The Back Channel Read online

  Copyright © 2019 by William J. Burns

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Burns, William J. (William Joseph), author.

  Title: The back channel: a memoir of American diplomacy and the case for its renewal / by William J. Burns.

  Description: First edition. | New York: Random House, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018042715 | ISBN 9780525508861 | ISBN 9780525508878 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Burns, William J. (William Joseph) | Diplomats—United States—Biography. | United States—Foreign relations—1945–1989. | United States—Foreign relations—1989–

  Classification: LCC E840.8.B857 A3 2019 | DDC 327.2092 [B]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2018042715

  Ebook ISBN 9780525508878

  randomhousebooks.com

  Book design by Debbie Glasserman, adapted for ebook

  Cover design: Anna Bauer Carr

  Cover image: Andrew B. Graham/Getty Images

  v5.4

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Prologue

  1. Apprenticeship: The Education of a Diplomat

  2. The Baker Years: Shaping Order

  3. Yeltsin’s Russia: The Limits of Agency

  4. Jordan’s Moment of Transition: The Power of Partnership

  5. Age of Terror: The Inversion of Force and Diplomacy

  6. Putin’s Disruptions: Managing Great Power Trainwrecks

  7. Obama’s Long Game: Bets, Pivots, and Resets in a Post-Primacy World

  8. The Arab Spring: When the Short Game Intercedes

  9. Iran and the Bomb: The Secret Talks

  10. Pivotal Power: Restoring America’s Tool of First Resort

  Photo Insert

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Appendix

  Bibliography

  Notes

  About the Author

  Prologue

  I REMEMBER CLEARLY the moment when I saw American diplomacy and power at their peak. I was seated behind Secretary of State James Baker at the opening of the Madrid Peace Conference in the autumn of 1991, feeling numb from exhaustion and excitement. Around a huge T-shaped table in the Spanish royal palace sat a collection of international leaders and—breaking a decades-long taboo—representatives of Israel, the Palestinians, and key Arab states. At the head of the table, alongside President George H. W. Bush, was Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev. He was visibly tired and distracted, the leader of a faded superpower two months away from collapse. They were all united less by shared conviction about Arab-Israeli peace than by shared respect for American influence—fresh off the spectacular defeat of Saddam Hussein, the bloodless triumph of the Cold War, the reunification of Germany, and the reordering of Europe.

  For a young American diplomat, Madrid was a heady moment. It was a dramatic illustration of how diplomacy could achieve what had seemed unthinkable. For the first time, Arabs and Israelis gathered in the same room, and agreed to the same terms for negotiations. With that, the door for the resolution of a conflict that had roiled the region and the world for more than four decades cracked open. They sat down together, against their instincts, because we asked, at a moment when well-framed U.S. requests were not easily ignored. It marked a time of uncontested American primacy in a world no longer bound by Cold War rivalry—when history seemed to flow inexorably in America’s direction, the power of its ideas driving the rest of the world in a slow but irresistible surge toward democracy and free markets.

  On that day in Madrid, global currents all seemed to run toward a period of prolonged American dominance. The liberal order that the United States had built and led after World War II would soon draw into its embrace the former Soviet empire, as well as the post-colonial world for which we had competed. Great power rivalry had rarely seemed so quiescent. Russia was flat on its back, China was still turned inward, and the United States and its key European and Asian allies faced few regional threats and even fewer economic rivals.

  Globalization was gathering pace, with the American economy propelling greater openness in trade and investment. With only a single website and eleven million cellphones in use around the world, the promise of the information revolution was tantalizing, as was that of remarkable medical and scientific breakthroughs. The reality that a profoundly important era of human progress was unfolding only reinforced a sense of permanence for the nascent Pax Americana.

  The question at the time was not whether America should seize the unipolar moment, but how and to what end. Should the United States use its unmatched strength to extend American global dominance? Or, rather than unilaterally draw and dominate the contours of a new world order, should it instead lead with diplomacy to shape an order in which old rivals had a place, and emerging powers had a stake?

  * * *

  * * *

  ONE YEAR LATER, after President Bush had lost his bid for reelection, I was tasked with writing a transition memo to the incoming Clinton administration and Secretary of State Warren Christopher. In it, I tried to capture the paradox for American statecraft. The memo began by welcoming the new administration to “a world in the midst of revolutionary transition, in which you will have both an historic opportunity to shape a new international order and a sobering collection of problems to contend with.”

  While “for the first time in fifty years we do not face a global military adversary,” I wrote, “it is certainly conceivable that a return to authoritarianism in Russia or an aggressively hostile China could revive such a global threat.” I argued that “alongside the globalization of the world economy, the international political system is tilting schizophrenically toward greater fragmentation.” Ideological competition was not over—it was simply reshaped:

  The collapse of Communism represents an historic triumph for democracy and free markets, but it has not ended history or brought us to the brink of ideological uniformity. A great wave of democratic institution-building is taking place, driven by a surging post-Communist interest in the political and economic empowerment of individuals. But democratic societies that fail to produce the fruits of economic reform quickly, or fail to accommodate pressures for ethnic self-expression, may slide back into other “isms,” including nationalism or religious extremism or some combination of the two. In much of the world, including parts of it that are very important strategically for us, Islamic conservatism remains a potent alternative to democracy as an organizing principle.1

  The memo highlighted a number of other growing problems, from climate change to the AIDS epidemic and continued fragility in the Balkans. There were as many challenges as there were holes in my analysis. I couldn’t yet grasp the pace and significance of China’s rise, the intensity of Russia’s resurgence, or the anger and frustration seething beneath so many authoritarian Arab societies. What was easier to see was the potential for diplomacy to harness unprecedented military, political, and economic advantage to promote American interests and help make the world more peaceful and prosperous.

  The potential for American diplomacy seems far less evident today. The global order that emerged at the end of the Co
ld War has shifted dramatically. Great power rivalry is back: China is systematically modernizing its military and is poised to overtake the United States as the world’s biggest economy, slowly extending its reach in Asia and across the Eurasian supercontinent; Russia is providing graphic evidence that declining powers can be at least as disruptive as rising ones, increasingly convinced that the pathway to revival of its great power status runs through the erosion of an American-led order.

  Regional orders that seemed stable shortly after the end of the Cold War are now collapsing, none more so than in the region for which the Madrid Conference once held so much hope. The implosion of the Arab state system is the sharpest illustration of the risks of emerging vacuums and the dissipation of American influence. With tactical agility and a willingness to play rough, Vladimir Putin has reasserted a Russian role in the region that seemed unimaginable in that palace in Madrid, where Gorbachev’s beleaguered presence was more a political convenience for the United States than a mark of Moscow’s clout. A half-century-long American moment in the Middle East—inherited from the British, boosted by Desert Storm and Madrid, and badly damaged by the Iraq War in 2003—is now disappearing.

  Meanwhile, a quarter century of convergence toward a Western model is giving way to a new form of globalization, featuring a new diversity of actors and the fragmentation of global power, capital, and concepts of governance. There is much that is positive in all of these trends. Hundreds of millions of people have risen out of poverty and into the middle class; unprecedented progress has been made in health and life expectancy; human society is more connected than ever before, with half the population of the globe now enjoying access to the Internet, and more than nine billion digital wireless devices in use.

  In the United States and much of Europe, however, the backlash against globalization has been building. Donald Trump’s election and Britain’s decision to exit the European Union both reflected a deep popular unease, a growing anxiety that the dislocations of a globalized economy are not worth the benefits, that globalization not only doesn’t lift all boats, but homogenizes political culture and obscures national identity. Those impulses, harnessed with demagogic flair by President Trump and European nationalists, have aggravated political polarization and incapacitated governance. Fewer than 20 percent of Americans now express confidence in government, half the figure in 1991. Gridlock is the default position in Washington and bipartisan compromise a distant memory.

  The value of American leadership is no longer a given—at home or abroad. Fatigue with international intervention after nearly two decades at war has fed a desire to free the United States from the constraints of old alliances and partnerships and reduce commitments overseas that seem to carry unfair security burdens and economic disadvantage. The disconnect has grown between a disillusioned American public and the conceits of a Washington establishment often undisciplined in its policy choices and inattentive to the need to explain plainly the practical value of American leadership in the world.

  Donald Trump didn’t invent all of these trends and troubles, but he has fed them and made them worse. His erratic leadership has left America and its diplomats dangerously adrift, at a moment of profound transformation in the international order.

  My own story helps shed light on how this came to pass, and how America’s role has evolved. I hope it helps illuminate the back channels of my profession, and drags the argument for diplomacy into the light of public debate. I hope it also shows why the sidelining of diplomacy is so tragic, and why its restoration is so important. My goal is not to offer an elegy for American diplomacy but a reminder of its significance, and of the wider value of public service, amid the mistrust and disparagement so willfully sown by so many.

  Long before Trump’s election, my diplomatic apprenticeship exposed me to the best—and worst—of American statecraft and its practitioners, from the early rituals of my first overseas tour to a junior role in a Reagan White House recovering from the self-inflicted wound of the Iran-Contra affair. I saw adept American diplomacy under Bush and Baker and marveled at the skill with which they harnessed America’s extraordinary leverage to shape a post–Cold War order. In Boris Yeltsin’s Russia, I learned the limits of American agency when it is arrayed against the powerful forces of history. As ambassador in Jordan, I was reminded that American leadership could make a profound difference, especially to a partner undergoing a precarious and consequential leadership transition.

  During the post–9/11 years, I led an embattled Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs in Washington as the inversion of the roles of force and diplomacy intensified. The casting aside of the Bush 41 administration’s unique mix of caution and daring, in favor of a disastrous mix of militancy and hubris, fumbled an historic chance to reset America’s role in the world. Rather than successfully shaping a new order, we compounded regional dysfunctions and undercut our influence.

  The underlying challenge for the rest of my diplomatic career—including as ambassador in Putin’s Russia and the most senior career American diplomat from the end of the Bush 43 administration through most of Obama’s presidency—was how to adjust to a world in which American dominance was fading, in part due to structural forces, and in part due to our own grievous missteps. From reimagining and realigning relationships with emerging global rivals like Russia and China and partners like India, to navigating the turbulent waters of the Arab Spring and direct diplomacy with adversaries like Iran, those years made clear to me that the tests awaiting the next generation of diplomats will be even more formidable.

  In the age of Trump, America is diminished, the president’s worldview smaller and meaner, the world full of difficult currents. The enlightened self-interest at the heart of seventy years of American foreign policy is disdained, and the zero-sum joys of mercantilism and unilateralism are ascendant. Seen from the Trump White House, the United States has become hostage to the international order it created, and liberation is overdue.

  Trump’s worldview is the antithesis of Baker and Bush 41, who combined humility, an affirmative sense of the possibilities of American leadership, and diplomatic skill at a moment of unparalleled influence. The clock can’t be turned back to that moment, of course; today’s world is more complicated, crowded, and competitive. We are no longer the dominant power, but we can be the pivotal power for many years to come—best positioned among our friends and rivals to assemble and drive the coalitions and initiatives we need to answer the tests of our time.

  The task will be to use what remains of the historic window of American preeminence to shape a new international order, one that accommodates new players and their ambitions while promoting our own interests. Neither unthinking retrenchment nor the muscular reassertion of old convictions will be effective prescriptions in the years ahead. The United States will have neither the singular unifying purpose of competition with the Soviet Union nor the singular unrivaled position of strength we enjoyed for nearly two decades after the end of the Cold War.

  We will not be able to safeguard our values and interests on our own, or by big sticks alone. It will require persuading our partners as well as our adversaries of their stake in such an order. Only diplomacy can deliver on that.

  * * *

  * * *

  SHORT OF WAR, diplomacy is the main instrument we employ to manage foreign relations, reduce external risks, and exploit opportunities to advance our security and prosperity. It is among the oldest of professions, but it is also among the most misunderstood, and the most unsatisfying to describe. It is by nature an unheroic, quiet endeavor, less swaggering than unrelenting, often unfolding in back channels out of sight and out of mind. Its successes are rarely celebrated, its failures almost always scrutinized. Even as visible and accomplished a practitioner as Henry Kissinger has called diplomacy “the patient accumulation of partial successes”—hardly the stuff of bumper stickers.2

  A diplomat serves many roles: a
translator of the world to Washington and Washington to the world; an early-warning radar for troubles and opportunities; a builder—and fixer—of relations; a maker, driver, and executor of policy; a protector of citizens abroad and promoter of their economic interests; an integrator of military, intelligence, and economic tools of statecraft; an organizer, convener, negotiator, communicator, and strategist.

  Diplomatic engagement is not a favor to an adversary, but a means of reconnaissance and communication. It is a way to better understand trends, assess motivations, convey determination, and avoid inadvertent collisions. It is a method of maneuvering for future gain, a means of gaining wider support by demonstrating our willingness to engage and exposing the intransigence of rivals or foes.

  The central function of diplomats is to try to manage the world’s inevitable disorders and crises. Our embassy in Pakistan worked tirelessly in 2005–6 to organize the largest relief operation since the Berlin Airlift, in the wake of an earthquake that killed more than eighty thousand Pakistanis. In 2008–9, American diplomacy was at the heart of an international effort to stop an epidemic of piracy off the coast of East Africa. Senior American diplomats brought together the U.S. military, international relief organizations, and African governments to cope with the Ebola crisis in 2014. All of those efforts required substantial international cooperation. None could have been accomplished by the United States alone—but none could have succeeded without American diplomatic leadership.

  Diplomacy is also essential to the promotion of a level playing field for American businesses abroad, to help open doors to the 95 percent of the world’s consumers who live outside our borders, create more jobs at home, and attract more foreign investment. Diplomats manage visas for more than a million foreign students in the United States, who generate about $40 billion every year for the American economy, and for the tourists whose visits produce another $200 billion annually. Diplomats help American citizens in difficulty overseas, whose predicaments run the gamut from lost passports to long-term imprisonment. They connect America to foreign societies, run educational exchange programs, engage with people outside of government, and try to cut through misunderstanding, mistrust, and misrepresentation of American realities.