The Return of American Diplomacy

Nicholas Burns

Chautauqua Institution

August 5, 2013

(excerpts from speech as prepared for delivery)

It is such an honor to be back here in Chautauqua in this great old amphitheater.

And, I am very grateful that you have decided to spend this week focused on a venerable and antique art, little understood and sometimes maligned, but of great value to all of us—Diplomacy.

I am a former career American diplomat—I served five Presidents between my first job as a lowly intern at the American Embassy in Nouakchott, Mauritania in 1980, to my last as Under Secretary of State in 2008.

And, I now have the privilege of teaching diplomacy and international politics to great young students from all over the country, and the world, at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

As I now teach for a living, perhaps I should ask you all a question.

What do you think about when you hear the word, “Diplomacy”?

What images does it conjure up and what value do we attach to it?

When I ask that question, some people invariably say-- well, diplomats are rather formal, perhaps even stuffy people in tall hats and mourning suits who meet in gilded palaces and talk at often absurd and endless lengths about the problems of the world.

That is certainly one true image of the antique diplomacy of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.   Think of Bismarck and the Congress of Berlin in 1878 after the Russo-Turkish War.

Or Woodrow Wilson, indeed in his top hot and morning suit, determined to pursue “open covenants openly arrived at” through his Fourteen Points at Versailles following the First World War.

But, we live in the twenty-first century.  Diplomats today from 195 member states of the United Nations look, and often act, quite differently than their forebears of a century ago.

The ranks of modern diplomats now include, thankfully, more and more women, as well as men.  And the Europeans and Americans no longer dominate international politics as they did a century ago.  Diplomats now represent many African, Middle Eastern, Latin American and Asian countries that did not exist in the world of empire and colonialism before the Great War.

Diplomats today represent governments, as they always have.   They also represent international organizations of every stripe such as the United Nations and the World Bank.

And, people who work for non-governmental organizations devoted to peace, development and poverty alleviation are diplomats too.

Think of Bill and Melinda Gates, and the enormously positive impact they are having on the fight against HIV Aids, Malaria and Polio.   The champion figure skater, Michelle Kwan, has signed on as a sports emissary for the State Department as did the baseball star Cal Ripken before her.

Diplomacy today is a far more diverse and inclusive enterprise than when it was the sole preserve of governments.

Traditional Diplomacy is, according to my Oxford English dictionary at home, “the management of international relations by negotiation”.

That very precise definition actually tells us a lot about diplomacy and why we are going to think about it from a variety of angles this week here in the amphitheater.

Here is another way to think about Diplomacy—it is actually everything we do—seven billion human beings on every continent—to manage, regulate, interpret and buffer relations among nations and peoples.

That is a critical job—to make the countries of the world, in a nutshell, work together efficiently, and profitably and, most importantly, peacefully.

Diplomacy thus embraces the widest spectrum of international activities.

When our indefatigable Secretary of State, John Kerry, opened negotiations a week ago today in Washington between the Israelis and Palestinians--that was diplomacy.

When President Obama, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping meet next month to discuss global economic problems,  that too is diplomacy.

When we negotiate free trade agreements with Panama and Colombia, that is economic diplomacy.

When nations meet to find ways to fight climate change, drug cartels and international criminal rings, that is, most certainly, multilateral diplomacy.

And, when we move tons of food aid to help feed desperately poor North Koreans, that is humanitarian diplomacy.

Diplomacy encompasses the thousands of actions taken each day by governments like ours, by international organizations such as the UN, and by non-profits like the Gates Foundation, to connect country to country, region to region, town to town, people to people to improve the human condition on our small, vulnerable, often violent and disputatious planet.

In this sense, I found in my career that diplomacy is sometimes, at its best, about hope.  The hope that people in all parts of the world can resolve the problems separating them from other people and other nations.

I found my calling in diplomacy in a rather unlikely way—I became fascinated by the Vietnam War.

I was actually too young to serve in the war, turning 17 the day of the cease-fire with North Vietnam in 1973.   The church bells in my hometown rang in celebration-- that long, arduous and divisive war had finally come to a close.

I saw, as did many of you, how our young men served bravely and honorably but were not always welcomed home with the dignity and honor that was their due.

Vietnam ripped at the threads that bound our nation, our communities and even our families together.

Even with my very limited teenage perspective, I could grasp the incongruity that a superpower like the U.S. had become involved in a civil war halfway around the world with a poor nation that did not represent a true strategic threat to us.

Or, so it appears now with the advantage of twenty-twenty hindsight.

Vietnam birthed my interest in diplomacy.  Given my rudimentary and lamentable grasp of world geography at the time, however, I had to consult an atlas to find out exactly where it was on the map!

And, then came the inevitable questions.

Why did we fight a people we actually knew so little about?

Was it right?  Was it smart?  How would we extricate ourselves from a war where we fought with one arm tied behind our back like a frustrated and increasingly embittered Gulliver?

Was there a better way—a different way-- for America to act and to lead in the world?

Like so many others in my generation, Vietnam was the impetus to seek a career in government -- in my case the American Foreign Service.

Forty years later, Vietnam still recalls, for me, the ultimate purpose of diplomacy.

Can we work amicably with other countries?

What is the best way to avoid conflict and war?

Are we capable of meeting the biblical challenge of peace among nations?

We know in our hearts that it may never be possible, as the ancient Greeks put it, to “tame the savageness of man” but we know that we have to try.

And, our path can be illuminated by a phrase Robert Kennedy used in his brief and tragic run for the Presidency in 1968.

He said that one of our purposes must be, in Tennyson’s words, “to seek a newer world” from the broken world we had inherited.

That is the ultimate promise of diplomacy—a newer and better and more peaceful world.

And that is why I found diplomacy to be a hopeful and, at times, even idealistic profession.

So, Chautauqua was right to bring us together this week to investigate how diplomacy might help us to resolve some of the problems that confront us now in the summer of 2013.

It has been a difficult and violent twelve years since the terrorist attacks of 9/11 brought down the symbols of our economic power on Wall Street, collided with the symbol of our military power in Washington and shook the foundations of our country.

In response, we came out swinging.  We invaded two Moslem countries, fought bitter and bloody wars in both and paid an enormous price in the lives of our soldiers, in treasure, and in our global credibility.

We also did some very good things for the people of Iraq and the people of Afghanistan in those two wars.

But, our experience in Iraq and Afghanistan can provide a unique perspective about diplomacy and the American approach to the world.

The United States is so enormously powerful---far more powerful militarily, for instance, than the ten next strongest countries combined---that we sometimes default to the military to meet the most difficult international threats.

When our Presidents have to decide whether we will fight other countries, or talk with them about our differences, the use of force can sometimes appear faster, cleaner, and a more direct route to success.

Diplomacy, by contrast, can move at a glacial pace and often requires infinite patience.

But, patience and restraint, as we all know, are also virtues.

The veteran negotiator, former Senator George Mitchell, illustrated the value of patience in diplomacy when he described his peace negotiations in Northern Ireland as:  “700 days of failure and one day of success”—the day he was finally able to secure the Good Friday agreement.

There are times, of course, when Diplomacy is not the answer and when the use of force is both necessary and just as President Obama reminded us in his memorable Nobel Peace Prize speech in 2009.

FDR was surely right to use force to defeat Hitler, Mussolini and Imperial Japan in the Second World War.

President Clinton used military force to stop two wars and save the Moslem populations of both Bosnia and Kosovo.

Most would agree that President Bush was obligated to strike back at Al Qaida after 9/11 and that President Obama had every right to launch the Abbottobad raid that killed Osama Bin Laden.

History demonstrates that force and diplomacy are sometimes closely interconnected.

Richard Holbrooke would not have been able to secure peace in Bosnia in 1995 without the use of force.  It ultimately convinced the Bosnian Serb army to stop killing innocent Moslems and to start talking.

There are times when we must rely on our military as it is critical to our security.  And we are fortunate to have extraordinary men and women in the armed forces willing to give their lives for us.

I admire the American military.  One of the proudest moments of my career was when I served as Ambassador to NATO—our joint State and Defense Department mission in Belgium.  I saw in Afghanistan, Kosovo and Bosnia how impressive, professional and competent our military personnel are in the most difficult environments.

The military is not the problem.

The problem is that we experienced, and are only now emerging from, more than a decade of war.  The two longest major wars in our history--and we chose to fight them simultaneously.

We discovered in both places the age-old truth that, to paraphrase Churchill, when you start a war, you really don’t know when and how it will end.

We in the U.S. government did not even remotely consider in 2001 that our brave troops would still be in Afghanistan twelve years later.  That we would stay in Iraq for eight, violent and frustrating years.

That is the major reason that President Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice shifted, in the President’s second term, to emphasize diplomacy as the primary instrument of American policy and why it has been President Obama’s abiding and wise impulse in his first five years in office.

We can see now that we asked too much of our military after 9/11 and relied too little on our diplomats.

We were right, in my view, to fully fund the military but we deprived the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development of necessary funds.

There is, as a result, an enormous gulf in size and financial power between diplomats and soldiers in the US government.

Former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has made the most effective points of comparison.

He has argued for greater attention to and support for diplomacy by reminding us there are more sailors and airmen in just one carrier battle group than there are American diplomats in all corners of the world.

And there are more members of the armed forces bands—Army, Navy, Air Force, Coast Guard and Marines-- than American diplomats.

That tells you all you need to know about our national security priorities.

That is why we must decide, as a country, to return to diplomacy as the primary way we interact with the rest of the world.

I remember Colin Powell saying—and he was a very fine Secretary of State after having been Chairman of the Joint Chiefs-- the proper way for the U.S. to position its assets is to put the diplomats on point with the military in reserve.

Well, we reversed Powell’s maxim after 9/11.  We chose war as the primary way to respond to the threat of Al Qaida.  It worked for a time.  But, it did not work out ultimately as we had planned.

The Founding Fathers recognized that this balance between force and diplomacy was vital for a democratic government like ours.

To picture this--Google the Great Seal of the United States when you have a chance.

You will see that The Eagle, symbol of our country, is holding in its talons on one side—arrows-- signifying our military strength and on the other-- an olive branch-- signifying our commitment to peace.

The Great Seal is a perfect metaphor for the natural tension our Presidents face in reacting to threats to our country.

There are times when we must defend ourselves—and use those arrows-- and there are times when our first impulse should be to look for a negotiated way out of a conflict —by offering that olive branch.

The first job of the President is to defend the country.

But, he, or she (we hope in the future), must also use our great power to be a peacemaker too.

President Kennedy gave a memorable speech at the American University in 1963—perhaps his greatest speech—on this very dilemma, entitled, “A Strategy for Peace”.

“What kind of peace do we seek”, he asked.  “Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war…..not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave”,  but “a genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living”…”not merely peace in our time but peace in all time”.

Kennedy had come to believe, after the Bay of Pigs and Cuban Missile Crisis, that we have, as he said, “no more urgent task” than peace.

We know that a perfect, complete peace is unattainable given the imperfect nature of human beings.

But, in its pursuit, we also know we will find our best and true selves.

So, we should invest in Diplomacy, especially at a time when the global balance of power is shifting and the U.S., despite our strength, can no longer call all the shots and act alone in the world.

Many of the most complex and dangerous threats we face—climate change, trafficking of women and children, world food shortages and poverty, the global recession, the danger of nuclear proliferation, the threat of pandemics and disease— are much better suited to diplomacy rather than the use of force.

These challenges are transnational—they threaten every country and every person in the world.

There has never been a time in human history like our own when the fate of every person on the planet has been so intertwined.  Globalization has given us a tightly connected world.

The U.S. is still, by a long mile, the most powerful country in the world—economically, politically, militarily.

But, we can’t resolve any of these challenges on our own.  We can’t be a true leader if we say to the rest of the world—it’s my way or the highway.

Instead, we need to coalesce with our friends and allies—and we have many all over the world-- in common cause.

And we would be foolish to succumb to isolationism which some very conservative Republicans and very liberal Democrats in Washington are now advocating.  We know, that in our globalized world, isolationism is a sure recipe for failure in our foreign policy.

We have plenty of examples from our history that demonstrate Americans are capable of this type of great diplomatic leadership in the world.

After all, it was Franklin, Jefferson and Adam’s diplomacy during the Revolution that secured our alliance with France and made the great difference in defeating the British army and navy at Yorktown.

As President, Jefferson used patient, smart diplomacy with Napoleon’s government to secure the Louisiana Purchase, doubling the size of our national territory.

Teddy Roosevelt was the first American to win the Nobel Peace Prize for his mediation of the Russo-Japanese war in 1905.

FDR’s wartime diplomacy secured an alliance with Churchill and Stalin critical to overwhelming the Axis powers.

President Kennedy turned to diplomacy, contrary to the recommendations of most of his advisors, when he convinced Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev to negotiate an end to the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.

Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger’s brilliant opening to China in 1972 re-established diplomatic relations and ensured a generation of peace.

President George H.W. Bush was perhaps the most accomplished foreign policy President in recent decades.  He employed his vast experience and faith in diplomacy to negotiate the unification of Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the creation of the modern Israeli-Palestinian peace process and the construction of the Gulf War coalition that vanquished Saddam Hussein in 1991 after his ill-fated invasion of Kuwait.

President Clinton’s negotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement with Mexico and Canada has lifted all three economies since.

President George W. Bush turned to diplomacy to create a strategic engagement with India.

We used diplomacy and negotiations to end the Vietnam War, to end the Cold War and that is how the Israeli-Palestinian crisis will end too, eventually, at the negotiating table.

At its very best, diplomacy can end war and it can also help to achieve justice as Nelson Mandela did so effectively in his long, four-year negotiation with F.W. de Klerk to dismantle the despicable apartheid regime.

Can we learn from the past as we address the great challenges on our own horizon?

Can we convince the erratic and isolated North Korean leadership that turning back to serious negotiations is a better path than continued confrontation in East Asia?

Can the Obama Administration overcome our 34- year isolation from Iran and achieve direct negotiations with its new President, Hassan Rowhani, inaugurated yesterday?  Can a negotiated settlement prevent that country from becoming a nuclear weapons power?  Can we thus resolve the Iran nuclear dilemma by diplomacy rather than force of arms?

Finally, can we find a way to maintain American predominance in Asia while, at the same time, engage China diplomatically to keep the peace in that vital region?

Diplomacy plays to the strengths of the United States.   It allows us to create a world based on the solidity of law and justice.

Diplomacy can even sometimes reveal, at the highest level, what Lincoln called so memorably “the better angels of our nature”.

As I have reflected on my own experiences as a diplomat and taught its utility to students, I believe it is only through a clear commitment to diplomacy, backed by the strength of our military, that we will be able to resolve these major international challenges.

And, if we can commit to work peacefully with China, Russia, Japan, India, South Africa, Brazil, Mexico, Germany and other powers, we have a chance to write a more positive chapter in the history of our time.

Fifty years ago this summer, in a remarkably prescient speech, President Kennedy evoked the global, integrated, connected world that we know today.  And he spoke up for diplomacy when he framed the ultimate challenge that we face, in every country, to create a better world.

“For in the final analysis”, he said, “our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet.  We all breathe the same air.  We all cherish our children’s future.   And we are all mortal.”

The United States has proven that we are the strongest country in the world.

Let us now demonstrate that we are also a country that can unite the world around common hopes.

In doing so, we might best heal the wounds of two wars, and build the more peaceful world that is the great and elusive dream of every generation.

Thanks to all of you for listening to me this morning.

And, thanks to Chautauqua for making this week possible.