Podcast: 10% Less Crazy with Tom Pickering

Transcript

Listen: Ian sits down with a man who's worked everywhere from Moscow to Mumbai, former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Tom Pickering.

TRANSCRIPT: 10% Less Crazy with Tom Pickering

Tom Pickering:

New people are struggling in an increasingly disheveled world to see if they can bring about some kind of more useful order.

Ian Bremmer:

Hi. I'm Ian Bremmer, and welcome to the GZERO World podcast, an audio version of what you can find on public television where I analyze global topics, sit down with big guests and make use of little puppets. This week, I sit down with former Ambassador Tom Pickering, who served more than four decades as a top-level diplomat and ambassador pretty much everywhere, and even led the congressional investigation into the 2011 Benghazi attacks. He's the right person to talk to in a time when America's role in the world is an open question. Let's get to it.

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Ian Bremmer:

Ambassador Tom Pickering, vice chairman in Hills & Company, career diplomat. You've been ambassador everywhere. Do we still have career diplomats? Are there any left?

Tom Pickering:

Yes, we do. There are some left.

Ian Bremmer:

There have been a lot of people leaving the State Department.

Tom Pickering:

Look the top level, if you had 15, 20, 25 years experience, most are gone, and that's a loss.

Ian Bremmer:

I have been told that morale at the State Department under Pompeo is improved. Is that true?

Tom Pickering:

I think you have to say that morale under Tillerson could not have gotten any worse. So Pompeo gets credit. And I was in the foreign service beginning in 1959, and I've never known a year when people didn't say, "Morale is as bad as it's ever been."

Ian Bremmer:

Really?

Tom Pickering:

Yes, sir. It's-

Ian Bremmer:

The beatings will continue until morale improves.

Tom Pickering:

Beatings will continue even if morale does improve.

Ian Bremmer:

Mm-hmm. The foreign policy establishment in the United States, both on the left and the right of the political spectrum, has been fairly unified in their opposition to President Trump.

Tom Pickering:

Yes. Mm-hmm.

Ian Bremmer:

Is there anything they're getting wrong?

Tom Pickering:

I think the foreign policy establishment may be underestimating the value of strong pressure and leverage in something like Korea, DPRK. I was on the bandwagon when fire and fury was most redolent and said, "Fire and fury is simply splendid, but you have to have opened a process to get something done to use fire and fury as an objective." Otherwise, you end up either going to war or backing down. And that's not the choice of the world's largest country which can pursue and indeed gain much by diplomacy.

Ian Bremmer:

Now, he did say, when the North Koreans were developing their ICBMs, that a missile that would be able to hit the continental United States was unacceptable. He has expressed the desire to move towards denuclearization. Are those not policies-

Tom Pickering:

Perfectly important. You can't expect to produce it all in one big go, and Kim Jong-un obviously wants us to pay the highest price for the smallest step. So as going in, you have to calibrate carefully what you give and what you get.

Ian Bremmer:

And that process has not happened.

Tom Pickering:

No, I don't see it happening.

Ian Bremmer:

So let's go to something happening right now: Venezuela. Situation's been deteriorating disastrously so for the Venezuelan people for years now, but the crisis appears to be picking up, with the Americans deciding to recognize opposition leader Guaidó as the legitimate president, many other countries around the world following our lead. First question, was that the correct thing for the Trump Administration to do?

Tom Pickering:

It's a very important and interesting question. I don't believe that Guaidó would've taken, necessarily, the oath of office without having some sense that he was going to have international support. I think this was an important pushback against Maduro. The really interesting questions for me is, is Guaidó, the chosen successor, capable of running Venezuela? Because we're very good at knocking people off, but not so good at bringing in successors who, in one way or another, can manage.

Ian Bremmer:

You mean Saddam Hussein?

Tom Pickering:

Of course.

Ian Bremmer:

You mean Gaddafi?

Tom Pickering:

Gaddafi. I mean, let's start with that list and go down. The second question is, does this become an international civil war like Syria? God forbid. We don't need that in this hemisphere. Is there something that can be done first and foremost to deal with the human crisis? Should we be putting food on the border and pushing it over? Should we be working with the NGO community? Should the Secretary General organize some kind of humanitarian effort that the others, all of us who care about Venezuela, should be engaged in? And secondly, is a negotiating table better than a military shootout? And if it is, should that be the next step? The Russians have said they favor that, clearly because I think they're worried about what clearly would be a military action in which they would be less capable than others.

Ian Bremmer:

They don't have the leverage that they have in Syria.

Tom Pickering:

They said deployment capacity and the long distances, and perhaps the money. Putin isn't running his country's economy, and never has, in a way that tends to look out for big involvement's costly basis.

Ian Bremmer:

I mean, the Russians were able with relatively limited cost to get what they, quote, unquote, "wanted" in Syria.

Tom Pickering:

Yes. And maybe, with a small deployment or whatever they're doing in Venezuela, a seat at the table. If they can influence Maduro to go, under conditions and circumstances that they can live with in the future and that we can live with, more power to them. If we're going to end up with a stalemate in which we become the evacuator and not the negotiator, then we're in trouble.

Ian Bremmer:

If you're the United States and you see the Cubans providing significant intelligence support on the ground in Venezuela to this regime, is it necessarily linkage with US policy towards Cuba?

Tom Pickering:

No. And it shouldn't be, but it is now because US policy has turned. But I go back and think of the resolution in Columbia where, interestingly enough, the US and Cuba ended up on the side of a negotiated workout in which the government of Columbia, I think, honestly can claim credit for doing a tremendously important thing in their own interest.

Ian Bremmer:

With the negotiations with the FARC on the ground.

Tom Pickering:

Exactly.

Ian Bremmer:

Mm-hmm.

Tom Pickering:

And is that the way of the future? I've been thinking about this. I don't know, but I think those are all things to explore. One wants to, as a matter, I think, of intelligent prudence, explore the non-kinetic efforts before you have to go kinetic.

Ian Bremmer:

When you look at the places that a misstep, a miscalculation, a mistake could lead to dire confrontation in the world today of a similar sort, what are the things that worry you?

Tom Pickering:

I worry about the Middle East. I think we need to be somehow moving toward President Trump's better deal with Iran if there is one because we have no deal with Iran between the United States and Iran. Happily, our European friends are doing their best to keep the deal alive. And guess what? We are sanctioning them economically because they're doing it.

Ian Bremmer:

The people don't worry about the arms race these days.

Tom Pickering:

It's fascinating. The degree to which we did during the Cold War is matched by the degree to which we haven't in this period of time. Perhaps one was an exaggeration, the Cold War, although I doubt it after the Cuban Missile Crisis, but cleaning things up helped and the decline of the Soviet Union helped. But now, we're in a position where seemingly the ability to say, "It's all over and it's gone away," resolves itself around the fact it's never coming back. And here, you have Putin and Trump talking about nuclear weapons as if they were hand grenades.

Ian Bremmer:

What's the thing happening around the world right now that you're most pleased about diplomatically?

Tom Pickering:

That's a fascinating question because it's kind of hard to find a good answer to that question in all honesty. I, from time to time, look north. And while people have differences in Canada about Trudeau, the Canadians have done an interesting job still in showing a lot of us what a reasonable country working in careful conditions can do.

Now, Mexico is a little different, but we don't live in a terrible hemisphere. And AMLO's been very interesting because AMLO, in the campaign so far, hasn't turned out to be AMLO in the presidency. We'll have to see where that goes. But there is a real opportunity between those two countries. And the undoing of NAFTA for the penny-farthing increase in the capacity of the new agreement to do things, I think, was hardly worth the effort. I think that we all have to think about improving the trade posture, but threatening to blow it all up-

Ian Bremmer:

So was it not-

Tom Pickering:

... as a way to get a 6% increase or something was not it.

Ian Bremmer:

Was it not worth the effort, or was it not worth the process? Because again, it's not as if there was so much time and effort in terms of the negotiation. It seems to me it was more that you had someone who was threatening to blow it up and it's the worst deal ever.

Tom Pickering:

I-

Ian Bremmer:

Because it did need modernization, right?

Tom Pickering:

Of course, it could. Any treaty can be modernized, and this one had that capacity. We got an agreement. The president was happy with it. It was a small value, but not necessarily zero.

Ian Bremmer:

Not zero.

Tom Pickering:

But the amount of damage it did both in Canada and Mexico and then beyond, believing that living next to a whirling dervish is not a good idea.

Ian Bremmer:

But they can't move.

Tom Pickering:

They can't move.

Ian Bremmer:

So, I mean-

Tom Pickering:

But the rest of the world is close to us, too, these days.

Ian Bremmer:

But we hear a lot-

Tom Pickering:

Sure.

Ian Bremmer:

I hear a lot of people talking about the damage to the United States and trust and the degradation. Again, I'm not trying to say you're wrong. I'm simply trying to say those are big words. And yet, the US is still the world's largest superpower. How is it that concretely, we're seeing countries act differently as a consequence of what's happening?

Tom Pickering:

I accept the challenge. Point number one, we're no longer a predictable partner. Point number two, we're getting out of agreements rather than fashioning.

Ian Bremmer:

But what are the implications of that?

Tom Pickering:

The implications of that, that we're no longer trustworthy.

Ian Bremmer:

So who's doing what?

Tom Pickering:

And that we-

Ian Bremmer:

Who's doing what differently?

Tom Pickering:

And the implication of that is that new people are struggling in an increasingly disheveled world to see if they can bring about some kind of more useful order. And we're seeing the growing up of an alternative to the liberal progressive order, and that alternative is very clearly dictatorial autocracy. And dictatorial autocracy is the perhaps fascination of a small group of leaders who aspire to it, but not necessarily something that greatly benefits very many players in very many countries around the world. And so if you're looking at perhaps your own interest as well as your national interest, is it good to have a disheveled world? Is it good to have increasing competition for power? Is it good to have an America where you can't turn and say, "What's the United States going to do?" even though that's the pattern and habit particularly of our friends and allies because they want to know where we're going even if they don't follow it? That's seemingly now all disappearing. And after the Iraq invasion, particularly in the Middle East, US popularity descended to very low figures.

Ian Bremmer:

Mm-hmm.

Tom Pickering:

And it went down geometrically with a whiff of a whirlwind through the process. Rebuilding it, Obama and others took a linear process a long time. Now, it's gone down again. So how many rollercoaster rides do people take around the world, believing the United States is the most trusted country in the world, perhaps one of the wisest, the most powerful in using its force for the public interest on a broad basis rather than a narrow promotion of an individual personality?

Ian Bremmer:

Do you think that's rebuildable?

Tom Pickering:

Course it is. But the longer it goes on, the longer the linear process of recovery is going to take, and the more work we're going to have to do. And having a problem of once burned, twice shy, you don't reconstruct that whole question in the blinking of an eye. And there will always be this view: the Americans, at one time, elected somebody who did all of these things that, at least I'm trying to explain to you, have not helped promote American leadership in the world. Can we ever trust the US again to stay on track as we had trusted it in the period after the Second World War and through the Cold War?

Ian Bremmer:

If you were advising someone that just got out of college, just thinking about taking the exam, becoming a diplomat, what's something from your experience applied to the world today that you think they need to know?

Tom Pickering:

I would say that as difficult as present times are, we will need you even more in the rebuilding.

Ian Bremmer:

Ambassador Tom Pickering, thank you-

Tom Pickering:

Thank you, Ian.

Ian Bremmer:

... very much.

Tom Pickering:

Great to be with you, friend.

Ian Bremmer:

... very good.

Tom Pickering:

Thanks. Yeah.

Ian Bremmer:

That's our show this week. We'll be right back here next week same place, same time. Unless you're watching on social media, in which cases, wherever you happen to be, don't miss it. In the meantime, check us out gzeromedia.com.

Announcer:

The GZERO World is brought to you by our founding sponsor, First Republic. First Republic, a private bank and wealth management company. Imagine a bank without teller lines where your banker knows your name and its most prized currency is extraordinary client service. Hear directly from First Republic's clients by visiting firstrepublic.com.