“I’m still bullish about America’s place in the century unfolding before us,” says Ambassador William J. Burns, despite a “more crowded, complicated and competitive world” in which the United States no longer enjoys unquestioned dominance and other nations are increasingly flexing their economic and geopolitical muscle.
Burns would know. A 33-year veteran of diplomacy who worked under five presidents and ten secretaries of state, he recently published a memoir of his time in the Foreign Service called The Back Channel: A Memoir of American Diplomacy and the Case for Its Renewal. Covering everything from the fall of the Soviet Union to America’s response to 9/11 to the Iran nuclear deal, the memoir serves as a political and personal tour through some of the most transformational moments in the modern history of America’s foreign involvement.
On Thursday, March 5, during the Hamilton Lugar School’s nonpartisan conference on America’s Role in the World®, Burns will sit down in conversation with Susan Glasser, who covers national politics for The New Yorker and is a global affairs analyst at CNN. Burns’ distinguished career, as well as the past, present, and future of diplomacy are all possible topics as the two survey the role of the United States in its current historical focal point.
After receiving an undergraduate degree from La Salle University and master’s and doctoral degrees from Oxford University in international relations, Burns’ decades-spanning career began in 1982 when he joined the Foreign Service. His early assignments were in the Middle East, and his integrity led Colin Powell, then the national security adviser, to put him in charge of the Middle East office of the National Security Council at the age of 32. He was promoted to the Senior Foreign Service in ten years, which is half the time it takes the average officer.
He served in Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union, traveling widely across the newly democratic country during the presidency of Boris Yeltsin. His task was to understand, as he writes, “the political and economic realities in Russia, so that policymakers in Washington could weigh them against all the other considerations overflowing their inboxes.” He saw first-hand Russia transform from Communism toward a market economy, from the relative security of a Soviet bloc to a fractured collection of different nation-states, and from an empire built up over centuries to a country with lowered influence.
In this role he talked to coal miners in Siberia, “mafia pretenders” in the Russian east, and the Moscow mayor, in a context of lawlessness that he said could be frightening. The Chechen crisis of 1995 was particularly troubling, as it revealed the tragic flaws of Yeltsin and the weakness of the Russian state.
From 1998 to 2001 he was ambassador to Jordan, and from 2001 to 2005 he was assistant secretary of state for near eastern affairs in Washington, DC. The 9/11 terrorist attacks unfolded outside his window, as he saw plumes of smoke rising from the Pentagon. In response, he wrote to his boss, Secretary of State Colin Powell, drawing on his experience in the Middle East to explain how he believed the US should respond and how it might use the goodwill of the international community to advance, as he writes, an “affirmative agenda that might eventually help reduce the hopelessness and anger on which extremists preyed.”
His belief that getting into Iraq and removing Saddam Hussein from power would be simpler than building a state there, along with many other of his warnings, were proven prescient during the years that followed. And he advocated for building “a sense of geopolitical order that would deprive extremists of the oxygen they needed to fan the flames of chaos,” instead of engaging in the kind of intervention that may turn international opinion away from the US.
Burns was ambassador to Russia from 2005 to 2008, during which time he worked to improve relations with an emboldened President Putin who, while open to working with the United States, was also set on asserting his own power. In his book, Burns describes the Russian leadership with a novelist’s eye, and the personalities of larger-than-life figures become grounded in their cultural and historical context.
From 2008 to 2011 he was undersecretary for political affairs, where he oversaw the bureaus for Africa, East Asia and the Pacific, Europe and Eurasia, the Near East, South and Central Asia, the Western Hemisphere, and International Organizations. And from 2011 to 2014 he was deputy secretary of state, only the second serving career diplomat to do so.
In these last two positions, he worked to contain the chaos of the Libyan Civil War of 2011 and to promote democratic values in the wake of the death of Muammar Gaddafi. Still interested in Russia and the former Soviet Union, he also negotiated with the leaders of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan to promote open dialogue between rivaling nations. Under President Obama, he initiated the highest-level conversations between the US and Iran since 1979, and, while mobilizing the diverse interests of Russia, China, and Europeans, worked to secure the Iran nuclear deal.
Having worked in many different regions and capacities for a number of both Republican and Democratic leaders, Burns has drawn high praise from a variety of peers and superiors. Former Secretary of State John Kerry, who inaugurated the Hamilton Lugar School building in 2015, said of Burns, “Bill is the gold standard for quiet, head-down, get-it-done diplomacy…He is smart and savvy, and he understands not just where policy should move, but how to navigate the distance between Washington and capitals around the world.”
James A. Baker III, who was secretary of state under President George H.W. Bush and is the subject of Susan Glasser’s biography The Man Who Ran Washington (forthcoming in May), called Burns a “top-notch public servant” who “speaks truth to power in an understated way.” And Richard Armitage, deputy secretary of state during President George W. Bush’s first term, said, “What makes Bill so special is that he is calm, unflappable, informed, with an absolute steel core. He is a man of principle who will not bow to expediency.”
Burns speaks Russian, Arabic, and French, and his numerous awards include the Presidential Distinguished Service Award (three times), the Secretary’s Distinguished Service Award (three times), two Distinguished Honor Awards, the 2006 Charles E. Cobb, Jr. Ambassadorial Award for Initiative and Success in Trade Development, the 2005 Robert C. Frasure Memorial Award for Conflict Resolution and Peacemaking, and the James Clement Dunn Award for exemplary performance at the mid-career level.
He retired from the Foreign Service in 2014 as a Career Ambassador, the highest rank of the Foreign Service. He now serves as the president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the oldest international affairs think tank in the United States, which seeks to advance international peace through a network of 120 experts from diverse disciplines and perspectives spread across more than twenty countries.
Burns and Glasser will speak from 4-5:15pm on March 5 in the Shreve Auditorium after an introduction by Rep. Lee H. Hamilton.
More from Burns on diplomacy:
“Former Deputy Secretary of State Bill Burns on What He Calls An Assault on Diplomacy,” via NPR
“The Diplomacy Imperative: A Q&A with William J. Burns,” via The Foreign Service Journal
“How the U.S.-Russian Relationship Went Bad,” via The Atlantic
“An End to Magical Thinking in the Middle East,” via The Atlantic
“Soleimani’s Ultimate Revenge,” via The Atlantic
“How to Save the Power of Diplomacy,” via The New York Times
“It’s Time to Talk to Iran,” via The New York Times
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