Mr. Burns thanks. Its great to be with you. Great to be with all of you. Mary yes, it is great to be here. So we are tasked with looking at the future of american diplomacy and Foreign Policy, but i thought i might look backwards for a moment. How did you get started in this gig . This was early 1980s, you write in your book you were offered a princely salary 21,000. Mr. Burns it seemed like a lot then. Mary yeah, it was in 1980s in washington. And what was the attraction. . Mr. Burns my dad was a career army officer, so i learned to respect Public Service through his experience, as i was growing up. Then when i was 18, just by serendipity, one of my best friends in high schools father was the ambassador of egypt, so i spent time in cairo at an very impressionable age, and that was my introduction and. And then i went to the old u. S. Embassy on groves square and took the written exam for Foreign Service ironically the same week that our colleagues were taken hostage in tehran, which should have been a signal to me, i suppose. [laughter] but you know, i entered never expecting id do it for three and a half decades. I was very fortunate. Mary im hoping i can get you to tell a few stories of the some of the characters and crazy scenes that you encountered along the way before we get to where we are at this current moment. And let me ask you to start with russia. You did a couple of postings there. Mr. Burns i did, yeah. Mary ended up as ambassador, 2005 you went in . Mr. Burns i did. Mary how does that work . You go in and you present your credentials. Mr. Burns right. Mary you went to the kremlin in this case . Mr. Burns i did. Mary talk about that. Mr. Burns this is august of 2005, the newly arrived u. S. Ambassador. I meet putin at the kremlin, which, as many of you know, is a place that is built on a scale that is meant to intimidate visitors, especially newly arrived American Ambassadors,. Huge, through a ornate hall, and you go down a hall and twostory bronze doors, and youre kept waiting there a little, and then the doors crack open a bit and here comes Vladimir Putin, and despite the barechested pictures, hes not very intimidating. He is about 56 with lifts in his shoes. Before i got a word out of my mouth he says, you americans need to listen more, you cant everything your own way anymore. We can have effective relations and not just on your terms. Mary and by the way, welcome to moscow. Mr. Burns yes. There was not a lot of pleasantry. Mr. Burns so it was in my experience, vintage Vladimir Putin, it was charmless, but a direct message and thats the putin with whom weve been wrestling for all. Mary one of the perks of being ambassador to moscow is you get to live in the house, and you in your book describe some entertaining dinner parties and guests who made their way through the house. Describe the house. Mr. Burns it has been the residence of the American Ambassador since 1934, so george kennon, as a young diplomat who helped move the first ambassador in there. I think theres so many layers of bugs in the walls that it probably confuses the Russian Security services as well. My wife and i said to have anything like a personal conversation, youd either have to turn the radio on really loud or go for a walk in the garden. But, no, its a lovely place and the history is full of stories of the house when kennon was serving there in the mid 1930s. There was one famous holiday or Christmas Party in which they brought not only the zoo keeper from the moscow zoo, but a bunch of the trained animals there and they one Red Army General managed to put basically like a, you know, a babys bottle filled with champagne for one of the trained bears, who then managed to get drunk and you know, fall all over the guests and everything else. So that was kind of a high bar for subsequent entertainment. Mary i hope you didnt replicate that in your tenure, but you did host a very young senator obama when he came to moscow . Mr. Burns yeah, this is the week after i got there. So shortly after this meeting with putin i described. So thensenator obama came with dick luger, you know the revered senator from indiana who who recently passed away, and lugar was clearly grooming barack obama to be his new sam nunn, you know, his new partner on a lot of arms control issues. And you know, i remember being struck first by senator obamas attentiveness to my daughters, you know, who were very young then, they were in middle school and his daughters were a little , younger than that, but he knew very much the experience of taking young kids himself moving to new places around the world and he was totally , and he was totally unpretentious at that time. And i dont know if he thought of running for president at that time. Mary were you struck by his knowledge or questions about russia . Mr. Burns no, we talked of other things, we moscow traffic was quite bad. He was interested in the george h. W. Bush Foreign Policy and and baker and schoolcraft others, and where we went wrong where we were with iraq, two years after the invasion. Mary and if i had told you then, 2005, that we would be sitting here in 2019 and Vladimir Putin would still be the president of russia with several more years ahead of him in that role, what would you have thought . Mr. Burns you know, it probably wouldnt have shocked me. Mary really . Mr. Burns putin had created a system, even this is a decade ago, with i centered so much on him, that even if he changed roles, as he did in 2008, you know, when he became prime minister, but he was still the ultimate Decision Making with Dmitry Medvedev as sort of the front for that. It was important for putin to move away from, as he wanted to. Mary you have watched the alaska my guess, three years play out with u. S. Russia relations and all of the many twists and turns weve witnessed, is the Vladimir Putin that we can glimpse today, those of us who havent met him, does it team to track with the Vladimir Putin you met . You knew him before he was president. Mr. Burns yeah, no, i met him when he was the deputy mayor of st. Petersburg, i think 1994, and he was a very great figure and i , and i was a great figure as the political chief at the embassy. I certainly never thought he was going to be president of the russia, and he probably never thought that i was going to be the u. S. Ambassador. Putin, grievance and ambition and insecurity wrapped together. He prides himself on being able to play a weak hand skillfully , and hes a realist if not a cynic. He understands that russia has essentially much weaker hand than the United States. And he says its not my fault if people with a stronger hand, hand well, and if people with a stronger hand, meaning us, plays them poorly. He has a deep mistrust of his political elite and foreign leaders, and i think hes convinced himself to chip away at an americanled order and , and hes been effective at parts of that especially over the last decade especially. Mary have you watched his appetite on taking risks grown . Mr. Burns i have. I think hes become more reckless. In my earlier experience, he was a much more calculated risk taker. I think you saw in ukraine, the appetite not just in swallowing crimea, but the push to the south of ukraine in the dawn donbas as well. And i think his appetite for taking risk has grown and saw that most vividly in our election in 2016. It is not as if putin invented the dysfunction or polarization in our system. He saw it has an opportunity to take advantage of. And i have always thought in addition to his training in the kgb as a Russian Security officers, one thing to understand about him hes a judo expert. He is trained to use the strengths of stronger opponents against them. When he saw dysfunction in our system, he saw to take advantage. I think he is as surprised as donald trump was that trump won, but i think he sought to accelerate the chaos in our system and put the thumb on the scale of Hillary Clinton. Putin,efore we leave tell us the story, because you were actually there, for the famous meeting between putin and Hillary Clinton back when he still kind of liked Hillary Clinton, and she asked him about siberian tigers. Mr. Burns yeah, the conversation had been desultry until then. It was president putin talking complaining about american policy and we talked about , things to discuss. Bearing in mind his barechested persona, he sees himself as a great outdoorsman, and he took had taken a particular interest in tagging siberian tigers as well as polar bears in the insian far east and way up the arctic north. As the conversation was kind of deteriorating, she asked him about this, and i have rarely seen putin more animated. He really lit up talking about his plans that summer to go up to the Russian Arctic and tag polar bears. So he took us out of the meeting we were in, down to his private office, and you saw all of these very surprised russian staff and president ial security officers, and he had this big, you know, it occupied the whole wall of his private office this map of russia, which is across 11 time zones it needs the whole wall for the map, and he was animated to places he wanted to go. The punch line is at the end of this if bill clinton, the former president might want to go with him, and he said maybe youd like to come hillary, and she was very polite but in the car , ride back the last place shed and her husband would want to spend their summer vacation. Mary chasing tigers with putin. Mr. Burns the last place they would be. Mary let me take you to another part of the world, another moment, the arab spring. Mr. Burns right. Mary because it strikes me as many of the days you watched history unfold realtime from either the state department or some foreign posting, or from the situation room in that case, i guess. And just those hours where obama was trying to persuade mubarak in egypt, game over. Youre done. You were there . Mr. Burns i was. Yeah, yeah. And mubarak was convinced that americans by and large were naive about what it took to ensure political control in egypt. You could almost feel it in his voice as he was talking to president obama. With the president quite firmly, if diplomatically, making clear to mubarak that the time had come. And you know, mubaraks experience with the revolution began in early 2011 was a classic instance of too little too late. Steps he might have taken to open up the system a month earlier, by the time he did it, the street had moved way past him, and ultimately the egyps armed forces did, too. Our friend in the gulf, saudis and others, still bear a grudge over this. Their sense is that the Obama Administration threw mubarak and the egyptian leadership upped under the bus. My experience was the political bus was halfway across his prone political body before the United States ever pronounced itself on all of this. Mary when did it start dawning on all of you, the president and Hillary Clinton was secretary of state then, that this wasnt restricted to one, two, or three countries, this was a whole region. Mr. Burns it was. I wish i could tell you that we had neatly predicted the change after the first revolution began in tunisia. You could see the seeds of this for years and years, even from in the early in 1980s jordan. The pace of it and the way in which it evolved in each of the arab societies was very hard to grasp, and id be the first to acknowledge i think we some some things right and other things wrong, too. In egypt, i think the president made about the only calls an american president could on this , given the limits of our agency. In libya, while again i think the president was right to act in the way that we did, we got a lot of our mediumterm assumptions wrong, about how hard it would be to restore order post gadhafi. There was mary you knew gadhafi . Mr. Burns i did. And i first felt this was another back channel diplomacy in the george w. Bush administration when i led secret talks with gadhafi, first, to get libya out of the business of terrorism after lockerbie attack killed 278 innocent people on an airliner, and then to get out of what was a rudimentary Nuclear Weapons program, and dealing with gadhafi in those years, 2003, 2003, 2004, was the single most probably the single most peculiar i had as a diplomate. His favorite time for meeting was like 3 00 in the morning. , which was not my prime time. Youd meet him in the middle of the desert with a tent, which was not ornate. It was this kind of canvas army tent filled with plastic white lawn furniture, and gadhafi sitting there at 3 00 in the morning, and he had this very disconcerting habit, during the conversation pausing up at the ceiling for three or four minutes presumably gathering his thoughts. He was a as a diplomat, you cary on the conversation. The distraction for me he was a snappy dresser. And it looked like he was wearing a pajama top with dead dictators on it. Mary wow. Custommade. Mr. Burns i am sure it was. I dont think it was a designer item, and i would spend three or four minutes trying to figure out how many i could identify. I got pretty good by the end of it, because he paused a lot. The other gadhafi story you may remember, the fall of 2009 he came to the u. N. Assembly and speak, leaders are supposed to speak no more than seven or eight minutes. Minutes. Gadhafi went on for 90 minutes. He didnt have a text in front of him, but little pieces of paper that kept falling off the podium. He was rambling all over the place. When i remember most vividly is 75 minutes into the 90minute monologue, the wonderful arabic Language Interpreter at the u. N. , i was listening on my ear phones, you could hear him in arabic say, i cant take this anymore. He threw his head phones off, and last 15 minutes anybody who didnt speak arabic, they didnt miss much. [laughter] mr. Burns but the problem with gadhafi, once the revolution began, this was existential for him. He wasnt going to negotiate himself out of existence, and so however much we may have gotten wrong, some of the mediumterm assumptions, you know, i still think the president s decision to act was almost unavoidable , because here you had the u. N. Security Council Resolution legitimizing the use of force in that instance. Of alle the arab league, institutions, calling on the United States to act, partly because at one time or another, everyone around the arab summit table, gadhafi had tried to off. He was a unifying factor in the arab world. And then syria is the most as , you look at the arab spring tragedies, you know, syria is the most painful, not just because of its impact for syrians, but because of the, you know, really dangerous spillover in the region and outside the region as well. Mary well, and ive interviewed many people who you would have been working closely with, veterans of obamas Foreign Policy team. Mr. Burns yes. Mary who describes syria as their greatest regret, and specifically the failure to enforce the red line that obama drew in 2012. Mr. Burns yeah, it was a mistake that we all made. And i think there was probably an earlier mistake in the sense that in 2012, when you still had, you know, a pretty significant, if kind of unruly moderate opposition, there was a moment when even the russians, i remember at the time, were quite nervous about assad losing altitude. He was having a hard time recruiting people for the syrian military. He was losing ground in northwestern syria. You know, there was a moment if we could have telescoped the assistance that we provided to the moderate opposition, im not at all sure it would have turned the tide on the battlefield or caused the assad regime to collapse. It would have given us more leverage diplomatically with the assad but with the russians and iranians. I think the classic problem in our diplomacy in syria in those years was an imbalance between ends and means. We are setting maximalist ends outside of moscow, theres a red line with regard to the use of chemical weapons, but we tended to apply our means too incrementally and too grudgingly. To contrast putin, with a military invention that was relatively modest, but he did it in a decisive fashion and that multiplied the political advantage. Mary do you see syria and where we are now as an american policy failure . How much responsibility does the u. S. Bear there . Whats going on . Mr. Burns it is hard for me having lived through this, having been responsible, scared shared responsibility, to see this as anything other than had an american policy failure. That does not mean it is exclusively an american policy failure. Himselfbashar alassad has saved his regime but ruined a society and a country. Assad himself was an accidental desperate. Despot. But he was setting up ophthalmology in london when his brother, who was an heir, was killed in a car accident. He was assuming the family play brutishly is an article of faith and suspicious of everybody else and did he that in a ruthless fashion. It didnt have to end that way. The initial were peaceful, it was school kids in a small city in southern syria near the jordanian border, but assad reacted in the only way that that mafia clan, which is really what the assad family is, new how, and that is brutally. That violence begot other violence as well. Russians and iranians share a lot of responsibility. I think they saw this as the place where they were going to make their stand against regime change, and almost anything the United States did, they were going to double down. Each for their own reasons, because russian and iranian interests in syria are not identical, but its just an awfully sad episode. In terms of diplomacy for american Foreign Policy, the reminder of the importance of getting ends and means aligned. Mary stay in the region and go to the situation that was leading the npr newscast as i walked in today, as we all walked in iran and whats happening in the gulf, two tankers attacked yesterday, tensions running high. How i mean, run us through the