By Michael F. Duggan
As nuclear powers flirt with Armageddon over Ukraine and Taiwan, we must ask: where are the adults in foreign policy? Where are the John and Robert Kennedys? The Tommy Thompsons? Where are the George Kennans? Where are the diplomats? It is as if we are in the Cuban Missile Crisis and Curtis LeMay is calling the shots.
A number of months ago, when I was lamenting the lack of realists in the Halls of Power, a friend recommended reading William J. Burns, the current director of the CIA. Burns had been a career diplomat—including tenure as the United States ambassador to Russia in 2005-08—and had a reputation for being serious, thoughtful, nonpartisan, and nonideological. This by itself makes him a rare bird in an age of true believers. With a few quick searches, I found his 2019 memoir with the encouraging title, The Back Channel, a Memoir of American Diplomacy and the Case for Its Renewal, and ordered a copy.
I also found some interviews with Burns on YouTube and was impressed with what I saw. In the spoken and written word, he is calm, careful, diplomatic, experienced, knowledgeable, and urbane. A student of history, there is much to like and admire about Burns. He likes Charles Bohlen and George Kennan and their accomplishments during the early years of the Cold War. These were all good signs.
Burns is a public servant of the first order, who, in the words of John Kerry, is on “a very short list of American diplomatic legends,” a list that would certainly include Bohlen, Kennan, and Thompson, and like those men, he is a leading Kremlinologist. Unlike so many of the big names in contemporary foreign affairs, he is the kind of official whose name evokes dedication and seriousness of purpose rather than ideology, zeal, and intervention.
Burns was at or near the center of the action during many of the most important moments of one of the most fateful periods of U.S. foreign policy. This is—or was—the post-Cold War period of U.S. primacy, from its predawn during the Reagan administration until his retirement just as the Age of Trump loomed into sight. Except for the realist Bush 41/Baker/Scowcroff years, his career was coterminous with the period of economic globalization, foreign policy neo-conservatism, U.S. military hegemony, and liberal interventionism. Like a realist, he believes that much of foreign policy is ongoing damage control in an imperfect world, and that diplomacy in large measure is the managing of potential train wrecks.
One senses that Burns longs for that one brief shining moment of sensible foreign policy during 1989-1992, when there was still hope for “the new world order,” if not Fukuyama’s absurdly utopian “end of history.” From early on, he opposed the interpretation of the post-Cold War order as a unipolar world, recommended to the Clinton administration policies that were “careful and realistic,” and “stressed the importance of leading by example” as well as “the perils of overreach,” all good realist principles. (80-81) And yet the period that followed became one of hubris, triumphalism, and squandered opportunities on the part of the United States, and a drift toward a renewal of great power tensions. If we include 1991, it is a period that saw 251 acknowledged U.S. military actions around the world.1 As Tony Judt put it shortly before his death, the post-Cold War years “were consumed by locusts.” (Judt, Il Fares the Land, 2010, 138).
One thus infers that Burns is something like a Bush I era realist at heart, who spent the lion’s share of his career biting his lower lip in the age of the interventionist Blob. Throughout the book he walks a diplomatic tightrope between being the proverbial good soldier who does not say bad things about former colleagues and interventionist bosses and their dubious policies on the one hand, and the consummate professional suggesting what he believes to be a more sensible direction for U.S. policy on the other. If he is a realist, or a stripe of diplomat tending in that direction, it is hard to imagine a less comfortable and more frustrating position to be in. And yet in spite of his moderation and even keel, one senses ambivalence; just because someone embraces the study of history as a basis for policy and a return to diplomacy over knee-jerk intervention does not by itself make him a realist.
Burns writes with a self-deprecating sense of irony and deadpan humor. He is a good writer. But in spite of his frankness, he walks a line that leaves one wondering exactly what he believes in other than returning to diplomacy and the general need for a new grand strategy architecture. Strategy must be based on judgment informed not only by situational dictates and historical understanding, but by the specifics of an outlook, a philosophy of diplomacy, foreign affairs, and power. Diplomacy is never value neutral; even when it acknowledges the legitimate interests of the other side, it is always based on and serves a perspective. On the face of things, Burns seems to see both sides—the realist and a more activist points of view—to a fault.
NATO enlargement might serve as an example. Burns concedes that James Baker promised that NATO would expand “not one inch” into the former Soviet sphere of influence, but then hedges with a legalism: “the pledge was never formalized and was made before the breakup of the Soviet Union” (as if these things make any difference as matters of establishing fundamental trust and good faith). (55-56) When George Kennan characterized the initial enlargement of NATO in 1997 as “the most fateful error of American policy of the entire post-Cold War era”—one of his many remarkably prophetic observations—Burns saw it “as a little hyperbolic.” (107-111) In light of the war in Ukraine, one wonders if he has come around to better appreciate the accuracy of Kennan’s observation.
There are, of course, the obligatory unfavorable comments about Vladimir Putin, while acknowledging the times that Putin’s Russia aided U.S. efforts (such as in the early days of the Afghanistan war and then later during the troop surge there, and in allowing President Obama a face-saving way out after he painted himself into a corner with his ill-considered “red line” threat over the use of chemical weapons in Syria) (276, 279, 282, 331-32). Regardless of how he may or may not feel about the Russian president, he is able to realistically see beyond personalities to the real national security interests of Russia itself.
This may be attributable to a sense of “detachment” that Burns attributes to growing up as a frequently uprooted army brat (as the son of an army combat officer who was also born in Fort Bragg, raised in a Catholic family and lived in ten places by the time I was eight, I can closely identify with his early years). This distance gave him “an ability to stand back and observe and empathize.” It also instilled a sense of circumspect, “a reluctance—born of many departures—to get too close or too invested.” (18) The fact that his education at La Salle University and that his “upbringing bore little resemblance to the caricature of the cosmopolitan, blue-blooded Foreign Service officer” (i.e. “pale, male, and Yale”) may have also provided some immunity to the ideological bubbles, clichés, and groupthink that have dominated for so long in foreign policy circles and which threaten world peace again. (22)
This detachment presumably allowed Burns to realize that a NATO MAP (Membership Action Plan), for Georgia and/or Ukraine would be seen as a direct threat by the Russians. As then Ambassador Burns wrote in an email to then Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice in 2008:
“Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of bright lines for the Russian elite (not just Putin). In more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players, from knuckle-draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin’s sharpest liberal critics, I have yet to find anyone who views NATO as anything as other than a direct challenge to Russian interests. At this stage, a MAP offer would be seen as throwing down the strategic gauntlet. Today’s Russia will respond. Russian-Ukrainian relations will go into a deep freeze… It will create fertile soil for Russian meddling in Crimea and eastern Ukraine.” (232-233, 457-59)
Burns saw the problem of NATO enlargement into Georgia and Ukraine early and fully, realizing that
“In many ways, [the Bucharest Summit] left us with the worse of both worlds—indulging Ukrainians and Georgians in hopes of NATO membership on which we were unlikely to deliver, while in reinforcing Putin’s sense that we were determined to pursue a course he saw was an existential threat.” (239)
In light of events in Ukraine since 2014, and especially over the past year, Burns’ observations appear to have been as prescient as George Kennan at his hyperbolic best. Although the war is the result of a Russian invasion, when we throw the zeal of highly-placed interventionists like Anthony Blinken and Victoria Nuland into the mix on the American side, the present war starts to look like a foregone conclusion. The Russian and Ukrainian chickens have come home to roost, and world leaders have spoken openly about nuclear war. It therefore seems odd that Burns has expressed concern about the possibility of the war turning nuclear, but has also given a far more conventional, official-sounding line about the conflict.2
Another example of his ideological ambivalence may be reflected in his curiously eclectic bibliography, which, at just under six pages, is not especially long for a 500-page book. Alongside old-school realists like Bohlen, Kennan, and Kissinger, and more recent realists like Andrew Bacevich, James Baker, and Anatol Lieven are titles by Neocons like Eliot Cohen, Robert Kagan, liberal interventionists like Madeline Albright and Anne-Marie Slaughter, and economic globalists like Thomas Friedman, John Ikenberry, Strobe Talbott, and Fareed Zakaria. Perhaps he is just including works of people he mentions as well as players he does not mention (he calls Francis Fukuyama a “star” while noting elsewhere that “history did not end in the 1990s”). The alternatives are that he either gives credit even to views with which he disagrees, or else he is a man who is moderate and rational to the point of being open-minded about everything at all times, which might be another way of characterizing a person who does not really believe in anything or does not want others to know what he believes (an odd thing for someone who took the time to write a lengthy memoir). True believers may be the most dangerous animals in the foreign policy forest, but those who entertain everything are their enablers. Perhaps he is just giving all sides their due.
In other words, Burns, in all of his detachment, is a hard person to pin down. Certainly he does have an outlook, but at times it must be inferred. On the face of things, he seems to be like John Lewis Gaddis (whose classic Strategies of Containment and Pulitzer Prize-winning George F. Kennan: an American Life are both in the bibliography as is his overly-reductionistic The Cold War: a New History)3 in wanting things both ways. In Burns’ case this would be cautious, interest-based realism and economic globalization. And yet one cannot say, for instance, that the containment of Kennan and the “rollback” of Reagan’s hardliners both won the Cold War (as Gaddis appears to do), given that they are at fundamentally at odds with each other.4 I would say that realism and economic globalization are similarly at odds with each other.
Burns admits that the unipolar moment is over and that the period of the post-primacy world has arrived. (397) But what does this mean about his prescriptions? After all, one does not have to be a realist to take an honest accounting and admit the failure of an overreaching, overly militarized U.S. foreign policy. One does not have to be a realist to learn from mistakes. Therefore, is this memoir just about learning from mistakes, or is it a chance for Burns to finally assert what he believes after so many years of being a loyalist to the Department and the nation, regardless of what he believed about the policies he served?
The conclusion of his memoir, ostensibly in response Donald Trump’s evisceration of the State Department, is equally a plea for a return to a foreign policy architecture founded on diplomacy after four decades of militarized foreign affairs, undeclared wars, bombing campaigns, and other forms of intervention that have resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousand of people around the world. But what shape would this diplomacy take and to what end? Burns yearns for a workable diplomatic policy framework comparable to Kennan’s containment, which, in spite of a fair amount of alteration, expansion, tampering, and outright vandalism by lesser men, still resulted in a satisfactory resolution of the first Cold War.
Burns observes that “Fashioning a strategy for the post-primacy world is no easy task” (401). I take issue with this point and would suggest that a frame for a grand strategy may be more straight-forward than he realizes. It has always been there, if we had taken the time to see it. The ideology of true believers had obscured it to many in policy circles. It still does. Rather, the difficulty would be in implementing it, and in deprogramming, overcoming, or superseding an entire foreign policy establishment—The Blob—committed to the rigid, heavy-handed, cliché-ridden ideologies of neoconservatism and liberal interventionism. Burns essentially says as much, but as with so much of his book, it is understated (“The preaching of the Gospel by the foreign policy ‘blob’ continues unabated—often unpersuasive and sometimes a little self-righteous;” a little self-righteous, eh?). (418) Even as understatement, such an observation does not conceal his discontentment and a desire for a new direction. While disagreeing, he is thus not subversive to the establishment (nor is he a departmental partisan vying for funds and influence with the Department of Defense), but rather is diplomatically constructive. He is like a man trying to turn around an ocean liner with a hand tiller.
So what would a workable and sustainable framework for a post-primacy American grand strategy look like? In my opinion—and this in my model and not Burns’—it would have to be situated in the broad ideological expanse between hegemonic internationalism and “Fortress American” isolationism. Such a proximity would allow the United States to adopt the posture of a vigorous regional world power while maximizing the best geopolitical real estate on the planet—its own. This would also allow the U.S. to continue to function as an international world leader and to honor its treaty agreements, without succumbing to the temptation of unsustainable imperial overreach. Significantly, it would allow the U.S. to disengage from parts of the world where it is not wanted or needed and where its very presence is destabilizing or otherwise problematic. The view that the U.S. must choose between inward-looking isolationism and unrestrained imperial internationalism is in fact a false choice. The debate over the role of the United States in the word founded on extremes of autarchy and empire is in fact a discussion with a wide and fruitful middle ground, and it is between these unrealistic poles that a reasonable basis for grand strategy will be found.
As a robust regional world power with capable air, land, and sea forces to match, the United States would be able to protect its vital interests. It would still be able to function as a world leader in international coalitions to preserve peace and order and to restore the status quo in instances where the territorial sovereignty of a nation has been violated by another. Such a role would also provide an effective stature for fostering the international cooperation necessary to address the unfolding world environmental crises. Above all it would allow the United States to re-embrace its noble diplomatic tradition that served us so well in the days before the time when the first option to complex problems was a Spec Ops team, a Tomahawk missile, or a B-52 strike.
What specifically would this strategy look like and what would we call it? The answer to both is consolidation; the US would embrace a more sustainable traditional role as the dominant power of the lesser “World Island” of the Americas, while remaining one of the community of world powers in the multipolar world already upon us. It would quietly survey the world and judiciously determine the nations and regions it would be willing to defend. This list would be a dramatic reduction of the current open-ended one. If “consolidation” is too uninspiring a name for this new grand strategy, then perhaps the more elaborate, history-based moniker Neo-Hadrianism will do. This name, which I first used in an article in 2013, is taken from the second-century Roman emperor who sought to preserve Roman strength via consolidation after the Empire had grown too large and unwieldy.5
The book’s subtitle is A Memoir of an American Diplomacy and the Case for its Renewal. But what is “the case”? Is it that the ideology of 1993-2022 is mistaken or is it the damage to the State Department wrought by Donald Trump (who knew nothing about foreign policy and was little more than a temporary, partial distraction from The Blob?), or both.6 The immediate target is Trump—an obvious, flailing target—but he also appears to be gunning for the tried-and-failed Blob—the foreign policy community of the post-Cold War period.
In his conclusion, after criticizing Trump and The Blob, Burns gives some indication of what he would like to see take the place of neoconservative and liberal intervention. He still embraces a robust role for the United States and the projection of power, but it is the softer power of diplomacy and economics. He favors the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and presumably other one-size-fits-all multilateral agreements. (405). In other words, he may be prescribing a globalist world based on diplomacy rather than on hard power, intervention, and nation-building. He is a diplomatic globalist with perhaps some realist leanings.
So who exactly is William Burns and what is his vision for a post-primacy American role? Is he the very picture of the consummate diplomat and career professional? An intimate observer—an insider—and critic of the now unraveling post-Cold War unipolar moment? A closet realist finally able to say what he really thinks?
Perhaps he is all of these things. The State Department—like the military—is an organization in which loyalty to the program is the highest and most unquestioned principle. It is also a community where the only thing as important as loyalty is discretion. A friend of mine suggested by way of historical analogy that he may be a latter-day version of John Hay: a loyalist, but a moderate, rational, sensible one. In his historical novel Empire, Gore Vidal portrays Hay as the consummate public servant who subordinates his personal opinions to the mission of the team and the policies of the time. Is this Bill Burns?
My sense is that Burns is a man of honor who has dedicated his life to the mission of the government and agency during his tenure, regardless of whether or not he always agreed with it. In this he is also like that paragon of the good soldier, Colin Powell. Unlike Powell, Burns still has time to do what is right, regardless of the mischief wrought by lesser people, by ideologues. Regarding the two flashpoints that threaten a third world war—Ukraine and Taiwan—he also has the opportunity to do a historical great good by defusing conflicts that would likely turn nuclear if they became direct great powers wars. The question is whether he is situated to do so as head of the CIA.
As for the immediate future, he is right about the desirability of a return to a policy architecture based on diplomatic primacy. The first orders of business must be de-escalation: backchannel talks to tamp-down the foremost dangers posed by the Russo-Ukrainian War (really the Russo-American War) with a pledge of Ukrainian neutrality and to halt NATO enlargement, and then the relaxing of tensions in the South China Sea by a drawing down of U.S. forward presence in the East Asian littoral waters (U.S. naval predominance in the South China Sea makes about as much geographical sense as Chinese naval predominance in the Gulf of Mexico). As long as innocent passage and the free flow of maritime trade are not threatened in the Asian shipping lanes, it is irrelevant who carries the biggest stick among nuclear powers there. Other important issues demanding diplomatic attention will include engineering a unified global approach to the unfolding crises of the environment.
As the world teeters on the nuclear brink, let us hope that cooler heads, like Burns, are working behind the scenes, and that he is living up to the title of his book. Perhaps he is already involved in back channel talks through a third party, like Turkey. We can only hope so. Without a settlement, the war can only end with world catastrophe or as an open-ended festering sore that could escalate without a moment’s notice.
As I have written elsewhere, the problem with the Great Game is the game itself; it is a stupid and egotistical distraction and one that the world can no longer afford. Nuclear brinksmanship is by its nature an insane manifestation of the game and is even more so in the hands of ideaologues who have caused or exacerbated so much of the trouble in the world over the past 30 years and who are still laboring under a delusional ideology.
With the Russian withdrawal from Kherson being widely characterized as a Ukrainian battlefield victory (as opposed to a consolidation of the Russian lines as hundreds of thousands of reservists arrive at the front), and with the war aims of both sides fundamentally at odds with each other, there is less and less reason for either to sue for peace.
In a dark, Hobbesian world, diplomats are the responsible adults in the room. It is time for a grownup to take a decisive stand before it is too late.
Notes
*I wrote most of this article in early October. Since then others, like former U.S. arms inspector Scott Ritter, have also suggested that Director Burns would be the best person to initiate a diplomatic dialog in Ukraine. It now appears that Burns is talking with Russian counterparts about the war in Ukraine.
- https://mronline.org/2022/09/16/u-s-launched-251-military-interventions-since-1991-and-469-since-1798/.
- https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-nuclear-weapons-burns-cia/31804539.html, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6M4W-OB6Ak
- Regarding the reductive nature of Gaddis’s book, The Cold War, a New History, See Tony Judt’s review “A Story Still to be Told. https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2006/03/23/a-story-still-to-be-told/
- It was Kennan, containment, and the intrinsic flaws in the Soviet Union that brought down the latter and to think otherwise is to dangerously misread the record of 1947-91. Unlike insiders like John Paul II and Lech Walesa, conservative heads of state like Reagan and Thatcher had little influence behind the Iron Curtain. By the 1980s, the USSR had been dry rotting for decades—perhaps since the death of Stalin. Nobody except for a few old true believes and virtually no young people believed in the old ideology. By the time of the Reagan administration, the Soviet Union was like a once-ferocious dinosaur about to drop dead of a coronary. Reagan had nothing to do with this, and his tough talk, at best sped the collapse of the USSR by a matter of weeks or months. In retrospect, it would have been more sensible to have brought about its end more slowly.
- https://realismandpolicy.com/foreign-policy-articles/
- There is no contradiction in opposing Donald Trump and the foreign affairs Blob. As Stephen M. Walt notes, the foreign policy elite was horrified at the election of Donald Trump. He writes “In March 2016 former State Department counselor and Johns Hopkins University Professor, Eliot A. Cohen organized an open letter signed by 122 former national security officials that denounced Trump’s views on foreign policy, described him as ‘fundamentally dishonest,’ and judged him ‘utterly unfit to the office.” Stephen M. Walt, The Hell of Good Intentions, 4. It should be noted, as Andrew Bacevich does in his 2020 book, Age of Illusions, that Trump, himself, is a symptom of trends of the post-Cold War period, a byproduct of bad domestic, economic, and foreign policies. The off-shoring of jobs caused by globalization that led to the rise of nationalistic populism, was in large measure the result of neoliberal globalization with pan-spectrum military hegemony as its bulldog. Without trying to sound like a 1950s science fiction movie, Trump may be rightly regarded as “The Son of The Blob.” He is the unintended spawn of policies of the Reagan, Clinton, Bush II, and Obama administrations.