R. Nicholas Burns

Well, first of all, I think that Secretary Gates was right, that NATO does face “a dim and dismal future” if Europe doesn’t do more to provide some of the muscle for NATO to expand their defense capacity. And you’re right; it’s been a preoccupation of ours for about forty years. Jimmy Carter during his presidency made this a signature issue with the NATO allies. And I certainly dealt with it when I was U.S. Ambassador to the alliance in the first part of the last decade.

The alliance has always been unbalanced. The United States has always been, by a mile, stronger than all of the other allies—in some cases combined. And that’s not going to change given the size and quality of our armed forces and the technological edge that we have. But we do have a right to expect the Europeans to do more. 

The biggest problem we have is that the largest continental allies—Germany, Italy, and Spain—are all spending well below 2 percent of their gross domestic product on defense. For comparison’s sake, we spend 4.3 percent of our GDP on defense. If they don’t do more, and particularly Germany, which is the keystone here and the largest country in Western Europe, it sends a signal to the others that they don’t have to step up to their responsibilities, either.

We saw this in Libya. President Obama challenged the European allies to lead there. And the U.S. had always led, in every military mission NATO had ever undertaken in sixty-three years. But the British and French did this time. Now, they almost ran out of munitions and had real problems operating without the United States, and, in fact, the United States provided a lot of backup support.

Nonetheless, Libya was an interesting example of a European-led success. But it was also a near miss, because if that campaign had gone on much longer they would have had to call upon the United States to rescue them. This is a serious problem. I think you’ll see at the summit in May that President Obama’s going to focus on this.

Well, I think the Europeans know that the United States is not going to quit NATO. It’s not in our interest to do so. We have learned, especially over the last ten years in Iraq and Afghanistan, that we need friends and allies around the world. We can’t go it alone. We can’t be unilateral, and they know this—that NATO is intrinsically important to us. 

And yet, I think that the Europeans will have to get used to the fact that the United States will also be looking to Asia—looking to East Asia and South Asia. And that we may not always be around for every contingency in Europe, and they may have to step up.

So I think there is an element of self-interest here for the Europeans, that they need to advance their capabilities, because they’ll count on the United States and yet we won’t always be involved. We won’t send troops to every minor conflict that occurs, say, in the Balkans.

I don’t think that there’s an alternative, in the sense that there’s no alternative in isolationism. You and I both know the history of our country.

For nearly two and a half centuries we have flirted with isolationism, all the way back to the Founding Fathers and as recently as this year, with the Tea Party, which is a very isolationist group of people in many respects with regards to foreign policy.

And yet we live in the most integrated, globalized community that the world has ever seen. Our fate depends on other people. We can’t determine the course of history ourselves. We need friends to help us; we need allies. This would be the worst time for the United States to walk away from NATO.

We’re leaders and this is a tough time; we’ve got unemployment rates at 8.3 percent. We’ve got people with homes foreclosed. There’s a lot of economic uncertainty. People ask how we can afford this.

We have to find a way to afford a first-class military, hopefully without wasting money. And we have to find a way to afford a country that acts globally, because we’re the only superpower in the world. And if we aren’t present in most of these conflicts, then usually things go wrong, and then it ends up hurting America in the long term.

Well, they’re very different. I think we should be exceedingly cautious about the use of force in Iran, in the following respect. Iran is a real problem. It’s seeking a nuclear-weapons capability. Few people doubt that. It’s the leading funder of terrorism in the Middle East. It’s been very unhelpful to us in Iraq and Afghanistan.

However, we have not had a sustained and substantial conversation with the Iranian government in thirty years, since the Jimmy Carter administration. It seems to me that President Obama has this exactly right. You know, what he’s been saying over the last couple of weeks is we have to be prepared to use force against Iran. We have to stop them, one way or another, from becoming a nuclear-weapons power. We will support Israel. We’ll defend Israel if necessary.

But the last thing the President’s been saying is the most important: we should negotiate with them. We’ve got time. They’re not a nuclear power. It’s not imminent that they’re going to become a nuclear-weapons power. And there’s a space, perhaps for most of the rest of 2012, where the United States ought to be negotiating with Iran. Those negotiations will likely be started before the Chicago summit in mid-May. So when the summit is here, there’ll be some negotiations in Europe with the Iranians.

It makes sense that we at least probe into the possibility that the Iranians might want to end this conflict at the negotiating table, not in war. And if we can end it at the negotiating table and prevent them from becoming a nuclear-weapons power, it’s far better for our country. As a last resort, if we’ve exhausted diplomacy at some point in the future, we can always use force. 

But not now. It doesn’t make sense yet. I really think the president has made a compelling case for diplomacy first with Iran.

You’re preaching to the choir here, because I run a project on diplomacy at Harvard Kennedy School, and I believe very much in diplomacy.

But you’re right. 9/11 was a terrible day and presented a real threat, and we responded with force. We invaded Afghanistan and invaded Iraq a year-and-a-half later. We occupied both those countries for the better part of the last decade.

The proper way to think about our foreign policy is that you talk, negotiate, look for weaknesses, look for agreements—first. Only when you’ve exhausted those options do you think about force. And after 9/11, we reversed that. We led with the military. We had the diplomats, people like myself (I was ambassador to NATO at the time) in reserve. And I think what President Obama has been able to do quite artfully is to reverse it once again to its proper sequencing.

I heard Secretary James Baker on Charlie Rose recently, and we’re going to be honoring him at Harvard tomorrow. I heard him say, “You have to negotiate with countries you don’t like. You have to be willing to talk to governments you might not like very much.”

Former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who was a pretty hard-nosed person, said this before he died: “You don’t negotiate peace with your friends. You negotiate with very unsavory enemies.”

It is not unpatriotic or unwise to sit down with Iranian diplomats. It’s smart, because we might be able to outfox them and outwit them and get our way without war. It’s not unpatriotic to talk to the Cuban leadership, because we’re going to try to weaken them through negotiations. Some people in our political leadership have designated a whole bunch of countries we can’t talk to anymore.

The world just isn’t made like that, and the United States is not powerful enough to fight everybody.  Diplomacy is actually a great strength of our country. We’re really good at it, by the way, and we’ve got a first-class Foreign Service. And we’ve done very well for how small we are. I was a member of the career Foreign Service until 2008. We’re about 6,500 people. That’s not much bigger than two armed heavy brigades in the U.S. military. Someone told me there were more lawyers in the Pentagon than there are American diplomats.

But we’re forward-deployed for the United States. We’re in all the embassies and consulates around the world. We’re the eyes and ears of the America, and should use our diplomats to try to advance our interests around the world. Nearly all the military officers I know agree with this, and they only want to be called upon when there’s no hope left for a diplomatic solution. And I trust these people in uniform who’ve done such a great job for us over the last ten years.

To answer your question, I became Ambassador of NATO just before 9/11. I arrived in Brussels on August 31, 2001. And during that summer, before my arrival in Brussels, there was a lot of talk about whether or not we should invite Russia to join the alliance.

After 9/11, President Putin declared that he did not want to join the alliance. Instead, he wanted a partnership, so in the spring of 2002, President Bush and the other NATO leaders formed a NATO-Russia Council with the Russian government. We meet with the Russians, who have a mission, a physical presence there at NATO, daily.

But it’s a complicated relationship, and I’ll tell you why. We have a lot of disagreements with Russia. It’s not a democracy and to be a member of NATO you have to be a democracy. So there’s one strike against Russia. Secondly, Russia has not been, in my judgment, a positive force in the world. What does Russia stand for? When was the last time that Russia stood up for something optimistic and positive?

Russia seems to be intent on blocking the United States and the Europeans and the Japanese in places like the Security Council. But they don’t have many countries that support them. They don’t have their own alliance. We have this global alliance that we can rely on because we have like-minded democratic countries. So there’s a difficulty in dealing with them, and President Putin has been a very difficult adversary.

On the other hand, we have arms reductions talks and a New START (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty) agreement with the Russians that President Obama negotiated. We are working on counterterrorism and counter-narcotics with the Russians. And the Russians have been helpful to us in Afghanistan. They’ve helped to facilitate the supply of American troops. So it’s a complicated relationship. There are some positive things happening, there are some negative. I wouldn’t brand Russia an adversary of the United States, as Mitt Romney did. I think it’s a lot more complex and complicated than that.

The fundamental problem that we have in NATO is that the largest European country, Germany—the keystone country geographically, is an economic superpower and a military pygmy. It’s not pulling its weight militarily, spending barely over 1 percent of its GDP on national defense. As I said earlier, U.S. taxpayers are spending over 4 percent of their GDP. In a democratic alliance, it is not fair that the United States has to shoulder so much of the burden.

I don’t think anybody worries that Germany is going to deviate from its democratic course. It has profoundly changed over the last sixty-five years, since the end of the Second World War. And you saw in Libya, when Germany opted out, how that weakened the overall NATO mission. It put an incredible burden on the British and French.

Currently, I’m a board member of the Atlantic Council and we’re working on a paper on NATO’s future. It will be published on April 30th, before the Chicago summit. And one of the key recommendations we’re going to make is a long-term effort by Europe and the United States to encourage Germany to take on new leadership responsibilities inside NATO. And that means they have to spend more, as the largest economy in Europe.