The Munk Debates Read online

  LYSE DOUCET: But Obama doesn’t seem to have any faith at all in the military side of the equation in Iraq, and it is clear the U.S. military presence in Iraq is having an impact. Barack Obama doesn’t even want to talk about the positive impact of the military presence in Iraq. If he becomes Commander-in-Chief, he’s going to immediately withdraw troops from Iraq, which some people would say is precipitous.

  SAMANTHA POWER: He has never said precipitous withdrawal. Obama was the first person to say President Pervez Musharraf is an unreliable partner. We’re giving the country a billion dollars of aid without asking where the assistance is going. A lot of it is being used against their own people — the very secular, moderate forces that we want to see prosper in Pakistan. He got Iraq right. He was the first person to say, “We want to open up our relationships with Cuba. At some point is there a statute of limitations on a failed policy?” There are a series of judgements and evidence that he does not “focus group” his way to policy decisions in the way that other candidates do.

  Now to your second question, which is whether or not Obama understates the value of military force. I don’t think he does at all. Obama is prepared to leave a residual force in Iraq to deal with al Qaeda. He doesn’t believe that al Qaeda will simply vanish into thin air in the absence of a U.S. troop presence. It’s unclear where that force will be based and how large it will be. He is somebody who has never taken military force off the table with regard to Iran’s nuclear ambitions. He is somebody who has said that if President Pervez Musharraf is unable or unwilling to deal with al Qaeda in the northwestern provinces of Pakistan, the United States will have to go after them. Senator Obama looks across a range of national security challenges, and does not see the military as the only tool in a vast American foreign policy toolbox.

  RICHARD HOLBROOKE: I want to address the issue of dialogue with Iran. This is a huge issue. President George W. Bush initially said he would not talk to either North Korea or Iran. As a result, the North Koreans made a significant increase to their nuclear arsenal. He reversed this policy under advisement from Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in 2006 and began a six-party dialogue, the other parties being China, Russia, the two Koreas, and Japan. He put a skilled professional diplomat in charge, Ambassador Christopher Hill, and as a result of that dialogue some progress has been made. Some people didn’t think it was enough, and interestingly President Bush’s major critics are former members of his own administration on the right, such as John Bolton, who have called the six-party talk a sell-out. Nonetheless, the North Koreans turned over more than 18,000 pages of documents on their acquisition and use of plutonium to the United States last week. Those documents are now being analyzed by the intelligence community, and based on that judgement, the president will decide whether to proceed down the road towards progress with North Korea.

  On the other hand, Bush has still done nothing with regard to Iran. He still insists on talking to Tehran through two channels, neither of which fills the needs that I mentioned in my earlier statement. First, and most important, is Iran’s very dangerous nuclear program. The United States speaks to Tehran through the EU’s foreign policy representative, Javier Solana, who carries messages back and forth between Washington and Tehran. Now many of you in this room are distinguished diplomats — David Wright, who was ambassador to NATO from Canada; political writer Alan Gottlieb. You all know Javier Solana — he’s a good man, but why would the greatest and most powerful nation on Earth think that they are strengthening their position by sending their message to Tehran through a European diplomat who has a different style of negotiating and may not accurately convey our position?

  The second channel is at the ambassador level in Baghdad, where Ambassador [Ryan] Crocker is political counsellor and has an intermittent dialogue with the Iranians about their outrageous, murderous behaviour in fuelling bomb attacks and road mines against Americans.

  That’s not a dialogue, and the position of the Republicans, including at least one of our worthy opponents here, says that any talk at all would be a sign of weakness. It is simply not true that negotiations or discussions in and of themselves represent weakness. Weakness is conveyed inside the dialogue and not as a result of talking to people.

  NIALL FERGUSON: With all due respect to Richard, there’s no point in talking for talking’s sake to a rival power, which is in a position of such obvious strength. The critical thing that happened when the United States opened up dialogue with China was that China’s position had been fundamentally altered strategically by the breakdown of its relations with the Soviet Union. That is what opened the opportunity for President Richard Nixon. There is no comparable situation today; nothing has changed. Economically, Iran has difficulties. Domestically, Iran is by no means as anti-American as other countries in the region. There is a potential for some kind of transformation in relations between the U.S. and Iran, but it won’t happen if Barack Obama hops on a plane, hoping to be welcomed with open arms. That’s not how diplomacy works.

  LYSE DOUCET: But if seven years of doing it the Bush way didn’t work, why should more years of McCain doing it the same way work?

  NIALL FERGUSON: The reality is that the option of using force against Iran needs to be credible. If the Iranians pursue their nuclear arms program, which the International Atomic Energy Agency today says they show no sign of abandoning, the United States cannot say, “We only want to talk; we won’t bomb you, we promise.” That’s why the parallel I drew a moment ago with the president and China is interesting. It wasn’t a Democrat who made that single most important departure in American Cold War foreign policy. It was a Republican. Why? Because Richard Nixon had the credibility to open up dialogue in a way that in my view only John McCain has. I certainly don’t think Barack Obama has a snowball’s chance in hell of opening up dialogue with Tehran. The Iranians will be celebrating if he is elected.

  RICHARD HOLBROOKE: Niall makes an important political point. It’s easier for somebody on a conservative side to reach out to the other side. But Niall, let me remind you that it was a Republican president — Ronald Reagan, the hero of the Republicans — who sent his National Security Advisor to Tehran with a cake with a key in it. Let’s not forget which administration reached out to Tehran in a humiliating and disgraceful way. The core issue is that Senator McCain has not taken the position Niall has outlined. Charles has been notably silent because, as suggested earlier, I do not believe he shares the view we just heard.

  CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: Well, my silence was a sign of politeness, but now that it’s been misinterpreted I retract my silence and I shall speak to this issue. This whole argument about speaking with Iran or the others is ridiculous. In our history, you sometimes speak with enemies, you sometimes don’t. It depends on the conditions. Obama says he was asked, “Would you be willing to meet separately and without preconditions during the first year of your administration in Washington with the leaders of Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba, and North Korea?” He said, “Not only would I, but the fact that the Bush administration refuses to do something comparable is a disgrace and ridiculous.” Now I think this was an off-the-cuff gaffe. He was not prepared to answer that question, and now he’s stuck with what he said. Then you go through the eighteen months of preparation as [Henry] Kissinger did, and you try to negotiate an agreement in advance so that the communiqué is basically written by the time the president arrives. But the idea that a president in his first year will meet with the leader of Iran and other rogue nations without preconditions is absurd. That does not mean you don’t have back-channel contacts. It does not mean that we don’t have the British and the French and the Germans negotiating on our behalf as they have for three years.

  The reason that summits are dangerous is because once you hold a summit everybody expects a result. There’s pressure to have a result, and results are a result of concessions. What concessions have the Iranians offered? None. What concessions will Obama offer in return to entice them? Does he believe that h
is eloquence alone will induce Iran to give up its nuclear ambitions?

  LYSE DOUCET: I want to get to Samantha Power, because the point made by Charles is one that actually Hillary Clinton made by describing Obama as “naive;” John McCain described him as “naive” and “reckless.”

  SAMANTHA POWER: First of all, I think Charles has the question correct, and had the answer correct when Obama said “I would,” but then he changed it to, “I would be willing, conceivably, to meet within the first year.” Obama has at no point said, “I pledge to meet, unconditionally, with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.” What he has said is that if it would advance U.S. interests, he is open to the possibility of dialogue, and it is irresponsible when U.S. lives are on the line in Iraq and Iran has such a major role to play in the region to rule that possibly out. It’s not the same as saying you’re going to meet without preparation or you’re not going to think pragmatically about what a negotiation achieves — the upsides and downsides, both of which could be considerable.

  Threatening the use of military force against Iran, which both Senator McCain and the current administration have done repeatedly, has done nothing to deter the enrichment of uranium, which is now occurring at five times the pace. It has however, strengthened Ahmadinejad’s hand domestically. I mean, Niall, your rosy picture of Iran notwithstanding, I would think that this would concern you.

  Finally, when the United States has gone to other countries and said, “We need to contain Iran, this enrichment intelligence is deeply worrying,” most of the world leaders have basically yawned. You cannot have a containment regime in the multi-polar world we live in. The United States is the only country that believes what it’s saying about the threat that Iran poses. Negotiating, not a meeting for meeting’s sake; areas of overlap where you could conceivably make progress or remind the world that Iran is the problem and the United States is not.

  CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: The correct answer to the question “Would you meet unconditionally with these rogues as president?” is a simple no. That’s not the answer Obama gave, and now we have Samantha and the others who have to clean up after him saying, “Well, really we’re going to meet, not with preconditions, you have to understand, but with preparations.” So the word “preparation” is going to become a substitute to try to undo the mistake he made with “preconditions.” A president does not meet unconditionally, without condition. A president does not go and shake hands with Ahmadinejad without precondition. That’s the right answer. Hillary gave the right answer in that context, McCain wouldn’t think twice, and Obama obviously was unprepared and he stumbled and now we’re stuck with it.

  LYSE DOUCET: We had a discussion about Barack Obama. Help us, Niall and Charles, to understand John McCain.

  NIALL FERGUSON: Well, I think there’s no question that in McCain you see two streams of foreign policy tradition, realism and idealism, coming together. The idea that you could have a league of democracies as a complement to existing institutions in the international system is obviously idealistic. In fact I’m sure Richard would acknowledge that it’s one that has its antecedence in the Clinton era, but at the same time — and more importantly — John McCain understands that such ideals can only be viable if they are based on a credible constellation of forces.

  That is why, if you look at John McCain’s Foreign Affairs article from the end of 2007, or his most recent speech in which he said, “These are the things I want to look back on in 2013 that I’ve achieved,” he makes it very clear that diplomacy, effectively directed, particularly at Russia and China, will play an integral part in his foreign policy. Diplomacy was not regarded by George W. Bush or by Donald Rumsfeld as necessary for the überpower that the United States had become. John McCain sees statecraft and diplomacy as central foreign policy tools, and only after those have failed to get the Russians and the Chinese to recognize the need to contain Iran’s nuclear ambitions will there be any consideration of military options. That’s the difference between McCain and Bush; and it’s also the difference between McCain and Obama.

  LYSE DOUCET: You mentioned the league of democracies. You say it’s a complement to existing institutions in the international system, but some people say a league of democracies allows the United States to fly in the face of multilateralism and go around the United Nations, which doesn’t include China.

  NIALL FERGUSON: Well, the United Nations does not have a tremendously impressive record on acting on humanitarian catastrophes. In recent interviews, John McCain has said that if we’re to take any action to stop the genocide in Darfur, it will have to be through some kind of coalition of democracies — because it’s clear that the Chinese don’t give a damn about human rights in Sudan, or in their own country for that matter.

  RICHARD HOLBROOKE: As Niall had already said, this idea exists today. It was put into place by Bill Clinton in 1998, and their headquarters are in Warsaw. The Bush administration refused to touch the league of democracies because it had Clinton’s fingerprints on it and the people advocating it were all liberal Democrats. I’m delighted John McCain joined that cause.

  Let me say a word about John McCain, whom I’ve known for twenty years and consider a friend. There are many areas of agreement between John McCain and both Democrats. Hillary Clinton and John McCain serve on the Armed Services Committee, they travel together, they like each other, and it is alleged that they’ve even had a drink or two together in places like Estonia.

  But I want to stress that there are wide areas of agreement. All of us on this panel believe that the United States must regain its leadership role in the world; if we don’t, the world suffers. My own view is that we want leadership without hegemony, but the Bush administration has offered hegemony without leadership. I do not disagree that McCain is the least bad of the nine candidates the Republican electorate were offered. The defining issue is Iraq. The issue of the United Nations and the league of democracies is a very difficult subject. Many share the feeling that the UN is a negative factor in world affairs. The fact is that the United States and a few of our allies, including Canada, created the UN in 1945 to solve a set of problems. The key to the UN and the context that we’re talking about today is the Security Council, in which we gave ourselves a veto to protect our interests. We’ve used that veto more than all the other four countries that have right of veto combined, and we’ve used it for a variety of reasons.

  From day one, the Bush administration undermined and underfunded the UN. It also appointed as one of the ambassadors a man who declared that the UN wasn’t an organization that was fit to exist, by proposing reforms that he knew were impossible to achieve.

  I was an ambassador at the UN for several years. It is a deeply flawed institution. However, we are still better off with it than without it. Our job is to improve the UN, to break down the iron lock of the so-called G7. I know the developing countries think the UN is a punching bag and a way of getting money and leverage. But when the UN won’t act — as it wouldn’t act in Kosovo — we, together with the Canadians and our NATO allies, went around the UN, liberated the Kosovo Albanians in 1999 with seventy-eight days of NATO bombing, and then went back to the UN and got everyone, including the Russians, to agree to what we’d done.

  That’s what we have to do with the UN. We have to make it better, not undermine it. I’m all for the league of democracies, but I do not think, as Senator McCain has suggested, that it can substitute for the UN. Even our closest allies, including Canada, will not agree to that proposal.

  LYSE DOUCET: Let’s bring it back to leadership. John McCain feels the league of democracies is a useful forum. He’s said that if there was a league of democracies, it could impose sanctions on Sudan and force Sudan to accept peacekeeping troops. Charles, what does this tell us about the kind of leadership John McCain would show?

  CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: I’ve been in favour of a league of democracies for a long time. The UN is useless, counterproductive, injurious. It’s almost a fiction. A league of democracies w
ould undo the mistake we made sixty years ago, imagining that universal international institutions are the way to go. “Universal” includes rogue states such as Russia and China, both of which stopped action in Sudan, Darfur, and elsewhere. Nothing ought to be expected from the United Nations, and the idea that the Bush administration’s inadequacies are the reason the UN has been ineffective is ridiculous. The UN is inherently dysfunctional because it was established as a coalition of the winning states after the Second World War. Within a year the member countries were at odds with each other, and that paralysis has lasted sixty years. If you want to act multilaterally in the world, then you establish a league of democracies with the understanding that over time you would hope it would displace the UN. Americans are too emotionally attached to the idea of the UN to ever withdraw from it, which is why I think a league of democracies is a clever way to dispatch the UN, without ever withdrawing. But I want to say that when Lyse was earlier speaking of John McCain, and said dismissively that he was for the rollback of rogue states —

  LYSE DOUCET: I wasn’t dismissing, I quoted him.

  CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: You quoted in a way that there was a note of skepticism, and I find this astonishing. What’s wrong with a rollback of rogue states? Canada is a country that is distinguished in its history for having invented peacekeeping, having devoted itself to international institutions to bring peace into the world’s most troubled areas.

  The United States has taken action in Iraq against the second worst man on the planet — a man who had committed genocide on his own people; a man who used weapons of mass destruction, and chemical attacks on innocent civilians; a man who had committed the greatest ecological crime in history by dumping 400 million gallons of crude oil after the Gulf War into the Arabian Gulf and the Persian Gulf to keep U.S. forces from coming ashore. This is a man who drained the swamps in southern Iraq in order to starve and destroy the marsh Arabs, an ecological and human rights catastrophe of the first order. The United States acted to depose a dictator and bring democracy to Iraq’s citizens. You can argue that the United States have mismanaged the occupation, and I would agree, but to question the United States for having undertaken an action that I would imagine Canada, with its long history, would applaud for the nobility of its objectives is to me astonishing. If you can roll back a rogue state, you ought to do it in the name of humanity.