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AS AMERICA ACCELERATED its rise to global power more than a century ago, Teddy Roosevelt took the stage at the Minnesota State Fair and drew new attention to an old proverb. “Speak softly and carry a big stick,” he reminded the audience, “and you will go far.” His point was not about belligerence, but balance, as the United States launched itself into a complicated and competitive world. Roosevelt saw clearly the interconnected value of force and diplomacy, the need to invest wisely in both to best serve America’s interests. The international successes of the next century would not have surprised him, nor would he have been surprised when imbalances between force and diplomacy caused some of our most serious failures.
Of course we ought to ensure that our military’s big stick is more imposing than anyone else’s, that our tool of last resort is potent and durable. But big sticks will only take us so far, and we need urgently to renovate diplomacy as our tool of first resort. Its importance in a post-primacy world is only growing, and we isolate only ourselves, not our rivals, by its deeply misguided disassembly. Calculated neglect has already done permanent damage, and the sooner we reverse course, the better.
That will be much easier said than done. While there is much that America’s diplomats can do to prove their value and relevance, they ultimately depend on wise leadership—in the White House and in Congress—to make the policy and resource decisions and provide the political backing that will unlock the promise of American diplomacy.
The good news is that there are plenty of reasons to be optimistic about the potential of American diplomacy. As I hope the pages of this book have helped to illustrate, it is an honorable profession, filled with good people and strong purpose. Another of Teddy Roosevelt’s well-known sayings was that “life’s greatest good fortune is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.” By that standard, my long experience as an American diplomat was incredibly fortunate. While it may sometimes not seem so apparent in the age of Trump, the experience of the next generation of diplomats holds just as much promise. The image and value of public service is scarred and dented right now, but the diplomatic profession has never mattered more, or been more consequential for our interests at home and abroad.
The rebuilding process will be daunting, but we have a lot going for us—enduring sources of national strength, a pivotal role to play in a competitive world, and no existential threats before us. If we can recover a sense of diplomatic agility out of the muscle-bound national security bureaucracy that we’ve become in recent years, we can help ensure a new generation of security and prosperity for Americans.
One of the benefits of serving overseas, of a life in diplomacy, is the chance to see your own country through the eyes of others. From that first visit to Egypt at eighteen, to my years at Oxford and postings abroad, to constant travels in senior State Department jobs, I certainly became accustomed to the hostility with which particular American policies are viewed. I knew all too well the resentments that come with our weight in the world and how we have sometimes thrown it around. Through all that mistrust and suspicion, however, I also saw what people expected of us—a sense of possibility, of pragmatism, of recognizing problems and flaws and trying to fix them. That’s who we still are—limping from self-inflicted political injury, challenged increasingly in a world of rising powers and shifting currents, but with a resilience that has always set us apart. “You’re testing our faith like never before,” a longtime European diplomat told me recently, “but I wouldn’t bet against you—at least not yet.” I wouldn’t bet against us either. My faith in our resilience, like my pride in American diplomacy, remains unbounded.
With Lisa during A-100 training in early 1982 (Courtesy of the author)
With President Reagan, Secretary of State George Shultz, National Security Advisor Colin Powell, and other senior advisors in the Oval Office in December 1988 (Courtesy Ronald Reagan Presidential Library)
Listening (back row, second from left) as President George H. W. Bush addresses the Madrid Peace Conference on October 30, 1991 (Courtesy of the author)
Secretary of State Madeleine Albright greeting Lisa, Sarah, and Lizzy during a 1998 ceremony marking the end of my term as executive secretary (Courtesy of the author)
Visiting the Palestinian refugee camp in Jenin on April 20, 2002 (Courtesy of the author)
With President George W. Bush and other senior foreign policy advisors in the Oval Office in February 2003 (Official White House Photo)
With King Abdullah II in Amman in November 2003 (Yusef Allan/Jordanian Royal Palace/Getty Images)
With Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak in Cairo in September 2004 (Amro Maraghi/AFP/Getty Images)
Celebrating a birthday on the road with Secretary of State Colin Powell (Courtesy of the author)
With Muammar al-Qaddafi in 2004 (Courtesy of the author)
During a December 2006 visit to a school in Beslan, Russia, where more than three hundred died in a 2004 Chechen terrorist attack (Kazbek Basayev/AFP/Getty Images)
Meeting with Russian president Vladimir Putin at Novo Ogaryovo, the presidential dacha outside Moscow, in the spring of 2008 (Alexander Zemlianichenko/AFP/Getty Images)
At a meeting between President Obama and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin held at Putin’s dacha on July 7, 2009 (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)
Meeting with President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in the White House Situation Room on September 29, 2009, in advance of P5+1 negotiations with Iran (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)
Leading the U.S. delegation (third from left, far side of table) in P5+1 talks with Iran in Geneva, Switzerland, on October 1, 2009 (Dominic Favre/AFP/Getty Images)
With Syrian president Bashar al-Assad prior to a meeting in Damascus in February 2010 (Louai Beshara/AFP/Getty Images)
In the Oval Office (fourth from left) during a call between President Obama and Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak on February 1, 2011 (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)
With President Obama on Marine One during a trip to the Korean DMZ in March 2012 (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)
Speaking with President Obama in the Oval Office in June 2013 (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)
With Secretary of State John Kerry during negotiations with Iran in Geneva in November 2013 (Courtesy of the author)
With Chinese vice president Li Yuanchao in Beijing in January 2014 (Photo by Jason Lee—Pool/Getty Images)
At the makeshift memorial honoring slain Maidan protesters in Kyiv, Ukraine, on February 25, 2014 (State Department Photo)
Greeting Indian prime minister Narendra Modi at Andrews Air Force Base during his first visit to the United States on September 29, 2014 (Courtesy Government of India Press Information Bureau)
For Lisa, who has enriched my life beyond measure, and made everything possible
Acknowledgments
My greatest good fortune as a diplomat was the extraordinary company in which I served. While never seeking or getting the credit they deserve, the friends and colleagues who shared this diplomatic journey enriched my life and honored our country with their skill and sacrifice. I could never acknowledge them all in these pages, but I am forever in their debt.
This book was a different kind of journey, but it benefited no less from the thoughtful support of many friends and colleagues.
At the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, my new professional home, I have been blessed with an exceptional team. Matan Chorev, my chief of staff at the State Department and now at Carnegie, embodies the very best of his generation of foreign policy thinkers and practitioners. Utterly selfless, an elegant writer and editor, and a terrific friend, Matan has been indisp
ensable to this project from its inception. He and Seth Center, a gifted diplomatic historian at the State Department, did a superb job of organizing more than thirty years’ worth of memos, cables, and other archival documents and helping me think through how best to structure the book and its arguments.
My treasured friend, Mary Dubose, has put up with me and deftly organized my professional life for nearly three decades, and made sure to keep me focused and on track. Three exceptionally talented James C. Gaither Junior Fellows, Miles Graham, Rachel Mitnick, and Austin Owen, were invaluable research assistants. Kathleen Higgs, Carnegie’s library director, could not have been more helpful. Tim Martin, Carnegie’s digital director, imagined and built a beautiful website for the book and the digital diplomatic archive. I am especially lucky to have worked closely at Carnegie with two wonderful board chairs, Harvey Fineberg and Penny Pritzker, whose encouragement for this undertaking has been unstinting.
I am deeply grateful to the many indefatigable readers who plowed through all or parts of the draft manuscript. They include: Salman Ahmed, Rich Armitage, Tom Carothers, Derek Chollet, Ryan Crocker, Liz Dibble, Bob Einhorn, Mohamed el-Erian, Jim Fallows, Jeff Feltman, John Lewis Gaddis, Frank Gavin, Jeff Goldberg, Tom Graham, Dan Kurtz-Phelan, Dan Kurtzer, Jim Larocco, Neil MacFarlane, Jef McAllister, Denis McDonough, Aaron Miller, Nader Mousavizadeh, Marwan Muasher, Evan Osnos, Jen Psaki, Philip Remler, Rob Richer, Dennis Ross, Norm Roule, Eugene Rumer, Dan Russell, Karim Sadjadpour, David Satterfield, Jake Sullivan, Ashley Tellis, Dmitri Trenin, Andrew Weiss, and Alice Wells. A presentation of an early draft at Carnegie’s “Research in Progress” seminar was particularly useful, and I’m grateful to Milan Vaishnav for the opportunity and to my colleagues for their frank and constructive feedback.
I owe a special debt of gratitude to a first-rate team at the Department of State who made possible the declassification of over one hundred documents and diligently reviewed the manuscript. Behar Godani is a gem, as are her colleagues—Kathy Allegrone, Anne Barbaro, Geoffrey Chapman, Alden Fahy, Paul Hilburn, and Daniel Sanborn. The State Department could not ask for more skilled and committed professionals.
I am also indebted to two remarkable institutions for providing ideal settings for extended periods of writing. Sir John Vickers and the fellows of All Souls College, Oxford, graciously hosted me as a visiting fellow in the autumn of 2017. The Rockefeller Foundation gave me a similar opportunity at its spectacular Bellagio Center in the spring of 2018, where my main challenge was not getting too distracted by the perfect view of Lake Como out my study window.
Andrew Wylie, my literary agent, has been an enthusiastic advocate and marvelous guide, as he has been for so many other lucky authors. I could not have been in better hands than at Random House. Andy Ward is the perfect editor—confident in his craft, and a rigorous and exacting partner. Chayenne Skeete did a wonderful job coordinating the all-star Random House team of Anna Bauer, Debbie Glasserman, Greg Kubie, Beth Pearson, and Katie Tull. Their support meant the world to me, and to the success of this project.
This book, like the rest of my professional life, is built on the bedrock of a loving family. I never had to look any further than my parents for the best role models I could hope to find. With his intellect and integrity, my father epitomized public service. My mother set an impossibly high standard of faith, decency, and compassion. My three brothers have inspired me by their own examples, kept me grounded, and embarrassed me year after year in fantasy football.
Dedicating this work to Lisa barely scratches the surface of what I owe her, and what her love and sacrifice have made possible for me. From that first day in the A-100 entry class almost forty years ago, she has been my best friend and most caring and constructive critic. By far our greatest accomplishments together are our two daughters, Lizzy and Sarah. Now remarkable young adults, they are a source of immense pride and joy. The diplomatic life that unfolds on the pages of this book is full of boldface personalities and dramatic events, but it was family that made it whole.
Appendix
The declassified documents in the pages that follow are a small sample of one diplomat’s imperfect efforts to provide ground truths, strategic advice, and—on occasion—disciplined dissent. Nearly one hundred additional cables, memos, and emails from my thirty-three-year career in the Foreign Service are available at burnsbackchannel.com. My hope is that this memoir and archive make vivid the power and purpose of American diplomacy—both in our recent past, and in the era unfolding before us.
Excerpt: Memo to Secretary of State–Designate Warren Christopher, January 5, 1993, “Parting Thoughts: U.S. Foreign Policy in the Years Ahead”
In Policy Planning, our task was to look over the horizon and prepare American diplomacy to seize new opportunities and manage emerging challenges. The transition memo excerpted below offered the incoming Clinton administration a strategy for navigating the post–Cold War international landscape.
1995 Moscow 883, January 11, 1995, “Sifting Through the Wreckage: Chechnya and Russia’s Future”
Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, violent separatism in the North Caucasus posed an enormous challenge for President Boris Yeltsin: His military’s botched attempt to put down the Chechen insurrection during the winter of 1994–95 was emblematic of the “slow crumbling” of the new Russian state. This cable conveyed to Washington the depth of the crisis in Chechnya and its consequences for Russia and U.S. policy.
1999 Amman 1059, February 7, 1999, “King Hussein’s Legacy and Jordan’s Future”
The death of King Hussein—the Middle East’s longest-serving ruler—was a traumatic event for Jordan and a pivotal moment for the country’s relationship with the United States. This cable outlined the challenges facing King Abdullah II as he took the throne, and it argued for doing everything we could to support a critical partner during a time of tumultuous transition.
2000 Amman 6760, December 5, 2000, “Peace Process: Relaunching American Diplomacy”
From my perspective as the American ambassador in Amman, the collapse of the Camp David peace talks and the outbreak of the second Palestinian Intifada were ominous signs for Jordan and the broader Middle East. In a highly unusual move, I joined our ambassador to Egypt, Dan Kurtzer, in authoring a joint cable that shared our thoughts from the region on U.S. policy and made the case for the Clinton administration to articulate its own parameters for a peace deal.
Email to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, February 8, 2008, “Russia Strategy”
As the George W. Bush administration reached the end of its second term, looming policy “trainwrecks” threatened to push U.S.-Russia relations to a new post–Cold War nadir. In this email to Secretary Rice from Moscow, I made plain the risks of a collision and tried to offer my best advice on how to avoid a collapse in bilateral ties.
Memo to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, May 27, 2008, “Regaining the Strategic Initiative on Iran”
In 2008, the Iranian nuclear program was accelerating and American diplomatic efforts were stalling. In this memo to Secretary Rice, I laid out a new approach for strengthening U.S. leverage on the nuclear issue and advocated joining the negotiations between Europe, Russia, China, and Iran.
Email to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, February 22, 2011, “Note for the Secretary from Bill Burns: Cairo, February 21–22”
Written less than two weeks after the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak, this dispatch from Cairo tried to capture both the exuberant mood in Egypt’s streets as well as the depth of the challenges facing the country’s new leadership. Throughout my tenure as undersecretary and deputy secretary, I frequently sent such first-person notes to capture my impressions and offer recommendations.
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