In the first few years after completion of the JCPOA, contrary to the prediction of its opponents that Iran would cheat, the IAEA and the U.S. intelligence community repeatedly affirmed Iranian compliance. Iran’s economy did not become a juggernaut as a result of sanctions relief. The agreement deprived the regime of the argument that outside pressure—not chronic mismanagement, corruption, and misallocation of resources—was the source of the grim economic circumstance of most Iranians. Widespread protests in the summer of 2017 demonstrated that the clerical leadership was not sitting comfortably in Tehran. Much as the Supreme Leader feared during the nuclear negotiations, the deal had exposed the regime’s vulnerabilities, not erased them.
Meanwhile, Iran continued to export instability across the Middle East, exploiting and accelerating chaos in Syria and Yemen, its forces and proxies locked in a bitter regional competition with Saudi Arabia and other Sunni Arab states. President Obama had always understood that the nuclear agreement would have to be embedded in a wider strategy for reassuring our friends and partners, who were unnerved by the prospect that dialogue with Tehran might someday temper our support for them. The nuclear deal explicitly reserved the option for the United States and its partners to take measures against the Iranian government for non-nuclear transgressions; but it was still tempting for critics to caricature the administration’s approach as constraining Iran’s nuclear ambitions but enabling its regional troublemaking.
Donald Trump came into office with visceral contempt for the JCPOA, which he called “the worst deal ever.” He was dismissive of its practical merits in limiting Iran’s nuclear program, and of the whole notion that there was value in the classic diplomacy of building coalitions and hammering out negotiated solutions, with all the give-and-take they required. His was a much more unilateralist impulse, aimed not so much at a better deal with the Iranians as at squeezing them so hard that they’d either capitulate or implode. Despite the entreaties of other P5+1 players, and despite zero evidence of Iranian noncompliance, Trump pulled the United States out of the JCPOA in May 2018.
I was surprised only that he had taken so long to withdraw, given the vehemence of his views. It was nevertheless a dispiriting moment, after years of effort to produce an agreement in which I continued to believe firmly. I wondered what we might have done differently to better insulate the deal. Perhaps we could have pressured the Iranians longer through the interim accord, the JPOA, and extracted more concessions from Tehran—on the duration of certain enrichment restrictions, for example. But the reality was that politics in both the United States and Iran were tortured and impatient, and it was always a lot harder than it looked from the outside to hold the P5+1 together, especially after serious rifts began to emerge over other problems, like Ukraine or the South China Sea.
We could have done a better job, both before and after the comprehensive nuclear agreement was reached, of confronting the wider challenge of Iran in the Middle East. A willingness to take more risks against the Assad regime after the Syrian civil war began in 2011 would have sent a strong signal to Iran, and cushioned the disquieting effect of the nuclear deal for the Saudis and our other traditional friends. Some of their angst, however, was simply unavoidable. They were deeply worried by the tumult of the Arab Spring, and the prospect of an eventual regional order in which Iran couldn’t be denied a place. But we could have done more to show that the nuclear agreement was the start, not the end, of a tough-minded policy toward Iran.
It certainly would have helped shield the JCPOA from Trump’s decision to withdraw if we had been able to anchor it better politically at home. It would have been harder to undo as a formal treaty than as an executive agreement. In a deeply polarized Washington, however, the two-thirds affirmative vote in the Senate required for a treaty was virtually impossible. The fact that public opinion polls showed 60 percent of Americans were opposed to withdrawing from the nuclear agreement was not a sturdy enough defense.
Trump’s abrogation was another reminder of how much easier it is to tear down diplomacy than to build it. Pulling out of the nuclear deal alienated allies who had joined us in the effort for many years. Reimposition of U.S. sanctions in the face of opposition from partners further damaged a tool of policy already suffering from abuse, driving other countries to lessen reliance on the dollar and the U.S. financial system. It also betrayed an obsession with Iran that exaggerated its strategic weight and undermined larger priorities like rebuilding alliances or managing great power rivals.
Trump’s demolition of the Iran deal was a further blow to our own credibility, to international confidence that we could keep our end of a bargain. “Credibility” can be an overused term in Washington, a town sometimes too prone to badger presidents into using force to prop up our currency and influence around the world. But it matters in American diplomacy, especially at a post-primacy moment when our ability to mobilize others around common concerns is becoming more crucial. With its echoes of the muscular unilateralism on the road to the Iraq War in 2003 and the seductive appeal of remaking regional order through American power, the decision to abandon the JCPOA signaled anew a dangerous dismissiveness toward diplomacy. It was exactly the kind of risky, cocky, ill-considered bet that had shredded our influence before, and could easily do so again.
10
Pivotal Power: Restoring America’s Tool of First Resort
DEPARTURES COMPEL US to look backward as well as forward. I was doing a little of both as I stood onstage in the State Department’s ornate Benjamin Franklin Room at my retirement ceremony in the fall of 2014. It was an extraordinarily generous send-off, which left my ego straining at its moorings. The room was packed with family, friends, colleagues, and diplomatic counterparts. There was a video compilation of congratulatory messages from all the living secretaries of state going back to Henry Kissinger.
President Obama made a surprise appearance and spent time with my family. In his remarks, he reminded the audience of his confinement in Perm as a freshman senator a decade before, of some of our other, more productive adventures in the years that followed, and of the unheralded sacrifice of Lisa and the girls and all Foreign Service families. Vice President Biden was his usual bighearted self, working the room with infectious enthusiasm. Secretary Kerry announced the naming of one of the department’s auditoriums in my honor. I was touched by his thoughtfulness—and amused by several condolence messages that my staff subsequently received from colleagues overseas assuming the worst.
As the ceremony continued and the kind words multiplied, I realized that the sense of detachment I had developed as a military brat, and refined during all those years on the move from one post and assignment to another, was fading fast. Lisa and I had taken our oaths of office in this very room thirty-three years earlier—I had known one employer, one institution, and one profession ever since. It was hard to say goodbye, but I was proud of the modest role I played in the larger drama of American diplomacy.
My mind wandered to an even more elegant, and certainly more consequential, setting a quarter century before, to that massive hall in Madrid’s royal palace where I had glimpsed the centrality and power of American diplomacy on full display. It was a memory that seemed increasingly distant, dulled by the realities of a changing international landscape. America’s unipolar moment was, by definition, temporary. Inevitably, our relative power would diminish as other players became wealthier, stronger, and more assertive. In the midst of these dramatic geopolitical shifts, some of which we accelerated with our own mistakes, we also lost our way in diplomacy. At first lulled by the experience of post–Cold War dominance and then shocked by 9/11, we gradually devalued diplomatic tools. All too often, we overrelied on American hard power to achieve policy aims and ambitions, hastening the end of American dominance, deepening the desire and capacity of adversaries to upend the American-led international order, and disillusioning the American public.
As that lov
ely retirement ceremony and my own career drew to a close, I could see that the next generation of American diplomats would have a difficult hand to play. Their challenge, however, became exponentially more severe two years later with the election of Donald Trump. During his presidency, our relative influence diminished further and faster, as did our capacity and appetite to lead. Our role withered, leaving our friends confused, our adversaries emboldened, and the foundations of the international system we built and preserved for seven decades alarmingly fragile.
The administration’s profoundly self-destructive shock and awe campaign against professional diplomacy only compounded the challenge. Its early unilateral diplomatic disarmament, born of equal parts ideological contempt and stubborn incompetence, was taking place at precisely the moment when diplomacy mattered more than ever to American interests, in a world where we were no longer the only big kid on the block but still a pivotal power best positioned to lead the world in managing the problems before us.
The window for defining a strategy for a changing international landscape, and America’s pivotal role, is slowly closing—but it is by no means shut. That strategy will require a new compact on diplomacy, one that reinvests in diplomacy’s core functions and roles, adapts smartly to new challenges and realities, and reinforces the connection between leadership abroad and rejuvenation at home.
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WHOEVER WAS ELECTED president in 2016 would have had to contend with a complicated set of dilemmas rooted in both a rapidly shifting international environment and a disaffected domestic mood. Donald Trump didn’t invent them, nor could Hillary Clinton have avoided them. As Americans went to the polls in November 2016, theirs was a world in the midst of historic transformations, which would strain the capacity and imagination of any new administration.
The reemergence of great power rivalry was in some ways a return to a more natural state of international affairs than the bipolar contest of the Cold War or the moment of American dominance that followed. Yet it carried complex risks and trade-offs, for which American statecraft was out of practice. China’s ambition to recover its accustomed primacy in Asia had already upended many of our comfortable post–Cold War assumptions about how integration into a U.S.-led order would tame, or at least channel, Chinese aspirations. President Xi Jinping was flexing his muscle not only in Asia but all the way to the gates of Europe and the Middle East. Our traditional allies in Asia, as well as new partners like India, were taking notice and adjusting their strategic calculations—raising regional temperatures and increasing uncertainties.
China’s dynamism, and that of the broader Asia-Pacific region, only highlighted further the struggles of Europe—beset by internal political crises and external pressures, including from a resurgent Russia. Putin continued to punch above his weight, exploiting divisions within Europe, settling scores in Ukraine and Syria, and sowing chaos beyond his wildest ambitions in the American elections.
Alongside these great power frictions, crises of regional order continued to bubble, products of both the strengths of local competitors and the weaknesses of failing states. The Middle East remained best in class in dysfunction and fragility. No longer the global energy player it once was, no longer able to sustain its rentier economies, no longer able to camouflage its deficits of opportunity and dignity, much of the Arab world teetered on the edge of more domestic upheavals, with extremists eager to prey on its vulnerabilities. Africa’s future carried both promise and peril, with a population likely to double to two billion by the middle of the twenty-first century and unresolved problems of regional conflict, poor governance, and food, water, and health insecurity all looming large. The Americas remained the natural strategic home base for the United States, poised to benefit from the possibilities of a “Pacific Century,” but burdened by inequalities and a limited U.S. attention span.
Beyond the unsettled rivalries of states, and the decaying foundations of regional stability, the old postwar order groaned and creaked, its institutions overdue for adaptation. The five permanent members of the UN Security Council were jealous guardians of an outdated system, and the international financial and trade institutions struggled with serious reform. Meanwhile, the transformative effects of climate change were becoming more evident with each passing season. With polar ice caps melting, sea levels rising, and weather patterns swinging wildly, the implications of an environment badly damaged by human behavior grew more dangerous and immediate. The prospect of half the world’s population facing significant water shortages was a mere two decades away.
The pace of the revolution in technology made the impact and dislocations of the Industrial Revolution look plodding by comparison. Advances in machine learning, artificial intelligence, and synthetic biology moved at breathtaking speed, outstripping the ability of states and societies to devise ways to maximize their benefits, minimize their downsides, and create workable international rules of the road. More broadly, authoritarian regimes used the apparently decentralizing power of technology to consolidate control of their citizens.
The competition, collisions, and confusion that all these forces produced had been building for some time, and their contours were faintly apparent even in the heady aftermath of the Cold War. In the memo for incoming secretary of state Christopher in January 1993, I highlighted the schizophrenia of the emerging international system, with the globalization of the world economy unfolding alongside the fragmentation of international politics. Power balances and relative positions were bound to be fluid, and often profoundly disorienting. “The resulting chaos,” I added, “is enough to almost—almost—make one nostalgic for the familiar discipline and order of the Cold War.”1 A quarter century later, my nostalgia was still under control, but the problem loomed much larger.
The diplomatic profession, like other endangered vocational species during this period of profound disruption, was overwhelmed by existential angst. I witnessed firsthand during the course of my career how the near monopoly on presence, access, insight, and influence that diplomats used to have in foreign capitals and societies was eroding. As a young diplomat in the Middle East in the early 1980s, I wrote “airgrams”—deliberate, long-form analyses that took several days to reach Washington by diplomatic pouch. Senior officials traveled with increasing frequency to foreign capitals, but the unhurried nature of communication kept diplomatic channels in the forefront and diplomats on the front lines, with considerable reach and autonomy.
A decade later, the “CNN effect” during the Gulf War demonstrated the ubiquity of real-time information, and in the years that followed the Internet tore down the remaining barriers to information and direct communication. Heads of state and senior officials across government departments could interact easily and directly, leaving foreign ministries and embassies feeling anachronistic. Nonstate actors—heads of massive philanthropic foundations, civil society activists, and corporate CEOs, among many others—wielded increasing international influence, shaping and funding a wide array of policy agendas. WikiLeaks displayed the vulnerabilities of “confidential” reporting, and social media muddied what once seemed like clear channels for shaping public opinion.
Despite considerable efforts by secretaries of state from both parties, we often failed to adapt wisely to this new reality, letting core skills atrophy while falling behind the curve as new policy challenges, players, and tools emerged. Budgets dropped precipitously after the Cold War, with a 50 percent cut in real terms for the State Department and foreign affairs budget between 1985 and 2000. Secretary Baker opened a dozen new embassies in the former Soviet Union without asking Congress for more money, and under Secretary Albright intake into the Foreign Service ground to a halt. More broadly, the steady militarization and centralization of policy turned into a gallop after 9/11, inverting the roles of force and diplomacy, diverting American power down the tragic dead end of the Iraq War, and distorting both strategy and too
ls.
It is of course true that the chances for successful diplomacy are vastly enhanced by the potential use of force. There is often no better way to focus the minds of difficult customers at the negotiating table than to have those remarkable tools on full display in the background. That was what gave force to Baker’s persuasive skills in the run-up to Madrid, and to Kerry’s diplomacy with the Iranians. “You have no idea how much it contributes to the general politeness and pleasantness of diplomacy,” mused George Kennan, “when you have a little quiet armed force in the background.”2
Overreliance on military tools, however, leads into policy quicksand. That was the lesson of the battleship New Jersey lobbing shells into Lebanon in the early 1980s, unconnected to workable strategy or diplomacy. And it was the lesson, on a far more disastrous scale, twenty years later in Iraq.
The militarization of diplomacy is a trap, which leads to overuse—or premature use—of force, and underemphasis on nonmilitary tools. “If your main tool is a hammer,” as Barack Obama liked to say, “then every problem will start to look like a nail.” Even Pentagon and military leaders went out of their way to highlight the perils of the imbalance between force and diplomacy. Secretary of Defense Bob Gates regularly reminded Congress that U.S. military band members outnumbered foreign service officers, and one of his successors, Jim Mattis, famously noted that cutting funding for diplomacy would require him “to buy more ammunition.”
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