, and China were on the Security Council. Germany was, thus, the “plus one,” though German foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier preferred the term EU3+3 to camouflage the fact that Germany was not a member of the Security Council. The P5+1 would become the principal international body dealing with the Iranian nuclear problem.
The meeting began with dinner—just the ministers plus one aide each, the restricted participation intended to allow candor and real negotiation. I was accompanied by Nick Burns, the State Department’s under secretary for political affairs, who’d earlier met with his counterparts and reported to me that the Russians weren’t keen to even mention any kind of enforcement in conjunction with the Iranian case.
Jack, French foreign minister Michel Barnier, Frank-Walter, and I had met for a few minutes before the Russians and Chinese arrived. We wanted the outcome to include a promise to refer the case to the UNSC if Iran balked at negotiations. We all agreed that the Russians were unlikely to accept everything we wanted. But if the meeting broke up in failure, we would embolden Iran. At this early stage, the immediate goal was to unite the international community. We were prepared to take less than a full loaf, if we had to, in order to make the first step toward unity and avoid a break in the ranks.
In fact, the Iranians had gotten wind of the gathering and were “working the phones” around the globe to find out what was going on. That would become a familiar pattern. Before every meeting of the P5+1, Tehran would launch a major diplomatic offensive, holding out a carrot of cooperation with one hand and threatening retaliation with the other. It wasn’t very effective. Rather, it usually reminded people, especially the Russians, why Tehran was not to be trusted.
The negotiations didn’t get off to a good start. Before the salad course could even be served, Sergei Lavrov stated the unequivocal Russian position that threatening the Iranians wasn’t an option. The Iranians, he said, had a right to civil nuclear energy under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), and even though they’d been caught cheating (failing to report enrichment and reprocessing activities to the International Atomic Energy Agency [IAEA] for eighteen years), negotiation, not confrontation, was the way out.
I spoke next, Sergei having talked through most of the main course. “You of all people should consider an Iranian nuclear weapon unacceptable,” I said. “You live in the neighborhood. They can reach the Caucuses with their medium-range missile force. Do you trust them?” Lavrov retorted that no one trusted the Iranians, but Russian policy was to provide civil nuclear power for them by building a plant at Bushehr. Moscow would run the plant, collect the spent fuel, and return it to Russia. The Iranians didn’t need to enrich and reprocess—he understood that—but we had to give them an alternative for civil nuclear power and a face-saving way out.
The two of us argued back and forth through dessert, coffee, and cordials—which everyone refused. At one point, Lavrov accused me of hypocrisy when I said that the United States wasn’t trying to deny Iran civil nuclear power. Rightly, he noted that the United States had never accepted the Russian effort at Bushehr. “Would that make a difference to you?” I asked. He seemed caught off guard by the question and didn’t answer. I let the point go, knowing that the United States was prepared to drop its objection to the Russian-built plant. We just hadn’t said so forcefully, though we’d publicly softened our opposition. In fact, we would come to embrace Moscow’s approach as an answer to Iran’s demands for civilian nuclear energy. That shift in policy would strengthen our hand with the Russians and make it harder for the Iranians to claim that we were blocking their pathway to a legitimate program that would have no military use.
Lavrov and I returned to the main point. “Okay,” I said. “You don’t like my idea of referral to the UNSC. What’s yours?” This was a reprise of a conversation that Steve and I had had over dinner with Lavrov late in 2005. He had told us that he worried that pressure on the Iranians might drive them out of the NPT altogether. “Then they will expel the inspectors and we will have no way to monitor the program,” he had said. But when we pressed for an alternative, Lavrov admitted that he really didn’t have one. That had not changed by the time of Jack’s dinner in London several months later.
The atmosphere was getting pretty tense, which always made the Europeans nervous—particularly the Germans. “Now, Sergei and Condi—” Frank-Walter began.
Lavrov cut him off. “Well, your idea in Iraq didn’t work out so well,” he said.
I felt my blood pressure rising. “This isn’t about Iraq, and you know it,” I replied.
Jack tried to calm things down. “Let’s get back to the statement,” he said.
Then there was a breakthrough. “Suppose we adopt two parallel tracks,” I offered.
“What do you mean?” Lavrov asked, and then answered his own question. “Do you mean we offer to negotiate and then plan to take action if they don’t come clean?”
“Yes,” I said.
This back-and-forth between the two of us wasn’t unusual in those meetings, particularly when the setting was informal. It was not that the others had no views, or failed to express them. But Lavrov and I were the outliers. The allies—and, early in the process, China—could accept the terms that Russia and the United States could agree to.
The Russian then changed tack, saying that the International Atomic Energy Agency, not the UNSC, was the proper forum to force compliance. That was enough of an opening, and we agreed that the first step would be a referral to the IAEA, but I laid down a marker that a judgment of noncompliance should lead to r
eferral to the UNSC. In an example of how diplomacy works when foreign ministers are empowered, no one had to “phone home” for approval to the language.
The weary Jack Straw faced the press gathered at the entrance of his house and read a brief statement of agreement. The five of us stood stoically behind him. The scene was a bit surreal, with only the camera lights illuminating the very dark doorway. It was 1:30 in the morning, but the P5+1 had reached an agreement on how to proceed.
The President called as I was packing up to leave London. “You’re on a roll,” he said. “Thanks, Mr. President,” I said. I was really tired and looking forward to that nap on the plane. I thought, It isn’t even February.
We now had a new strategy for the Iran problem. The P5+1 would negotiate to come to a unified position that would be taken to the IAEA. The IAEA Board of Governors would then refer the matter to the Security Council.
The idea of two parallel tracks was also established. This meant that Iran was presented with an offer to talk but a threat of sanctions if they refused negotiations. The United States had levied unilateral sanctions on Iran for many years dating back to the takeover of our embassy in Tehran in 1979. And though we would continue to use the power of our own unilateral penalties, multilateral sanctions—even weaker ones—added to the pressure on Tehran. Once we had a Security Council resolution we also anticipated a “halo effect.” Other like-minded countries could use the fact of a UN resolution as cover to gain the support needed to impose their own national penalties. Security Council resolutions also had a way of unsettling international corporations and financial institutions doing business in Iran and slowing investment (even if it did not end). Future investment decisions would have to take into account the fact that no one knew if there was another shoe to drop. The goal was to increase international isolation of Iran and engender change in its behavior. This strategy would persist beyond our time in office.
The outcome of that first P5+1 meeting was only the first step. Shortly after the meeting in London the IAEA Board of Governors referred Iran’s case to the UN Security Council. Several weeks later, as the diplomacy continued, a headline saying “World’s Top Powers to Display United Front on Iran” seemed to sum up the strategy. Keeping everyone united would be no easy task, and getting the Iranians to respond would be even harder.
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TRANSFORMATIONAL DIPLOMACY
NOT EVERY ISSUE in the first month of the year related to the Middle East, though it seemed that way. I needed to keep advancing the agenda for transformation of the department, where management challenges were stacking up. In particular, I was determined not to produce a budget through the bottom-up logrolling process that was in place. I decided to give a speech at Georgetown University that laid out the reform agenda for State. The speech was a bit wonkish, but the foreign policy community took note, and that was the point.
Referring to the phrase I’d used at confirmation, I talked about transformational diplomacy, focusing on the need to foster the growth of well-governed democratic states. The point was that the work of diplomats should focus less on political reporting—we really didn’t need long cables about British politics since I talked to the Brits every day—and more on deeds. What we needed was an expeditionary foreign service that would work on AIDS relief in Botswana; democracy promotion in Egypt; and women’s education in Afghanistan.
We established a number of American presence posts, which would allow us to place a single Foreign Service officer in a foreign city where we did not have (and couldn’t afford financially) to establish a consulate. This was in recognition of the increasing importance of regions and cities outside the capital, such as the industrial hub of Pusan in South Korea.
I also made a major push to encourage the study of critical languages. Don Rumsfeld, George Tenet, Margaret Spellings, and I launched a “Critical Languages Initiative” to support the study of Farsi, Chinese, Arabic, and other “hard” languages. I reminded everyone that the National Defense Languages Act had done the same during the Cold War to increase the number of speakers of Russian and East European languages. The U.S. government needed to do the same for the post-9/11 world.
In my Georgetown speech, I said hundreds of Foreign Service officers would be shifted from Europe to Asia and the Middle East. Anyone seeking promotion to senior rank would need to gain expertise in at least two regions. I acknowledged the growth in hardship posts around the world and gently suggested that working in Vienna and Paris was not the future of the Foreign Service. That would soon lead to a Time magazine article highlighting State’s new breed of officers, who were dubbed, aptly and affectionately, “the Hellhole Gang.” Among those featured were Anne Patterson, our ambassador to Colombia and later Pakistan; David Satterfield, an Iraq advisor who’d also served in Lebanon; David Welch; and others. Ryan Crocker, who’d been serving in Pakistan and would soon head to Iraq, belonged on the list too. The message was clear: the future was in hard places doing hard things.
To help ensure the State Department was thinking innovatively about these initiatives, I appointed an outside advisor committee on transformational diplomacy cochaired by Barry Blechman and former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Thomas R. Pickering. To assess the Department’s democracy promotion efforts, I convened a similar panel of outside experts led by Anne-Marie Slaughter, then the dean of Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of International Affairs and later director of policy planning under my successor.
The most controversial aspect of the Georgetown speech, though, was the creation of a new office of director of foreign assistance to unify the budgets and development policies of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the State Department. USAID had always considered its mission to be separate from and yet equal to that of State. Development was thought to be a long-term process and—theoretically—free of political and strategic motivations: a kind of U.S. largesse at the taxpayers’ expense.
In many countries, Britain for example, the two agencies were completely separate. This led to bizarre circumstances in places such as Afghanistan, where the British foreign secretary could not direct foreign assistance to support the war effort. Thankfully, in the United States, USAID was not a stand-alone agency, its budget being determined by and defended before Congress by the secretary of state. But there was still a kind of uneasy tension in which the USAID administrator reported through the secretary of state, though precisely what that meant was left a bit fuzzy. I made clear that USAID needed to keep its institutional integrity but had to be subject to the secretary’s direction.
The problem was that the cultures of State and USAID were very different, the latter eschewing the idea that it was involved in “U.S. foreign policy.” That attitude, I was sure, would have come as a shock to taxpayers, and I referenced that disconnect in defending my proposed changes to Congress. While I was a proponent of compassion (as in the President’s AIDS relief effort), I needed to make the point that the United States is not a nongovernmental organization. We can’t simply focus on a single issue at the expense of others. I saw—and still see—nothing wrong with the proposition that development assistance ought to support broader U.S. foreign policy objectives.
The Bush administration was in a strong position to make this case since we had dramatically increased foreign assistance worldwide. In our view, U.S. interests were tied to democracy and good governance, and development assistance was critical in achieving those goals. What good was it to elect a new democratic government if it couldn’t provide for its people? Sometimes the United States needed to give foreign assistance for purely strategic purposes—even if the recipient wasn’t a poster child for democracy. But we wanted those cases to be the exception and not the rule.
I ASKED Randall Tobias, who’d launched PEPFAR, the President’s AIDS relief program, to take the job as director of foreign assistance and, concurrently, administrator of USAID. His tenure was pretty rocky—Randy could be heavy-handed—but he achieved a lot
. Most important, when I conducted budget reviews, the regional administrator for USAID and the regional assistant secretary presented a unified budget. I could finally answer questions such as “How much money do we spend on Nigeria?” without referencing twenty different accounts. And I could make a reasonable argument that our money was going to encourage democratization and development as well as fight corruption—if not always successfully.
A visit to a small credit union in Mexico, where I spoke with a tiny woman receiving a microfinance loan to expand her ceramics and crafts store, or to the highlands of Guatemala, where farmers once living at subsistence levels were now shipping produce to Walmart, made our efforts come to life. The farmers even took the opportunity of our visit to chastise the Guatemalan president for failure to deliver a promised road. Democracy was alive and well in that remote place. The experience fitted my conception of the changed nature of diplomacy. We needed to be involved in transforming people’s lives, not just reporting on the activities of their governments.
I felt even better about those countries that were granted aid through the Millennium Challenge Corporation. The secretary of state chaired the board of the institution that I’d helped the President design in 2003. So much foreign assistance had been wasted over the years, pocketed by corrupt leaders whose wives wore expensive jewels while their people suffered in poverty, ignorance, and disease. The MCC used strict criteria and a process of negotiation to create compacts between aid recipients and the United States. The countries that were selected were certified using quantitative indicators such as governing wisely, fighting corruption, and investing in their people. For countries that did those things well and earned an MCC contract, the sums of money were large: $698 million to Tanzania, $547 million to Ghana, $697 million to Morocco, and $461 million to El Salvador, to name a few. But we set the bar high, and not every country scored well enough to be certified, at least at first. Countries that weren’t quite ready were given threshold awards that targeted specific areas of reform. If threshold countries implemented the reforms and took the program seriously, they could become eligible for a full MCC contract and potentially hundreds of millions of dollars in assistance.
No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington Page 51