thomas pickering was ambassador to india and russia under the clinton administration. he spoke at george washington university last month about u.s. efforts to promote democracy. this is about an hour and ten

minutes. >> thank you all for coming to this event. we're all very excited to hear from the honorable thomas pickering. the panel -- the conversation is going to be moderated by chris kojim who is a visiting professor of the practice of international affairs after serving as the chairman of the national intelligence council at the elliot school he was previously the director of the mid career mipp program and director of the summer foreign policy program. in government, chris served as a staffer on the house foreign affairs committee, under representative lee h. hamilton as the deputy assistant secretary of state in the bureau of intelligence and research and as deputy director of the 9/11 commission. he was also the president of the 9/11 public discourse project, the commission's follow on public education organization. he served as a senior adviser to

the iraq study group. please welcome professor chris kojim. >> it's a real honor to be here tonight, and this is in the very best traditions of this school. a very erudite, accomplished policymakers into the academy, and so that both can benefit. and i'm deeply dedicated to this continuing interaction between scholarship and practice. so it's a real honor tonight to introduce ambassador thomas pickering. he is a career ambassador. and that is the designation that very few ever receive. only a few in a generation. and ambassador pickering really is a phenomenon. the most accomplished ambassador of his generation. and he joined the foreign service in 1960 and retired for

a second time in 2001. and during that period of time, oh, the assignments he had. it's just stunning for me to contemplate him having served as ambassador of the united states of america seven times. in important countries and positions around the world. he was not limited to any single area of expertise. so he served as ambassador in jordan, from '74 to '78. ambassador in nigeria, '81 to '83. ambassador in el salvador, '83 to '85. israel, '85 to '88. and then he was the ambassador of the united states to the united nations from '89 to '92. in the lead-up to, during and then the aftermath of the gulf war. a hugely important position for the united states, and he represented our government so

very well. followed by his service as ambassador to india, and then during the clinton administration, as ambassador to russia. as the first ambassador to russia. his predecessor, of course, had been ambassador to the soviet union. he also served as the undersecretary for political affairs from 1997 until the last day of 2000. again, a position of exceeding importance in the formulation and implementation of american foreign policy. just on a personal note, i have never seen an individual with more energy and more creativity and more ideas working tirelessly to figure out ways to advance the diplomacy of this great country.

he has served with enormous distinction. i can't tell you how fortunate all of you are, as am i, standing here to have the opportunity to hear from ambassador pickering, and he will speak for approximately half an hour, and then he'll take questions and we'll have a bit of a conversation here. so ambassador pickering. [ applause ] >> thank you. thank you all very much. and chris, thank you for that very elegant, very hyperbolic, wonderful introduction. i'm sure i'm going to have to put that on paper somewhere and keep it. it's a pleasure to be with you, and thank you very much for the invitation to come by tonight. i want to talk about three things. i want to talk a little bit

about the changing world situation in terms of some of the key influences on foreign policy. that are new or different or more challenging. and then i'd like to talk about seven major issues, problem areas, challenges, difficulties, that we face with the opportunity perhaps on two or three of those to talk about some policy directions for the future that i think are interesting and possible and useful and perhaps not yet being fully pursued. then i look forward to your questions and comments, criticisms, ideas, thoughts, whatever. everything but tomatoes. thank you. the world is perhaps going

through the most rapid change in the human environment that we have ever seen. one wonders whether, in fact, with the geometric speed with which things are proceeding there is an end point at some time. one also used to look years ago at the roman empire. and when the barbarians came in, everything froze. we're all related to both romans and barbarians, so we can be proud of the roman achievements, and a little bit sorry that some of our ancestors threw spears. but that is obviously a question that none of us is prepared to answer, seemingly we can move on from strength to strength, and deal with change. the most fascinating change that i think we are all facing, and that you see, know and master well beyond what i have to deal with, is the electronic information related revolutionary changes that we all see. much of this has changed the way in which we do diplomacy. it's changed the way in which we understand the world.

it's changed the way in which the people of the world absorb it, know about it, and understand a bit about it. and i think one of the major contributions, not the only one, to something like the arab spring, or the arab transition as i think we all prefer to call it now, was, in fact, the notion of a rapid movement of information, people taking in ideas and thoughts that they had. the notion that dictatorships and autocracy were not a successful way of treating people in terms of the governments and the need to change that, and the fact that you could mobilize people through electronics in the main and bring them out and use public demonstrations to make a serious change in governmental organization was very, very interesting. in egypt it was fascinating that one of the things that people seemed to have forgotten in the plethora of changes was that there already were established

political forces at work and had been at work in society. some of them a little bit underground. certainly the muslim brotherhood was one. another, perhaps, was the notion that ordinary people ought to be able to gain an opportunity to participate in their own governance in a serious way. there were no leaders of that movement strikingly, and one of the interesting things is that with no leaders you can't win elections. and if elections are the preferred method of choice, then you become absent from the future in an unusual way, even though you have, perhaps, been instrumental in causing it. but these are examples of things that are happening around us and all the time. but the pace of change, i think, the breadth of change in the world, is very much due to this. closer to home, and i think more interesting, if i can sort of swivel around in a different way, is the fact that over the

last decade we found not to the surprise of a lot of people but to the surprise of some in the leadership of the country, that military force is not a very good way of solving diplomatic problems. and that diplomatic problems can be usefully solved at the conference table, often because you have a first-rate military course. and if you begin using military force to try to resolve problems, that don't -- that -- where it doesn't work very well, then you undermine in a serious way the capacity to have, in fact, the value of a first-rate military force behind your diplomacy, and behind your actions, and so if used and abused, if i could put it that way, it tends to be less persuasive. less useful. less important. as an american diplomat i was always grateful that we had a first-rate military force behind us. i was grateful, too, that we had

a first-rate economy. and even with some of the change that came about in 2008, and in 2009, from which we're still recovering, i think that our ability as an economy to perform, and to show leadership, and to deal with issues, great and small, is very significant. i think that there is another set of questions that's very important that we tend, when we add up what is it that's behind our diplomacy that makes us have a great chance to be more successful, is in the political realm, interestingly enough. and interestingly enough, it happens to be, i think, our values and principles. if there was one thing around the world that people admired about this country, was its freedom, its prosperity, its commitment to doing things correctly, its valuing ethical principles and its ability to act in accordance with them.

some of that has gone away. and we've lost some of that. there's nothing written in stone that says we cannot come back to it. and i think we are. i think it's -- we're moving perhaps more slowly than we should be, but it's a significant and important part of what underpins our diplomacy in a changing world. i think that there's several other things that are happening. diplomats normally used to work on a country by country basis. now we work much more significantly multilaterally. we used to be very much consumed by political questions and they were always treated by american diplomats as the top priority and the top of the heap. now that has shifted remarkably. and questions that are both multilateral, and heavily economically based are equally as significant, if not more significant, in the concentration of our effort, and the focus of our diplomacy. and that's important.

i'd like to say two or three other things. i think that, as we come to look at questions, it is important for us to begin to move out of the traditional stovepipes of consideration, particularly if we want to look at questions from a strategic point of view. from a point of view of strategic impact and strategic importance. and i've come to believe that there are now clusters or packages or groupings of issues that need to be taken together, as we consider them a foreign policy importance. one example is obviously the intimate relationship between energy policy, environmental issues and policies, and climate change. they're not uniquely clustered, and all alone. but they form the center focus of i think one of the important

clusters of questions we have to deal with. i'll talk in a minute about seven of these. they vary. some are clusters of issues that we would call worldwide, and functional. and others happen to do with regional areas of the world, where, in fact, regional problems and major country competitions are important to us. but looking at them this way, at least from a strategic perspective, is helpful from two directions. one of those directions is that it helps us avoid the unanticipated consequences that sometimes happen when we make a move on a set of issues and intimately related questions in one way or another affected. so the broader sweep of the cluster gives us an opportunity, at least, to understand those are interrelationships that we need to pay attention to. i think the second question is maybe more technical, more useful for the diplomat, but it

gives us an opportunity when we're negotiating in a set of questions, to understand that if we need a broader scope to get the negotiations moving, to offer either concessions or to seek concessions on a broader basis, looking at questions through the cluster focus is helpful and important in being able to gain those advantages in a negotiating scenario. let me now turn to the questions, and perhaps some of the things that we should do about them. i always am a little bit stymied at this point as to which priority is important. absolutely fascinating. i've been talking about this for a few years. and almost every time i come before an audience to talk about it, the priority has shifted a little bit. so tonight i want to begin with what i call the extended middle east as a cluster of questions. it's self-evident, it's obvious, the importance is perhaps, if anything, been overstressed in the press recently.

but we can look at that. and so, from the straits of gibraltar to the hindu kush, the extent of the middle east is a fertile field to continue to present us with new, interesting, challenging, and sometimes very destructive problems. and, in fact, the middle east fertility in this sense has probably outstripped our capacity in any real way to continue to deal with them. certainly new questions have emerged since the beginning of 2013, or even 2012, with a kind of rapidity that has left us all breathless, left our government masters, if i can call them that, certainly stymied often at the starting post, as to how to

get at them. and looking now at the complications of their interrelationship. no one set of questions, i think, in the middle east has the silver bullet embedded in it, that will solve the others. but it is interesting that as things get worse in one area, they tend to affect others. so that as we fail, and indeed, as the process fails to find a way to deal with the problem between israel and the palestinians, it tends in the main to affect arab attitudes toward the united states that runs across the full gamut of the middle east. and while it wasn't the centerpiece of change in egypt or in yemen or in libya, it is certainly there in the minds of many people who think about that problem. similarly, in an interesting way, and i'll talk about this in a minute, if we are able to break through in the negotiations with iran over a nuclear arrangement, there are opportunities to follow on, because we in iran share some

common interests in afghanistan, in iraq, and maybe eventually even in syria. although that looks like a long shot at this point. but it is interesting to see that interrelationship, and we should keep it in mind. it doesn't mean finally that all of these issues have to be treated in a broader context. we can deal with them in stovepipes. but we should keep our mind on the strategic interrelationships as we go ahead, and understand some of that, rather than to fence ourselves off in a narrow corner and treat with the policy merely as the policy as we are the press, or as our own inventions about the region, tend to catalog it. often people in the region don't see it the same way and we should be cautious about that. i would say that the number one problem at the moment is probably what our arabic speaking friends called daish, it is arabic for isil or isis or

i.s. the islamic state in iraq and in greater syria. and this is a serious problem, and we've addressed it as a serious problem. perhaps in my view we've overmilitarized it. but it has great military connotations. and if anybody wants to undertake a really unpopular cause, just go out here and raise up a banner and say, let's negotiate with isil. you can understand why, in effect, this has a bigger military character. but there are political and economic issues that are important here. and i think they need to be looked at. political questions of what kind of a coalition can we build. and those are important. political questions that have to do with how and in what way in iraq, in which the maliki government spent a good bit of its time either ignoring or tormenting sunni, a new iraqi government can pick up its socks and understand that it has to deal with minority from the point of view of their rights,

as well as obviously the significant value of majority rule, and that happens to be at the moment the shia. but those are significant. and economic questions are very important. where is some of our oil coming from? well right out of isil-land. do we continue to take that oil, and do we continue to feed the money into isis that that oil is being paid to -- paid for to receive. a very interesting question, particularly at a time when oil prices are going down. of course, if it were isil, it couldn't happen to nicer guys but there are still real problems about a resistance to a fundamental terrorist movement that is now heavily funded by the oil enterprise and we need to think about that. so those are significant. on the military side i think it's very interesting. there are now clear indications,

whether we like it or not, that while our aerial attack has been quite successful, both in northern syria, and in northern iraq in supporting the forces opposing isis, it is also now become an isis rallying cry to try to bring more recruits to the flag, more folks to the kalashnikov. and this is something we need to keep our eye on. it is also useful to begin to think about whether isis in its own galloping mistreatment of the sunni population of northern iraq has opened an opportunity for us politically and militarily to begin to deal with the sunni tribal leaders that we worked with in 2005 and 2006. is that door going to open? well the problem with that door is, having opened it once years ago, and then walked away when they had a feeling that somehow we were going to be around to

protect their interests, and left them cold in the hands of a new shia government, are they going to move to our side as rapidly as they did before. are they going to be useful. and then the final piece, who are the ground troops who are going to help us deal with isil if we are limiting ourselves now to air, to training, to intelligence support, and to equipment. i don't know. it's interesting. the shia forces in iraq have shown up until now they can protect baghdad. but can they help retake the region. which is an important objective. general allen who is leading the effort, i believe, is now focused on a two-year plan, that some time by 2017, he hopes to see the kind of results that we would like to see as soon as possible but aren't going to be possible, in part, because much training is required and much

equipment is required, and that's not ready at hand. i always ask the kind of question myself, in looking at this sort of issue, why is it that the afghan taliban, with almost no training, are so effective as military operators, when, in fact, the afghan national security forces, with all of our training, doesn't seem to be nearly up to the grade. why is it that isil, a kind of ragtag bunch, a combination of islamic fundamentalists, ex-baathist officers of the iraqi army and some real banditis, and why are they doing so well? we have to look at that a little bit and see, in fact, whether we have an answer to that particular problem or not. that takes me to syria. i'll only say the following. syria is a real conundrum for us. we declared war on 2 of the 3 major elements in syria. isis, and assad.

assad is happy to fight isis. isis is happy to fight assad. we've picked the moderates who are arguably, perhaps, the most timid of the military forces. maybe the most divided of the military forces, to put our chips on for all the obvious reasons. they're politically the kind of people that we should support. but that raises real difficulties. do we, in fact, go slow on assad while we try to go fast on isil? that seems to be some way in which we're leaning. on the other hand, the turks are very upset by assad. don't want to join us if, in fact, we go slow there. the final political piece is interesting. because, in dealing with isil, we have this unusual combination of people who all find it in their interest to oppose isil, but with whom we have wide variety of varying differences.

iran, russia, saudi arabia, turkey, the gulf states, certainly the sunni gulf states. if we could figure out a way to unify them against their other divisive interests, we would certainly have a better coalition than if we kind of move in with support from our traditional friends. that's a challenge. it's not yet fixed. it's a real problem. in syria, this problem is forcing taking hold, as well. because we have serious differences in our interests in syria, between us and iran and russia, among others, and saudi arabia and turkey. the syrian problem has been going on for three years. 200,000 people have been killed. 9 million people have been displaced in one way or another. a human tragedy of the first dimensions, bordering on genocide in many ways. a situation in which we saw

almost no attention in the papers except when it comes to a problem on the turkish border. we know little about what's going on, in many ways. and some of the more despicable inhuman acts are regular fare, unfortunately. and the principle sufferers are probably women and children. the people who least deserve to suffer for any reason at all. and so this is a huge problem. there's no question at all in my mind that a cease-fire is an imperative. and increased humanitarian assistance. on the other hand, there is no way at this point that we know of to generate the leverage to do that. i think in some ways, perhaps, further consideration of things like a no-fly zone might help to generate the pressure that might bring us closer to the table. but that's an arguable proposition but an important one. i think it is also significant that beyond a cease-fire, if you can get there, then the challenge is to negotiate a

transitional government, with or without some electoral arrangements. and then, obviously, to ease out mr. assad, and put him on his way to whatever hotel or villa arrangements he's chosen. and then see, in fact, whether syria can be held together with all of the terror and turmoil. and that's a huge job. it's a very big challenge, and one that i don't see on the near horizon, as well. so we're looking at two-year time frames or worse. for some of these problems. i spent a lot of time on this, because i think it's important to demonstrate how difficult diplomacy is these days. how intertwined it is with military, political and economic considerations, and how complicated the interrelationship is just between these two issues in the middle east. i won't spend a lot of time on arab palestine. i think that there are several things that are important here. we almost know what the solution could be.

we also know that the parties are not ready to negotiate on both sides, despite their professions of interest in doing so. we also know that the status quo is not defensible. and it is not permanent. and it is pushing the parties, once again, toward violence and conflict. whether we like it or not. the bicycle principle applies. if you're not riding forward, you're falling down. and this is important to keep in mind because too many american administrations have kited their arab/israeli check on the basis of the theory that peace has to mean to the parties than it does to us is the overwhelming judgmental basis for our proceeding. the truth is that if our national security is intimately involved in the middle east, and i believe it is, then it has to mean as much to us as it does to the parties.

the truth also is that the parties have shown themselves almost congenitally now unable to cross enough of the divide to get themselves started, much less to move down the path to negotiations. the tragedy is that i still think majorities in both camps, palestinians and israelis, with any kind of a reasonable leader, would move in the direction of the risks that have to be taken for a two-state solution. and while academics write wonderful papers on the demise of the two-state solution, i don't see anybody who's ready to accept a one-state solution where there is equal vote, equal political rights, equal citizenship, equal civil rights. at the moment, the situation is that the palestinians are under a kind of virtual occupation, and i don't believe that will continue to be the case forever. they won't accept it.

we are a key, perhaps the most important key, even though we have continued to fail. and that's a significant issue. i will mention as well iran, because i followed the negotiations for a long time. let me just say this -- i said that the negotiations if successful could produce real progress in the middle east. i think if they're not successful, watch out, because i don't think the absence of progress there will do anything but lead us on the road to conflict again, a conflict we can ill afford and a conflict which will solve little. and the opportunities are great at the present time. we have some gaps to cross, but it was interesting to read on a back page of the paper today that on the critical question of enrichment, the western side has increased the offer, if i can put it that way, of how many centrifuges the iranians can operate.

so i think we're beginning to see a little movement even before the election day in the united states. but that's one of the questions that obviously is at the moment containing in my view real progress. the other two issues are how rapidly the sanctions come off and what duration the agreement should be. i think they're all bridgeable, but i'm a consummate optimist. nevertheless, i think that the next three weeks will be critically important in where we go. i don't expect to see a full treaty, but i expect to see either 1 of 2 things, and that's what i'm optimistic about. either agreement on the major questions that have to be resolved with the treaty to be drafted later, or a set of arrangements that is close enough to that particular goal to justify a further continuation of negotiations.

and i believe that both of those are better results than nothing at all. i believe that we can get a good agreement, and i believe that it's now in sight. i'll only mention one other area of the middle east -- what to do about afghanistan and pakistan. i happen to believe that there are opportunities there that some of them can come out of the potential for india and pakistan to find a way through some of their deep problems that underlie if not overburden some of pakistan's preoccupation with afghanistan. the new president of afghanistan has gotten himself off to a good start. he's a very intelligent man. he understands some of the difficulties. he's take an real swipe at corruption, something that was not in the lexicon of the former president. it will be interesting to see where that goes. in the meantime, pakistan is still a state that has an army or an army that has a state but not at the moment a democracy in which the army is, in fact, part and parcel of political decisionmaking made by the civilians.

that i think will continue for some time. i'm not sure that the army is ready to move to take back governance in pakistan, but it's always a danger, particularly when the governance gets as weak as the present civilian government is now. well, we spent a lot of time on my number-one priority so, let me go through some of the others so you don't get the idea that the world is simply the middle east. the world is even more complex in other areas. the one i would choose to discuss next is probably the one that i like to call rivals and partners. our relations as a country with china, with russia, with india, with the european union, which is not a state yet, and not in some cases not a state yet, japan, brazil, if you want to add others perhaps continental countries where the real sweep

with strong economies are growing economies with real potential for the future, a potential to be rivals or partners. and our challenge, obviously, is in our foreign policy whether we can work to make one and not the other be the outcome of that relationship. it's not all diplomacy, but diplomacy has a lot to do with it and, in fact, can help in an important way. china is slowing down in its economic advancement. that should please some. it certainly isn't pleasing to the chinese. china is shifting some of its economic focus from export-driven growth to domestic demand-driven growth, and we should be grateful for that. we're concerned about chinese expansionism as we're concerned about russian expansionism. new elements perhaps on the

scene and how and in what way we deal with them. it's critical in my view that with major countries that are part of what now is a multipolar set of directions if i can put it that way from the major countries of the world, that we seek several things, that we seek to find those win-wins which can buttress a relationship and make sure that there are on both sides real investments in that relationship rather than major competition for leadership. and that's significant. much of those relationships relates to personal relationships between leaders. when it sours, things don't go well. when the relationships get defined by negatives as our relationship with russia has been defined, i think unfortunately on both sides from time to time, it takes on a kind

of version and diplomacy of ankle kicking. but then it gets worse. and i can answer questions and talk further about some of those issues, but we have real opportunities with friends and partners. we have opportunities to use diplomacy, to seek a better sense of where countries are going and where they would like to see themselves, what they see as their role in a major world in which we are still looked to for leadership despite some of the declines. another set of questions intimately connected with the rivals and partners question because they all seem to play in it in one way or another is the issue of weapons of mass destruction. they've been around for 60 or 70 years. we have had evidence of use, happily not nuclear use in wartime, since august of 1945, and that's a fire break that we should work hard to keep and perpetuate.

we're concerned about proliferation. we talked a moment ago about iran and how and in what way they can provide a problem for us as they could. even worse, i think in north korea, we have some capacity to contain, but the question of whether we can roll back a north korean program or not is a highly contentious one and a very difficult one. there is potential for serious instability and a potential for obviously as we saw when the world began to wring its hands with the one-month absence of kim jong-un, that raises the specter of difficulty for us. and it won't be easy. i think that beyond that we owe it to four quite serious cold war warriors. henry kissinger, george schultz,

sam nunn and bill perry. none of them wimps. to come out of the closet four years ago and say, you know, we really have to take a serious look at whether we can get rid of these things and if so how. a lot of people were taken up short by that. there was a theory that in the world of the blind, the one-eyed man is king, if somebody develops in their back garage a nuclear weapon and threatens a denuclearized world with it, will that be the end-all and be-all of danger? happily, we see conventional force playing some role in that. happily, we see the potential for some serious interest in moving in that direction. and it will be a challenge, obviously, if we can make any progress there, but we've made progress in other fields as well. a third and important issue -- or a fourth and important issue for us is perhaps also connected with the larger players.

it's 2008 and 2009. the cluster of questions that runs from basically the failure of our home mortgage system to report honestly on what it was that was being marketed as clusters of home mortgages all the way through to a macroeconomic crisis, potential failures of major banks, in some cases the failure, major involvement by the governments in stabilizing the economies and propping them up, a real crisis in europe, certainly great potential for a country like greece more or less to drop out of the world economy for a while, and significant challenges in how and in what way we institutionalize a little better, the operation of the world financial system and the world banking system, how we bring it in in a way that accords with some of the institutional attentions we have paid to trade and the regulation and indeed the international

role played in evening up the trade picture, removing unfair practices and seeking new ways to move. we are now challenging the world with two major trade agreements east and west. they can provide an important and i think very significant addition to multilateral trade arrangements, which have fallen on hard times. they're an important complement to the many bilateral trade agreements we have around the world. we are recovering. the rest of the world is not doing as well, particularly in europe. it's important, obviously, for world stability that we continue to move ahead, and it's important that we not produce once again the kind of behavior in the united states which helped to unhinge a great deal more of the world's economies than we ever anticipated.

the next question that i think is important for us, it's been around for a long time, is countries on the path of development and change. i call it poverty, growth, and development. i look at food, water, and health as major ways of dealing with a cluster of questions. i look at many issues that come out of this set of problems. not all economically determined but in many cases they are. everything from failed and failing states to crime and narcotics to migration, again, to effects on trade. a whole series of intimately related issues that have to do with how and in what way we continue to address the developing world and the issues that are there. it would be surprising tonight if i were never to mention ebola.

it is clearly just an example in effect of how closely we are now linked in the world to even the most disadvantaged states at the farthest removed and how much what happens there affects us in many ways. again, the crisis may have been overdramatized. we won't know until we see it recede. again, it's required a particular determination on the part of people who are well trained and able to protect themselves. it's involved self-sacrifice in an enormous way. i spent two years in nigeria. nigeria, the spread was stopped by a wise doctor with two assistants who found the victim, went out and found all of those people the victim was associated with, the doctor did that at the

expense of his life. it stopped it so far in nigeria, a country that is slightly better provided for than liberia, sierra leone and guinea, but one that not necessarily is so and one that has the largest metropolises in africa, because you don't understand what that might have been. we do need constantly to think about how and in what way we deal with that part of the world, whether it is for reasons of the best sort, or self-interest reasons of the best sort. they're remarkably combined in what we see out there now. and i think that no one has had an entirely successful foreign aid program, and i suppose the opposite is also true -- no foreign aid program has so colossally failed that it hasn't helped somebody. but we do need to think about it.

we have jumped from pillar to post too often in my view, from focus on agriculture to a focus on health, to a focus on education. when the reality is that most countries need all of the help in all of the regions in whatever way they can. we have struggled with the issue of good governance and how important that is to make progress in dealing with that issue and how we cannot produce that. that has to come from the state itself, from their own people and from the leadership. and leadership has been very differential, and we see across the board serious problems. but we have no opportunity to re-create the colonial world. that's gone. and in many ways we have to operate in a situation where we have fully to respect not only leaders but publics while at the same time seek to work with them to persuade them that their future can be better and that

we're in a position to help. i just talked some time ago about energy, the environment, and climate change. i won't say a lot about that. i do think that, as we move ahead, climate change is a hugely befuddling and very challenging problem. it's one of the few problems now whose life span is a great deal longer than ours and therefore those who are comfortable and have reached advanced age but are still in charge of decisionmaking feel less imperative and less imperative about venturing large amounts of money to deal with something that they find very hard to detect. but we are seeing this gradually year by year, increasingly bringing difficult news to us.

the best scientists tell us that indeed it's a real phenomenon an we have now seen a significant disappearance of traditionally iced-over areas. the argument is of course that normal variations in climate are producing this, none of it is man made. those particular challenges are real. i believe in fact now it has gone on so far and so fast that we have to look at the mad-man possibilities and we have to deal with it. and i suppose you can say for those of us who have children and grandchildren and beyond we ought to look at it from their perspective as much as our own, and i hope we do. but it is a very difficult problem. we have done a pretty good job in part because we've learned how to get gas out of shale in moving away from putting excessive amount of carbon in the atmosphere, but we are a long way from being there, and

that challenge will remain. let me wind up now very briefly, as i've already overstayed my time i'm sure much too much, with one other question. our government is not well prepared in my view or organized to deal with the problems of the 21st century, and that was before we saw the standoff at the okay corral, which takes place on a daily basis on capitol hill. i think that it is significant that we need to move in the direction, particularly in the executive branch, of how we can deal with problems worldwide and domestic on a much stronger whole of government basis. we are still too stove piped. we are still, in many ways, too separated in our ability to bring the full concentration of the government across a broad spectrum to deal with issues as they come up. mobilization times are slow.

our military have shown the way in being able to put the four services together to be able to deal with their problems. but their showing the way has now opened the door for the civilian side of the government to move that way. and finally, internationally, our institutions, we have many, maybe too many, they are all spread out. some of them lack what i would call the commitment to deal with the problem. other areas i think lack better institutions. i mentioned banking and finance a while ago. and so there are even if we are able to get our domestic government in shape, significant challenges out there in the world, whether it is at the united nations or at nato or all the other institutions that are out there. i won't dwell at length on that. you've been kind to listen to me for so long. and let me now open the floor to your questions.

[ applause ] >> i will start here by saying we have 'til a little after 8:10. >> we can go to 8:15. >> 8:15. so we have some 20 minutes for questions. really in the interest of getting as much student participation as possible, i will -- i'll forego the first question and let's just go right to the audience. right here. can you wait for the microphone? it's coming to you. >> so at this point in time the united states is probably, like, the largest superpower in the world, but at the same time we're living in an increasingly multipolar world, but there are a lot of other countries or

blocs like the eu that have significant power. how do you perceive ideally the united states playing into all these problems that you've touched on? like, should we be leading the charge on all of them? should we purposely be stepping >> i think it is a great question. i think that there are a couple of ideas here. i think that we consulted more with our friends during the cold war than we have since. that is my experience. we learned a lot. our leadership was very effective, because they played a role, even though they were going to follow us, in supporting the direction in which we chose to go, which was often, in many ways, informed by their ideas. i think partic papory ways of

proceeding, even those estranged from. russia, with all the problems on ukraine s playing a positive role in the iranian negotiations, and seems to be continuing, if anything maybe more positive. why? i don't know yet. i guess they don't want iran with a nuclear weapon either. i mention, with many of the countries and many of the problems, we have common interests. we don't want the world run by islamic fundamentalists. we don't want people with nuclear weapons all over the place. there are things we can do to enstrengthen the international financial system, if we are prepared each to anti-up. and one of the great tricks of leadership is getting everybody to believe that your best idea was really their best idea. i think that is where we should be in the diplomacy.

i think that it notion, final point, that we were a unilateral super power, if you define it as, we could do anything we wanted while we were in that state, without the help of anyone else, i don't think that ever existed. i don't think we operated that way. we may have pralted periph reallily, that it was a mistake, i don't think we disregarded everybody else, and went out hell for leather doing what we wanted. >> please, here. don't turn around. you are the one. you got the do the. dot. >> in your talk, you mentioned some of the challenges, facing global institutions today, specifically, i wanted to know, this has been discussed a lot, whether or not there has to be or should be structural form to

the united nationings security council, and specifically, is it time for the world to consider the elimination of the veto power? >> i am glad you asked that question. i was lunatic enough, without asking washington to give a speech every once in a while to take a look at the veto power, it wasn't working in our interest. happily, nobody heard that, if they did t they were kind enough not to come down on my head. i thought for years, if you chalked up the veto power, and those who exercised it, most of it was for rather silly reasons, china exercised a veto in guatemala case over taiwan. we did in the middle east when we didn't need to. it was an easy way out.

i also think that a proposal which said, take genocide. let's make it a particular case for reform. while they there are disputes about it, we pretty much can define it it is easier to define than tororrism. now, let's say now, i thought there was a time when we could convince the five permanent members, want now. there it was a time to cop vince the five permanent members, unless three of them said they were prepared to vote against a draft, they would all agree to obstain or vote in favor. that would do several things, that would crystallize the negotiations on a draft. it would give us a better chance to get a tougher draft on genocide questions. which in my view is very important. i think you could take out of the mix right away things that

states as a clause in the nuclear test band territory, it is in your vital interesting to go back to testing you have an out. limit that as much as you possibly could. moving it,a way from those kinds of things would be important for us. i think you could extend it to nonproliferation, and maybe state to state aggression over international boundaries, that is a way forward. it may not be the only way forward. the other structural change is to put stateos as permanent members who in fact are now very large, prepared to play a major role in the world scene. i won't say nuclear powers, because if it happens by circumstance that all five permanent members are nuclear powers, i don't want to make that a hurtle someone has to jump through to become a permanent member. it is time to cut down the veto. it is a perfect opportunity.

so that it isn't over-used. i think it would help to transform the security council a great deal, if constructive thought to that t do i think there is a chance in hell that will happen? no. so, regarding the arab spring, how effective do you think it has been, given that egypt had a horrible experience after a year. libya is essentially a failed state, and syria is in the midst of civil war? >> and iraq isn't doing so good. yemen is a mess, everything is okay. >> it seems that the monarchies escaped pretty well. in some ways, i feel they paid

their way, if i could put it that way, made sure their people got advantage, consistent with the kind of autocrattic rule that they have, and beginning to think they have to open up. do i think the arab spring was a haoing success, no. do i think they were endevelopedered by popular opposition, yes, did popular opposition channel itself into the right course in one way or another? could we help it? probably, we couldn't help it much. probably in one way or the other, significant forces were at work in the country, were more significant than the people who opened the door to the square, unfortunately. will it change again? i don't know. i think president cici has to know he is not being judged against the gamal standard or

the mosey standard, he is being judged against, i think slightly more liberal standard than we saw before. will that in fact, engender change? will the military in egypt give up power? we will see something moving on to political parties and political competition in the near feature? i am afraid not. i wish i could see it i don't think it will happen. i think tunissia is a happy example, but even they have problems. >> i am looking to this side for a question, all the way in the back. touching back on russia. and the potential energy crisis with russia and ueu.

there is a rumor the u.s., is thp plausible, more effective than the current sanctions that we have. should we look at something more unilateral outside of the u.n.? >> everybody is wrestling with this issue now. i would say the following. i think that one of the effects that we would feel at home if we begin to export gas and i will talk about why that is hard. is that european gas prices are three times ours. once the marginal british thermal unit of gas begins to go at higher prices, i suspect it will drive up domestic prices. that it will push inflation, that will not give us the advantages that we have now with cheap energy, protected in some ways, by our failure to export. to export gas we have to build

expensive expensive liquefied facilities, at least, to get them underway. one of the things we can do, i suppose, and we are doing, is take less of the world's gas, although, we are heavily relint on canada and mexico, and maybe less of the world's liquids. so, in fact, we push that surplus in the direction of people who need it. my own feel suggest that the most effective sanctions on mr. putin in the long run will be to take advantage of his strategic era, of not using his oil income over the last 15 years to diversify and strengthen russ russia's economy outside of the area of hydrokargon. he is vulnerable to market

changes. interestingly enough, the present drop in the price of oil has an impact on russia, they have balanced the budget at $100, and it is now down an $80. russia's political fast and hoos activities have had a serious effect on the russian economy, more than anybody expected to see at this stage. a serious infleet in flight. many billions of dollars have left. almost no foreign investment. a rubble exchange rate that is going 10% against the ruble. no growth in the russian economy. oil prices down, income is down. they may account for at least mr. putin's temporary paying attention to the minsk

agreement, over how to deal with the problem in ukraine. not beautifully, not perfectly, not without exception, some of that is happening. if we could get the europeans, four 40 and 50% on russia's hydrocarbons, get off that, giving them the opportunity to say to the russians, our off take is so low, we request suspend it, find other sources to. do that, we have to find other sources for the europeans. iraqi oil is undisturbed and growing, gone from a million barrels a day to almost three and a half. that if we have an agreement with iran, iranl can get up to 3 million barrels a day, it is down on to a million because of

sanctions, that can fill in the losses, in other places in the world, they are beginning to look at exploitation of shale. not all of it is as good as ours, that will begin to change some of the oil availability that we can see. so, maybe we can convince the europeans germany has to lead, germany so far is not readies to move. germany is getting rid of the nuclear, not until 2021, 2022. we as well a chance with germany to bridge the grap. all of these kinds of things, and new technologies, interestingly enough, solar is coming down in price. wind has been less productive. it has been expanded in many places, in this cases, china, one of the greatest wind farm production capacities, of anybody.

even if in fact, it is not a particularly big piece of china's production. >> yes, the young woman with her hand up here. >> ambassador, i wanted to know what your favorite part of your career was? >> well, gosh, interestingly enough i was in a lot of strange and sometimes difficult places. i liked them. for me, the most satisfying was the opportunity that i had in new york in 1990, when iraq invaded kuwait, to work with the security council for three very intensive months of bringing it together. prushing on resolutions for sanctions for increasingly tightening the strings on hahn.

it didn't produce what we wanted, but it produced a coalition that stuck together, even the shy members of the democratic members voted enough to cemetery u.s. military involvement, in itself did produce a result, in large measure, because we had a political goal in mind and stuck to it. >> this it will have to be our last question. thank you very much. i was wondering, tying off of russia and china, you mentioned the problems with member of the relations, how they are often defined by negative factors, disputes, territory, like in ukraine, and/or the south china sea. we have talked about solutions regarding sanctions and

pressures, you mentioned, what kind of positive aspects can we utilize to improve our situations with these characters, whose importance is clearly not going to diminish any time soon? >> i think for people who are particularly hard to deal with, they only have to turn to leverage. clearly, what leverage we have has to be articulated and operated in ways that are effective. sanksings, if broadly applied, have the disadvantage of punishing the population for the sins of the leader. i used to say, back when we were dealing with hahn, that he owns the last chicken sandwich in iraq. but he makes all the decisions. targeted sanctionses have interest suggest possibilities. it is also true that over the years, the u.s. treasury was to

impose financial sanctions because they feared it would destroy the world banking system. they have been the most effective, they say to the international banking system, if you want to do business in iran, you won't do business in the united states. it is a harsh judgment. it means that we try up the country's ability to trade and export which is very important and that is a draconian sanctions with a lot of effect. one of the drivers in the iranian input, because the president wants to be able to demstralt to his population that he can change the economic

equati equation, and bring inducement, sometimes. we seem to be interested in spending trillions in war, rather than billions to buy off somebody. that is not a happy circumstance. some cases it works, some cases, we have found financial solutions, some big, some wall. i had the opportunity to go to china, to explain how we bombed their embassy in belgrade. there it was a lot of chinese encouragement of put it this way, demonstrations. each of us paid for the damage that was done to the other. that is a way to settling international disputes.

courts have been pretty good about it. they take into is on the leg regimes, and it would make sense if we do so, in my view, not the right answer. >> i would like to thank mr. pickering, for his his career and his enormous contribution to this country. >> thank you.

>> the center for international studies, annests to develop an

hiv vaccine. the head of the aids vaccine coalition, this is an hour and 40 minutes. >> i am steve morrison, the senior vice president here at csi, and global policy center. welcome to csis today. we are thrilled with the lineup that we have, and thrilled to be able to do what we hope will be a recurrent series of meetings of this sessions of this kind, focused on technologies, and central importance, and the evolution of new opportunities, and new tools that can be quite important in a number of different areas of global health. this is a terrific way to kick this effort off. and it is really the brain child of my close friend and cleek,

todd summers, thank you, todd for getting this rolling. and i want to thank sap hill anello who worked hard to pull all the pieces together over several months, welcome, i will turn the floor over to todd. we will get on our way. >> thanks, steve, welcome, for many of the new digs at csis. up scale, nice new building for dr. fachi. many us in the room have been working on hiv for some time. for me, past my third decade. many of us would like to move on and we see an hiv vaccines, the hope for an end to the epidemic. to start the series that steve mentioned, we wanted to focus on hiv vaccines, and give you a

sense of where we are in the research pipeline. what you are like lito see, what it will look like. potential impacts on the epidemic. we are thrilled to stauf it off with dr. tony facuhi, he has been head of the hin, nid, since 1984. which is quite an accomplishment. and has been a stalward champion of vaccine research, among many of the responsibilities he has leading the hiv agenda. thank you very much for coming here. we have joining us, mitchell warren, who runs a vac, now, avac, i am on the board. a big conflict of interest there. mitchell will talk about some of the perspectives where the research is from the organization, focused on hiv

prevention. and margie runs the hiv initiative. product development partnerships, focused on bringing together a multiple sets of actors to it will be a great opportunity to hear from her, where the partners are, and the leading pdp in this area. for format, about 30 minutes for dr. fauchi, to give a presentation, and then, we move to mitchell warren, eight or ten minutes of comments, margie mcglenn, and then, open it up for the panel for you to engage them in questions and answers, i will moderate that. that is a good chance for you to see where we are with hiv research, dr. fauchi, over to you. thank you for coming.

it is a pleasure to be here with you today. i am going to talk a bit about the issue of the role of an hiv vaccine. i want to start off by putting into perspective the concept of why we really do need an hiv hax vine, despite the spectacular successes, that we have had over the last several years, in the arenas of both treatment and prevention. take a look thea the background, then i will get into the nitty-gritty about where we are with the vaccine. we are all aware of the most recent numbers from un aids, that again, keep hiv aids, historically, among the short list, less than a handful of devastating pandemics that our

civilization has to face, with stunning numberers, 75 million total tass, 39 million deaths, 35 million still living with hiv, as of the last count, 1.5 million deaths last year, 2.one million new infections, in the united states, we are a developed nation. we have drugs, health care, that is getting better. and it is really very difficult to accept one million living with hiv, 16 to 18 percent of them don't know fay are infected. 600,000 deaths, the number that keeps bothering me for decades, is that there are approximately 50,000 new infeces every year for decades.

why go we say we are doing so well, it is based on decades of extraordinary accomplishments in science. i could spend a half hour on each of these here, but the ones that really come to mind are the extraordinary advances in treatment which started off, if you think of the history, todd was mentioning he was involved from the beginning, i began in miff, after the mmwr came out on june 5th, i have been doing it ever since. it was a time when we didn't

know not even what the virus was, over the years, to developing treatment. we have 30 fda approved drugs, right now, we can say, without exaggeration, a lot of times people when they talk about results, exaggerate. if you can put anyone on retrovifrales and they stay on their drugs, 25-year-old infeblthed man or woman, look them in the eye, when i see them in my clinic three times a week and tell them, if they stay on their drug, you can project they will live an additional 50 years, one of the most, now, low and middle income countries, to

the point not the first time, but when i was sent to africa by president bush, for the program, there was less than 50,000, now, 13 million, that leads to 7.6 million deaths that are averted globally since 1995. you super impose that on prevention, condom use, needle exchange, sir rinchlg exchange, behavior modification, we have medically related, circ cision, mother to child transmission, treatment as prevention, that not only saves the lives of the infected person, in a high percentage, 95%, to transmit it to another individual. that has allowed us to talk

starting from a couple of years ago, at the international aids conference in washington, d.c., when hillary clinton came to the nih a few months before, and used an aids-free generation. we can talk about a world without aids. why do we need a vaccine? i will tell you why. so, take a look at the current status, whether it is essential, what the path way is. the current status. the projection in the absence of an hiv vaccine, you canny do mathematical models, i am in the middle of an ebola mathematical model, that is another story, steve will think of another session to discuss that the

projection is that when you look at the new injections, it is a 30% decrease since 2001. the current projections is good. if you get to that mathematical model, it depends on how much you implement what we already have. say we don't have a vaccine, take all the things that i put on the prevention slide, and everything that i have told you about treatment, the red to blue to green really means how you increase the implementation of these modalities, if you put a full-court press on, you can see that emplimt egg. then you can say, is the hiv vexine essential for the