Tag Archives: William Burns

Fixing Diplomacy

William J. Burns is one of the most respected retired American diplomats. As a career diplomat, he served in many diplomatic posts, including Moscow. He capped his service by serving as deputy secretary of state under President George W. Bush.

In an interview with World Politics Review (June 10, 2020), he acknowledged the damage done to American diplomacy under President Donald Trump but said diplomacy had been adrift “for decades before that.”

Ambassadorial and department administrative posts given to political supporters has grown for several decades, but has increased under Trump.

As the investigation in Trump’s dealings with Ukraine has shown, inexperienced political appointees can cause serious damage to America’s reputation for leadership.

Unfortunately, Burns said, “It’s going to take a lot longer to fix the institutions of American diplomacy than it’s taken to break them.”

What’s been wrong with Trump’s diplomacy is not so much the direction it has taken with, say China. A push back against that country for certain predatory trade practices was justified, Burns said.

Instead of working with allies in that pursuit and in others, however, Trump attempted to go it alone. The president appears disdainful of such alliances and of the diplomatic efforts it takes to maintain those alliances.

Especially because the U.S. is no longer the only dominant player on the world scene, shoring up alliances is more important than ever.

Also, Burns said, the U.S. needs to look at the global problems, like climate change, that don’t relate to a specific country.

Summing up, Burns said, “The essence of employing enlightened self-interest is to see that our interests are going to be best served if we’re disciplined about our engagement overseas; that we can’t retrench entirely, but nor can we restore the role that we held uniquely in that first quarter-century after the end of the Cold War; that we’re going to need, in our own self-interest, to work with allies and partners, and reshape institutions. And that we still, at least as I look at it in the next couple of decades, have a better hand to play than any of our major rivals.”

Listening to Elders

Retired U.S. military officers as well as diplomats have recently voiced alarm over Donald Trump’s presidency.

General James Mattis, Trump’s former secretary of defense, finally broke a long silence and wrote in an article for The Atlantic:

“Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people — does not even pretend to try,” Mattis wrote. “Instead he tries to divide us.”

Further, he wrote: “We are witnessing the consequences of three years of this deliberate effort,”

Mattis is one of several retired officers who have spoken of their alarm at what they see as Trump’s damage to American democracy.

Retired diplomats also have spoken out against politicizing the U.S. Foreign Service. Writes a former assistant secretary of state with over three decades of diplomatic experience:

“By using his public office for personal gain, Trump has affirmed Putin’s long-held conviction—shared by autocrats the world over—that Americans are just as venal and self-absorbed as they are, just more hypocritical about it. For dictators, Trump is the gift that keeps on giving, a non-stop advertisement for Western self-dealing.” (William J. Burns, “Demolition of U.S. Diplomacy,” Foreign Affairs, 14 October 2019.)

What are we to make of this unprecedented outpouring?

Pointing to a way out, Mattis. writing after George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis, said, “We can unite without him, drawing on the strengths inherent in our civil society. This will not be easy, as the past few days have shown, but we owe it to our fellow citizens; to past generations that bled to defend our promise; and to our children.”

Big Brother Has You in His Sights

Reading the Mueller Report side-by-side with a U.S. diplomat’s recent memoir, The Back Channel, makes frightening reading.

William Burns, author of The Back Channel, spent most of his adult life, from 1982 until his retirement in 2014, serving the United States as a diplomat. He held several top jobs, including ambassador to Russia from 2005 until 2008.

In his book, Burns goes out of his way to compliment almost all the people he has worked with in a long diplomatic life, both American and foreign. One exception is Russian leader Vladimir Putin.

Putin, according to Burns, harbors something close to paranoia about the United States. Among other views, Putin doesn’t see the movement in Ukraine to topple a Russia-friendly autocrat as a people’s movement, but an effort by the United States to keep Russia down.

Burns writes: “Putin gradually shifted from testing the West in places where Russia had a greater stake . . . like Ukraine . . . to places where the West had a far greater stake, like the integrity of its democracies.”

Then read even the outlines of the Mueller Report, beginning with the section titled “Russian ‘Active Measures’ Social Media Campaign.” (The term “IRA” is the Internet Research Agency, a Russian agency used to spread disinformation on the internet.)

“The IRA Targets U.S. Elections. The IRA Ramps Up U.S. Operations As Early As 2014. U.S. Operations Through IRA-Controlled Social Media Accounts. U.S. Operations Through Facebook. U.S. Operations Through Twitter.” And so on.

The unquestionable conclusion of the Mueller Report is that the Russian government actively interfered in U.S. elections in an attempt to manipulate voters its way.

And next time?

“Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.”

Rush to Judgement

William Burns held a leadership position in the U.S. Department of State when terrorists attacked the United States on September 11, 2001. In an article in politico.com (March 13, 2019), he speaks of that time when the country, reeling from shock, was deciding on responses to the attacks.

The title of the article is “How we tried to slow the rush to war in Iraq and why the lessons from my time in the Bush administration are relevant today.” It speaks of Burns’ attempts to come to terms with that time and the wrong decisions made.

Even as Burns watched from his office window at the plumes of smoke from the attacked Pentagon, he wrote in a memo: “We could shape a strategy that would not only hit back hard against terrorists and any states who continued to harbor them, but also lay out an affirmative agenda that might eventually help reduce the hopelessness and anger on which extremists preyed.”

In hindsight, we chose to hit back hard but tended to ignore the need to also craft a positive policy to reduce the factors that led to the attacks.

Burns writes: “In the 18 months that followed—that rare hinge point in history between the trauma of 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq in early 2003—we took a different and ultimately disastrous course. This is a story of the road not taken, of the initial plan of coercive diplomacy in Iraq, which turned out to be long on coercion and short on diplomacy.”

Burns writes of how the campaign in Afghanistan morphed into a tragic focus on Iraq and became quicksand from which we are still trying to free ourselves.

In a memo from the time before the decision to invade Iraq, Burns wrote: “we needed ‘to show that we will finish the job [and] restore order, not just move on to the next Moslem state.’”

We did not finish the job in Afghanistan. While the work was unfinished there (and remains to this day) we moved on to Iraq, then Syria, and now Iran.

The hardliners won after 9/11, and they are continuing to win today in our policies on Iran. “The Iraq invasion was the original sin,” Burns writes. Unfortunately, we are still following the path begun then.