policies toward syria in the fight against the militant group isis. before heading to his holiday vacation, president obama held a year end news conference this afternoon saying that sony erred in choosing not to air the

---including the president talking about the u.s. response to north korea. let's talk of the specifics of what we all know. we can confirm that north korea engaged in this attack. it says something interesting about north korea that they decided to have the state mount an all out assault on a movie studio, because of a satirical movement, starring seth rogan. and james flaco. i love seth and i love james. but the notion that that was a threat to them? that gives you some consistency of the kind of regime we're talking about here. they caused a lot of damage.

and we will respond, we will respond proportionally and we will respond in a place and time and manner that we choose. >> again, you can see all of today's news conference by president obama any time on our website, cspan.org. the u.s. has special envoys for sudan and south sudan. the israeli-palestinian negotiations and other places around the world. the u.s. institute of peace hosted a discussion on if using special envoys works in addressing international conflicts and what should be done to bolster the effectiveness of the envoys. this is about an hour and a half.

and also the issue about overall operations in areas of conflict has certainly been a topic that's come up a great deal. i'm going to hand it over for very brief bios >> well, thanks very much, tom. i'm princeton lyman, a senior advisor here, assistant secretary of io. i want to talk about the origin of this study a little bit and the methodology. then we'll get into the substance. but as both ron and tom have mentioned, the use of special

envoys, particularly in conflict situations, is a fact of life. it is something that administrations have used in the past, they will use it in the future. while there is some controversy over the amount of effort, the use or overuse of special enjoys, the fact is they are an important instrument of u.s. foreign policy and what we wanted to get at this study together or to institutions is how do we make that more effective, what are the issues that arise, how do you make the use of envoys more effective. i came off of two years as the u.s. special enjoy for sudan and south sudan so i had some thoughts on this. but in our doing this study, what we did together, bob and i, was to first develop a set of issues that we thought were the relevant issues. we then convened two roundtables of diplomats, former envoys,

military officers, et cetera, to review those terms of reference, if you will, and make sure that we will targeting the right issues. and then following that and revising it, we then sent out the interview. more than 20 people, former envoys, people who had worked or selected envoys, and others. and then we reviewed a lot of the memoirs of envoys who had worked on conflict situations. now i want to mention that we focused on special envoys in conflict situations. there are a lot of other special envoys. some for islamic outreach, for climate change, et cetera. some of our recommendations may be relevant to those, but we focus on conflicts because there are some special characteristics. they're dealing with life and death situations. and they usually attract very high level of both political and public attention. after our interviews and our review of memoirs of several of

the envoys, we covered a lot of conflict areas from northern ireland, the middle east, the balkans, south asia, and several situations in africa. so we tried to reach out and get a perspective from people dealing with these issues over more than one administration, and in various parts of the world. so let me turn to bob who will talk about the basic elements of the study. >> thank you. let me begin by thanking the u.s. institute of peace and princeton the opportunity to work with him has been really great. and i do appreciate it. just touching briefly on the structure of the report and what we tried to cover. i served as special envoy to the bosnian federation at the end of the bosnian war just a little

under 20 years ago now. i later went back to bosnia as ambassador as head of the uscoe mission. we look at purpose, empowerment and authority. in brief terms, what's the mandate. it is broad or narrow, is it clear or vague, are the goals evident. and we looked at a number of cases. we then looked at empowerment. what's the authority that the special envoy has or wishes that he or she had. what is the relationship to foreign governments. and what are the relationships with the u.s. government. after empowerment, we turn to policy authority. what is the role in policy formulation that the special envoy has or does not have. what are his or her channels in to the decision making process. the next issue we looked at was

dealing with what we called unfavorables. sometimes it's the special envoy's responsibility to deal with people that the u.s. government ordinarily would not touch with a ten-foot pole. but when you are in an immediate post-conflict situation, these are the people who are still relevant and the question is how you define the relationship with these people and how much you tell washington about what you're doing. i dealt with some later indicted war criminals in bosnia, but it was necessary to get past the conflict. we go into that at some length. then there is the issue of structure and turf battles. exactly what kind of team can a special envoy put together, if

any. where is the special envoy going to be working from? we say in the report that in almost every case, special envoys are physically located at the state department. i was physically located in a broom closet in sarajevo. but i did have a window. and i got to know everybody at the embassy because my broom closet was the only access to the bathroom. so either you have a staff -- in my case, i served both as special envoy and ar as charge deaffairs. so there was some gray area between what the embassy staff did for me and what the embassy staff did for the special envoy. we played that game i think pretty well. so turf battles. there are turf battles taking place in washington. there are battles between authorities in washington and in the field. and there are battles locally.

all of this required a certain amount of creativity and fast footwork, at times. and then there is the question of state nsc rivalry which is another kind of turf battle which we can talk about later. finally, outreach. whom do we reach out to. there's congress. there are advocacy groups. and there is civil society when there is civil society in the conflict areas. the concept of civil society basically doesn't play very well -- or didn't 20 years ago in the former yugoslavia. but we had to work with all of these people, and in some cases create at least the bases of a civil society who would then, we hope, take root on its own. so those were the areas that the report covered. as princeton said, we had the opportunity to talk to current and former special envoys and learn from them about how they

did their jobs and compare it against our own experiences. >> bob and i might just share some of our experiences. then ask dan and david do the same. >> excellent. >> let me start with this question of power, mandate and authority. if you're a presidential envoy, what everybody wants to know is, are you really the president's envoy. that is, are you speaking for the president, do you have the president's backing, does the president look to you as the key person in that regard. and that comes from both the substantive relationships but also comes from appearances. one of the first things i did when i -- even before i became the full envoy but the assistant envoy is when president obama

went up to new york, the general assembly. it was important i was sitting right behind him. the visible characteristics are important. we have cases where envoys are appointed and not empowered. they're forgotten. they don't show up. but then the question of authority and mandate. because authority comes, yes, in part from empowerment, but it comes from much baltimore. if you're going to have authority as the leader in the policy situation, you have to have credibility. you have to show respect for all the other actors in that situation, the bureaucratic actors, substantive actors. and then you have to come up with credible policy recommendations. in sudan's case, we had two policies running at the same time. on the one hand, the president and several senior people in the sudan government were indicted war criminals. i wasn't even allowed to talk to the president or those so indicted. on the other hand, my mandate as the president repeated every

time he introduced me, this is principleston lyman, he's working to prevent sudan, south sudan from going back to war. and to do that we had to get sudan's cooperation to allow for the independence of south sudan. walking those two lines of policy meant we had a lot of differences, overshading, et cetera. and it was important to respect the interests of the war crimes office in the department, the democracy people, the human rights people, and at the same time, give me enough leeway to be credible with the sudanese government that what we were looking for was going to be in the long-term interests of that country as well as south sudan. so how you get authority, use authority, create authority has a lot to do with how you act in those situations, but also starting with the empowerment you get from the president or in some cases from the secretary of state. >> that contrasts interestingly with the situation that i encountered in sarajevo when i arrived there in the summer of 1996. the war had just ended. there was still some shooting

going on. the u.s. military had come in heavy. we had 50,000 american troops in bosnia and herzegovina, with a population of 4 million. also 1 million refugees and 200,000 casualties. we also had a holy writ. it is called the dayton accords. the dayton accords, which were the product of the will of one single person, the very special envoy, dick holbrooke, in effect outlined a government which did not exist. in fact, the dayton accords were signed in 2 cases out of 3 by non-bosnians. they were signed by slobodan milosevic in belgrade and someone else.

the only bosnian to sign them was the muslim bosnian leader. what we basically had done was given ourselves cover because the neighbors signed it. but we didn't want to deal with the local war criminals. at least as a government. i, however, was in a position where i dealt with indictables, as we called them, all the time. and a number of them were later indicted and ended up in the hague which, in most cases, was a richly deserved location for them. but in other words, we had a structure -- we, the united states. we, the so-called peace implementation council which was the u.s., plus canada, plus the european union, plus russia, and

and turkey, representing the organization of the islamic conference, to put together a country which did not exist. and so we didn't have to worry much about purpose. the purpose was to, we in this country tend to call it nation building. i prefer to call it state building. to build a viable state. as for empowerment, the state department led the process. working hand in hand with the u.s. military, i worked very closely with a then two-star general named david petraeus who was the first one in. to enforce the peace and prevent a re-igniting of the conflict. as for policy authority, it was all here. we had the authority. dick holbrooke called the shots from washington, once a month would come out to sarajevo and scare everybody.

but we worked together very well, and i was his man on the ground, and spent my time shuttling between mainly the croats and the bosnians, that is to say between the catholics and the muslims, and then when i game charge as well asked the serbs to the list of people to shuttle to. it was a jaw-boning exercise. because there was no resistance. we called all the shots. very different. >> let me talk a little bit more about this question of dealing with what we call unfavorables. it's one of the chapters in the report that i think is one of the most important. there are risks in dealing with people who are either indicted or war criminals, or in some cases terrorists, and it is important to weigh those risks, and have an understanding of whether it's worthwhile or not to engage. it's not necessarily the thing to do in every case. i was not allowed to speak to the president of sudan. it clearly limited to a large extent our role in the situation. i reserved the right to ask for that policy to be reviewed if i felt it essential. i never reached that point, because there were risks in

opening that door. but i think it had to be an issue on the table. there were others out there who were also indicted, that i found it necessary to engage with. and that comes to another question. if you're going to be a special envoy you have to take some risks. if you feel you have the right authority, and you feel this is necessary, you have to take some risks, doing things that may not have received all the blessings in the world. if you take those risks you ought to be ready to take the blowback if they go sour. but i think some risk, and giving the special envoy some latitude in that regard, is one of the uses you could make of a special envoy, because that person is not in the line of normal diplomatic representation and activity. and therefore, it doesn't convey the same, necessarily, recognition of the interlocutor with whom you're engaging. let me go on to this question of relationships within the bureaucracy. now this comes up all the time. and one of the most sensitive areas with the special envoy, especially a presidential one, but even sometimes a secretarial special envoy, is the relationship to the department of state, to those mechanisms that are there all the time, dealing with that conflict, and our diplomacy. and particularly the regional assistant secretary and the regional bureau.

there's no cookie cutter way to resolve those issues. it depends a lot on the structure of the situation, et cetera. what we found in all our interviews was chemistry matters. and chemistry means that you respect each other, you respect the importance of roles that embassies play, and there's -- it's, as we indicate in the report, where people, envoys, did not involve the embassies, and pay the price for it. respecting the role of the department, and, in my case, i was recruited by the assistant secretary. i know this guy, he won't give me too much trouble. and we worked very, very closely. the other thing that we were able to do at the request of the department was actually to help in the state white house rivalry over who controlled sudan policy. and after we made it clear -- i made it clear that i wasn't going to engage in that very much in one side off the other, the state department said, well then would you coordinate our representation at the embassy on these issues? which i did. and that facilitated the state department's role with the nse and i worked very closely, of course, with the assistant set. it's important that that relationship be understood, that it has inherent rivalries, but they can be overcome if people

really make an effort to do so. and after we made it clear -- i made it clear that i wasn't going to engage in that very much in one side off the other, the state department said, well then would you coordinate our representation at the embassy on these issues? which i did. and that facilitated the state department's role with the nse and i worked very closely, of course, with the assistant set. it's important that that relationship be understood, that it has inherent rivalries, but they can be overcome if people really make an effort to do so.

>> again, an interesting contrast. in the case of bosnia, there was little nsc or white house direct engagement. i think it's fair to say that president clinton had hesitated to engage in the balkan wars until the events of the summer of 1995, srebrenica, and the bombing of the market in sarajevo. in that -- at that point it became the first television war. and we saw a whole lot of christiane amanpour all the time. the consequence was that there was pressure to, quote, do something, unquote. and that's when dick holbrooke got the players together in -- at wright patterson air force base in dayton, ohio. so the objectives were basically defined by holbrooke and his people. he was the assistant sect for european affairs. and execution was left to him based in washington, mostly in general terms, and to me on the ground for the specific execution of what we had envisaged. this change when john kornblum succeeded dick holbrooke in 1996, dick stayed on for awhile as special envoy but john kornblum was the assistant secretary. holbrooke came out once in awhile every couple of months in

a c-20. my job was to create what was called the federation forum. which was a group of croats bosnians, so catholics and muslims, because these things are always seen in confessional terms in the balkans, who had been fighting each other. having started out as allies, they ended up fighting each other, and this was to get that half of bosnia working again. and the federation forum met virtually every week. my staff consisted mainly of me and embassy officers. i'll leave it at that for now. >> can i just deal with one more.

the next question of the structure of the envoy's office within the state department, and as bob mentioned, he had very few staff. we looked at various envoy situations. some had staff from the regional bureau. some had little. there are three instances we deal with in the report of significantly autonomous officers under the special envoy. currently the special representative for afghanistan and pakistan. and the office that i directed, the u.s. office on sudan and south sudan. in my case the desk officers were under my office, as well as a cadre of regional specialists and others, contracted by the conflict and stabilization bureau.

i had tens of millions of dollars of resources to dispense. i had a lot of control over the machinery of policy, and support, which is very helpful. but there's a danger in that degree of autonomy. you can get separated too much from the rest of the structure. as i mentioned, the importance of the embassy's role. my case i found strong embassies were critical. but in some cases, those offices don't pay enough attention, and second, resources are helpful. they were helpful in my case. but i found we also strayed into areas that were better done by usaid. and that we sometimes didn't lack the oversight for running projects in the field from washington. so i think there are pluses to that kind of an office but there are warnings, as well. >> why don't we shift to you and get some reaction to the report and a little bit of your experience on how we might carry it out.

>> sure. first of all, this is a very important report. and i want to commend them giving us something to work with that's now organized and very well structured. it raises the issues that need to be thought about, and in a sense can provide a guide path for an administration thinking about deploying an envoy. what it also needs to do, however, is to stimulate case studies. what we've had today, even, are two examples of successful envoys. but they're successful in part, i would think, because of both of these gentlemen came up through the system. they were both experts before being appointed envoys. they were experts in the fields that they were asked to focus on. they had experience in the field. and they knew how washington and the department of state, and the interagency system worked.

that has not always been the case. in all of the conflict situations where envoys have been appointed, as suggested in the report itself. so therefore, a series of case studies on the way envoys worked in different situations could be quite helpful. as some of you know, i spent most of my career in the middle east, particularly focused in the arab/israeli conflict area ambassador to egypt, ambassador to israel, and i saw 15, count them, 15, envoys over the course of about 30 years. if you review the names of those envoys you're talking about what we would call an all-star list, boy@erson, don rumsfeld, jim leonard, maury draper, richard fairbanks, dick murphy, dennis ross, tony zinni, john wolf,

george mitchell, martin indyk, and now frank lowenstein. you would expect with this kind of a lineup if we're using our baseball analogy, that the scoreboard would look pretty good. but the scoreboard actually shows no hits, no runs, and lots of errors, which suggests that this is one of the case studies which needs to be undertaken to find out whether or not it's the idea of an envoy in this situation, or the individual selected as the envoy, the conflict itself, or the criteria that the report has suggested. was it an absence of empowerment by a president? was it an absence of authority? were there turf battles in washington? and i think you'd find if we did this case study and we haven't done it yet, but certainly this report should simulate it and i may grab the opportunity and do it myself, i think you'd find that there are a combination of factors at play here that suggest that even some of the smartest and most senior people selected for this job, were not necessarily the right choice, and not necessarily the right choice for this conflict.

after all, if you look back at the last 35, a little more than 35 years, in the arab/israeli conflict resolution process, there have been three american successes. but they have all been shepherded by secretaries of state, and by presidents. they have not been shepherded by envoys. now, part of this may be a problem that we have created ourselves. we have raised the level of engagement in this conflict to a point where the parties simply don't pay much attention to an envoy below the level of secretary of state, and sometimes not even to a secretary of state.

waiting for the president. and that may be a major factor at play in the arab/israeli conflict. but it also suggests that context specificity, and i would add, and i want to say this carefully, because we're talking about smart envoys, understanding of nuance and details. not all of our envoys enter the job knowing what the arab/israeli conflict is all about and many of them left the job not knowing what the arab/israeli conflict was all about. and what that does is not only a waste of an american asset, which is the power to do diplomacy, but it also weakens our ability to then pick up the conflict resolution process once that envoy has left the job. i had an experience when i was serving as ambassador in israel. we had an envoy who was appointed to monitor the compliance of the parties with the road map. you mentioned his name, john wolf, a senior state department official who was asked to drop his job in political military affairs and come out for a few

months and john was a strong diplomat but had no background at all in the arab/israeli conflict and no background at all in trying to resolve the arab/israeli conflict. and it was a series of errors, and problems over the course of three months, some of which actually impeded the efforts of israelis and palestinians to reach small agreements on what we called then the road map that president george w. bush had unveiled a short time before. now during that period i came back to washington for a couple of days, went in to see the then-deputy secretary of state rich armitage and i said, rich, i like john wolf, why did you appoint somebody who didn't know anything at all about this conflict or this job? and for those of you who know rich armitage he said, that was exactly why i did it. he wanted somebody who would be tabular rasa. in some situations make it works. it doesn't work when you're dealing with two entrenched parties in a protracted conflict.

they've been at this thing for decades. they know each other far better than they know us. and they deal with each other far better than we assume they deal with each other. and in walks somebody a babe in the woods, and doesn't really help resolve issues. i could go on. we've had other situations referenced in this report. for example is the fact that when dennis ross was appointed the special middle east coordinator one of the things that he demanded was that that office be taken out of the normal bureaucracy of the state department. and in fact, in 1992 '93, '93 actually when that office was created, i was serving as a deputy assistant secretary in the near east bury, i went in to see our assistant secretary and i said ed, i'm sorry you're leaving your post. ed said why, i'm not leaving my post. i said wait they've just taken

one of the heartbeats, one of the jewels of your portfolio, away from you. why would you remain as the assistant secretary when you no longer have responsibility for one of the most critical issues in the portfolio? and it suggests to you that this bifurcation of responsibilities was a problem from the outset. and it became a more pronounced problem over time. because, what nea had to offer was the expertise and experience of a lot of very good officers who had served in the field, but who now became separated from

the conflict resolution process. i think it ended up hurting that process over time. on the issue of latitude to deal with unfavorables, we're still living with this problem. we had envoys who who could not deal with the representative of the palestinian people, palestine liberation organization because of american policy. in fact, the united states government for many of these years was talking to the plo, but through the cia. not through the state department. so we had a channel with an organization that was an unfavorable but it was a channel that was not helping us at all deal with the conflict resolution process. we have the same issue today with hamas. where if you're going to appoint an envoy to deal with the arab/israeli issue, for example, as martin indyk was appointed or now frank lowenstein is acting, does it make sense for that envoy not to be able to talk to all palestinians? doesn't mean we like them.

doesn't mean we support those who are engaged in terrorism, which hamas is engaged in terrorism. but if the envoy doesn't have the mandate or the scope of responsibility to reach out to all elements within the two societies in which he or she is working, how effective is that going to be in trying to produce an agreement that can be agreed and indicated. there are a number of issues taking the israeli case as a case study which suggest that using the five categories or five criteria that this very useful report has given us could be very important in understanding whether or not this thing works. whether the envoy works in conflict situations. i would as an opposing sentence my own bias that is in the arab/israeli conflict, presidents and secretary of states will be fooling themselves to believe that they can outsource this conflict resolution process to an envoy. it doesn't mean that the secretary has to run out to the region every week or two. may want to comprise a team of his own experts to pursue this, but we've created a situation in which arabs and israelis are stating to see that the

president and the secretary of state are engaged in that process and an envoy is simply not going to substitute for the presidential power, and the secretary's prestige. thank you. >> thank you so much.

>> thank you so much. david we'll go to you. you've seen this from the inside, from the advocacy community. you know some of the hill dynamics on it as well. talk a little bit about what lessons you feel we've learned over the last however many years looking at this and any reactions to the report as well? >> thanks so much. and thanks so much for usip for inviting me to participate in this panel and thanks to the authors for laying out some very interesting ideas. and i actually came away from the report feeling somewhat like dan did that there was a lot of very interesting nuggets, and descriptions of case studies, but to really understand some of these issues you really have to go more in-depth. and i think that one issue that really needs to be on the table is why do we have special representatives and special envoys? the report does talk about that to some degree. but, if you go back and look at diplomatic history we've always had special envoys and special representatives. if you go back to 1789, george washington had a personal representative who went to the court of st. james to represent the united states with what had to be the most important relationship that the u.s. had at the time and congress didn't even know about it until a year and a half later. similarly you could go to woodrow wilson who had a bad relationship with his secretary of state, and who sent colonel edward house to try to negotiate peace in europe in 1950. this was a central issue to try to keep the u.s. out of the war, and the president said i'm basically a private figure,

someone who was working for the white house, but who did not have relationships with the state department in any significant way. of course, harry hopkins is an example that, i won't spend time talking about. i think that the report does raise a number of issues. and, dan, i think that while i accept what you say about trying to dig deeply into the arab/israeli conflict, but i think that the arab/israeli conflict in some ways is unique in this kind of context because of the very deep, domestic political dynamics that are involved. the great deal of energy that has been invested by the united states, and over the time since the '70s, at least in particular, so i think that it's -- it's an important one to look at, but perhaps not the best one to measure these criteria again. so for example, one of the areas that i have been involved with was the democratic republic of congo and the appointment of senator feingold as a special envoy there. if you look at what was happening before that, our policy with respect to the drc was somewhat in disarray. we had very conflicting views within the administration regarding what was the role of rwanda, how do we approach

president kagame, what was the right view, and approach. and you had some significant dysfunction, and in that context, as pressure was building from the advocacy community, and congressional members of congress, who were interested in this issue, to appoint a special adviser, as was reflected, ambassador johnny carson who was assistant secretary at the time appointed a very skilled diplomat, but someone who was not very well-known in the region. he had served there. didn't have a huge amount of stature, and was considered a special adviser. and was, frankly, not the kind of dynamic individual that was needed. so there was a big push to have a more significant individual brought in line. and, in fact, people were very surprised when senator feingold agreed to take on that position. and i think that someone like senator feingold, in that position, can do things that are

important. so if you look at the effort of the bureau and their scope of jurisdiction there are some huge problems the assistant secretary has to deal with. they've got nigeria which could perhaps the entire continent if it goes down. it's got zimbabwe, which is a huge human rights problem we've spent a lot of time on. kenya was on the cusp of violence and came on the cusp of violence again. of course you have sudan, south sudan and look what happened to the central african republic just last year. in the context with an assistant secretary have multiple crises that have significant political attention, bringing in a special envoy can sometimes, i think, be a constructive approach to try to deal with it. in the case of drc, though, i think something that the report indicated happened that was very important. which was, when senator feingold came in, he had a policy structure to go forward with similar to what bob beecroft was saying. you have the peace and security

koop ration framework that basically was the road map. was it a detailed road map? no. implementation of that road map was going to be critical in order for it to succeed, and therefore, having someone who could go in with the stature, indicate that he had a personal relationship with the president, and to dan's point, had been studying these issues for a long time, as a longtime member of 9 senate foreign relations committee did understand the building, at least to some degree, and was able to fit in within the bureaucracy in a way which i think most people see as fairly constructive. so i think that that contrasts the before and the after in a context where there are multiple different pieces is important to think about. on the other hand we've seen envoys who have had mandates constructed for them in part because of advocacy from the advocacy community that were real failures. so it's interesting to look at the list of envoys that are on the american foreign service associations list of 25 envoys, and we have two envoys for north korea. we have an envoy that's supposed to negotiate on the issues around north korean nuclear section, but because congress felt that there was not enough attention for human rights, you have a north korean ambassador

for human rights. special representative for human rights. so how does that work? or in the case of sudan, as i'm sure princeton will remember, the -- in the context of the north/south negotiations that was the real focus offer the special envoy's view, there was very little attention being played to darfur which was kind of an intractable situation in many ways at that time. and so there was a big push to have a senior adviser or special representative on darfur. that was not a very successful or wise advocacy push in my mind in hindsight. there were reasons for it. i think reasonable people could differ about whether it was a good idea when we were pushing

for it. and at the end there was a good result because the u.s., when pressing for implementation of the separate darfur peace agreement saw that that would never go anywhere actually helped, i think, get the united states to the point where it was looking at what the right solution was with respect to sudan, which was a comprehensive approach to deal with all its conflicts.

so, if you believe that the only way to have an effective envoy is to have someone who's really empowered, who is seen as important, who is sitting behind the president at the meetings, and who has the policy authority, then how is it that they're really outside of the chain of command, or outside of the political challenges that can be faced if they meet with the unfavorables? and i think that this points to, you know, a challenge that i think goes very much, i agree with princeton in his analysis, that there's a risk/reward issue here. so we had a big debate between s the two of us about the visit of one of president basher's advisers. who was an adviser to the president who had been involved or we believe, most people believe was involved in the darfur genocide. princeton had met him in

khartoum. most of us, i can't speak for the advocacy community, but most of us had no problem with him meeting with nafi. but when there was a suggestion that the administration would invite nafi to the united states, people got very much in arms, and, in fact, the founder of my organization called me in an irate fashion. and i think the question in meeting with unfavorables is what's the risk or the reward? what's the strategy? if you're going to bring an unfavorable here to the united states, what are we getting for it? are you going to actually be able to do something constructive and productive with him? because it is going to confer legitimacy on that individual. it is going to be a propaganda coup for a regime that the whole strategy is around isolation. so i think this is a tough issue. and i think that the -- it's one of the reasons why i think there has to be some significant conversations around what are the right kind of individuals for these kinds of positions, who are willing to take these risks.

because, is it the case that it's only professionals who have been in the field and so on who are able to do these jobs because of all the things dan said? you need people who have an inside knowledge of the department. you need people who've had negotiating experience. you need people who have had field or international experience. you need people who are willing to collaborate. you need people who had multinational experience. i think one of the things that princeton benefited from was his time as assistant secretary for international organizations. because in the context of the very complicated way sudan was being dealt with, the u.n. system had a very important role, peacekeeping missions in both countries, very capable special representative, so that experience which is often very common not in the arab/israeli conflict, because there the notion is let's keep the u.n. out because of various political dynamics, but in most of these

conflict situations, view as really critical, do a lot of for service experts career ambassadors or retired ambassadors have that kind of experience. but at the same time, individuals who are outside the system, as we say, also lack some of those key experiences that i mentioned. the front part. so i think it really goes to how do we select individuals. maybe i'll just make a couple of brief comments. with respect to turf battles, i really think there's no right answer on structure, and so on. it really is very personal. i think the chemistry matters issue is very big. i think there is something very interesting about where there are conflicts in dynamics between the white house and the state department over the issue because of its political volatility, because of its importance domestically and so on. it is a real question about whether it's an addition or a subtraction to have a special ambassador. i was in meetings in during the

peace process when dan was deputy assistant secretary. if you see smoke coming out of my ears because i'm not sure if they're talking about my experience in state or on the hill or in the advocacy community. but there was some very frosty meetings. and they weren't just frosty because the state department had responsibilities in this area, it was also because those in the nsc who had responsibility in those areas were chafing under the kind of structure that dennis was able to build for himself. and sometimes it could work out. because you had three sort of power centers, and you could kind of negotiate through. sometimes it didn't. so, i think that those that have a lot of personality issues that really need to be thought through, and the kind of tethering that has been talked about. we can perhaps talk more about that. i think the outreach issue is significant.

i think it's another piece of if you're going to have a special envoy, particularly in an area that's politically volatile or there's a lot of political interest or a huge amount of civic interest, being able to negotiate the halls of congress is really critical. being able to talk to the members of congress in both the house and the senate, as well as civil society, that's a skill set that not everyone has. that, you know, i think that scott glecian who was special envoy had his challenges on both those scores and that really undermined his role in being able to be effective. and so, having the right skills in that area can be really critical. let me just leave it at that and see whether you have any questions, tom, to kick us off or you want to go to the audience. >> i do. i have some questions but i really want to open it up and give folks a chance. because before we end. and i want to come back to again this issue of turf.

there's a certain sense, i'll just ask one question and then hand it over. is it too simplistic to say that part of the message here is when it comes to envoys, go big or go home, that this tension of saying if it's just another seat at the table? there seems to be an inherent tension here which is these are buildings that really believe in working things up through the building, working through a clearance process, et cetera, sort of consensus or what sometimes seems like coconcone us is, building up through, and the effect is, as you noted you've got to be able to sit down with the head of state or foreign minister and people know that you're in charge. so is this one of these things where if you're not willing to give it that authority, you may end up just with the -- another cook in the kitchen? if you're going to appoint an envoy you don't give him authority, you shouldn't bother. i don't know what the point would be to do that. we have cases that allude to them in the report where that's happened.

where the authority or the empowerment has been undercut. by the secretary or the president, or otherwise. with. in the sudan case, the issues on the ground bilaterally were a integral to the peace process. in other cases, that isn't necessarily the case. so, in the sudan case, i found it very valuable that the structures and the outreach to the ambassador system came through my office. but there may be other cases where that is not quite the case, and that the bureau supports the envoy is sufficient. so i think when we look at that in terms of what is the nature of the conflict, and the mandate. >> i would go along with that. my experience was that the european bureau played a very

big role, in the post-conflict situation in bosnia, for example. and that was fine. secretary of state was comfortable with it. the president and the nsc were very comfortable with it. and as i said before, we had a clear road map on what we were supposed to be doing there. and it was a situation in which the united states largely called the shots. so, in that situation, it was more executing a policy, but doing it on the ground, and understanding the issues. and in effect building the country, which didn't exist in 1996. >> excuse me. my question has to do with -- my question has to do with cuba and iran. do you think those two -- special envoy?

>> i would -- i don't pretend to be an expert in those two areas. but i would have thought on the question of iran, where you already have a major negotiation under way on the nuclear, that to have a separate envoy on the overall issue probably gets in the way. but beyond that, or leading up to that, perhaps a special envoy might have been useful. a special envoy in cuba might have been useful beforehand. but now that we are in the process of establishing a regular structure and diplomatic relations, i'm not sure that that would be necessary. >> well, i would just underscore what princeton said. you're talking two different types of issues. the cuba issue seems to me is a nixon china question.

it's reversing a many decades long policy, and so in a sense, there had to be not only complete coherence in how you're going to run it but the policy issues really do need to be run out of the white house until the point where the president has now announced the change where it can enter in to a more normal building of a diplomatic infrastructure. with iran, and we're still in the middle of that, you've had so far an interesting case study of the utility of multiple tracks that are very well integrated at the source. you had the professional negotiations through the p5 plus 1 that were proceeding along a certain track, and you had a secret channel also run out of the state department by the deputy secretary of state bill

burns, with white house involvement, and the two were connected at the hip. so if we did our case studies this might prove to be one of the most efficient issues of a variety of envoy types but it would also, i think, prove the idea that you need people with the experience, the expertise, and familiarity within the system to be able to maintain that integrity of the effort. >> just let me put a punctuation point on that particular comment, because i think it's something that we haven't talked about. there was a special envoy for cuba. it just was an unnamed national security council official until we found out about it. and that's what happened. is that they ran it out of the national security council. there was obviously some coordination with the state department and secretary kerry was involved. but in terms of some of the key meetings, that were at sort of the operating level, it was really the nsc that did it. i think that the -- you know the

iran example i would agree with dan. there was a special envoy for iran. his name was bill burns. he was within the system, he was not named, he had, you know, all the authority. he had the undersecretary for political affairs also back him up. we had a huge amount of senior attention there. and i think that it was an effective model that you have to look at. i just don't think that every situation in which the u.s. can make a real difference can have that kind of involvement from senior officials. but i think that it's a really important case, and you see this in other cases. i think that one of the warnings that is in the paper is about just don't do something because congress says you should do it. that you know, you really need to look at how you do it. but i think there is a way of dealing with those issues, through the double hatting concept that is mentioned in the paper. for example in our china relations, of course tibet always gets short shrift. that is the nature of the u.s. relationship with china. it isn't there aren't people who

think it's important, there are people working on it within the u.s. government. but it always gets short shrift. so the u.s. congress said there has to be a special coordinator on tibet. what did the bush administration do when that happened? they appointed paula dobriansky as the special coordinator for tibet and i think that did help both politically for the administration as well as internally to say, yes, we need to think more about these issues and how we deal with those issues. so i think that kind of fusion approach is something that is useful to consider. >> there has to be a decision taken at the outset. is the special envoy, especially when it's a publicly known envoy, therefore symbolic purposes, or to actually do stuff? >> would you concede that there can be some value in the symbolic? >> depends on the situation. >> yeah, but it's also -- it's also -- it's also somewhat deceptive to your international interlocutors. you're pretending to have a stake in it, and you're going to deliver something, and you really don't have the support behind it to do so.

you know, it highlights an issue, but i've known people in that situation, and i -- i describe it like it is, so walking naked into the jungle. i mean you're out there with nothing behind you. and i don't recommend it. >> you know, princeton, there's a reality show about that. so -- [ laughter ] >> tom -- >> a little bit of diplomatic experience in the back. >> tom, i could just add one thing to princeton? >> sure. when the 2006 lebanon/israel war broke out i was asked to go on cnn there one of those cases where they had four little boxes, you know, four talking heads. three from congress, and me. and the three from congress were all very upset that we had not appointed an envoy to solve the problem. and they got to me, i said, i don't have a problem appointing an envoy. i first would like to see what our policy is. and it kind of struck everybody as strange that we would ask that question. but i think that gets the point princeton made. what is the envoy being asked to

do? and if it's symbolic just to kind of wave the flag it actually hurts our interests in these conflicts. >> if i may address the congress question but we'll go with a question first. >> thank you, tom. i just had two brief points, and question. one is, i'm very supportive of the idea that dan kurtzer raised that you've now opened the door, i think it's an excellent report but it's very clear that there is a next level, if i could put it this way, of understanding, and indeed of detail that would be enormously valuable as this process goes ahead. and particularly in the area of conflict resolution, and i would strongly second him. i think that the rest of you up there are probably tilted in that direction.

the second question is the broader question. for a number of you slid into the question of envoys who are not there to deal with conflicts. as we understand the word conflict. and they raise a different sort of set of situations. some of which are very much parallel to what the report has considered and some go beyond that. and some of them, i think, transgress a number of the lines that you have drawn, that in some ways would be very useful. and so i raise the question, isn't it time now for somebody, whether it's the academy of diplomacy, the qddr process, contracting people from outside, whatever we want to do, obviously paying attention to the knowledge to do that. in many ways over the years, there was a process of the state department of being light on these kinds of people, and often gathering them up to create a new bureau. and in some cases the absorption of these people into the structure was the natural element of what had to be done.

if people think the state department wasn't paying attention and wanted a special envoy, over a period of time we probably needed a bureau with deep experience working in the subject rather than the, what i would call, attention light factor of the special envoy. there is also finally the question of, how does the special envoy relationship, particularly in conflict resolution, accord with the rest of our policies? you've touched on some of that, and the natural conflict, if i could put it this way, between the functional bureaus, particularly those that deal with democracy and human rights. and some of the more difficult questions that arise in conflict resolution. but, i'd be grateful if you would address the two questions. the broadening question to other special kinds of appointments, and the other question in how and what way the special envoys have to take care and attention to look at the rest of u.s. foreign policy, and how it fits in to the context in which they work. thank you. >> well, i hope yo