America in a World of Upheaval

29:45I mean, I know we'll talk about Russia in a minute, but for Putin, this has been a lifeline, both in terms of more revenue as a result of higher energy prices and his ability to export more, and diminished military inventory on the part of the United States for the kind of things that the Europeans want to acquire from the United States and then provide to President Zelensky in Ukraine, especially air defense interceptors as well. So from Putin's point of view, at a moment when he was beginning to feel, I think, genuine economic pressure and quite significant battlefield losses, well over a million killed and wounded on the battlefield, this is, as I said, a lifeline.

30:28And for China, I think the consequence, at least so far, even though they're obviously worried about their access to Gulf energy, has been that every week, every month that the United States is preoccupied in the Gulf or in the Middle East is a week or a month or a year in which the United States is less focused on the Indo-Pacific as well, which, you know, from the long-term strategic point of view of the Chinese, as well as Putin and Russia, is, you know, a positive. Is there any risk in the aftermath after this war that Iran would in fact be able to dash toward a bomb and we would either not see it or not be able to stop it?

31:09Is that a thing that keeps you up in it? Yeah, it does. I mean, you know, it's something that worried us in the last year or two that I was director at CIA, the possibility that they could make a dash in the absence of the kind of intrusive verification and monitoring that the comprehensive nuclear agreement had set up and which had largely atrophied in the years after the Trump administration pulled out of the nuclear agreement, that they could try to do that, although we didn't see any evidence that there had been a decision by the Supreme Leader to reverse his edict at the end of 2003 to at least pause their weaponization program.

31:48So it's possible. I think given the quality of Israeli and U.S. intelligence, there's a fair chance that, you know, we would see it happening. But it's a lot more complicated right now in the absence of having, you know, inspectors on the ground. But, you know, it's a significant order, even if you're not talking about, you know, recreating or reassembling the entire nuclear infrastructure, much of it has been destroyed now. If you decided to make a determined effort to build a crude nuclear device, you still have the know-how to do that, and you still have, you know, a significant amount, like over 400 kilograms of, you know, 60 % highly enriched uranium, you know, you could have the means to do that.

32:33I'm not certain that this Iranian regime would, you know, set off down that path. I got a lot of other preoccupations right now. But given what I said before, that you now have a regime that's weaker in many ways, but also even nastier and more radical, this is a regime that, you know, we'll will certainly seriously consider trying to do that. I went back and read the memo you wrote ahead of the Iraq war when you were the Assistant Secretary overseeing the Middle East, kind of diplomatically warning against the war, warning of some of the consequences of that war. It's kind of remarkable that we're at another moment, you know, more than 20 years later, where the 82nd Airborne is back on its way to the region.

33:11And we're talking about regime change and, you know, sending troops into another Middle Western country, just on a more conceptual level, how do you kind of make sense of the intractability of these problems, the fact that we seem to kind of keep repeating these mistakes? We don't learn a lot. We don't learn all the lessons that we should. And, you know, we sometimes have a short attention span for issues like that. You know, the war in 2003 in Iraq seems a little bit distant right now, and it shouldn't because, you know, the lessons of that experience ought to have been seared in our memory as we, you know, weigh choices about decisions like the one the president made five weeks ago to go to war with Iran, especially when, as I said before, it's a war of choice.

34:02You know, it's not something that was driven by an imminent threat. And sadly, you know, in all my experience in the Middle East over the years. It's the place where grand ambitions and, you know, ill-conceived strategies go to die. And it is a place where pessimists always feel right at home. And, you know, that ought to be instructive for us at least to weigh those kind of choices very carefully. And, you know, I just think also it's, when I talked about some of the institutional damage that's being done, I'm not sure that you have, I mean, all of us bitched and moaned sometimes about, you know, know, the number of interagency meetings and everything else and different administrations I worked in.

34:45But I'd much rather err on the side of having, you know, too much process than no process at all on some of these issues, too, that enable you to think about issues like, okay, what happens if the Strait of Hormuz is blocked or disrupted? What should we be thinking about in terms of evacuating, you know, American citizens and places in which they might, you know, face considerable risk? You know, how should we think about managing our embassies overseas? There's lots of different questions like that, that, you know, sometimes just don't get the attention they deserve when you have an absence of process.

35:20We'll be back after a short break.

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36:57In addition to being the American who's probably spent the most time negotiating with senior Iranians, you've also spent as much time with anyone with Vladimir Putin, both as ambassador to Russia during the Bush administration and also in your more recent jobs. I'm fascinated by a couple of moments with regard to the war in Ukraine when you were at CIA. The first is this moment in the fall of 2022 when all the reporting suggests that people within the administration were pretty acutely concerned about nuclear use. This was a moment when Russian troops were losing ground and there was fear of a kind of precipitous collapse of Russian lines.

37:37And reportedly, the intelligence community thought there was a 50 percent chance of Russia using a nuclear weapon. People can write in Foreign Affairs and elsewhere that the Biden administration was overly sensitive about such risks. But I realize it does feel different when you're in those chairs. And the fact that you were one of the people making that warning, I think, made people take it seriously. I'm fascinated by how you kind of thought of Russian decision-making in that moment. And what made you take that risk seriously? Well, I mean, I think first, I mean, whenever you're dealing with a significant nuclear on power like Russia, you're the president of the United States, you have to take risks seriously like that.

38:15And we had collected some intelligence which suggested that there was at least some contingency planning going on. And this was a moment where, you know, the Russian military had broken and ran east of Kharkiv in, you know, the eastern part of Ukraine, where the Russians were in an untenable position on the other side of the Dnipro River in Kherson and were pulling back. And I think our judgment at the time was that if a situation emerged in which the Ukraine advanced, continued at a rapid rate, and put at risk Putin's grip on Crimea, that that would be a circumstance in which he'd at least consider the possibility of using tactical and nuclear weapons.

38:58We didn't believe that there was a high likelihood that his grip on Crimea was going to be put at risk then, just because the Ukrainians said thanks to their courage and innovativeness had made huge progress. But also they needed to regroup as well, too. And the Russians had begun to use their head and pulled back across the Negro to more defensible positions. So I didn't think there was a high likelihood that circumstance was going to emerge. But it was sufficiently serious, even if it was a marginal likelihood, that we had to act. We did that. I mean, the president sent me to talk to one of my Russian counterparts, Sergei Naryshkin, the head of their external intelligence service, the SVR.

39:42I met in Turkey in November of 22, four hours of my life that I'll never get back. Because, you know, he was as polemical as you can imagine then. But he did get the message. And, you know, this was one instance where the Chinese, both privately and publicly, made clear that they didn't want to see any use of nuclear weapons as a result of the war in Ukraine. And Xi's was a voice that, you know, Putin couldn't afford to ignore as well. So for all those reasons, I think it was right to react energetically to that kind of a potential threat, even if the likelihood of it happening was not particularly high.

40:24The other really essential role that intelligence has played in the Ukraine wars is through strategic declassification, as you put it in the foreign affairs essay, the release declassification of intelligence about Russian intentions to make clear what is going on and what is going to happen. And this, you know, in some ways, I think really determined some of the early Russian failures in the war. As you were sitting in CA in that job, how did you kind of balance risks and rewards? What was the discussion around the strategy? And do you think we've lost the ability to use it just given the lack of trust in our institutions at this point?

41:01Well, I think that's a real challenge, too, because, you know, there were a lot of skeptics, you know, in the run-up to the war when we became increasingly convinced that Putin was going to launch a massive invasion against Ukraine. And, you know, that was reinforced for me when the president sent me to talk to Putin and some of the knuckle-draggers around him in early November of 2021, and I found Putin utterly unapologetic. You know, we laid out, I laid out, you know, in pretty graphic detail, unusually, what we knew about their invasion planning and also the consequences that would flow from, you know, his going ahead with that invasion plan.

41:42And he was, as far as I could tell, you know, sort of convinced that this was his moment strategically to control Ukraine and its choices, about which he had had a singular fixation for many years over, certainly over the years that I had known him as well. And, you know, I was also proud of the fact that we provided, you know, credible early warning of what was coming. It was kind of a lonely period because it was really only the British intelligence services that shared that conviction that invasion was coming. Many of our other closest allies were pretty skeptical. And we invested a lot going back to 2014 and the annexation of Crimea and working with the Ukrainian services to put them in the best possible position to defend themselves.

42:27I think the credibility of our intelligence helped the president to build a strong coalition of countries to, you know, to push back against Putin's aggression and help the Ukrainians defend themselves. And then I think the strategic declassification for which the president deserved credit, President Biden, I think was very useful. I had watched Putin over many years create false narratives or stage what are called false flag operations to try to pin the blame on the Ukrainians. for provoking exactly what he planned to do anyway, which was a war. And I think by carefully, you know, exposing the falsity of a lot of those narratives and putting out in unclassified form a lot of what we knew, I think that turned out to be a very wise investment and a pretty effective tool.

43:19Now, the challenge, because the easiest way to lose good sources of intelligence, whether it's human or technical, is to overdo it. And Washington's a place where, you know, oftentimes people think anything worth doing is worth overdoing. We have to be careful about that. But I think both the process for making those judgments and, you know, the President's, President Biden's ultimate political instincts on this, you know, were very sensible one. And I think they paid big dividends. Now, you can't necessarily do that in every instance. And I do think your last question is an important one, Dan, because to the extent we're less trusted, you know, as an ally, as a partner, you know, people are going to also be a little bit wary of assertions we're making about intelligence we have.

44:05We built up a fair amount of credibility, I think, especially in the first in the run up to the war in Ukraine in the first year of the war. And I think that paid big dividends. But you can squander that too, if you're not careful, and if you let trust erode. Did Putin seem surprised by the amount we knew, by what you were laying out to him in that November 2021 meeting? Not particularly. I mean, he's professionally trained to, you know, keep his game face on in a way on issues like that. I mean, ironically, you know, a couple of his, you know, sort of senior officials, I think, genuinely didn't know.

44:39I mean, he had kept this very, in a very, very tight circle. And at least one of the very senior intelligence people that I met with then, I think, was actually quite sincere in his protestations that you guys, the CIA doesn't know what you're talking about. There's no plan to invade. We're not going to do it. And I think that was because he was largely cut out of the planning. How do you understand Putin's theory of success in Ukraine right now? How does he understand his own strategy and what would he settle for? What might an end of the war look like? I think he's quite cocky right now, unfortunately.

45:14And, you know, when you look at a million killed and wounded, it's kind of hard to explain cockiness right now, too. But I think he has seen the sort of consequences of the Iran war as benefiting him. I think he is convinced that time right now is on his side, that he can continue to grind down the Ukrainians and that, you know, eventually, you know, the United States is going to sort of lose interest. And that's, I think, how he reads, you know, the president's impatience sometimes, President Trump's impatience. And he looks at the increasing fissures in the transatlantic alliance right now. And that also feeds his sense that if he just keeps at this, eventually he's going to extract something that he can portray to Russians, who have lost a lot in this war, as a victory.

46:01And, you know, some of the components of that would be, you know, achieving at the negotiating table, you know, control of all of the Donbass, including parts of, you know, Donetsk-Goblas that he hasn't in more than four years of war been able to gain on the battlefield. But he thinks he can drive a hard enough bargain in negotiations that, you know, the United States, that this administration will want to drive to an agreement. I think he thinks he has convinced the White House that it's only a matter of time before he wins. And therefore, we should negotiate a solution sooner rather than later as well.

46:43I just have not believed that. I think there are ways in which we could puncture some of Putin's hubris, despite the benefits that I think have accrued to him as a result of the Iran war. His economy is not in great shape. and, you know, his military has its vulnerabilities as well. And it thanks in part to our support, but mostly to the courage and tenacity of Ukrainians. You know, they've managed to offset some of the obvious manpower munitions advantages that the Russians have by the use of drone technology, electronic warfare, a lot of other things too. So I think it's a mistake for us to accept the Putin argument that, you know, the Ukrainians are going to lose sooner or later, So should just negotiate an end to this now, because I think that's a prescription for what would be not only an unfair outcome for Ukrainians, but also set a precedent for European security for, you know, the Indo-Pacific, because Xi is watching this all very carefully, too, that we'll regret.

47:43And I think also, you know, in many respects, strategically, the stakes are higher in the war in Ukraine than they are in a war of choice against Iran right now. If I could ask you to indulge in nostalgia in this case, too, and imagine yourself charged with trying to craft a strategy that would lead to some kind of negotiated end of the war, what would a good outcome look like that we could potentially get to over the course of this presidential term? Well, first, I'm all for the efforts that the Trump White House has made to negotiate. I mean, I think that's important as well. But the question is always leverage and how do you create leverage to produce a fair outcome?

48:20And I think, you know, I believe that the Ukrainian government understands that they're not going to regain Crimea, you know, anytime soon, even if they're not going to accept, you know, Russian sovereignty. I think that's probably true for much but not all of the Donbass right now, too. But I think what Putin is also going to drive at is to hollow out any set of security guarantees that we and our European allies might provide to the Ukrainians, as well as commitments to continue to support their military, which is in many ways better than pieces of paper, as deterrence against a repetition of this by either Putin or some successor in Moscow as well.

49:05So it seems to me the basic tradeoff is, you know, swallowing what will be some very painful compromises, you know, for the Ukrainian government, but being able to point to sufficiently strong security guarantees, on the other hand, that as unpalatable as this is for most Ukrainians who have suffered so much, it gives them some reassurance that they're going to be in a position where they can prevent a repetition of this, that the West is still going to be supporting them, and that they have the space to strengthen both their democratic system and economic recovery. Have you been surprised by the speed and depth of development of the China-Russia relationship over the course of the past few years?

49:48No, I mean, I think it's been far more than a marriage of convenience that, you know, people sort of talked loosely about some years ago, too. And it's not just about the relationship between Xi and Putin, although that's certainly a part of this as well. I think it's not a formal alliance in the sense that NATO, at least as we've known it till now, is, but it's a pretty strong partnership, born of mutual interest right now, too. A partnership in which the Russians and Putin are very much the junior partner right now, dependent on the Chinese in a way that the Chinese are not dependent on the Russians.

50:26And it really is only because of, you know, Chinese support and dual use technologies and economic support that the Russians have been able to continue the conduct of the war in Ukraine, too. You know, I've always thought as someone who spent a lot of time in Russia as a diplomat that sooner or later, Russians are going to chafe at being the junior partner of China, just as they chafed at the notion of being the junior partner of the United States after the end of the Cold War. But that's a ways down the road. And so I think for the foreseeable future, you know, we should base our own policy on the assumption that that's going to remain a pretty strong partnership.

51:05You made headlines in 2023, I believe it was, when you noted about Xi Jinping in Taiwan that he has, in fact, instructed his military to be ready to conduct a successful invasion by 2027. And I believe you said that I wouldn't underestimate of President Xi's ambitions with regard to Taiwan. As you've watched those ambitions develop over the past few years, and especially as Xi has watched the war in Iran and the further developments of the war in Ukraine, how do you assess that risk at that point, both the intentions and the capabilities when it comes to a Chinese invasion? Well, I mean, 2027, you know, was a readiness goal, which we knew that President Xi had instructed the PLA, the People's Liberation Army leadership to aim toward, but it's not a decision to go to war in 27 or 28 or 26, for that matter.

51:54I think partly as a result of Xi's perception of the battlefield in Ukraine, which tended to sober him and deepen his doubts a little bit about, you know, what an objectively weaker player could do on defense if sufficiently motivated and sufficiently supported. I think he still probably has some lingering doubts about the capacity of the Chinese military to achieve at acceptable cost a successful all-out invasion of Taiwan. I think his preference right now, as far as I can see it, President Xi's preference, is a kind of boa constrictor approach where you squeeze the will to resist out of Taiwan, where you try to chip away at what has historically been a U.S.

52:37commitment to help Taiwan defend itself. You chip away at the conviction of some of our allies in the Indo-Pacific that they have a stake too in Taiwan's survival. And you, by time, in a sense, I mean, this is one case, Taiwan, for half a century, we're kicking the can down the road, may not win you a Nobel Peace Prize, but it's actually the best of the available choices too. I think the other reality is given the fact that Xi has unleashed, you know, the most sweeping purge of senior military ranks in the PLA since the cultural revolution under Mao, is that tactically that disarray that inevitably flows from that, you know, probably creates, you know, some obstacles in the path of, you know, sort of serious consideration of an all-out invasion.

53:27That's the good news. The bad news is that I think it probably also reflects a strategic conviction for all the, you know, sort of tactical problems that it may create, it reinforces the strategic conviction. And you quoted something I said before, that we shouldn't underestimate Xi's conviction that controlling Taiwan and its choices, you know, is something that he wants to accomplish, I think, you know, over the course of his, you know, professional lifetime, or at least in the near term for China as well. I don't think he's in any rush to do that. But I think one of the things he'll try to do when he and President Trump meet in Beijing in the middle of May is going to be to ship away at, you know, declaratory U.S.

54:10policy on Taiwan. And it probably thinks he's in a good position in the wake of wherever the Iran war is at that stage to get more concessions on, you know, sort of high-end technology from the U.S. as well. And he knows that The president at that point, again, depending on how the Iran war turns out, may be looking for something that he can portray as a success and change the channel a little bit on Iran. And certainly, you know, a significant trade agreement would be a part of that. But, you know, Chinese leadership will extract something for that. And I think Taiwan and technology are the two areas where they'll be most sharply focused.

54:49The kind of underlying question when we all try to understand what's happening with these purges and other decision making in Beijing is to really understand the kind of dynamics of power within the Chinese elite and what Xi's grip on power is, to what extent there's internal resistance to him, real debate about Chinese strategy. What is your assessment of Xi's power and how much debate is there about the kind of direction of Chinese foreign policy beneath the surface in ways that are kind of hard for outside observers to really detect? Yeah, I mean, I suspect it's, you know, the debate that may have occurred a decade ago is less likely to occur now because he's consolidated power so effectively.

55:32And that's always a mixed blessing for autocratic leaders, because what it means is that whether it's in Chinese intelligence services or in the PLA, there's a tendency to tell, you know, a very deeply entrenched autocratic leader what he wants to hear, as opposed to, you know, generating real debate about choices right now, too. And, you know, I suspect that that's probably increasing in the case, too, especially since she has been so effective in consolidating power and authority right now, too. That's the flip side of doing that, is that you expose yourself more to ill thought through decisions sometimes because you don't have people who are challenging your assumptions sometimes, too, because they've learned a long time ago it's not career enhancing to do that.

56:22It's disquieting that when you look at the three most powerful countries on earth today, you have those court dynamics in all three capitals, with Trump, Xi, and Putin. Yeah, in different ways, but you're exactly right. And coming back to our earlier part of the conversation about the erosion of not just trust with allies, but of institutions and career public servants, and I'll be the last person to argue that career public servants, you know, a monopoly on wisdom, you know, that's certainly not the case. But you create a process where people feel comfortable and actually feel an obligation sometimes, not just to speak truth to power, but to challenge assumptions.

57:00That in many ways is the best insurance against making bad decisions sometimes, too. And I think whether it was Putin's decision to go to war in Ukraine based on false assumptions, you know, and I heard Putin say this to me for, you know, decades that, you know, like I was kind of a dim fourth grader, you know, you don't understand Ukraine's not a real country. You know, it's not just a question of Russian entitlement to control Ukraine, but it's they need, you know, Russian guidance as well. And that was the assumption on which the FSB, you know, the biggest of the Russian intelligence services, was providing advice to Putin.

57:38He thought this was going to be a walkover and vastly underestimated the determination, not just of President Zelensky, but of Ukrainians. because Putin, through his aggression in Crimea in 2014, helped create a sense of Ukrainian national purpose that didn't exist, you know, in the same way before that, too. And you can see some of the same dynamic with Xi and some of the decisions that he makes as well. And I think certainly you've seen some of that contribute to the decision making, at least as I understand it, before this war in Iran. I mean, it does seem that we in the United States and people in capitals around the world also underestimated the Ukrainians ahead of the invasion, that we were surprised by just how effective they were and how strong the leadership was.

58:26Yeah, I think a fair way of putting it is that we did overestimate the capacity of the Russian military. I think, you know, we looked at Putin's modernization of the Russian military over the two decades before that when it was, you know, a shambles. I remember seeing the Russian military in the first Chechen war when I was serving the embassy in Moscow in the mid-1990s. And it was like a street gang more than a sort of strong conventional military. But I think we assumed, much as Putin did, I think we assumed too much about Russian capability. And part of that may have been because the decision-making circle was so tight that you had a lot of relatively senior Russian military officers who were kind of making it up as they went along in the first months of the war.

59:08And you saw that in the shoddy performance of the Russian military. But in a lot of that, of course, also was, you know, as you said before, Dan, was the determination, the courage of Ukrainians, too. So I think it's fair, at least in my view, to say that we overestimated the strength of the Russian military than underestimated the determination of Ukrainians to resist. We talked earlier about the importance of human intelligence. I want to make sure before we close that we talk a bit about technology because that is certainly under your tenure, but I assume now is still continuing to transform CIA and the intelligence community more broadly.

59:47How do you see AI especially changing the way intelligence works? I think we're probably just at the beginning of integrating these tools, but I'm interested in how you see that change happening. Well, I mean, certainly emerging technologies, but particularly artificial intelligence are critical to the future of any good intelligence service, including the CIA. And so whether you're an operations officer, you know, a case officer trying to recruit and then manage assets in complicated places overseas, you know, you need to use artificial intelligence to navigate smart cities and, you know, be able to defeat facial recognition and biometric, the collection of biometric data.

1:00:26And, you know, we put a lot of effort, certainly in the four years I was director, and I'm sure John Ratcliffe, my successor, has continued that, not just in investing in the pool of technological expertise that's in the agency. Because, you know, more than a third of all the career officers in the agency spend every day working on digital cyber science and technology issues. So it's a pretty strong in-house set of expertise. But unless we build better relationships with the private sector, there's just no way we're going to be able to compete effectively with the Chinese. And so that's what I tried to build on, you know, some of the efforts that my predecessors had made to strengthen those private sector relationships, both as a tool so that we can take advantage of new technologies to conduct those operations or to help analysts through the use of large language models digest the enormous amount of information that's out there, whether it's open source, generally available or clandestinely acquired, to put the best human analysts in the place where they can do what I think ultimately only they can do, which is tell a president, you know, here are the choices that we see, here are the second and third order consequences of decisions that you might make.

1:01:43And so we put a lot of effort into applying large language models and AI, both for analysts and, you know, and for operations officers too. And then, you know, try to develop more flexible approaches to career paths too. Because, you know, while we welcome, you know, officers who say, I want to spend 30 years, you know, as a technologist in the CIA, the truth is that increasingly, you're talking about a generation of officers who may be very much interested because of their patriotism, their commitment to the mission, their commitment to working with other smart people to deal with some really complicated challenges, they'll spend eight or nine years, but then they may also have an interest because they're putting their kids through college or whatever to go into the private sector for a while.

1:02:29And so we put a lot of effort into trying to keep the door open for people to come back and bring back the benefits of experience in the private sector too. So I think all of those are areas in which we made some headway, but which we just, I recognized at the time, need to move even faster because the pace of innovation is such that just keeping up with it, let alone getting ahead of it, is a huge challenge. But it matters as much as anything else, if not more so than any of the other priorities that I had at the agency. Let me close by asking you if there are two or three issues that you think aren't getting adequate attention in the broader foreign policy conversation.

1:03:11We talked about, I think, the kind of headline threats. We could have added Gaza or Venezuela or lots of other things to that list. But what do you think we're not paying enough attention to? I mean, Africa is a continent that's often suffered, I think, and the administrations of both parties that I've worked for in different ways from benign and sometimes not so benign neglect as well. And I think, you know, if you just look at the objective realities of population of a continent that's going to double at least by the middle of the century that, you know, has both incredible potential if you look at some societies that have been able to fight corruption and are well governed, but also huge challenges of urbanization, the movement of people to cities, the challenges of job creation that that creates, the potential for migration of peoples that, you know, other parts of the world then, you know, have to deal with as well.

1:04:01So it just seems to me, you know, there are too many other issues that tend to crowd out a focus on Africa. And I think that's really important. I think it's to, you know, this administration's credit that they focus more attention on the Western Hemisphere, which, you know, in many ways is the natural strategic home base for the United States. Now, we've also managed, and this takes a particular effort for Americans to piss off the Canadians, which I think is unfortunate. And I think we have to be careful that we don't shoehorn too much in the Western Hemisphere through the prism of counter-narcotics, as huge a challenge as that is.

1:04:38You know, there are a lot of other dimensions to, you know, successful strategy in the Western Hemisphere as well. And, you know, Mexico is obviously hugely important, you know, for the United States for lots of different reasons, too. So that's a credit to this administration, even if I don't entirely buy the Donroe Doctrine or, you know, the notion of sort of almost brute force American dominance in the Western Hemisphere. I think there are certainly American power is enormously important. But I think paying attention to a range of other issues, you know, whether it's what the U.S. Agency for International Development used to do before it was demolished, you know, makes a big difference, too, in building, you know, the kind of position in the Western hemisphere that's, you know, seen as a kind of shared benefit by leaderships in the region, as well as by the United States.

1:05:31Yeah, and, you know, terrorism, counterterrorism was, you know, remained a very high priority for me and all of my colleagues at the CIA, because even as we tried to focus attention and resources on major power competition and the revolution in technology, you know, we had to take very seriously potential terrorist threats. And cyber issues also, I think, get a lot of attention. I worry that in this administration, budgetary resources for cyber defense have been cut, as I understand it, even as resources have been increased for cyber offense, which I think is a good thing. But I worry a little bit that we become more exposed to cyber attacks, particularly with formidable players like China's Ministry of State Security who have penetrated, you know, a lot of the critical civilian infrastructure that matters so much to the United States, too.

1:06:25So I worry a little bit that, you know, we haven't as focused as much attention and resources on that. It's also striking how much Gaza and developments in the West Bank and elsewhere in Israel have kind of fallen out of the conversation as a result of the war in Iran. I have to think that will come back as a challenge. Yeah, and I say that as someone who is deeply committed to Israel's long-term security interests. But if you look at the pace, people used to talk about creeping annexation in the West Bank. This is at a gallop right now, too, in terms of settler violence and a lot that's going on there.

1:07:03Gaza's situation, you know, seems kind of frozen in a way right now with, you know, Gaza itself being kind of physically divided between an area that the Israel Defense Forces controls and an area where most of the population of Gaza is, where Hamas is reemerging as well. And even though it's not fashionable to think about the Palestinian issue as something that matters, and it's fashionable to think that the two-state solution is dead, the problem is without some progress, some credible pathway over time, not overnight, but over time, toward a demilitarized Palestinian state, I don't see how you serve the interests of a Jewish democratic secure state in Israel, let alone the legitimate aspirations of Palestinians or the interests of neighboring countries like Jordan, too.

1:07:54So you're right. I think that should be an increasing concern, particularly what's going on in the West Bank right now, too. Well, Bill, thank you so much for doing this. We could obviously go on about a bunch of these topics. I will say that both your 2024 essay and also some of the work you did before going back into government, really about the State Department and American diplomacy is still well worth reading. There was a piece you did in 2019 called The Demolition of U.S. Diplomacy, which in some ways those concerns look quaint compared to what's happened since. But the warning you issued in that piece I think is still well worth hearing.

1:08:29Yeah, no, and I do worry. I mean, when you asked about what sort of keeps you up at night right now, too, I just think we're going to regret the demolition of institutions and career public servants as well. You know, nobody should think that it's as neat as turning the clock back to the way things were before, you know, the second Trump term. You know, it was not a perfect system. And Syria streamlining and reform, any of us who served in those institutions, you know, was essential. But, you know, what's happening right now, I think, is just going to, you know, put us in a weaker and weaker position to compete in an unforgiving world for years and years to come.

1:09:08and the kind of gleeful indignity with which people have been treated, apolitical career, political servants, people without a political bone in their bodies, I think is shameful on the one hand, but it's also in practical terms, I think very dangerous for the United States over time. Well, on that grim note, thank you so much, Bill, and we'll look forward to having you back in our pages, I hope, before too long. Thanks, Dan, very much. Take care.

1:09:36Thank you for listening. You can find the articles that we discussed on today's show at foreignaffairs.com. This episode of the Foreign Affairs Interview was produced by Elise Burr and Kanesh Therrur. Our audio engineer is Todd Yeager. Original music is by Robin Hilton. Special thanks as well to Irina Hogan. Make sure you subscribe to the show wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you like what you heard, please take a minute to rate and review it. We release a new show every Thursday. Thanks again for tuning in.

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