Trump Diplomacy

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I'm Isaac Dover.

This Wednesday, the British Ambassador to the United States resigned.

Sir Kim Derrick announced, and I'm quoting him, that the current situation is making it impossible for me to carry out my role as I would like.

In that situation,

the oldest political controversy, saying what you actually think.

Earlier this week, private cables from Derrick leaked in which he described the White House as clumsy and inept and said President President Trump radiates insecurity.

And of course, Trump tweeted back.

The president called Derek wacky, a very stupid guy, and a pompous fool.

Descriptions the ambassador's friends have strongly disputed.

So, Donald Trump being the leader of the free world has been, I think we can say an adjustment for diplomats.

And it's not just Britain.

The New York Times reported Wednesday that an ambassador still serving in Washington said, quote, it could have been any of us.

This This week, I wanted to talk with someone who understands diplomacy.

How did diplomats deal with this president?

Is this episode just normal for the Trump era?

Or is it something new that might have lasting consequences for the country and the world?

So I sat down with former U.S.

Ambassador Thomas Pickering in his offices in Washington.

Pickering has been an ambassador in six different countries, plus the United Nations, under Republican and Democratic presidents, and holds the title of career ambassador.

We spoke a few hours after Derek's resignation became public.

Take a listen.

Ambassador Thomas Peckering, thanks for joining us.

Happy to be with you.

So let's start with you.

You have had probably one of the most

diverse experienced careers in diplomacy in American history, I feel like.

The postings are Nigeria, El Salvador, Israel, the United Nations, India, Russia, and then back to the State Department.

Jordan.

Jordan.

How many languages do you speak?

I could work, I have worked in, beside English, three others, French, Spanish, and Swahili.

So no Russian, no Hebrew?

I studied Russian, Arabic, Hebrew.

I never tried to use them in my business because I had my limitations.

All of them were an hour a day at whatever place I was serving.

And it's Leninist progress.

One step forward, two steps back.

Is it not necessary to speak the language to do the ambassador job?

I mean, obviously you were.

It's always highly desirable, but I was lucky in a number of places that I went, the preferred language for communication turned out to be English.

Or in Russia, I had an interpreter.

So what is the common thread anywhere in Central America, in the Middle East, in

the UN?

Is there something that binds these assignments together, that binds the thinking about what diplomacy is?

Yes, there is.

There are a number of things.

Fundamental is the fact that people everywhere have common traits and habits and they have culturally defined traits and habits and figuring out which is which is always a big help.

For example, humor does work but be careful because in some places and in some languages it's not so easy.

but people get it.

I think it's important that diplomacy has its conventions and its protocols.

They're not too slavishly demanding.

But one of the great questions here is truth.

And I've always felt you have to tell the truth, but you don't have to say everything that's true.

If I could put it...

So where do you find that line?

Right out of my experience.

Well, like what?

Can you give an example from your work on this?

Well, in my work on this, when you sat down with a country and tried to define a problem for them as you saw it, the better thing was to tell them how you saw the problem and how the people in Washington saw the problem.

And you didn't have to try to tell them how they saw the problem.

You wait for that and then you bring things together.

In many cases, there were things lurking around American policy that I would have have rather had my friends find out for themselves than I be the bearer of that particular piece of unhappy news if I could avoid it.

On the other hand, when it came to solving a particular problem, you really did have to lump the good with the bad and let people know this is where thinking went.

The best way...

When did that come up?

What?

When did that come up?

Always in conversations.

I mean, I had conversations with heads of state.

I had conversations with foreign ministers, I had conversations with ambassadors from other countries where I was working, I had conversations with my staff, and I had conversations with Washington intensively.

I'm just wondering, is there any specific just in trying to, obviously, this is a week where the role of ambassadors and their frankness is very much in.

Let's go to the question of Sir Kim Darak.

I admired what he said to his government.

That's an approach I tried to emulate.

And I feel very strongly that he was really scalped.

And that's knifed in the back.

And that's a situation where he was privately.

communicating with his government.

And every ambassador must privately communicate with the government.

And if they don't say what they believe and what's on their mind, they're not doing their job.

They have private communications with the foreign government.

And some of the things, particularly in the,

I think, particularly anguishing problem that Kim Durek had, was that he knew the truth about the Trump administration and conveyed it to his people.

He knew the truth about the Trump administration, but did not have to convey it to the Trump administration.

Those are the two things that I think illustrate the point as clearly as I could make it.

It is the situation where part of what he said is the stories are true.

What you're reading is true.

So

that's one of the things that makes this so bizarre that he's gotten into so much trouble for saying, not for saying something that was out of left field, but for saying what most people who are looking at the Trump administration very closely or even from a level of outside are able to see as well.

It's one of the great home truths about this administration.

that if you're going to be truthful about this administration, you're going to disappoint seriously the man in charge of it.

And the man in charge of it, if you're a serious disappointment for him, is going to use the opportunity to attack you, particularly if there's somebody he thinks he can deal with from a position of overweening strength, if I could put it that way, just to crush this guy or submerge him.

And particularly if it looks like he is the champion and hero of this, because if you look at the way the current administration works, not everybody, I think, believes Trump, nor does everybody who works for Trump believe Trump, but they all have to pretend that they do in the presence of Trump, or they don't stay there very long.

And in many ways, we're in a situation where we have a president who is, in every sense of the word, totally fascinated with self-interest and not with national interest.

And this all comes out in his way of behaving.

And his fascination and self-interest means that there is an overwhelming necessity to be in charge of the dialogue every day, as much of the day, as he can be.

And he has developed some very remarkable tactics for that.

He doesn't care really whether he tells bad news or good news as long as he's the centerpiece.

And if, in fact, the bad news is disheartening and disturbing to his own chances, he has eight hours and two more efforts every day to change it.

So it's something else.

And so you're left in a way as if you're in a hundred mile race going 40 miles an hour on your feet and panting every

way.

And every short stop for a break leaves you voiceless.

That's very diplomatic language.

What happened with Kim Derek is notable perhaps because we haven't seen this happen with an ambassador and it enter the level of diplomacy in that world.

Is it a big deal?

Sometimes when thinking about the Trump administration and things that Donald Trump does as president, it can be overwhelming, hard to sort out what matters and what doesn't.

Does this matter particularly to this incident?

It's a very good question.

I think it's not going to matter in terms of the U.S.-U.K.

relationship on a permanent basis.

I've been an ambassador.

I know how unimportant they can become.

And particularly when they're going to be sacrificed on the altar of a stronger relationship with a foreign country.

And if the ambassador can't make that happen, he often, by leaving, can help it happen, if I can put it that way.

Now, that's a pretty stark question.

It doesn't happen very often.

But I think that Sir Kim Darak is, in many ways, a perfect example of that kind of a situation.

And his resignation, I think,

was eminently to be wished for in London,

if I could put it that way, as a way out of the contretemps with President Trump that they've sought to avoid all along in whatever way they can to protect their status, not only as

the

other party in a special relationship, but the other party in what they clearly might believe is the only kind of paramount special relationship that the United States should have and has.

Does it matter in terms of diplomacy?

You say it won't affect the U.S.-UK relationship overall, but is this a new frontier that matters that diplomats are saying to their home governments?

Every destruction of a

process that's well established to pass on to the public and to leadership things like the truth is a disaster and has to be fought against and has to be obviously looked at with great care.

I haven't talked to any American ambassador that I know who is still serving, but I would have to say this is a cold bath.

And telling the administration what they, the ambassador, believe to be the truth about a relationship that is not prospering, particularly because the president is the centerpiece of that lack of prosperity, is not something that I think people will necessarily find a great yearning for among America's professional diplomats.

So this is a way of, in a backhanded way, of discouraging something which any smart administration should give gold for, is to get an honest recitation of the truth.

You mean a smart administration back in London?

Or a smart administration here in the United States.

They should give gold for getting the truth, however painful, however harmful they may feel it is to personalities and to individuals.

Were there occasions when you were ambassador that you sent cables back to D.C.

about foreign governments assessing them in ways like Kim Derrick assessed the Trump administration?

I don't know why so starkly because it was rare to find a foreign government who met the kind of criteria of the Trump administration in all honesty.

But there were, and there were many occasions, Russia in particular.

And the purpose of these cables is to give an assessment.

This is the man on the ground.

It feels like in the age of

more and more interconnectedness, and

in

London, they could watch the television

reports on what is going on with Donald Trump.

They could read the newspapers.

They see it on the internet.

What is the value of having these cables even still?

If you go back to when you were doing it and certainly decades before that, that's a different thing.

No, that's a great question.

No, decades before that, we had press, and they were covering things very well.

Sure.

The value of what the ambassador does, and you're getting to the heart of this, is not just to tell it like it is, but to make suggestions for change in American foreign policy that can accord with the truth as the ambassador and his staff see those.

And I never felt it was important to tell the downside process to Washington Washington without telling them what the upside opportunities were that they had before them.

And I think that's the important role of an ambassador and an embassy and the team and everybody who was out there.

Aaron Powell,

when you were in Russia, what sort of things were you sending back to D.C.

as

assessments that they should be concerned about with how things were looking in Moscow?

Well, I sent back as ambassador views on the NATO enlargement that I thought would sit very badly in Russia and

have an impact.

On arms control proposals, where I had spent a certain amount of my prior life, I sent back views that said, I think if we move in this direction, we'll be better off.

In a number of places, not just in Russia,

one of the important things for an ambassador was to find somebody very senior in the foreign government who would be prepared to join the ambassador, if I could put it this way, in a careful review of the relationship and be honest enough to say, this isn't working.

And this is why, from my perspective, I don't think it's working.

What about yours?

And then to be able to say, I think we can do things along the following lines.

What do you think of that?

And then have the good sense to say to you, I think I could help you deliver this and this, but not that, if you change it a little bit.

So this is what we would call the idea of how do you build confidence and a relationship with a foreign government in which you can come back to Washington not just with suggestions pulled out of the air, but suggestions pulled out of what is essentially a very valuable set of sources in the foreign government.

Was there ever a time when anything that you meant to be private ended up being public?

I think probably there was, but nothing quite so startling as what we've seen in the last couple of days.

I'm just trying to figure out what must have been going through the ambassador's head over the last couple of days as they found out that this report was going to be published, as then he sees

the way that it is published and then what the president's reaction was to it and

how things have proceeded from there to obviously resigning.

If it was a leak,

and it probably was a leak, because you asked the question in Latin, qui bono, who benefits.

It was not something that one could see very much benefit yet.

On the other hand, if it's a leak, you don't know in advance.

And so you read about it in the front page of a paper.

Somebody else may know about it in advance, but if they're a leaker, they don't usually do that on the basis of government policy.

And so it is a surprise.

And so one is a surprise.

Two, you wonder, why would they do something like that?

Three, am I the victim or the only victim?

Or do I share this with somebody else?

Four, is this a repairable circumstance?

Five, what are my suggestions for taking care of it?

And we've seen, we've been through that.

And six, of course, what is the government at home likely to be able to do or to think about or to move?

And seven, what are they going to be their highest priorities?

Their highest priority is not going to be to save the gentle rear end.

end of the ambassador, but in some ways to see what they can do about promote the relationship, which is what the ambassador's first job is.

And so they know that.

And so those seven points of questions would be the things that would automatically run through your head as you look at this.

With seven points that you just picked up off the fly.

Because I've been there and thought about it and done it.

Of course, I haven't written these out.

And if I wrote them out, I'd probably do it differently.

Does it matter how it came, if it were a leak?

There's a theory that it might have been some Russian intelligence hacking that happened there.

There's a theory that it might be

part of infighting in the British government as this is a question of Derek being anti-Brexit and pro-Brexit forces.

Is that a question that makes a difference in how we think about this?

It's not a question.

It makes a difference in the effect of the person who counts most, President Trump.

And President Trump is a very thin-skinned gentleman, and obviously anything that

attaches adjective which is highly uncomplimentary to his work is something he's not going to enjoy seeing or have, and he lashes out, as we know, and he has the capacity to do that.

And he, in effect, did something in the backhanded way that normally would have been done in a regular way if they thought the ambassador had been acting

in a pattern or in a situation which was not in the interest of the relationship and particularly of them.

Often that involves things like declaring ambassadors persona non grata because embassy staff members have been collecting intelligence or doing other things which are from the point of view of the host government beyond

their mandate.

Aaron Powell,

the question of President Trump's response is

interesting to me because

he

has developed what he says is a very close relationship with Kim Jong-un now,

that a year and a half ago was

Kim calling him a dotard, right?

And he referred to Kim as little rocket man.

And from that, now they've got this close relationship.

It doesn't seem like calling

Trump inept as president, which is what Derek did, is very different from Kim calling him a dotard.

Maybe one is even a few degrees more.

And yet Trump pursued this relationship with Kim, Kim, pursued it all the way into North Korea two weeks ago,

and

on the other hand, goes on Twitter and just roasts Derek for what was in these cables.

It was quite clear that Trump knew and assessed the fact that Kim could deliver something to Trump that was very important.

And that Trump obviously is not totally oblivious to the feelings of individuals he's interested in getting something from.

Sir Kim Darrick did not have that capacity, and Trump saw this as something that was undermining him, and had it stayed entirely secret,

probably never would have bothered him.

But now that it was out, here was a distinguished ambassador of perhaps the most friendly country saying things about his administration, which he thought was totally objectionable.

I'm not sure he would even believe they were true.

But that's a different story.

And as a result, he slashed back.

And he had the capacity to do that, and I think put things in an unhappy mode in the United Kingdom, particularly as it got involved into the question yesterday of Boris Johnson saying, well, he would never reappoint the guy.

And today, now that he's resigned, he's the most brilliant ambassador the United Kingdom has ever had.

Aaron Powell,

one thing that I have heard from

people in London

is that this is coming out as a much bigger deal in the UK than it is in the U.S.

In the United States, this just seems like Trump doing things.

And I wonder whether you think that this is something that has a bigger impact than we are sensitive to in the United States.

I think there is a differential impact in the United States and in London.

I think your sources analyze this pretty well.

One could say this is Trump 500.0.

And in London, it's to say this is our relationship with the United States put into a very nasty patch for a while in a situation of great uncertainty when we ourselves are struggling for what is clearly going to be the future of the United Kingdom, both economically but also politically in terms of whether it stays in the European Union or gets out, whether it gets a deal or doesn't get a deal, Something that's consternated everybody, tired everybody out in the UK,

left a mark on everybody in one way or another, and left the country at

daggers drawn almost over this particularly important future issue.

And here is the US piece now getting put forward.

And as you said, is this a backhanded effort on the part of Brexiteers to go after

the British ambassador in Washington because they think in one way or another it will expose a weak point in the Conservative government's own activities and moving things ahead.

Will it help Boris or hurt Boris?

Yesterday it seemed to be something that might hurt Boris.

Today maybe it's something that will help.

We ought to look at all of those things.

The foreign secretary, who is intimately involved, has obviously got to deal with this position.

Does it in one way or another help him or hurt him?

I would imagine it would hurt him, but he may be beyond the fact that hurt will really hurt him.

So who's right?

Is it Trump 500.0 or is it a major incident that puts the relationship, the special relationship in play?

Well, you've heard me on this.

I think the special relationship is extremely important.

I think that ambassadors should not be shredded at a moment's notice.

I think the things that ambassadors have to say in private ought to stay in private.

And all of us as being ambassadors have been concerned about that.

We had our own episodes.

Happily, the category into which the

Sir Kim Darak's cables went was

a category that was happily closed off.

when a huge

vomiting of stuff came out.

And the stuff that got into that that should have been in a tighter hold category was perhaps more interesting.

And it was just sloppiness that it wasn't in a tighter hold category.

So we've been through it.

We've seen it.

A number of American ambassadors had to leave posts as a result of the things they wrote.

So it isn't new or strange.

You're talking about with WikiLeaks.

With WikiLeaks, yeah.

So how do you fix a diplomatic crisis?

What is the

stage forward from which Derek has resigned?

Yes, and he did the honorable thing.

But so what do you do past that?

Do you just wait until there's a new ambassador and let time pass?

You appoint a new ambassador.

You find out how and why this took place.

Hopefully, you will guard against it ever happening again so that your ambassadors can continue to serve their dual function of truth at home and a different sort of approach, truthful to the extent that you can make it truthful and not untruthful under any circumstances in the relationship between the United Kingdom and the United States and the official contacts that have to take place there.

I wonder, just from your experience, was there some level of a breakdown that you then had to, as the ambassador, obviously you were never recalled or never had to resign,

that you were involved in knitting back together?

Oh, yes, in one country where I was ambassador,

I had developed a relationship with someone else in the government.

The foreign minister took umbrage at this.

The other fellow got me in to see the president

on a basis where the foreign minister was not involved.

And I had to build back my relationship for the foreign minister and took months.

So how do you do that?

You begin to work with the people around him.

Is it just taking him out to lunch or is it you don't get him out to lunch for a while,

but you do what you can to build back and be as honest and truthful with him as you can.

And does that work or is it...

Sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn't.

When it doesn't, then what happens?

You learn a good lesson.

You don't.

I mean, is it a permanent?

It's not a permanent impairment of the relationship, but it was not a happy circumstance.

And my sense was that it was overdone on his side.

But maybe the truth was that he said, well, you never should have gone to see the president without telling him you were going to go see the president.

Well, that's between the president and him.

I feel like you're being diplomatic enough that you're not revealing which country this is.

We're going to take a quick break, but we'll have more with Ambassador Pickering in a moment.

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This comes in the context of Donald Trump's relationship to other world leaders,

the Trump administration's dealings in international affairs.

Is this incident, again,

just trying to understand what matters about what happened this week,

is it something that is within that context or is it something that changes the way that things go?

It's within that context, but as we've talked about it now, I think the resignation has left the way open for a new ambassador.

He may or she may come as a result of a new prime minister.

We'll have to wait and see.

That may help to open the door even more.

If the U.S.

president remains under the illusion that the new ambassador is only going to say wonderful things to his government about him, he will have to live with that element of untruth, which seems in many ways to be the center of his own personal gyroscope.

But that's

what are the odds that of the, whatever it is, 150-plus ambassadors who are in Washington,

multiple others have written cables back home, much like what Kim Derrick sent.

I think they should be worried because there is a copycat problem.

And leakers are people who, in one way or another, like to see themselves as the movers and shakers of great change.

And they may have different views about the views of the ambassador.

They may have

differences over a period of time.

Well, there's the old Seymour Hirsch line about journalistic sources that a source is a schmuck with a grudge.

Which I've benefited from in my own country.

And I have too in my own country, too.

And I can't tell you.

It doesn't work for diplomats either.

But you would feel confident that other ambassadors have written things much like Kim Derrick wrote.

I mean, I don't know their relationships with their home governments these days as well as I might otherwise had I been serving.

But I would imagine that they have, and I imagine they have kept them in very tight channels,

and I imagine so far their governments have had the capacity to protect them.

The leaker must have been somebody who was quite privileged in terms of the very tight hold on these kinds of communications that particularly I think the UK government would have put and we would have put

on ours.

Are you you talked earlier about how anything that changes the way that things have gone in

I guess you think it's a negative way it should be seen as a disaster

and I wonder how much you think

international relations changes long term from Donald Trump he's a little over halfway through his first term he might serve a full eight years he might not I'm thinking about a couple weeks ago when there was the apparent last-minute change of heart on the attack on Iran, I went around to several of the presidential candidates, the Democratic candidates, and said, what would you do differently in this situation?

And the answer that they had was basically, I wouldn't be Donald Trump.

They didn't have a great sense of what to do.

Now, they're running campaigns that are all in the early stages and with many different issues to sort out.

And I don't think that they were particularly prepared to have a plan on Iran.

But what it struck me is it's another instance of how there are certain people who seem to have this almost magical thinking that if they're opposed to Donald Trump, that once he is gone, whether it's after one term or two, that things will go back.

We've got a lot of questions tied up there.

One of those questions is, what is the value or the failure of red lines?

Are red lines imputable by actions as much as they are by clear declarations?

Should we be concerned about them?

And that is what I would call the tradecraft piece and the politics of the piece.

And it's important and it shouldn't be lost, particularly because we are now in a period where the tradecraft seems to be the first line of an American approach to a problem resolution is pressure, pressure, pressure.

And it's only over a period of time that they have come to learn

about what I call the bluff trap.

Too much pressure with no way to relieve it and no way to convert it into everything else, and to expect a retreat to appear on your doorstep just coming down from the clouds because of your pressure leaves only two results.

One is a backdown by somebody, but the failure of a backdown, it's war.

And it's not a very good way to proceed.

I don't mind leverage, and I don't mind pressure.

There's some things that, in my view, we're doing we shouldn't be doing.

Indirectly, we are violating international law by keeping food and medicine from Iran.

And my own view is that is is only encouraging the hardliners in Iran to recruit the people who are being deprived of international support through food and medicine by the way we are running the financial aspects of this, not directly.

And that's a serious mistake.

The second set of questions is, is this going to make a major change in which the world proceeds with respect to dealing with international problems?

The biggest danger is that truth is irrelevant, or truth is only relevant from time to time, and that the magnification of falsehood can become in its own way a driver of serious mistakes leading to conflict and all the things that we hope to avoid.

And that's something we need to be very careful about.

The third piece is time.

My own sense is that we tear down geometrically, that is, by a factor of multiplication, and we build back back linearly by a factor of addition.

And the mathematical implications of these two things are very serious.

And just look at how in what way buildings come down and buildings go up in this fair city of ours.

And it takes about five times longer to get them up than it does to take them down.

And we're living in a situation where the politics, the economics, the relationships are all going to be determined by that particular question.

There is another factor.

The deeper you get into the hole, the harder it is to claw out.

And we are continuing to dig that hole deeper and deeper.

The more you substitute the self-interest of the leader for the national interest of the country, and elections have a real capacity to drive you in that direction, the more you're losing the capacity of the country to serve its long-term self-interests, national interests, and to sacrifice that to the short-term self-interest of the individual who was elected.

And that means we need to be very, very careful about who we elect to senior positions in this country and what they do.

It seems clear that you are not a big Donald Trump fan.

If you thought otherwise, you have been engaged in a remarkable feat of self-deception.

But is there not something to

the greater argument that he he makes that there was a world order that had sort of been built up by

people like you over decades, that everybody said, this is the way that it has to go.

It has to be this way.

And that it wasn't working for a lot of people and it maybe wasn't the best way to do it.

And that he is this force that says, we're going to try it a different way.

I think that we already have seen, if you're careful in your analysis, the many ways in which the new way doesn't work, the many ways that it's promoting dictatorship over democracy, the many ways it makes mistakes, and the many ways it is trying to learn how to use pressure tactics and avoid getting into conflict.

The 150 people problem for Iran is only one.

I'm delighted he's learned that.

But it's taken now three years and change to get there with all of the problems that we might have gotten to first.

Who saved him from doing this with Kim Jong-un, Moon Jai-in, and the South Koreans?

Why?

Because they didn't want a war, and they knew very well if it was.

Who's beginning to save him from the idea that he is the world's greatest negotiator?

He can walk in a room and the deal appears right there on the table, 100% to be signed with no work, with no involvement, and with no knowledge?

Well, I I have to tell you, Pam Oon Jom was interesting.

Why?

Not because they met, not because he stepped into North Korea, because he went back and said, we've got to get the real guys who understand this problem back to work on dealing with it, and it might even be step by step.

So he knew things.

And

what we told him in many ways

the day he started fire and fury against North Korea.

It's only taken three years.

But he was also told by Barack Obama that North Korea was the biggest problem that he was going to face and that Obama, and I know this from reporting on things when Obama was president, they didn't know what to do about it exactly.

They didn't know how to deal with him.

And Trump says, well, now we're dealing with him.

My way worked.

It is true.

Well, they haven't got a deal.

And it took them three years to figure out how to turn the pressure.

But none of us were fighting against the use of pressure, provided it didn't get into the the bluff trap, that it got to shape an answer that we could live with.

And that finally we understood, because we knew at the beginning, you weren't going to get the whole enchilada solved in one meeting, whether it was Singapore or Hanoi,

because it is a very complicated, difficult question.

But it is stupid not to make progress.

as you go ahead, because over 400 years of history, we have found found that step-by-step progress can produce a good result, not forever, but it often does.

And it's a way to proceed that makes sense.

And that's not part of an international order so much as an understanding of reality.

And an understanding of reality here is still what informs what it was we have been trying to do.

We have never been perfect and we never will be, but we have been an extremely valuable and important leader.

And most of all, we have been open to suggestions from people like our friends, the Brits, on how we could do things better.

After the end of the Cold War, that sort of dried up.

We sort of thought we were unilateral, but we couldn't really do things without anybody helping us.

And so we got into this kind of hubris that was mistaken.

Most of the ambassador posts you held were 20, 30 years ago.

But it seems like sometimes we are reliving the 1980s and the 1990s in

both American culture and in foreign policy.

There were people who said that when Trump was elected, it was 25 years since the end of the Cold War

and now maybe like it never really ended.

We're back to this fight with Russia.

Does it feel to you were in these world capitals.

You were dealing with the leaders then who are different leaders than the ones who are around now.

But it's the same issues in many ways that have just been filtered through time.

Does it feel to you like we're reliving it in that way?

We are, unfortunately, because there's that famous line about history, if you forget it, you're condemned to relive it.

Or somebody with perhaps more astuteness said, it doesn't really repeat itself, but it rhymes.

And so there are words to that effect, and I think that's right.

And I think we are seeing not the question of an electable

repetition of history imposed upon us by circumstances we can't control.

What what we are seeing is basically a combination of lack of knowledge, naivete, and a failure of wisdom to put us into this particular position.

And it is true that if you go back and look at the things that it took us a long time to learn in the Cold War, we have an enormous appetite for repetition.

We don't want to listen to people who have any expertise.

We don't want to teach our kids

what it is that would make a difference in their lives.

And in many ways, we run a lot of our policies that what we gave up 20 years ago becomes the new single focus point of how to solve this problem, whether it's the national health program or a foreign policy issue in one way or another.

I mean, I would just imagine that having dealt with this stuff in Israel and Russia at the UN,

and to see some of it,

We're still not sure what kind of peace process there might be with the Israelis and the Palestinians, let alone where the lines might be of a border.

We still don't know what the actual working relationship of both a strong United States and a strong Russia might be, what the international order is.

That it's

the same stuff.

It is.

And it's not that necessarily

these issues were bankrupt,

that we have, in effect,

in many cases,

allowed an absolute preoccupation with domestic political survival to transcend the necessity to deal with the really hard challenging issues which make survival secondary

and primary,

an individual's willingness to take some carefully calculated risks to make progress as

conferring the mandate of heaven on that individual, as opposed to to merely surviving to the next election with trickery and games.

Is it disheartening to you, having worked on it?

It is disheartening because I think we, for a long time, came a long distance.

The Cold War was interesting.

There was at least one occasion when

one of my great friends, Larry Eagleberger, quotes written, said, we would live to ruin the day when we had lost the predictability of the Cold War.

Not that Larry was wishing the Cold War back on us, but he could see ahead in a very clear way the coming unpredictability that it's taken now 20 plus years to evolve, but which is something that we have once again to contend with.

And we don't have what I would call

the celerity and the care that we exercised after the destruction of the Second World War, which I think left an impact on anybody thinking about problems, that this is a place we don't ever want to go again, to try to drive us, and it took us through the Cold War.

We avoided sometimes with

a certain amount of high risk,

the fact that we had

it within our capability to blow up the globe.

Do you miss the predictability of the Cold War?

I don't.

Because it was an enchaining predictability as well as a potentially liberating predictability.

But I think there is predictability in where we are, and there's unpredictability.

And there are certain things that I would change right away if I had the opportunity to do so.

We mentioned some of this in the conversation.

So let's leave it at this.

You, I am sure, have friends and colleagues all around the world who you're talking to

regularly.

What do they tell you that they think is happening in America

and where they think that this goes.

I

remember being in Italy at the beginning of 2004 when there were a lot of Europeans who were very upset about George Bush and who said to me, well, is America going to do the right thing and beat George Bush?

And I said, I don't think America thinks whatever you think is the right thing is top of their minds.

And obviously they were disappointed with Bush winning.

They were so excited that Bush was gone that they gave Obama the Nobel Peace Prize for

basically just being elected.

Thanks for arriving.

And

there was

Joaquin Castro, who's a congressman from Texas,

said to one of my colleagues a couple weeks ago that he feels, I'm going to make a very lowbrow reference here, but he said that he feels like Europeans are walking around like the people in Superman 3, which is when Superman becomes, he gets taken over and he's like bad Superman, and they are waiting for bad Superman to go away and come back to being good Superman.

Is that what you're hearing from the friends and colleagues you have around the world?

What do they make of where we are?

Less clearly waiting for a return of an America, more clearly deeply concerned about the situation.

Clearly concerned about the loss of a leadership that they had relied on for such a long period of time that I think they they still ask two questions.

First,

what's America think?

And secondly, the harder question is what can we do without America?

And the answers to neither of those or either of those questions is clear.

And we're in this position of deep uncertainty and chaos.

And in many ways, it does take a certain amount of leadership to move it.

It is an open question, in my view, as to whether we'll ever return to anything that resembles any particularly

attractive past golden age.

I don't think that's where we are.

I think, however, we should be able to find and elect and bring into place a leadership that is prepared to operate in an international community.

on a basis that even if we have serious differences with a foreign power, we can find ways to move things ahead, and that the more we rely on conflict, either as leverage for diplomatic progress, solely and alone,

or as a way to proceed in dominating the world without principles and values, the more we are going to be seen as being on a kind of bankrupt path.

And people will go back to reading the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, which has got lessons for us already, I suspect.

That's such a high note to end things on.

Ambassador Thomas Pickering, thank you for joining.

Thank you.

That'll do it for this week of Radio Atlantic.

Thanks to Kevin Townsend for producing and editing this episode.

and to Catherine Wells, the executive producer for Atlantic Podcasts.

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