Welcome, everyone. Good to see you all here.

We are here to the

meeting with Anthony Blinken, Deputy Secretary of State, United States
Department of State. We had scheduled a meeting a little early to
accommodate his schedule, and we will now be extending the meeting a
little bit counter to usual council practice. We may run a little late, so I'm
just warning you that now. Deputy Secretary, would you come up and
give your remarks? Thank you. Well, thank you all very, very much, and
my apologies for being late. I think my watch may be set to Secretary
Kerry's and it's never clear what time zone he's in, so that may explain it.
And this really is a momentous day. And I know you're all gathered here
in tremendous anticipation because, of course, the new iPhone will be
coming out this afternoon. But in advance of that, it is a great pleasure to
be at what is the CFR mothership. We have a satellite in Washington,
D.C. but it's wonderful to be here at CFR Central. Walter, thank you so
much for presiding over the event today. But more important, thank you
for your extraordinarily thoughtful critiques that have enriched our
foreign policy debates and that we take very, very seriously. And I'm
especially and deeply grateful to my good friend. And you know, in
Washington, we say good friend all the time. This time I mean it.
Richard Haas, who has been a wonderful friend, a wonderful counselor,
and has done extraordinary things leading this community. I have to say,
too, that it's particularly nice to have an excuse for a brief family
reunion, because my parents are here, Donald and Vera Blinken, and so
many friends from New York. We are in the midst of one of the most
significant national debates that we've had in decades over United States
foreign policy. Although you might not recognize it foreign from the
tenor of the campaign, but it's there and it's real. And it doesn't pit left
against right, Democrat against Republican, liberal against conservative.
Rather, it's an argument between those who would erect walls and those
who would build bridges. In the shadow of shared vulnerabilities
exposed by the dizzying pace of global change, some of our fellow
citizens question the merits of facing outward, of being open to the
world. They worry that terrorists are sneaking into our country as
refugees, immigrants slipping across our borders to radically alter our
identity. They've seen their real wages stagnate, factory jobs disappear.
They wonder whether US Global leadership has benefited others at their
expense. What value is there in a system that they feel has left them
behind? The result is a renewed blend of isolationism and unilateralism.
That argues that our engagement in the world costs us too much,
achieves too little, encourages free riders, embroils us in other people's
problems, and distracts us from investing in our own communities. In
other words, they suggest that it's time for America to come home or go
it alone. This debate, this argument, has its roots in legitimate concerns
that we have to better acknowledge and more effectively addressed
together. Because, after all, you can't really call it progress if too many
of our fellow citizens don't believe that they're sharing in it. But this
argument that we're better off pulling up the drawbridge is
fundamentally flawed. It underestimates the risks of turning inward
while overstating the costs and downplaying the benefits of facing
outward. It's harmful to the health, strength, security and prosperity of
our nation. And those of us in the foreign policy community have to do a
better job explaining why. Now, I know that here at cfr, for the most
part, I am preaching to the choir. But here's the truth. Today's debate is
evidence that our voices are not as clear, as compelling, as
compassionate as they should be to convince our fellow citizens. And I
think it's a responsibility that we share if we believe in an open world
and an open facing America to actually try to meet that challenge
together. You know, we know that we don't work with other countries as
a luxury or as charity or as the problems we face today are notoriously
resistant to unilateral solutions. We cannot build a wall tall enough to
stop the oceans from rising or the planet from warming. We can't bolt the
gate tight enough to stop the spread of disease or break the allure of
violent extremism. If we step back from the global stage, Americans of
all stripes will be worse off. Our companies would make less money.
After all, 90% of the global market, even more is beyond our shores.
And Americans would have fewer jobs absent our leadership to promote
a global business environment favorable to our brands, our products, and
our high standards. Our soldiers would actually be dragged into more
costly and unintended wars absent our leadership to build alliances that
share the burdens, however imperfectly, of security and increase the
capacity of others to prevent small crises from turning into big ones. And
our citizens would be left unacceptably vulnerable absent international
cooperation to try to stop threats, to spot them and stop them before they
actually reach our shores. Our national interest demands global
engagement. Now, you all know that this is not a lesson that we learned
suddenly, 71 years ago. We faced, after World War II, a fundamental
choice as the world's rising global power. How would we use that power
and our new place of preeminence? We could choose to come home and
turn our backs on a broken world. We could take advantage of the
moment to impose our will on others, as victors of war have done for
centuries. Or. Or we could channel our power through a system of rules,
principles, norms, international institutions that gave everyone a stake in
the running of world affairs. On one level, embedding our country in a
broader system that bound us to the same rules and restraints as others
seemed counterintuitive, a check on our own power. But as I think most
of you know, it proved remarkably wise. It took away the incentive for
other countries to band together to block our rise. As happened
throughout history, when one nation sought to rise above others. And
rather than constraining us, the rules based international order has
legitimated, preserved, and indeed amplified our power over time. Of
course, this system didn't eliminate all turmoil, all conflicts, all inequity.
It did not and could never insulate societies fully from the pain of social
and economic change. But with American leadership that married
wisdom to strength, it got the big picture right, averting new global
cataclysms, ending the Cold War, peacefully creating the space and
stability for countries to prosper. This is a narrative that most of us in
this room, in one way or another, have lived and grown up with. But it is
not a narrative that's familiar, or as familiar, certainly to a young
generation looking at America's place in the world with fresh eyes. But I
think it bears repeating. President Obama pledged to carry this legacy
forward with what he called a new era of engagement. Entering the Oval
Office at a time when the United States was a bit more isolated on the
world stage, he knew the risks of ignoring our allies and stiff arming
potential partners. He recognized that the international system is not a
threat to our interests, but rather a logical, indispensable extension of
those interests. He saw American leadership in a diverse array of
multilateral forums was essential to shaping this wider system to our
advantage. And so we actually renewed our leadership at the United
nations, worked at the Security Council to advance nuclear negotiations
with Iran to remove and destroy Syria's declared strategic chemical
weapons capacity. We rejoined the Human Rights Council, brought
attention to some of the world's worst human rights violators, passed the
first resolution on LGBTI rights in a multilateral body. We not only
embraced the Millennium Development Goals that we had once
shunned, we helped reach agreement on the Sustainable Development
Goals to end extreme poverty. We bolstered the capacity of UN
peacekeeping operations by mobilizing pledges for an additional 50,000
troops from countries around the world. We reinvigorated our
transatlantic partnerships by deepening our engagement with the
European Union, enhancing NATO's military capabilities to address
regional and global challenges, reinforcing the OSCE's expanded role in
working for Europe whole, free and at peace. We strengthened our
relationships with Asia's key institutions, joining the East Asia Summit,
sending our first dedicated ambassador to asean, hosting the first US
ASEAN Summit here in the United States, and hosting apec back in
2011 in our own hemisphere. We revitalized the Summit of the Americas
by updating our Cuba policy that had isolated us in this hemisphere. And
we worked with new leadership at the Organization of American States
to preserve that institution's role in defending democracy where it is
threatened. Now, there are those who believe that our nation's
overwhelming military and economic superiority means we should and
could operate alone, that corralling others at a summit, working through
a system, is much more trouble than it's worth. But in the absence of US
leadership, these institutions don't simply disappear. They take on a
profoundly unhelpful shape, as the League of Nations did in the 1930s.
By turning inward, we lose our ability to advance positive
developments. We forfeit one of our most powerful tools to check
negative ones. We know that there is a very clear tactical as well as
strategic and political value in not having to act alone in so many of
these institutions. Working with others, we build a foundation of trust, a
greater alignment of interests, habits of cooperation and greater
legitimacy that better enables us to mobilize others against common
threats and seizing common opportunities. By taking a seat at the table,
we can drive the conversation and help shape the results. When a
spiraling economic crisis threatened the world eight years ago, we
worked with the G20 to forge an international response that helped bring
the global economy back from the brink and set the stage for the longest
streak of job growth ever in the United States. Our leadership, American
leadership, our willingness to work with our partners produced the
massive coordinated fiscal package needed to help restore confidence,
save families, companies and countries hardest hit by the crisis. That's
exactly the kind of collective action that we continue to need if we're
going to generate sustained income gains for middle class households.
When we saw Iran's nuclear program speeding ahead while the window
for preventive action was closing, we worked in lockstep with a diverse
group of nations over several years to peacefully negotiate the toughest
non proliferation arrangement and most rigorous verification system
ever devised. Without our partners we could never have built or
maintained a sanctions regime powerful enough to help bring Iran to the
negotiating table, or knitted together an understanding strong enough to
verifiably and comprehensively ensure that Iran's nuclear program is and
will remain exclusively for peaceful purposes. When Dassha's campaign
of terror emerged in ungoverned spaces in Syria and Iraq, we built a
coalition of more than 65 countries to bring every political, diplomatic,
economic and military tool to bear against this threat, undermining the
very foundation of DASA's self declared caliphate and revealing its
cause for the savage lunacy that it is. When Russia violated the
sovereignty and territorial integrity of an independent democratic
Ukraine, we turned to the European union and the G7 core groups of the
world's great democracies to design and implement our response. Now,
we could have simply imposed sanctions and bailed out Ukraine by
ourselves to much less effect at far greater cost. Instead, we rallied
others, which also helped ensure that sanctions didn't wind up hurting
American companies or European companies instead of their intended
Russian targets. In each of these instances and so many more, acting
multilaterally, acting with others, has made American leadership more
effective. In a little over a week's time, just 25 blocks from here, the
United nations will gather in its annual General assembly to the great
pleasure I know of so many inhabitants of Manhattan. Every day, the
bulk of our global engagement happens at the un, the poster child for
multilateralism. From its earliest moments, the UN has been a source of
discomfort for some in the United States. Lately, its high profile failures
and endemic shortcomings have contributed to a perception that we may
be better off without it than we are with it now. Anyone who's engaged
with the UN knows it can be an incredibly slow and frustrating place.
And of course, we don't get our way every time. But there remains no
substitute for the work the UN does, the legitimacy it brings, the reach it
allows. We rely every single day on a network of institutions under the
UN umbrella to protect us from disease, to prevent conflict, to deliver
life saving aid, to facilitate trade, to defend human rights, to bring war
criminals to justice, to maintain little known standards that ensure, for
example, that mail is delivered across borders, that cell phones work,
that patents are respected, that airplanes can fly safely, tarnish and all.
The UN remains the gold standard of global action. And when it is
mobilized effectively, the results can actually be historic. Just four days
ago, the US and China formally entered into the Paris Climate
Agreement. There was a time, not so long ago, when this seemed
impossible, when no one believed that the two Largest economies and
the two largest carbon emitters would join forces after decades at
loggerheads. But years of painstaking and painful UN negotiations and
leadership, above all by President Obama, by Secretary Clinton and
Secretary Kerry, helped produce an agreement among nearly 200
countries and our best shot yet at saving the planet. Part of our challenge
is it's hard to help some of our fellow citizens imagine what the world
would look like without the advantages for all of the deficits of this
multilateral rules and norms based system. It would mean, though,
building ad hoc arrangements every single time we wanted to act, an
extraordinary diplomatic lift that would distract us from the real
challenges at hand. It would meet a world where goods are fewer and
more expensive, businesses move slower, the appetite for risk is lower,
where travel is harder, educational exchange is tougher, international
research collaboration near impossible. It would mean anarchy on the
high seas with pirates, drug traffickers, smugglers, sanction violators
sailing freely, and a global power vacuum filled by those whose values
look anything like ours. So now is not the time to abandon that system.
The liberal international order that we have spent so much blood and
treasure to build over these last seven decades. Now's the time to
strengthen it, to adapt it to new realities. Even as the United nations has
taken on more and more responsibility, it struggled to keep pace as
major new economies have emerged, looking for a platform
commensurate to their growing importance on the world stage. Today
the UN faces challenges its founders could scarcely have even imagined,
from cyber terrorists to violent extremists. And its humanitarian system
is under historic strain, buffeted by protracted emergencies and extreme
natural disasters, to take just one example. And the President will be
focusing on this in a couple of weeks at the Refugee summit on the
margins of the General Assembly. We now have, around the world the
largest single wave of human displacement since World War II. If every
person on the planet displaced by conflict was put into one country, it
would be the 24th largest country on Earth, bigger than Spain, bigger
than South Korea. And that's just one problem that the UN is at the heart
of grappling with. So I would leave you with the thought that our
challenge today is to bear down on adapting the international system to
suit a young century, while also ensuring that its foundation, its rules, its
norms, its principles remain intact and remain strong. And that work
does start at the United nations, where we will soon have an opportunity
to select the next Secretary General. That person must have a strong
diplomatic and negotiating background and experience, proven
management leadership skills, a demonstrated commitment to
transparency and accountability, and an unflinching adherence to the
UN's principles. The UN, especially now, needs a strong leader with a
vision for and commitment to fundamental reforms, to a culture of
accountability, so that failures are addressed immediately, effectively,
transparently. And it needs a moral leader with the resolve to actually
speak for the downtrodden, to call out bad actors to defend the
protection of civilians, to restructure the global humanitarian
architecture, putting the needs of the world's most vulnerable people
front and center in this time that is more fluid and fraught with
complexity than ever before. It's not enough to make little tweaks around
the margins or the edges of the existing system. We have to think hard
about how we redefine multilateral engagement for the times we're
living. And I believe we need to stand up and boldly defend its value as
well as address its failures, making it real and relevant in the lives of our
fellow citizens, responsive to their legitimate concerns. This work of
reform doesn't come with banners. It doesn't come with parades, but it
actually helps real people living real lives here and around the world see
that the UN is worth fighting for. It ensures that our collective action
better upholds our own promises. And it will help us shape and adapt an
international system that actually lives up to the vision of those who first
built it. A global project that remains now, as it did then, indispensable to
the health, the strength, the security, the prosperity of every nation and
especially the United States. Thank you very much. Yes. Okay. Well,
thanks. That was a really comprehensive introduction. And I just want to
say, as somebody who's sometimes been thought of as a little critical
about American foreign policy, that I think one of the key things about
whether you're going to criticize or support an administration or foreign
policy is you've got to remember these things are not easy. It's not as if
there was some simple little alternative that only an idiot wouldn't see.
The world that we live in is difficult to do well, and I think we all need
to start by acknowledging that. That said, I was waiting for the turn. No,
no, I mean, it was interesting to me that there were sort of two worlds in
your talk. One was a world of fantastic multilateral organizations. The
greatest thing the world has ever seen under eight years of absolutely
brilliant diplomacy. Seven and a half. And then the other was the most
displaced civilians since World War II. Widespread discontent with the
whole system. In the United States. I think you could have mentioned
that in France, in Germany, all over the world, the discontent at this
fantastic system so ably led has been growing. How do we reconcile
those two? I'd say two things. First, I think we're living a moment of
extraordinary paradox. As the President has said a number of times, if
without knowing where you would be born in the world, what your race
would be, what your sex or sexual orientation would be, what your
politics would be, if you didn't know any of those things and you had to
choose a time in which to be born, you would choose today over any
other period in human history. Because when you look at the global
sweep, when you look at the planet as a whole, it is healthier, it is
wealthier, it is wiser, it's more tolerant than it has ever been in the course
of human history. And so part of that, not all of that, but part of that, I
think, is due to the system that we put in place after the war to try and
create an environment in which progress could actually be made more
efficiently, more effectively. That's one side. The other side is that so
many of our fellow citizens, and you're exactly right, pick any of our
partners and friends in Europe, or for that matter, virtually any place else
in the world, feel disconnected from this reality, they felt left behind,
ignored, not part of the deal. And I think that's happening for two
reasons. One, there's a reality to the fact that folks are left behind. We
need to more effectively address that. But there's also something about
this moment that we're living. The onslaught of information has, I think,
radically changed the way we in government operate and the way most
of our fellow citizens respond to what's going on around the world.
Having this intravenous feed that virtually every citizen now enjoys, and
I use the word enjoy advisedly, creates a sense of confusion and chaos
just as much as it illuminates. I think most of us brought up in a liberal
tradition were brought up to believe that more information is a good
thing. And if you read John Stuart Mill, as everyone does in high school
or college, you think it's great. We're going to have a competition of
ideas, and the best ideas will win out. And fundamentally, I still believe
that that's true, but in the making, it's really painful. And right now,
something that happens on one side of the planet, a problem that
emerges is instantaneously on your iPhone, on your TV, you name it.
And this feeds, I think this growing sense of disconnect, of discomfort,
of confusion, governments have a tougher time clarifying it. When I
started in government almost 25 years ago, in my case, at the beginning
of the Clinton administration, think about this. At the White House every
evening, everyone stopped what they were doing and at 6:30 turned on
the national network news, CBS, NBC, ABC. The only other collective
action was to get up in the morning, open your front door and pick up a
hard copy of the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street
Journal. Those things don't really happen anymore. A President,
President Reagan, it was starting to erode by the time President Clinton
arrived, could actually dominate the media space. That doesn't happen
anymore either. And in particular, Walter, I think the most pernicious
thing in my judgment is because of the immediacy of information.
There's an extraordinary pressure on people in government to react, to
respond. And if a problem is emerging at 6am on Morning Joe and it
hasn't been fixed by 9, you're a failure. I believe, having watched him up
close for the last seven and a half years, that one of President Obama's
great strengths is that he sees his role and responsibility as being a
circuit breaker. To be the person who says, as President, wait, let's look
at this, let's understand it, let's study it, let's devise a response. And you
pay a short term political cost for that. Because again, if you're not seen
as responding immediately, aggressively, actively, somehow, you're not
leading, you're not engaged. I think this time demands exactly what he
has been doing, which is to actually try and take a step back and
understand the huge complexities that you refer to, how these things fit
together and what the best answer is. Well, that still doesn't get us to then
why things are in such a mess, you know, with all of this deliberation
and so on. Why do we have more displaced people than we have Since
World War II in Syria, for example? Well, Syria is obviously one of the
big drivers of this displacement, not the only one. In fact, one of the
things we lose sight of is that as horrific as the situation in Syria is
pushing people out to the neighboring states, first and foremost Turkey,
Lebanon, Jordan, then pushing them further to Europe, pushing some of
them even here in the United States, there is a refugee crisis of one kind
or another in virtually every continent. It is a global problem. And there
are obviously a wide array of answers as to why this is happening in
given places. And of course in Syria, it's the civil war. And the main
answer to that of course, is end the civil war. But in the meantime, even
as we try to do that, we need to more effectively. And this refugee
summit that the President will be hosting in a few weeks is aimed at
helping the front line states, Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, be able to do
more so that kids can go to school who are refugees and adults can
actually work legally. It's designed to get more money into the
humanitarian system, which is overwhelmed and overburdened. That's
part of the problem. It's designed to get countries to do more to resettle
refugees themselves, including the United States. So there's obviously a
lot of work to be done. Well, let's kind of pull back a little historically,
because I noticed you talked about after World War I and after World
War II, we had these debates. To me, it's always interesting that after
World War II, actually, the United States first decided, we're going to
wash our hands of everything. We demobilized, we were coming home.
And it was really only when Stalin sort of began to move forward in
Eastern Europe that Truman was able to kind of painfully rally the
country there. Interestingly, after 1990, we didn't have that debate. You
know, we didn't. Cold War was over. What are we going to do? We're
going to build a new world Order. We're going to extend the west to the
East. I'm not sure that the American people bought into that. I buy into
that, by the way. But I'm not sure that maybe the lack of that public
debate, I think the way that people like us at CFR and so on in both
parties handle that was to say, look, don't worry people, it's going to be
cheap and it's going to be easy now that the Soviet Union is gone, it's not
going to cost a lot of money. There's not going to be a lot of risk of war.
America's going to be able to put a lot less into the international system,
but take a lot more out in terms of human rights and so on and so forth.
I'm not sure a lot of people ever really believed that. And now what
they're doing, one gets the feeling people are looking at this world that is
so very unlike the world that George H.W. bush or Bill Clinton
suggested we were headed into. Where's that end of history thing gone?
And so there's a tremendous skepticism now, and we're sort of having
the debate now that we would have had in 1990 is that, yeah, I agree
with what you see. I agree with that. And I think part of what we're
seeing is the basic organizing principle. The nation state is under
challenge in ways that it's never been before. From below, from above,
from the side we have all sorts of non state actors, whether it is the CEO
of a major corporation, the mayor of a megacity, an ngo, a super
empowered individual, for good or for bad, in different ways,
challenging the state. We have countries, particularly for example in the
Middle east, that have been unable to effectively deliver for their citizens
who are under challenge. Old orders fading away, vacuums that tend to
be filled by more extreme forces, not more moderate ones. And all of
this is coming to a head and again, it's driven in many ways more
quickly by technology, by information. And again, that feeds into the
sense of chaos, the sense of confusion, and it feeds into questioning
whether the basic premises, the basic organization that we agreed on,
you're exactly right, when Truman really came into the game and then
that we renewed after the Cold War is the right thing. But you know, I
look at. Just take the Middle east for example, please. I might say, but
we think the same thing. But you know, you look at the Middle east and
this is probably going to offend everyone in the audience. But at
different moments in the statement, it looks to me as if at root the
George W. Bush administration and the Barack Obama administration
shared a set of wrong beliefs about in particular how close the Middle
east was to democracy. And so both administrations to a certain degree,
bet the farm on a quick, relatively for the US painless emergence of a
new stable democratic order. Looking at the situation, it looks like those
calculations were wildly out, to say the least. Is there something. And if
this democratic project of liberal society and extension, for whatever set
of reasons, isn't working in the Middle east, is it going to work in
Russia? Is it going to work in China? I think we have a sense where
public opinion is beginning to wonder whether the liberal
internationalists understand the way the world actually works, because
there have been these high profile errors. How would you. I think that's a
fair critique. One of the things that we discovered, particularly in the
Middle east, is that when you had one variety or another, an
authoritarian or autocratic regime, it spent a lot of time trying to make
sure that nothing could challenge it, particularly from a moderate camp.
And of course the result was that when the regimes fell away in one way
or another, the most organized groups were actually the more extreme
groups that had been organizing in mosques under the spotlight. And
countries had not allowed any kind of moderate alternative to actually
gain, take root, gain experience and gain the ability, the capacity to
govern. And so these vacuums that have emerged have been filled by
more extreme versions. Libya is a great example of this. Gaddafi spent a
lot of time making sure that there could be no opposition to his
government. And when he, he was gone, the government that came in
had absolutely no experience or capacity to actually govern. This is one
of the difficult problems. I'm not sure why that was so hard to predict
given that we had just had a similar experience in Iraq. I mean, this is
where it seems to me we've got these sort of shared, these are elements
of American political culture rather than partisan leanings of one side or
the other. So I'd say two things. First, it also takes, even as we believe in
American exceptionalism, it takes also a certain amount of hubris and
lack of humility to believe that people in every other part of the planet
are not capable of developing the same capacities and are not driven at
heart by some of the same instincts and some of the same values. But if
you're starting from way back under, a huge deficit, or in the case of
Iraq, decades of dictatorship, war or occupation, it's going to take a lot of
time. We came about this and we came to this, I think with a different
approach. There's an argument that we hear frequently that somehow the
United States is less engaged, that we're not leading. I believe from my
own vantage point in the State Department that we're more engaged in
more ways, in more places than we've ever been before. The debate
really is about the nature of our engagement. And for some, if
engagement is not spelled out as a large scale military intervention that
may be open ended, then somehow you're actually not engaged, you're
not leading. We've rejected that premise and we found out that it is
incredibly difficult. But I still believe it's the right way to work on trying
to develop and build the capacity others of partners to actually govern, to
build institutions. And over time that's the only sustainable way to get to
a good result. But there's something else, I think that's profoundly true
and there's a real deficit that we're seeing in many places. In each of
these areas, our military can go in and do the job extraordinarily well. It
will take on and defeat any enemy and do it quickly and effectively. But
then a question, then what? Either we're left holding the bag and we're
there for years and even decades at tremendous cost, at tremendous
turmoil, and what was a liberation turns in the minds of the country in
question into an occupation and rebounds back against us. Or we can try
to do the hard work of building that local capacity, but also trying to find
out if there's a sustainable political solution or settlement. Because
absent that, none of the work of the military is actually going to last.
And that has been one of the things that's bedeviled us in Iraq. The
absence of a sustainable political accommodation. And by the way, we
will in short order defeat Daesh in its so called caliphate in Iraq and
Syria. But that's only the beginning of the problem. If we're not able to
help Iraqis and ultimately Syrians develop some kind of reasonable
political accommodation, the conditions within which another Daesh
could arise will remain. All right, well, listen, I've had my opportunity. I
wonder if there are any questions from the audience. I should remind
everyone this meeting is on the record. Glad you said that now. Yes.
Well, I wanted to get you, you know, draw you out a little bit first. Yes,
sir. Frank Wisner with the law firm of squire, Patten Boggs. Mr.
Secretary, thank you for a message today that I think virtually everybody
in this room would agree with. The liberal order of the world is very
much tested. But I'm going to ask you if you could bring it down to a
practical issue, and that's the question of Syria. We are looking at a
bewildering array of events, particularly in northern Syria. Could you
give us some context within which we can understand what our strategy
is at the moment? What are we trying to accomplish? How are we trying
to move the parties to the Syrian problem? To what end? Where do our
efforts diplomatically stand? What can we look forward to in the next
months? Frank, thank you for the softball question. It's very much
appreciated. Step back for one second. We have two challenges that we
face in Syria and Iraq. We have the problem that we just talked about of
dealing with Daesh. And quite frankly, that is first and foremost on our
minds because that represents the most immediate, significant threat to
our interests, to our citizens, to our country. But in parallel, we're dealing
with what has become a civil war in Syria. And we have, in my
judgment, a moral obligation to do whatever we can to arrest it. We have
a practical and interest based obligation because of all of the fallout from
that civil war, including the refugee crisis that we were talking about a
little while ago. And we have an interest because the efforts we're
making against Daesh ultimately I don't think will succeed in totality
until we also deal with the civil war in Syria. Because as long as that
remains, it will remain a vacuum and a magnet for extremists coming in
to fight Assad and joining up with Daesh or joining up with other groups
like Nusra so the big question is, how do these things end? Because it is
important to be informed as best we can by history. And if you go back
and look, as you know, typically they end in one of three ways. One side
wins. That's not likely to happen anytime soon in Syria because there are
too many outside patrons willing to put enough in to prevent its side
from losing. So we're in a situation, I believe, where neither side can
win, although they can avoid losing for some time, which means it's
likely to go on. Second, the other way these things end is that the parties
basically exhaust themselves. But here's the problem. If you go back and
look at civil wars over the last 50 years, that exhaustion process typically
takes 10 years, and we're in year six of Syria's civil war. It takes even
longer when you have a fragmented series of actors, a multiplicity of
actors with different interests. And unfortunately, Syria is truly,
unfortunately, the paradigm of that kind of situation. The third way it
ends is if there's some kind of outside intervention. And it can be a
military intervention or it can be a political intervention, a military
intervention. There are enough actors in play who have been working on
the edges of that, trying to advance their interests through proxies, but
no one is prepared to take the steps necessary to intervene so decisively
militarily that victory will be produced. Russia is not going to do that,
and I'll come back to that in a second. As much as it's done, we're not
going to do that because we would be inheriting something that would
be, I think, a huge burden on us. It would actually likely, into the short
term, make the problem worse. By the way, most of these outside
interventions in civil wars actually add fuel to the fire and make them
worse. They don't make them better. And then finally, there is a political
intervention, an imposition by the larger outside patrons of some kind of
settlement. And as improbable, as difficult, as challenging as that is, that
remains, in our judgment, the most likely course of action to try to end
the civil war, which is why we have been looking to see if we can work
with Russia, which with Iran, is the principal outside patron, obviously,
of the regime. Now you might say, why would Russia go for this? And I
think the answer is this one. They too recognize that as much as they're
doing in trying to prop up the regime, they can't make Assad win. They
can only, at best, prevent him from losing. And as a result, they'll be left
defending Assad in a rump state. Smaller and smaller, controlling less
and less of Syria and constantly under siege. And meanwhile, if the
conflict goes on and they're defending Assad, the outside patrons
supporting various groups in the opposition, extreme or moderate, will
flow more and more. Weapons into Syria of greater and greater.
Lethality, and more and more Russians will die and suffer as a
consequence. At the same time, the straddle that Russia is doing, trying
at the one hand to make nice with the Sunni Arab world and at the same
time support Assad, Hezbollah and Iran, that straddle can't last. It will
alienate Sunni Muslims. It risks alienating the Muslim population In
Russia, roughly 15%, almost all of which is Sunni. And of course,
President Putin made his bones initially in quashing that very group in
Dagestan and Chechnya, etc. And of course, you have Central Asia, the
Caucasus, etc. So we believe that Russia does have an interest in helping
achieve some kind of political transition. The challenge, of course, is
that Russia is trying constantly to negotiate from the greatest position of
strength and to make sure that before it cuts a deal, it's gotten as much as
it can. And that's the moment I think we're at now. But listen, absent
some kind of imposition, in effect, of a settlement by the international
community, the recipe is for this to go on and to go on. One final thing.
One of the other reasons this is so complicated and so hard to solve is
that every actor involved has a different priority. For Turkey, it's actually
the Kurds. And to go to what you started with, their action in Northern
Syria was supposedly directed at dealing with ISIL coming across their
border. That was a part of it, but mostly it was about preventing the
Kurds from. In Northern Syria from joining their cantons and having a
contiguous space in Northern Syria in the makings, perhaps, of a state.
For Russia, it's about keeping their foothold in the Middle east, which
they've had through Syria and which was at risk. For Iran, it's preserving
the regime and space and supplies for Hezbollah. For Saudi Arabia, it's
probably about checking Iran for. For us, as I said, it's about Daesh and
ISIL more than it's about anything else. So when you have so many of
the outside players with different priorities, getting everyone on the
same page is incredibly complicated. But again, I come back to the
proposition that at the end of the day, we all have an interest in ending
this. No one wants to be left holding the bag, and the only way to do that
is to move forward on this political accommodation. It starts With a
cessation of hostilities. We had one briefly. It actually worked for a few
weeks back in February and March, we got more humanitarian
assistance in. We got it to a million people that hadn't received it. John
Kerry is working eight days a week to get back to that. Now people
criticize and say, oh, he's running after the Russians. When you're trying
to end a civil war, you take every conceivable step to do it. And I have
great admiration for the work that he's been doing to see if we can get to
a better place. Let me just push that a little farther and say, isn't one of
Russia's goals, though, to diminish U.S. prestige and. And do whatever
it. So that, you know, the fact that we're hunting for a solution simply by
withholding one. Russia, to some degree, is achieving a goal. Does that
figure your calculations? No doubt. But think too, about Russia
strategically, right now, you're exactly right, Walter, that I think that is
one of their goals and objectives. And not just in Syria, in Europe and
maybe other places. But my sense is that President Putin can act very
decisively and very tactically and indeed very effectively. But
strategically, again, in Syria, there is a real risk that if Russia overplays
its hand, it will be left holding a very heavy and unattractive bag. And
the specter of Afghanistan is not far from people's minds in Europe.
Ukraine. Russia's aggression in Ukraine, its attempted annexation of
Crimea, its efforts, continuing efforts in the Donbass to support the
separatists. They may look strong, they may look decisive, but I think
what Mr. Putin has done is actually precipitate much of what he's tried to
prevent. Ukraine, the vast bulk of Ukraine is gone to Russian influence
for a generation or more. They're detested in much of Ukraine. NATO,
which Putin tries to keep at bay, and this is relative, is more energized
than it's been in recent memory. Largely driven by concerns about Mr.
Putin. Europeans are more serious about energy security than they've
been in a generation. Again driven by concerns of Russia using the
weapon and Russia's economy, of course, as a result, in part, of
sanctions, largely of oil prices, mismanagement is in very difficult
shape. This is not a good strategic proposition for Russia. Neither is
Syria. We can talk more about that, but let's get somebody else from the
audience back there. Yes. Ken Roth from Human Rights Watch. Ken.
Hey, Ken. I wanted to follow up, if I could, on Syria. I don't think
anybody quarrels with the importance of trying to achieve peace. But,
you know, the Kerry Lavrov talks have been going on for some two
years, and I think it really raises the question, which you didn't address
quite as much, is how do you mitigate the harm in the interim while
these talks go on? You talked about the humanitarian aid and certainly
the cross border. Humanitarian aid has been very important. The cross
line, much less so, unfortunately. But what you didn't address is really
the way Assad has chosen to fight this war, which is by deliberately
targeting civilians. And that more than anything else, is why we have
millions of refugees. And at least from my vantage point, it seems that
Kerry is so focused on treating Russia as a potential partner in peace that
he's not treating it as an accomplice in mass murder. And he's not using
public diplomacy to pressure Putin, which is frankly the only way we're
going to have leverage over Assad to stop deliberately targeting
civilians. And I wanted to challenge you on what I see as a big gap in US
Policy towards Syria. Yeah, no, fair enough. We get up in the morning,
go to bed at night with these images in our minds as well. And it, I think,
drives all of us. And it is probably the biggest frustration we've had that
we have not been able to stop this and certainly to stop this sooner. But
practically speaking, you're exactly right that what is driving so many
people into leaving their lives behind, fleeing, putting everything at risk,
putting themselves in another country, another language, a place that
they don't know, taking to the high seas with traffickers and putting their
lives and their children's lives in traffickers. You're exactly right. It is the
horrific violence being directed at them by the regime. The barrel
bombs, the chemical weapons, more recently the chlorine weapons, et
cetera, the indiscriminate bombing. So the question is, what is to be
done? And the reason that Secretary Kerry is so intensely focused on this
is that the practical answer to actually making people's lives better, to
saving them, to protecting them, to giving them space, is to get a
cessation of hostilities, is to get more humanitarian assistance flowing, is
to get a political transition going and ultimately a resolution of the civil
war. It's not pretty. It's usually imperfect, it's usually frustrating. But it
seems to us that, practically speaking, that's the best way we can address
these problems. Now, I don't think we've been shy about calling out
Assad and calling out his patrons for the atrocious human rights abuses
they're committing every single day. We do that every single day, we do
it from the podium of the White House, we do it at the United nations,
we do it around the world. And it's usually important and usually
necessary, but it is not sufficient to actually get a result. And the result
lies in this painful, painstaking, frustrating thing called diplomacy,
backed, I believe, by strength and also backed by our assessment that,
and we may be wrong, that ultimately, in the case of Russia, its interests
lie in coming to a settlement as well. Thank you. I know we actually
have a lot more questions, but we have gone beyond our allotted time,
and I'm going to have to call this meeting to a close. Thank you,
Secretary. It's a real pleasure to have you. Thank you. Appreciate it.