Evan Meyer welcomes, David Michael Satterfield is an American diplomat and ambassador, who has served extensively in the Middle East, including the Persian Gulf area, Lebanon, and Iraq.
Meyerside Chats seeks to eliminate the “us and them” narrative and toxic polarization by striving to create virtuous community leadership and authentic conversation. The intent is to showcase the humanity in those that take on the often thankless jobs of public service through civil discourse, and honoring differing points of view.
About David M. Satterfield
The Honorable David M. Satterfield is the director of Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy and leads the institute’s Edward P. Djerejian Center for the Middle East. He is also the Janice and Robert McNair Chair in Public Policy. He has more than four decades of diplomatic and leadership experience, including service as special envoy for the Horn of Africa, assistant secretary of state, National Security Council staff director and as ambassador to Lebanon and Turkey and chargé d’affaires in Iraq and Egypt.
About Evan Meyer
Evan is the Founder of BeautifyEarth.com, a tech platform and marketplace that speed tracks the urban beautification process through art, as well as the original 501(c)3 sister organization and public charity that beautifies schools in the communities that need it most. Beautify has now facilitated thousands of murals around the planet, working with hundreds of communities, community organizations, cities and national brands.
He is also the Founder of RideAmigos.com, a tech platform that optimizes commuter travel and behavior through intelligent programs and analytics for governments, large enterprises, and universities, serving many regions across the US.
As a civic leader in the City of Santa Monica, he is the past Chairman of his neighborhood (Ocean Park), giving residents a voice in the public process, as well as helping the City of Santa Monica with innovative, actionable ways of civic engagement.
Podcast Summary
- [00:00:24] Introduction of Ambassador David Satterfield and his extensive diplomatic experience.
- [00:00:49] Mention of Satterfield’s notable negotiating experience and achievements.
- [00:02:41] Discussion on the current state of division and disagreement in US foreign policy.
- [00:03:00] Historical context of sharp divisions and the exceptional degree of public agreement in the past.
- [00:10:17] The role of the internet and social media in creating a lack of common facts and information
- [00:11:37] The impact of changing expectations and globalization on populist and demagogic appeals.
- [00:13:31] Avoiding contempt and catering to ethnic or racial identities as a response.
- [00:14:22] Different approaches: feeding, exploiting, or addressing the concerns.
- [00:16:00] Socioeconomic drivers behind the problems and the need for their resolution.
- [00:16:45] Loss of trust in foreign policy experts due to events like 9/11 and disastrous military adventures.
- [00:18:00] The negative context for the rise of populism and isolationism.
- [00:19:58] The concept of being “in the room where it happens”. How certain information is withheld from the public in various conversations and levels of decision-making.
- [00:20:00] The issue of the media and the distortion of narratives. Questioning how far the American people and others are from the information presented in these private discussions.
- [00:27:40] Media’s role in polarizing issues and the influence of corruption, lobbying, and private interests.
- [00:30:52] Discussion on the consensus regarding Putin’s actions in Ukraine and attacks on the president.
- [00:33:51] The fear of escalation and the risk of nuclear weapons in the conflict.
- [00:38:00] Three critical threats: divisions in the United States, socioeconomic challenges, and poorly considered military adventures overseas.
- [00:41:34] Discussion on the influence of business dealings on political decisions.
- [00:42:50] Exploring personal vision and the importance of facts shaping action.
- [00:44:03] The danger of ideology overpowering available facts.
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
David M. Satterfield , Diplomatic service, Bilateral negotiations, Multinational negotiations, Expeditionary diplomacy, Domestic issues, Economic challenges, Globalization, Demagoguery, Media influence, Socioeconomic concerns, Political divisions
Transcript
Evan Meyer:
[00:00:00] Hi everyone and thank you for joining today. Today we have Ambassador David M. Satterfield who has over four decades of diplomatic service and policy and management leadership experience in the United States and overseas in the Near East and Europe.
He has served as assistant secretary of state, National Security Council staff director and as ambassador to Lebanon and Turkey and charge’ d’affaires in Iraq and Egypt.
[00:00:32] Satterfield has extensive bilateral and multinational negotiating experience, most notably the 1995 Roadmap for Israel-Palestinian Peace (with the United Nations), the 2000 withdrawal of the Israel Defense Forces from Lebanon and Blue Line boundary agreement (with the United Nations), and the 2008 Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) between the United States and Iraq.
[00:00:54] He managed the largest domestic staff in the department’s history and directed fundamental reforms to the [00:01:00] Foreign Service that established “expeditionary diplomacy” as a career model.
[00:01:06] As director general of the Multinational Force and Observers ,Satterfield conceived and directed the comprehensive modernization military and civilian peacekeeping operations and led fundraising efforts with the U.S. Congress and donor governments.
[00:01:20] Among other honors, he’s the recipient of the highest Department of State Recognition, the Secretary of State Distinguished Service Award, the Office of Personnel Management Distinguished Federal Executive Rank Award, and the Multinational Force and Observers Distinguished Service for Peace Award. He’s a graduate of the University of Maryland, speaks Arabic, French, and Italian.
[00:01:40] Thank you so much for being with us, sir. How are you? My pleasure.
David Satterfield:
[00:01:45] Delighted to be with you today.
Evan Meyer:
[00:01:48] It’s really great to have you and you are an inspirational figure for sure. You’ve done a ton of amazing work. You’ve obviously won a ton of awards for your amazing work and. I’m [00:02:00] excited to have you here to discuss some of the issues that we’re having domestically in conversation around civics, around getting to understand one another’s perspectives so that we can get to better solutions quicker.
[00:02:15] This a lot of this problem that we have creates just long delays in actually understanding one another and we can’t get more of what we want faster. So given your international experience. Where do you see this problem right now in this country and is there a relationship to how we are seeing things internationally from what the media is telling us and so forth?
David Satterfield:
[00:02:41] I haven’t, there have been many times in the history of the United States, certainly over the course of the past hundred years plus, in which there have been sharp divisions within the US, divisions among citizenry. Divisions at the political and governmental legislative level over the direction of foreign [00:03:00] policy.
[00:03:00] We saw them most notably in the period that preceded the Second World War, when there was an end first World War, when there were very powerful America first movements, who argued strenuously against American involvement in European wars and external military adventures. That’s not new. What is new is the striking change from a truly exceptional degree of public, as well as governmental and bipartisan agreement in the broad direction of US foreign policy.
Once we entered the Second World War and in the long decades of the Cold War that followed.
Now that, agreement on fundamental lines of US policy, or if there was disagreement that the disagreement stopped at the shore, it did not project itself overseas. That has certainly ceased to exist. There is no comity.
There is no broad agreement as presented publicly. As opposed to privately on the direction of US policy and there are many reasons for this. Some of which are quite understandable, and I think without them you can’t take anything other than a critical position of why do they think that way? Why do they act that way?
Let’s look at the expectations in 1990, 1991.
When you had public philosophers, Francis Fukiyama, most notably claiming that there was an end of history in the end of Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, and then the fall of the Soviet Union itself. By which fall of history, Fukiyama meant the end of the fundamental dialectic that had shaped developments over the [00:05:00] proceeding.
Almost hundred years had come to a close, that was a very premature judgment and on most real world grounds certainly did not stand up to the text of what people actually did and what governments did.
[00:05:14] But it led an expectation that we were entering into the broad and fertile uplands of a world peace and American peace, and in America enjoying prosperity for more and more of its citizens.
[00:05:31] Continuing the rising curve of economic, social aspirations that had taken place since 1945. Reality was much harsher. The world did continue conflicts. There were attacks on the United States, both domestically and overseas, the end of the Soviet Union, the emergence of the Russian Federation did not bring about the piece that was expected [00:06:00] China which was thought to be a candidate for inclusion in the global system, in the global order membership in the W T O turned out not to be a willing participant in much of any of all that.
[00:06:13] Conflict continued, pension continued, and the economy proved to be not quite so everlastingly supportive of rising prosperity in the US as had been expected.
[00:06:28] Indeed, very different things took place on the economic side. And I start with this because I think it’s fundamental to understanding why a more populist demagogic appeal not just here in the United States where it’s certainly present.
[00:06:46] But in many democracies overseas and some of our closest allies and friends has had a resonance, the expectation that life would continue to get better and better and [00:07:00] expectations set in the forties, the fifties, the sixties, and into the beginning or mid 1970s, turned around.
[00:07:09] With increasing technological advancements, major employment bases diminished or disappeared entirely. Positive Labor moved the kind of without high school degree or with just a high school degree jobs.
[00:07:26] Jobs such as our parents, our grandparents, friends, and neighbors had held overseas. Now they’ve migrated overseas, first to a nation Germany and Japan.
[00:07:38] Then from Germany and Japan to the Asian tigers then from then to China itself. And now we’re facing the facts that China itself may be facing a diminishing labor force and arising cost of labor.
[00:07:53] It’s a natural progression in a global economy.
[00:07:58] But tell that, this is just a national progression. No one’s to blame. No one could stop it. It is the effect of a globalization to the worker who has lost his job or her job.
[00:08:13] To the family that doesn’t have the income that they expected they would have. The family’s facing rising college costs and diminishing returns for the degrees that they receive.
[00:08:24] It’s a tough message. And all too often in human history, I take this away from the United States and our unique experience, someone must be found to blame. It cannot be a natural ordering of the universe, which has happened in the past, will happen in the future. It’s someone’s fault.
[00:08:47] Now, fault finding is a product of every democratic system.
[00:08:52] But the finding of fault in democratic systems today in the 21st century is fundamentally altered from the admittedly difficult challenge of dealing with Yellow Press, fiercely competing newspapers. All of them anxious to secure and retain a base of readership by advocating very strong and very differing editorial lines.
[00:09:20] That’s something any of us who lived in a major city in the US were familiar with through the fifties, sixties, and seventies.
[00:09:28] Know it’s different today because at least at that time, there was a broad agreement on what the fundamental facts of an issue were. Why was there broad agreement? Because Walter Cronkite, John Chancellor, Chet Huntley, and David Brinkley brought you every evening those facts.
[00:09:54] And there was a common base, you could then take your opinion in very different directions. You could agree or [00:10:00] not agree with the politics of a particular party or a particular leader at a stable or a national level. Sure, but there was no fundamental disagreement over the fact set. There is such disagreement now.
[00:10:14] The internet, social media have created a world in which for many people, there is no one single set of facts. There is no single starting point for understanding economic issues, domestic, political issues, or international affairs. It’s a blessing and a wonder for those of us who want access quickly to the widest range of inputs.
[00:10:42] It’s a great thing. It has democratized information basis that were previously available only, and a great difficulty to specialists.
[00:10:55] That’s the good side of all of this. It’s the universalization, the democratization of knowledge, but it also has come without filters and with no ability for many to discriminate.
[00:11:08] Between what they read that represents genuine factual news. What is opinion and what are not facts at all, the true fake news. And there is indeed genuine fake news, although not as usually represented by those using that slogan. So you couple a diminishing sense of wellbeing from an economic standpoint.
[00:11:36] A multiplicity of those explaining to you why this has happened to you and who did it to you .
[00:11:45] Who is to blame? And what do you get? What do you get in the US? What do you get overseas in democracies?
[00:11:52] You get what every movement, which is populist in its core, demagogic in its style, comes up with. The identification of the other or the others who are responsible for your ills, and those ills are exaggerated and played upon endlessly.
[00:12:13] Prime is threatening you in your home, and it is because of X, Y, or Zed, others who are doing it, when in fact, the statistical presentation on crime shows historically, low rates of crime and continuing low rates of crime as a broad national phenomenon and as a broad urban phenomenon.
[00:12:42] But those fact-based analysis are lost in the appeal to emotion and above all to fear.
[00:12:50] Now, how do you respond to this as a society? How do you respond to it as a government? They’re two different courses to take, but there’s [00:13:00] one course absolutely not to take, which is to regard those who are fundamentally frightened, worried, angry, who see their world, their expectations change and diminish.
[00:13:16] You don’t regard them as deplorables and don’t treat them with contempt. You try to understand where they’re coming from. And address those concerns in as empathetic a fashion as possible while maintaining America’s democratic, encompassing, inclusive, not exclusive values and beliefs.
[00:13:43] Meet the needs of individuals seeking an inclusive ethnic identity in the face of perceived threats.
[00:13:52] You don’t misrepresent facts of the challenges confronting the US or the UK or France, [00:14:00] or any other democracy around the world.
[00:14:03] You speak honestly to it. But you speak from the heart as well as the head. That’s a skill that’s very difficult for many politicians to do.
[00:14:13] Now, what are the approaches you can take to all this beyond avoiding feeding it or deploring it?
[00:14:21] Or demeaning those who form that fearful, angry base?
[00:14:28] First, you can cynically and hypocritically respond to it, feed it, develop it, encourage it. Either because you are afraid of the challenge that it poses to you, to your political position or to your party’s political position, or you can attempt to write it.
[00:14:49] You’re not responding out of fear of the base, you’re responding out of a desire to manipulate it, exploited in order to increase your political standing. That is a [00:15:00] course which unfortunately many in the US and overseas in democracies have chosen very smart people of eminent sensibility and sense. Who understand right and wrong fact and non fact.
[00:15:17] Engage in the cultivation of exploitation of these sentiments, these fears. Either because they’re afraid of taking a different position or because they wish to exploit it, both certainly result in harm to the nation, to our society, to our political system. There is another approach. That other approach is to remain calm, to remain focused, to understand that at the core there is a socioeconomic driver behind these problems, and they must, these concerns [00:16:00] and the socioeconomic situation of our people, whether our people or this country or any other democracy, they’ve got to be addressed.
[00:16:09] I’ll add to you Evan, one additional complication that is specific to foreign affairs.
[00:16:15] We’ve spoken a lot about domestic turmoil and unhappiness and the roots, but let’s look at foreign affairs.
[00:16:24] Americans and others around the world who thought they were an entering a world
[00:16:30] of increasing freedom and peace of moving beyond conflict.
[00:16:38] Saw both involuntary intrusions on that hope. The events of 9/11, the terrorist attacks on the United States, terrorist attacks in Paris and elsewhere in democracies around the world. But then they saw something else. The disastrous, [00:17:00] ruinous, debacles of the adventures in Iraq.
[00:17:06] Afghanistan after the initial defeat of Al-Qaeda and in Libya and Syria.
[00:17:15] The message that taught americans and others was you cannot trust the respondents, the foreign policy experts, the specialists, whether diplomats or commentators or those involved from private think tanks.
They had led America to a horrific situation and a natural reaction to that is to turn away from external involvement. So look at America first, and to take a more isolationist to prove, not new in US history, but more profound right now because of what I often describe as the gut sickness, which these disastrous.
In terms of lives, in terms of treasure, in terms of alternate opportunities lost for America and Americans. These disastrous adventures, it’s going to take a while to recover from all of that, but it feeds and provides a negative context for much of the demagoguery and populism, which appears to be so prevalent.
In our and other societies today.
[00:18:27] So is it hopeless? No. Are there ways leaders can respond? Yes, but they should not respond by either responding in fear or responding. By cultivating these phenomenon, they will not help construct and sustain a more perfect union in the United States in a social or a political sense.
Evan Meyer:
[00:18:55] That was an amazing answer. Thank you. That was about as clear and informative that I could have possibly imagined an answer to that question. You’ve been at the table at a lot of these, in a lot of these conversations. And I like to use that term at the table. I think in Hamilton, there was a whole song on this then.
It’s if you’re not in the room where it happens.
David Satterfield:
[00:19:17] I want to be in the room where it happens. Says, Aaron Burr.
Evan Meyer:
[00:19:23] Yes.
[00:19:23] I and that’s stuck because it’s something I think about a lot in being involved, in local politics and civics at a large level and understanding a lot of this.
[00:19:34] You realize that at different levels and different conversations, there’s just things that the public is not privy to. There’s things that at the seat, at the board meetings that they’re not telling the people in the customer service department. And to a degree and that’s probably for good in a lot of ways, and maybe some of it isn’t, I don’t know.
But if you’re not in the room where it happens, the way I see it is. The narrative gets larger and larger. The chain links get longer and longer, and the story becomes like telephone. And maybe a lot of times it is accurately reflected, but it seems to me that one of the big problems with the media and narrative and that word has become a really a buzzword now, is narrative.
People, even people use it. They understand this issue. They seem to choose to continue to believe the narrative, but they don’t have a humility in their understanding, in their knowledge base very often.
: Now, it’d be great to hear from you being at the table, how far from the conversations that you’ve had or in the issues that you’ve seen or dealt with, how far are the American people or in, or people in other countries in general?
However you feel you want to answer the question, how far are we from the information that is presented in the room?
[00:20:52] At the table.
David Satterfield:
[00:20:53] There’s never going to be a perfect public facing presentation of all of the information. A quote in the room where it happens for obvious national security reasons.
[00:21:06] It, that’s just not a possibility. But the tragedy of this situation is that enough of the information in the room where it happens is available to the public is transparent rather than obscured, but it’s distorted. It’s represented in misleading fashion. Corrective measures that respond to mistaken judgements are not made clear at the time they’re taken, and so courses of folly appear to be endless.
[00:21:41] Knock the product of continued efforts to readjust. That isn’t done well, but believe me, on many fundamental national security decisions, whether right or wrong, mistaken, or correct, much of the facts that are available in the room are the [00:22:00] same facts, which are largely available outside.
Ukraine represented an extraordinary presentation where what was available in that room were made almost instantly available to the broad national and international public, so people understood exactly what was intended by Putin and Russia. Why we were trying our best to prevent what they wanted from taking place before the war began.
And if a war came to deny to Putin, the ability to create a false narrative about the sources of the war there, you had a perfect exposure or near perfect exposure, quite extraordinary.
David Satterfield:
[00:22:47] And it was a lesson learned from Iraq, from Afghanistan from other experiences. And I like to think a lesson for the future as well, what we do in those rooms.[00:23:00]
[00:23:00] Is really often not so much of an obscure rocket science as the same things people do in their everyday life. Here’s what we know. Here’s what we don’t know. Here are decisions we have to take. Here are the risks we think occur. If we take these decisions, here are the risks that occur. If we don’t take the decision, scale is vastly greater.
[00:23:25] But the process is not dissimilar. We don’t do a good job in government of explaining and presenting that.
Evan Meyer:
[00:23:37] So where are the data or the information getting distorted, at which points are they getting distorted, and how do we start to remedy that? Because if people are living a lie, Whatever the reason, they’re living false narrative.
[00:23:53] They’re living fake news, they’re living whatever, and it’s hard to discern now what’s real and fake. Especially now.[00:24:00]
David Satterfield:
[00:24:00] It’s easier to do on a policy issue like Ukraine. Where so much of the fact base it is, and not fake news, but genuine news is being accurately and timely reported and you see a higher degree of governmental and national consensus on the issue of Ukraine, that on almost any other external foreign policy issue that I’m familiar with since 9/11, certainly since 2003 and the invasion 20 years ago of Iraq.
[00:24:34] But even there, margins of both sides of our political partisan process criticizing the engagement.
[00:24:44] On the same basis, the extremes actually come together in why are we engaged in paying for, in taking risks for a far away people of whom little is known. Now, there’s an [00:25:00] overarching supportive consensus for Ukraine. And for the strategic implications of a victory by Putin in Ukraine for much broader issues than just Ukraine or just that region.
[00:25:14] And that consensus has held remarkably. It’s held remarkably because political leaders on both sides of the aisle have spoken cogently and frankly to the consequences of different outcomes. But over time, as checks continue to get written as military stockpiles diminish, extend an election campaign in the US truly takes hold.
[00:25:44] Certainly for the Republicans, this is going to be a difficult challenge, not that the national leadership doesn’t understand and support what is being done. But there is a deliberate cultivation of [00:26:00] exacerbation of an isolationist base that says this is just another folley like Iraq, like Afghanistan, like Libya, in which those pointy-headed elites are dragging you the good and honest people of the US implication everybody who doesn’t think like you is not a good and honest citizen of the United States.
Evan Meyer:
[00:26:27] Yeah.
[00:26:29] It does seem from, I’ll use CNN and Fox around the issues of, with Ukraine and Russia, that there is a general, most people seem to agree that what Putin is doing is absolutely horrific. I haven’t really heard anyone who thinks that. This is a good idea, right? But I hear a lot of attacks on the president, like the, maybe the stances they took on by Fox with the stances they took [00:27:00] on Biden previously.
[00:27:01] They have this commitment to continuing to pound him on certain decisions and or CNN, the opposite. And they nitpick on the, I don’t know the back stories of these things, but everyone pretty much agrees that this shouldn’t happen. Where do we go from here with this, how, why is it that every issue has to be polarized in some way? And we know to a degree why these things happen, right? There’s corruption, there’s lobbying, there’s private interest. It’s like these levels of problem, right? I imagine they exist everywhere to some degree.
[00:27:41] Let me know if you disagree with that. But knowing all of that, how is it that we are continually fooled by these issues, even around the small issues around Russia and Ukraine that they’re bickering on, but still tend to agree on the major premises. We shouldn’t be there. [00:28:00]
David Satterfield:
[00:28:00] It’s not that we are continuously fooled.
[00:28:03] It is that whether out of fear or out of exploitation, or a combination of the two, it is viewed as politically useful, necessary, profitable, or at least minimizes risk to, if not endorse. The extraordinary envenoming, of American political life, national life beyond politics as opposed to confronting it.
[00:28:33] Now, sometimes the response is silence. People don’t contribute to it. They’re just silent in the face of it. But silence denotes consent and is really under these circumstances, not an acceptable alternative for leaders. But why do the littlest issues get fed into this? Because we have now a concentration of media some of whom are intent to cast everything we now know in court records for reasons of audience share, not even notional belief in the factual character of what they’re reporting.
[00:29:13] Quite the opposite. Knowingly reporting something they’re aware isn’t true outta fear of losing audience base. Sure, CBS, ABC and NBC keenly competed each with the other for audience share. You bet. Whether on radio or on television. But not to the extent of knowingly broadcasting information they believed was false.
[00:29:42] And when such things happened, even the most prominent journalists, Dan Rather, is the poster case for this, lost their positions. That was a different time.
Evan Meyer:
[00:29:57] Yeah.
[00:29:58] We have what,110 armed conflicts around the world right now. Is that right?
David Satterfield:
[00:30:04] I guess.
Evan Meyer:
[00:30:06] I think I saw that on one of the Geneva Academy sites. Why do you think that Ukraine and Russia is taking up all the bandwidth in the public space? Given how much has gone on in so many other countries and just like right now.
[00:30:26] What is happening? What’s the main purpose?
David Satterfield:
[00:30:28] It honestly, it merits that premier position because the consequences of what is happening or could happen in Ukraine are so profound for broad, international and US interests. If Putin can declare a victory in Ukraine, if that happens as the outcome. Who is watching that outcome most carefully?
[00:30:56] Xi in China, and that will shape what China and Xi do in terms of potential other challenges, other conflicts, countries will respond with concern and self-help in the wake of a Putin victory, which diminishes the structural ability of the international order, whether you European, transatlantic, or regional.
[00:31:22] To be able to shape events. It will not be good for the US. It will not be good for any of our partners, and not just in a European or Eurasian context in a Pacific and Asian context as well. And also the horror of what Putin is doing, the deliberate campaign against civilian infrastructure. To freeze Ukrainians, to deny them food because he could not achieve his military objective.
[00:31:54] By pure force of arms on the ground, he is attempting to atri. Putin has several fundamental beliefs about the world, and I don’t say the US and the West or NATO in specific the world. The world is weak. Russia is strong. The world is impatient. Russia is endlessly patient. The world is incapable of absorbing pain for any sustained period.
[00:32:22] Russia knows nothing but pain and is capable of absorbing it indefinitely. This, in many ways is a personal campaign, if not vendetta, by this little man against the entire world, the world that he believes. Deliberately brought down his world, the Soviet Union, and then humiliated the new Russian Federation and he will pay us all back.
[00:32:54] It is that payback and it’s unacceptable consequences, which ought not to be acceptable. To any democratic state. Indeed, I would say even those who are not in the community of Democratic democratic nations need to be very worried about a Russian victory here for praise or couldn’t mean for them.
Evan Meyer:
[00:33:19] Should we be worried if Putin feels backed into a corner?
David Satterfield:
[00:33:25] One of the reasons why there was hesitancy. In providing extraordinarily lethal complex arms to Ukraine, at the beginning of this conflict is the fear of escalation by which is meant escalation to the use of a tactical nuclear weapon in some shape. Putin has escalated this conflict on his own timeline and in his own manner consistently.
[00:33:54] He plays on the fear. Of a further escalation to the nuclear level. I don’t dismiss that as a genuine concern. Any president, any prime minister, any head of state or government has to think this through very carefully. But Putin has played all of us with the card of escalation dominance line with him. As opposed to Ukraine or the supportive community working with Ukraine, that is a terrible position strategically for us to find ourselves in.
[00:34:32] And I would argue the risk, value of the risk of escalation, vice the certainty of consequences if he achieves what he can define as a victory. The two don’t come out on the same level.
Evan Meyer:
[00:34:52] Do you believe that he was in any way provoked, and this is part of the conversation around what could we have done [00:35:00] differently to prevent this? Was there any provocation that has happened from the US or NATO or anyone else? Where do you see, how do you see that narrative? And is there any truth to it?
David Satterfield:
[00:35:14] The reason why we released to the public, the enormous quantity of highly sensitive intelligence that we did starting in late October, beginning of November, well before the conflict began, was to diffuse what we absolutely anticipated would be a Putin narrative, that he was forced into this. It was to show this was a war of choice.
[00:35:43] An elective campaign that he undertook to achieve Russian national goals that were not provoked or forced upon Russia or Russian citizens in any sense? No, this was not a provoked campaign. You can endlessly sort through what Samuel Taylor Coleridge famously described as The Motive-Hunting of Motiveless Malignancy, but there’s no genuine provocation here whatsoever.
[00:36:20] Certainly not on the part of NATO. And reflect for a moment is Russia to define for who for its neighbors, for its next to neighbors. For countries that may have found themselves in the 19th century under the Russian empire’s control. For others, is it to define their security choices endlessly? Look at the end of the Cold War, there were debates about the expansion of NATO into Eastern Europe.
[00:36:55] Was this a wise thing? Was it not a wise thing? But at the end of the end was a provocation for Russia would approve a provocation at the end of the day. Those directly involved with those decisions. Said it. It was really not a matter of choice. Poland, the Baltics, Eastern European states who had lived under the horror of Soviet rule, wanted a guarantee that Russia wouldn’t come back.
[00:37:27] They turned out to have been not unwise to have sought that guarantee. No, I don’t see a provocation here.
Evan Meyer:
[00:37:40] Do you, obviously this is one of the most important critical threats of our time now. It feels that way, at least it’s top of mind for most people, the threat of nuclear war. Obviously no one wants that. What are, if you had to name the top three critical [00:38:00] threats to our country and or internationally that you see, what would they be?
[00:38:06] Divisions amongst the American people and the envenoming of discourse in the United States. The otherization of anyone and everyone who does not agree with me, and the assignation of labels to them, which are all too often tinged with racist or ethnic color. That’s the first threat.
[00:38:32] The second threat is, Socioeconomic. Their needs to be a better ability to provide fundamental socioeconomic stakes for more Americans.
[00:38:48] I would say same thing applies. If this were the government of the UK or France, how do you provide greater socioeconomic hope? Aspirations for more of your populations than you are doing at present. This is a challenge and it feeds almost everything else that is going on.
[00:39:11] Third, on the part of leadership and understanding of the consequences of engaging in military adventures overseas.
[00:39:26] Which are not well thought through, which are ill considered in terms of our ability to shape outcomes and whose consequence when they fail, is to further diminish the trust and the confidence of the American people in their leaders and the term used to be Vietnam syndrome. Accelerate an inward turning isolationist point of view to the extent that when a genuine situation like Ukraine appears where a significant investment of support is required for broadly agreed, understandable national interest, you get a reaction against.
[00:40:13] That’s something that I don’t blame publics for. I blame a succession over multiple administrations and multiple political party leaderships of disastrous and extraordinarily ill thought through external adventures, which led to this situation informed by the best of intentions, but ill thought through.
Evan Meyer:
[00:40:40] The road to hell.
[00:40:43] Paved with good intentions. It’s a classic. I have to remember that one. Been told it since we’re a kid, continues to today and never get never seem to get too far away from that. You think, it was interesting there was a lot of narrative around both Trump and [00:41:00] Biden and their dealings in the Ukraine.
[00:41:03] I heard a lot about that, but I don’t hear a lot about but when they were when Biden took on his presidency and Hunter Biden and all that, and then when Trump was president, do you believe that there’s any conversation here worth being had? It seems like it doesn’t happen anymore, but I just remember hearing a lot about it beforehand, that there’s business dealings in this country and those are pretty two pretty significant figures.
David Satterfield:
[00:41:28] I don’t believe for this administration any factors other than Vladimir Putin’s invasion of a peaceful neighboring state has any bearing whatsoever upon decisions or conduct of the US government, the president or our leadership. I would refer you to others to comment on the history of the proceeding administration and what it did with respect to the Ukrainian leadership and why.
Evan Meyer:
[00:42:01] Gotcha. You’re obviously very thoughtful in when you speak and how you speak and I can see that there’s deep sense of meaning and purpose around what you do and why you do it. And I, first, I want to acknowledge that. I think it’s great. And secondly, it’d be great to know.
[00:42:22] Where, when you started this, did you have a vision for yourself? Did you have a vision for the world? And now that it’s 40 years later, is it the same vision for yourself? Is it the same vision for the world? And if not, what is it? What is the vision for yourself and for your world, given all your great work?
David Satterfield:
[00:42:43] There is a Latin motto. Lux et veritas light and truth. Lux et veritas out of light, out of facts comes truth. If there has been [00:43:00] an informing principle to my professional career, it is that the facts not aspirations. Reality as best assessed and most carefully assessed should determine action rather than more fantastical, less fact-based appraisals.
[00:43:23] That ideology is important, absolutely, but ideology must shape itself to the facts. Not attempt to triumph over those facts and where nations, including the US have gotten themselves into the gravest trouble are when ideology imagined abilities to impact events have taken hold in the face of despite available facts to the contrary.
[00:43:56] That’s said without any political prejudice. [00:44:00] Both parties have yielded to this and part of it, and I say this, sympathetically, understandingly is a product of who we are. Exceptionally extraordinary. No challenge that if we brought the right resources to it, we could not meet no challenge. We could not win, frankly.
[00:44:25] There are in the military terms, hills out there that we just can’t take. We can diminish the threat posed by those hills. Yes, we can be cognizant of and work assiduously to minimize others’ attempts to move from those hills, but we do not as a nation and we have not been even as part of a coalition.
[00:44:52] Able to achieve all those objectives that we would’ve hoped to. Our initial attempt to take on those hills stemmed from this very positive and American sense of we can do anything know in the end, we can’t. And the price for trying and failing is often far greater. Then adopting a strategy, which through the decades of the Cold War, served us so well.
[00:45:25] Containment, risk mitigation. There are times when you cannot move the needle much into the positive side of things, but you can prevent it from moving further into the negative, and that’s a strategic achievement. We lost sight of that. We lost sight of it with the victory of the end of the Cold War, the emergence of Europe from chains, the fall of the wall, an event I never thought I would see in my lifetime.
[00:45:54] And then the fall of the Soviet Union that led us to believe anything was possible. The world is still shaped by factors over which we can have perhaps an influence and impact. Which we are not, in many cases, able to fundamentally change, and we shouldn’t take that as a failing on our party. We should take it as part of a rational, informed process that assesses decisions in the light of truths which are determined in the light of facts.
Evan Meyer:
[00:46:34] Yes, it’s and sounds also like I have some humility in what we know. One of the things I just got from the end of that.
David Satterfield:
[00:46:41] Any career in national security strategy apart from the purely academic to whom there are never consequences of the most grievous errors you just write on and pursue another tenure track.
[00:46:54] No. For those who are practitioners, we fail more than we succeed. That’s not a bad thing. [00:47:00] You learn from failure. You should learn from failure. You should learn important lessons. It is the repeat of the same failure for the same reasons over and over again, which is not, should not be, cannot be acceptable.
Evan Meyer:
[00:47:15] All right.
Evan Meyer:
[00:47:16] Close things off. Can you leave the world with the one thing you’d like to impart to America, to the world, to whoever that you believe from your learnings and which from what you wish to the world. Give that to them now.
David Satterfield:
[00:47:31] The world is an extraordinary place. The United States is an extraordinary country.
David Satterfield:
[00:47:38] Don’t allow anyone to shape a future of darkness. Bloom, despair as the sole outcome facing policy on hope, riskful basing of on despair equally bad. [00:48:00]
Evan Meyer:
[00:48:00] There you have it.
[00:48:01] Brilliant. David Satterfield, I thank you so much for joining. I’m sure people have learned a ton from this, and I just really appreciate you being here.
[00:48:11] This is great.
David Satterfield:
[00:48:12] Thank you very much.