In government, chris served as a staffer on the House Foreign Affairs committee, under representative lee h. Hamilton as the Deputy Assistant secretary of state in the bureau of intelligence and research and as Deputy Director of the 9 11 commission. He was also the president of the 9 11 Public Discourse project, the commissions follow on Public Education organization. He served as a Senior Adviser to the iraq study group. Please welcome professor chris kojam. Its a real honor to be here tonight, and this is in the very best traditions of this school. A very erudite, accomplished policymakers into the academy, and so that both can benefit. And im deeply dedicated to this continuing interaction between scholarship and practice. So its a real honor tonight to introduce ambassador thomas pickering. He is a career ambassador. And that is the designation that very few ever receive. Only a few in a generation. And ambassador pickering really is a phenomenon. The most accomplished ambassador of his generation. And he joined the Foreign Service in 1960 and retired for a second time in 2001. And during that period of time, oh, the assignments he had. Its just stunning for me to contemplate him having served as ambassador of the United States of america seven times. In important countries and positions around the world. He was not limited to any single area of expertise. So he served as ambassador in jordan, from 74 to 78. Ambassador in nigeria, 81 to 83. Ambassador in el salvador, 83 to 85. Israel, 85 to 88. And then he was the ambassador of the United States to the United Nations from 89 to 92. In the leadup to, during and then the aftermath of the gulf war. A hugely important position for the United States, and he represented our government so very well. Followed by his service as ambassador to india, and then during the clinton administration, as ambassador to russia. As the first ambassador to russia. His predecessor, of course, had been ambassador to the soviet union. He also served as the undersecretary for Political Affairs from 1997 until the last day of 2000. Again, a position of exceeding importance in the formulation and implementation of American Foreign policy. Just on a personal note, i have never seen an individual with more energy and more creativity and more ideas working tirelessly to figure out ways to advance the diplomacy of this great country. He has served with enormous distinction. I cant tell you how fortunate all of you are, as am i, standing here to have the opportunity to hear from ambassador pickering, and he will speak for approximately half an hour, and then hell take questions and well have a bit of a conversation here. So ambassador pickering. [ applause ] thank you. Thank you all very much. And chris, thank you for that very elegant, very hyperbolic, wonderful introduction. Im sure im going to have to put that on paper somewhere and keep it. Its a pleasure to be with you, and thank you very much for the invitation to come by tonight. I want to talk about three things. I want to talk a little bit about the changing world situation in terms of some of the key influences on Foreign Policy. That are new or different or more challenging. And then id like to talk about seven major issues, problem areas, challenges, difficulties, that we face with the opportunity perhaps on two or three of those to talk about some policy directions for the future that i think are interesting and possible and useful and perhaps not yet being fully pursued. Then i look forward to your questions and comments, criticisms, ideas, thoughts, whatever. Everything but tomatoes. Thank you. The world is perhaps going through the most rapid change in the human environment that we have ever seen. One wonders whether, in fact, with the geometric speed with which things are proceeding there is an end point at some time. One also used to look years ago at the roman empire. And when the barbarians came in, everything froze. Were all related to both romans and barbarians, so we can be proud of the roman achievements, and a little bit sorry that some of our ancestors threw spears. But that is obviously a question that none of us is prepared to answer, seemingly we can move on from strength to strength, and deal with change. The most fascinating change that i think we are all facing, and that you see, know and master well beyond what i have to deal with, is the electronic information related revolutionary changes that we all see. Much of this has changed the way in which we do diplomacy. Its changed the way in which we understand the world. Its changed the way in which the people of the world absorb it, know about it, and understand a bit about it. And i think one of the major contributions, not the only one, to Something Like the arab spring, or the arab transition as i think we all prefer to call it now, was, in fact, the notion of a Rapid Movement of information, people taking in ideas and thoughts that they had. The notion that dictatorships and autocracy were not a successful way of treating people in terms of the governments and the need to change that, and the fact that you could mobilize people through electronics in the main and bring them out and use public demonstrations to make a serious change this Governmental Organization was very, very interesting. In egypt it was fascinating thai Governmental Organization was very, very interesting. In egypt it was fascinating tn t Governmental Organization was very, very interesting. In egypt it was fascinating that one of the things that people seemed to have forgotten in the plethora of changes was that there already were established Political Forces at work and had been at work in society. Some of them a little bit underground. Certainly the Muslim Brotherhood was one. Another, perhaps, was the notion that ordinary people ought to be able to gain an opportunity to participate in their own governance in a serious way. There were no leaders of that movement strikingly, and one of the interesting things is that with no leaders you cant win elections. And if elections are the preferred method of choice, then you become absent from the future in an unusual way, even though you have, perhaps, been instrumental in causing it. But these are examples of things that are happening around us and all the time. But the pace of change, i think, the breadth of change in the world, is very much due to this. Closer to home, and i think more interesting, if i can sort of swivel around in a different way, is the fact that over the last decade we found not to the surprise of a lot of people but to the surprise of some in the leadership of the country, that military force is not a very good way of solving diplomatic problems. And that diplomatic problems can be usefully solved at the conference table, often because you have a firstrate military course. And if you begin using military force to try to resolve problems, that dont that where it doesnt work very well, then you undermine in a serious way the capacity to have, in fact, the value of a firstrate military force behind your diplomacy, and behind your actions, and so if used and abused, if i could put it that way, it tends to be less persuasive. Less useful. Less important. As an american diplomat i was always grateful that we had a firstrate military force behind us. I was grateful, too, that we had a firstrate economy. And even with some of the change that came about in 2008, and in 2009, from which were still recovering, i think that our ability as an economy to perform, and to show leadership, and to deal with issues, great and small, is very significant. I think that there is another set of questions thats very important that we tend, when we add up what is it thats behind our diplomacy that makes us have a great chance to be more successful, is in the political realm, interestingly enough. And interestingly enough, it happens to be, i think, our values and principles. If there was one thing around the world that people admired about this country, was its freedom, its prosperity, its commitment to doing things correctly, its valuing Ethical Principles and its ability to act in accordance with them. Some of that has gone away. And weve lost some of that. Theres nothing written in stone that says we cannot come back to it. And i think we are. I think its were moving perhaps more slowly than we should be, but its a significant and important part of what underpins our diplomacy in a changing world. I think that theres several other things that are happening. Diplomats normally used to work on a country by country basis. Now we work much more significantly multilaterally. We used to be very much consumed by political questions and they were always treated by american diplomats as the top priority and the top of the heap. Now that has shifted remarkably. And questions that are both multilateral, and heavily economically based are equally as significant, if not more significant, in the concentration of our effort, and the focus of our diplomacy. And thats important. Id like to say two or three other things. In at questions, it is important for us to begin to move out of the traditional stovepipes of consideration, particularly if we want to look at questions from a Strategic Point of view. From a point of view of strategic impact and strategic importance. And ive come to believe that there are now clusters or packages or groupings of issues that need to be taken together, as we consider them a Foreign Policy importance. One example is obviously the intimate relationship between energy policy, Environmental Issues and policies, and Climate Change. Theyre not uniquely clustered, and all alone. But they form the center focus of i think one of the important clusters of questions we have to deal with. Ill talk in a minute about seven of these. They vary. Some are clusters of issues that we would call worldwide, and functional. And others happen to do with regional areas of the world, where, in fact, regional problems and major country competitions are important to us. But looking at them this way, at least from a strategic perspective, is helpful from two directions. One of those directions is that it helps us avoid the unanticipated consequences that sometimes happen when we make a move on a set of issues and intimately related questions in one way or another affected. So the broader sweep of the cluster gives us an opportunity, at least, to understand those are interrelationships that we need to Pay Attention to. I think the second question is maybe more technical, more useful for the diplomat, but it gives us an opportunity when were negotiating in a set of questions, to understand that if we need a broader scope to get the negotiations moving, to offer either concessions or to seek concessions on a broader basis, looking at questions through the cluster focus is helpful and important in being able to gain those advantages in a negotiating scenario. Let me now turn to the questions, and perhaps some of the things that we should do about them. I always am a little bit stymied at this point as to which priority is important. Absolutely fascinating. Ive been talking about this for a few years. And almost every time i come before an audience to talk about it, the priority has shifted a little bit. So tonight i want to begin with what i call the extended middle east as a cluster of questions. Its selfevident, its obvious, the importance is perhaps, if anything, been overstressed in the press recently. But we can look at that. And so, from the straits of gibraltar to the hindu kush, the extent of the middle east is a fertile field to continue to present us with new, interesting, challenging, and sometimes very destructive problems. And, in fact, the middle east fertility in this sense has probably outstripped our capacity in any real way to continue to deal with them. Certainly new questions have emerged since the beginning of 2013, or even 2012, with a kind of rapidity that has left us all breathless, left our government masters, if i can call them that, certainly stymied often at the starting post, as to how to get at them. And looking now at the complications of their interrelationship. No one set of questions, i think, in the middle east has the Silver Bullet embedded in it, that will solve the others. But it is interesting that as things get worse in one area, they tend to affect others. So that as we fail, and indeed, as the process fails to find a way to deal with the problem between israel and the palestinians, it tends in the main to affect arab attitudes toward the United States that runs across the full gamut of the middle east. And while it wasnt the centerpiece of change in egypt or in yemen or in libya, it is certainly there in the minds of many people who think about that problem. Similarly, in an interesting way, and ill talk about this in a minute, if we are able to break through in the negotiations with iran over a nuclear arrangement, there are opportunities to follow on, because we in iran share some common interests in afghanistan, in iraq, and maybe eventually even in syria. Although that looks like a long shot at this point. But it is interesting to see that interrelationship, and we should keep it in mind. It doesnt mean finally that all of these issues have to be treated in a broader context. We can deal with them in stovepipes. But we should keep our mind on the strategic interrelationships as we go ahead, and understand some of that, rather than to fence ourselves off in a narrow corner and treat with the policy merely as the policy as we are the press, or as our own inventions about the region, tend to catalog it. Often people in the region dont see it the same way and we should be cautious about that. I would say that the number one problem at the moment is probably what our arabic speaking friends called daish, it is arabic for isil or isis or i. S. The Islamic State in iraq and in greater syria. And this is a serious problem, and weve addressed it as a serious problem. Perhaps in my view weve overmilitarized it. But it has great military connotations. And if anybody wants to undertake a really unpopular cause, just go out here and raise up a banner and say, lets negotiate with isil. You can understand why, in effect, this has a bigger military character. But there are political and Economic Issues that are important here. And i think they need to be looked at. Political questions of what kind of a coalition can we build. And those are important. Political questions that have to do with how and in what way in iraq, in which the maliki government spent a good bit of its time either ignoring or tormenting sunni, a new Iraqi Government can pick up its socks and understand that it has to deal with minority from the point of view of their rights, as well as obviously the significant value of majority rule, and that happens to be at the moment the shia. But those are significant. And economic questions are very important. Where is some of our oil coming from . Well right out of isilland. Do we continue to take that oil, and do we continue to feed the money into isis that that oil is being paid to paid for to receive. A very interesting question, particularly at a time when oil prices are going down. Of course, if it were isil, it couldnt happen to nicer guys but there are still real problems about a resistance to a fundamental terrorist movement that is now hecavily funded by the Oil Enterprise and we need to think about that. So those are significant. On the military side i think its very interesting. There are now clear indications, whether we like it or not, that while our aerial attack has been quite successful, both in northern syria, and in Northern Iraq in supporting the forces opposing isis, it is also now become an isis rallying cry to try to bring more recruits to the flag, more folks to the kalashnikov. And this is something we need to keep our eye on. It is also useful to begin to think about whether isis in its own galloping mistreatment of the sunni population of Northern Iraq has opened an opportunity for us politically and militarily to begin to deal with the sunni tribal leaders that we worked with in 2005 and 2006. Is that door going to open . Well the problem with that door is, having opened it once years ago, and then walked away when they had a feeling that somehow we were going to be around to protect their interests, and left them cold in the hands of a new shia government, are they going to move to our side as rapidly as they did before. Are they going to be useful. And then the final piece, who are the Ground Troops who are going to help us deal with isil if we are limiting ourselves now to air, to training, to intelligence support, and to equipment. I dont know. Its interesting. The shia forces in iraq have shown up until now they can protect baghdad. But can they help retake the region. Which is an important objective. General allen who is leading the effort, i believe, is now focused on a twoyear plan, that some time by 2017, he hopes to see the kind of results that we would like to see as soon as possible but arent going to be possible, in part, because much training is required and much equipment is required, and thats not ready at hand. I always ask the kind of question myself, in looking at this sort of issue, why is it that the afghan taliban, with almost no training, are so effective as military operators, when, in fact, the Afghan National security forces, with all of our training, doesnt seem to be nearly up to the grade. Why is it that isil, a kind of ragtag bunch, a combination of islamic fundamentalists, exbaathist officers of the iraqi army and some real banditis, and why are they doing so well .