Ambassador Nicholas Burns HARDtalk

Now

Now it

Now it is

Now it is time for

Now it is time for HARDtalk.

Welcome to HARDtalk I'm Stephen Sackur.

To put it mildly, a Washington foreign policy-making establishment

doesn't like Donald Trump.

Unqualified, ignorant, dangerous, those are the kind are adjectives

being thrown around.

But what about his rival?

And there are reasons to worry about Hillary Clinton's

foreign policy vision?

Is she an unreconstructed military interventionist?

My guest is veteran US diplomat and now foreign policy adviser

to the Clinton campaign, Nicholas Burns.

Is the Clinton worldview out of step with America's mood?

Nick Burns, welcome to HARDtalk.

Thank you, Stephen.

Let's start with this piling in on Donald Trump that we see

from pretty much all the sort of Washington and establishment

foreign policy and national security figures in the United States.

Frankly, that just helps Trump's narrative, doesn't it?

He's the antiestablishment candidate and this simply proves he's riling

up the establishment.

Well, it may help Donald Trump with his supporters

who are on the far right, but the great majority of Americans

who vote are in the middle, they are centre right, centre left,

they are independents.

They want to see somebody who has the capacity to govern who has

a modicum of knowledge about the world, if not much more,

and who has the temperament to lead.

And you are seeing a mass exodus of senior Republicans this week,

this extraordinary letter signed by 50 Republicans who have served

all of our presidents in recent decades, saying he would be the most

reckless American president in our history and they are questioning

a couple of things.

They are questioning his denigration of Nato, his appeasement

of Vladimir Putin, and the extraordinary lack

of judgement here is shown and the capacity, the lack

of capacity to know even basic facts about how the world works.

We have never had a presidential candidate like this.

Well, I have seen the letter, of course.

The interesting thing about the letter is that the names

on the end of it are longer than the words in the letter itself.

Those names, you know, let's talk about a few of them.

People like Michael Hayden, Negroponte, a whole bunch of people,

Tom Ridge, I suppose, all of them connected,

redolent of the era of George W Bush.

And I don't think Americans really regard those names as terribly

credible any more.

Oh, I disagree.

Some of these people, like John Negroponte you mentioned,

he was a career foreign service officer, he has

served our Democratic presidents, as did I,

as well as Republican presidents.

These are people who were part of the successes of the George HW

Bush administration when the Cold War ended.

Because of your worldview, you would rather talk

about George Bush senior, but I am more interested in talking

about George Bush, the son, George W Bush to the country

about George Bush, the son, George W Bush took the country

into Iraq, I think the consensus view across the United States now,

especially amongst the public, is that that was a terrible,

terrible mistake.

Donald Trump's message is the people who made that ghastly mistake,

which has repercussions to this day, not least in the creation

of the Islamic State organisation, these people are telling

you how to vote.

Why would you listen to them?

And this is the Donald Trump who supported the Iraq war in 2003

and now is lying about the fact that he did that.

He has changed the story completely.

What you are seeing is, and the Democratic party

are rallying around Hillary Clinton, and she is in a very strong

political position right now.

What you are seeing in their Republican party,

the 50 people who signed this letter this week but also the leadership

in the house and Senate is a real lack of support for Donald Trump.

He has shown on this campaign trail that he doesn't have

the fitness for office.

Whenever someone takes, criticises him, he responds

in a rational way, he doesn't seem to be cool under pressure,

he doesn't seem to be learning in this campaign and he has been

in it for one year.

He has alienated all Muslims, he has alienated arguably our closest

friend in the world, Mexico, and he has taken these

outrageous positions that would isolate the United States,

bring us back to an autarkic economy.

It is exactly the wrong way forward in this century.

I think the tide has turned in this campaign.

Let me remind everybody that you have offered advice

to the Clinton camp, so you are not entirely neutral

on this particular issue.

I am not neutral at all, I support Hillary Clinton.

Let's take down, if there is such a thing, Trumpism,

and what its core messages.

You can point to all of the "gaffes" and all of the comments which many

commentators regard is completely crazy but I would put it to you that

if you get down to what Trumpism is really about, there's a message

there that resonates with many American people.

That is, you know, putting America first, getting out

of many of the expensive commitments which, in Donald Trump's terms,

do not work in America's interest, and actually being much more

transactional and realistic about America's place in the world.

And that is not where the American people are.

I think what he has been able to do, you saw this with Bernie Sanders

on the left, there are a group of Americans who had been left

behind by globalisation.

Who have been priced out of the job market, whose jobs are no longer

there because they worked in the manufacturing industries

of several decades ago.

And obviously whoever is elected president,

and I hope that is going to be Hillary Clinton, are going to have

to speak to those people and that is why you have seen

Donald Trump too well but his electorate is

on

the conservative right, the great majority

of Americans are in the middle and if you look at the public

opinion polls, Americans don't want to dig a moat around

the country and pull up the drawbridges is,

there is a basis of support in this country for an active American

leadership role in the world.

Now, there are problems.

Forget the interruption but you mentioned opinion polls,

so I'm going to dive in with a very recent one.

Nearly six in ten Americans, 57%, want the US to "Deal

with its own problems and let other countries deal

with their own problems as best they can."

I can't think of a much better encapsulation of Trumpism.

Well, there are a lot of polls, I have just looked at the you polls

-- Pew polls, and the Pew polls are among the most credible

and the United States, they sure Americans support Nato

and Donald Trump has denigrated Nato, that Americans believe we had

to be true and faithful to our allies in Europe and in Asia,

that is what the polls show and the problem with Donald Trump,

he has the sweeping denunciations of everything

that

Republican, as well as Democratic presidents, have stood

for for the last six or seven decades.

I think it is too blatant a criticism of the entire post-war

foreign policy of the United States and it doesn't strike me

as reasonable, or one that is quick to give a success.

One of the things about Donald Trump that many Americans perhaps

are interested in is that he is actually prepared to tell it

like it is, not just to America's rivals and perhaps enemies around

the world, but also to America's friends.

When he to other Nato members, if you are not prepared

to pool your weight financially, then why should we offer our men

and material to you and lay down our lives for you?

He reflects a widespread feeling amongst Americans that you,

for far too long, have had to be a ridiculously disproportionate

portion of the burden for defending Western Europe.

I'm a former American ambassador to Nato and there is no question

we have been arguing with the Europeans to do much more

in terms of defence spending but...

It hasn't worked.

Maybe it takes a Donald Trump to get the message through.

I was going to give a data point.

Since Vladimir Putin invaders Crimea in 2014,

20 of the 28 allies have actually increased their defence budgets,

Britain is at 2%, France is near, Poland and the Baltic states

are all pushing 2%.

You know better than me, Nick Burns, four nations right now

meet the 2% threshold, which means an awful lot

of countries do not.

Maybe Donald Trump is going to change the dynamic.

Five countries meet the threshold right now, 20 of the 28

are increasing their defence spending, so the trends

are on the right direction.

We all want Europe to do more but Nato is not a protection racket,

we are not running this the way the Mafia would run an organisation.

If a country is at 1.6% of GDP on his defence and it is invaded

by Russia, of course the United States and Nato

are going to protect our country and I think the most reckless thing

that Donald Trump has said in this campaign and foreign policy

is that we would not back up our article five,

that is an attack on one is an attack on all,

commitment in Nato.

He has also said that he might consider recognising the Russian

occupation of Crimea.

This stands on its head the foreign policy of Ronald Reagan,

Dwight D Eisenhower, all of our Republican

presidents as well as our Democratic presidents.

He is completely out of the mainstream and I think

he is out of his depth on foreign policy.

All right, well you have had your pop-up Donald Trump

and I suspected you would, but I am actually perhaps more

interested in hearing you analyse Hillary Clinton's worldview

and foreign policy vision.

One of her problems is that she seems to have

learned little from Iraq.

She now describes her vote in support of the Iraq war

as her greatest regret

and her biggest mistake and yet here she is still a candidate

who appears to be offering the American people and vision based

on militarism, hawkishness and intervention around the world.

Has she learned nothing?

I think she has learned quite a lot if you read her memoirs of her time

as Secretary of State.

I think a lot of us, that includes me, I was in Government

at the time of the Iraq war, regret our support of the Iraq war

and we have to learn from it.

I would not describe Secretary Clinton the

way you just have.

She is a proponent for American engagement in the world.

That means being true to our allies.

It means having an effective military policy and strength.

But she is not someone who is articulating American

military intervention around the world.

In fact, she is someone opposed to Donald Trump who is saying

we have got to have alliances in the world and we have to lead

with diplomacy.

Donald Trump would have us withdraw from global leadership

and that is the antithesis of Hillary Clinton.

Yes, but you have to judge her on her words.

Syria, for example, if you look at the record,

back in 2012, she wanted to provide weapons to the anti-Assad rebels.

In 2013, she ultimately made it plain that she disagreed with Obama

on the question of military intervention after Assad's alleged

use, we all seem to think he did use them, chemical weapons.

It was described as a red line but in the end Obama backed away

from military intervention.

Hillary Clinton.

She thought was a mistake and much more recently she said this

of the Syria

policy of the administration, "It is time to begin a new phase,

to intensify and proper our efforts.

to intensify and broaden our efforts.

We should have no illusions about how difficult

but if we press forward, in the air and on the ground,

as well as diplomatically, I believe we can crush Isis."

Again, come back to the lessons learned from Iraq.

Has she not learned them?

These are mainstream views with which most of our European

allies and certainly most of the Sunni-Arab countries

would agree and I certainly agree with her on every example that

you cited, Stephen.

Back in 2012, we know now that she was part of a group,

including Leon Panetta and David Petraeus advocating not

that the United States intervened militarily in Syria that we actually

arm those Sunni rebels that could oppose the Assad regime

and the Assad regime has killed most of the civilians in Syria.

In 2013, if you do draw a line in the sand as President Obama did,

and then if Assad crossed it and you do nothing, that is a symbol

of weakness and so I think actually she is in the mainstream

of what most Democrats and Republicans here in our country

and I think in many European capitals, think would have been

the right way to go in Syria.

Stephen, looking forward...

On, before we look forward, it is important to learn

the lessons of history.

One of the most important lessons may because all the way back

to the 1990s, American arms supplies to the jihadist in Afghanistan.

You're now telling me that you and Hillary Clinton,

the women you want to see in the White House, believe it

would have been sensible in 2012 to be pouring weapons into Sunni

fighters in Syria?

Do you really mean that, given the inevitability that

many of those weapons would have ended up in the hands of fighters

who now proclaimed loyalty to Islamic State?

I think it made sense in 2012 and it still makes sense in 2016 that

if there are Syrians in the Sunni majority Arab community in Syria

who want to defend themselves, who are not part of

the Islamic State,...

It's not for you to decide who is not or a part of Islamic

State.

That is my point.

You in America surely have to accept, experience tells you,

from Afghanistan right across the Middle East,

that you cannot dictate the rules of the game in these conflicts.

Stephen, I did not say that the United States believes it

should dictate the rules of the game, I just simply said that

in the Civil War that has produced 12 million homeless,

the destruction of an entire country, the greatest

humanitarian crisis of our time, we shouldn't stand by.

No-one in this country, my country, is advocating

an American military intervention but what we are advocating is two

things, help those moderate Sunni rebels who want to defend

their homes and their villages and their towns against this

rapacious government in Damascus and its Russian,

Iranian and Hezbollah allies.

Number two, you've got to the refugees.

That means we have got to get humanitarian aid workers

by the United Nations and NGOs into Aleppo,

which is being besieged right now, pressure the Russians

and the Chinese to start vetoing those aid columns

at the United Nations, this is not an intervention

of a type and it was wrong, I think, in retrospect,

of Iraq in 2003.

It is simply trying to deal responsibly with the greatest crisis

in the Middle East and Syria and Iraq.

It also means, Stephen, we have got to fight Islamic State

and that is what Europe and the Arab world and the US

are trying to do.

I guess what I am picking away at is not so much the differences

between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, I think

they are pretty obvious, but actually the differences

between Hillary Clinton and the eight years of foreign

policy making we have seen from Barack Obama.

There is a very interesting book that has been out in the US

for a little while called Alter Egos by a New York Times writer

and he says, "Clinton and Obama have come to embody competing visions

of America's role in the world.

His vision, restrained, hers hard-edged."

Is that fair?

I don't think so.

I'm reading the book right now and I have a great respect for Mark

at the New York Times.

I think there is going to be a lot of continuity between Barack Obama

and Hillary Clinton on foreign policy.

But obviously there will be differences as well.

In this case, Syria and Iraq, President Obama has actually formed

an international coalition to fight the Islamic State,

mainly through the air, in Iraq and Syria but now

you have a problem, as you know, of the Islamic State metastasising.

They are in Libya, they control about 180 kilometres of coastline.

They have a lot of influence in Boko Haram in Nigeria,

so this is going to be a long struggle.

The European people's countries have to be involved and are and we had

to be involved.

I think that will be a major pursuit, if Secretary Clinton

is elected, and that is continuity with Barack Obama.

Coming back to Obama.

He famously said, and I cannot repeat all of his words

on here because there was a little bit of rudeness in it,

he said, "My mantra is, don't do stupid..."

And then a word I'm not going to use.

The danger, it seems to me, is that Hillary Clinton with a much

more combative worldview, we are not just talking

about what she wants to do in Libya, but also the way she wants

to respond to Vladimir Putin in Ukraine and across the piece

with relationships with Russia, also her stand on the South

China Sea and relationship with China, she seems to be

about to put America back into a highly confrontational

position with the world's other great powers.

I don't agree with that calculation at all.

Let's take those two examples, Russia and China.

I see Secretary Clinton very much supporting what President Obama has

done in working with the European Union, Angela Merkel,

we have sanctioned Russia over its illegal annexation

of Crimea and its division of Ukraine.

We have put more Nato troops into Poland and the Baltic states

to show President Putin that we are going to support

our Nato allies.

That is an Obama position, it is an Angela Merkel position,

it is the British position, also supported by the Hillary

Clinton.

On the South China Sea, the United States is not looking

for a military conflict with China.

But we are looking for freedom of navigation

and we do want to support the rights of countries like the Philippines

and Vietnam not to have their sovereign waters trampled

upon by the Chinese.

I actually don't see on those two questions a lot of distance

between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

You see, I think I do.

I think Barack Obama was very mindful that right now,

the US is not able to be the world's policeman in the way it has been

before, and you talk about this foreign policy establishment

that runs through a previous administration, both Bushes,

and the Clinton Administration as well.

There was this idea of America being the world's policeman.

Barack Obama didn't really buy into that, and he's partly not

buying into it because he recognises power has shifted, economic power

not least has shifted, and there needs to be another

paradigm for the United States.

Hillary Clinton doesn't seem to accept that.

I really think that is unfair to her.

I think Secretary Clinton sees what a lot of us see,

that the United States, by any metric, is still the most

powerful country in the world and will be for several

decades to come.

China is not going to surpass the USA military power or political

influence and certainly not an economic power.

Certainly not in terms of the elevation of our economy.

We have got to lead.

But you are right, I think there is an acceptance

here that we have got to evolve and be more multilateral in some

respects to work in coalitions, a good example of that with the US-

China cooperation on climate change.

I don't see a big difference between Hillary Clinton

and Barack Obama.

But Hillary Clinton has been throughout her career as senator

for New York and as Secretary of State, she wants

the United states to maintain its military power,

she wants the United States to lead but this is a consensus

that we have had, whether it is Bill Clinton,

George W Bush, Barack Obama, and it is who is out

of the consensus, Donald Trump who is charting a new way that

would weaken the United States in my opinion.

One specific thing, and again you speak as a very ardent

supporter of Hillary Clinton and adviser to her campaign,

there is a trust problem, isn't there?

This is perhaps more of an issue inside the United States

with Hillary Clinton's perception around the world,

but there is a trust issue and it goes to the use of how private

e-mail server for top secret, confidential electronic documents

which she should never have done and which she has now been slammed

for by the director of the CIA.

Excuse me, the FBI.

It also goes to what happened on Benghazi on her watch

and the loss of American lives which many Americans feel

that she has never truly given her a full accounting for.

That is a big trust problem.

If you look at the public opinion polls, that is certainly

an issue in this campaign.

For both candidates.

I would say, Stephen, that the attack on Hillary Clinton

on Benghazi, I have looked at it, I am a former career person,

I have served both parties, I think it just doesn't stand.

There was no way that the United States could have rescued

Ambassador Chris Stevens and his colleagues that died that

night in Benghazi.

There have been tons of reports, lots of reports on this and I think

it has been the right wing that has hijacked this issue and has lodged

unfair attacks on Hillary Clinton, and I don't think it is right.

I hope the public will be able to get beyond that.

Certainly there will be a dramatic moment in September and October.

There are three debates scheduled.

These two candidates are going to stand side-by-side,

Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump on stage.

I think it is going to be pretty clear by September or October

who is the most trustworthy candidate, who is the most likeable

candidate.

It is not going to be Donald Trump.

His campaign is sinking because of his mendacity

and because of his unreliability and I think she is someone who can

be trusted with American power.

You raise an interesting point there and it is one

I want to close with.

You are right, the polls are favouring Hillary Clinton

big-time right now and it may be the American public chooses

Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump, for reasons which have nothing to do

with our conversation with a fairly detailed analysis of the foreign

policy challenges and strategies of the two candidates.

Here is a possibility, Hillary wins power

but she doesn't necessarily have the backing of the American

people for the more muscular, more competent foreign policy that

I am trying to persuade you Hillary Clinton seems

to be pushing.

In which case, that is a danger for the United States because,

if there is a disconnect between what the president wants

to do and what the American people are prepared to wear,

that makes foreign policy making potentially very dangerous.

I think you have got a point in that we are a democracy

and so we have to rely on public support, and what is happening

in both political campaigns, the Democrat and Republican,

is that there is not a consensus on whether the United States should

be engaged or should retreat isolationism.

There is no consensus on trade and no consensus

on immigration and refugees.

If she is elected, and I hope she will be, a President Clinton

is going to have to deal with those issues and appeal to the American

people that we have got to have an outward

looking foreign policy.

And she has given no indication if she knows how she...

She has given no indication of how she might go about doing that.

I don't think that is true.

I think on refugees, immigration, certainly,

she has given an indication, and certainly she supports

an engaged leadership role for the United States.

I think she is going to provide that leadership but I am agreeing

with you that this is going to be the major challenge,

to try to create a stronger basis of American public support

and congressional support for the kind of role that we have

to play in the world.

I think that will be an immediate challenge of her presidency if,

as I hope, she is elected in November.

Interesting you say that, and we are almost out of time,

but give me those issues, then, where you think she faces that

difficult challenge of knitting together what she truly believes

with what the American people will wear.

Keeping our doors open to refugees, making sure that we have a sensible

immigration bill that can legalise the existence of a lot of people,

Mexican-Americans in this country, and also making the argument

that we've got to be smart about our power.

We have to lead with diplomacy, we have to learn our lessons

from Iraq, but we have to lead.

There is a big choice in the selection between

an isolationist, I think, ignorant Donald Trump, and a strong,

experienced leader like Hillary Clinton.

She will have to use that bully pulpit to convince the American

people that she is right.

Nick Burns, we have to end there but I thank you very much

for being an HARDtalk.

Thank you, Stephen.