On October 24, Chatham House, a prominent London-based think tank, named Secretary of State John Kerry and Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif as co-recipients of an annual prize. Members of the institution vote for person, persons or organizations who have made “the most significant contribution to the improvement of international relations in the previous year.” Kerry and Zarif were chosen to receive the Chatham House Prize critical roles they played in negotiating the historic nuclear deal between Iran and the world’s six major powers in 2015.
On October 31, Secretary Kerry accepted the award in London. In his address, he called on people to “explore every other avenue, use every tool, transparently summon every bit of reason, and deploy every moral, political, and economic argument at our command to avoid” war. Kerry said Zarif was a “tough, very capable negotiator… who fought hard for his nation’s interests while always trying to find a constructive way to solve” problems. The two tried to coordinate schedules. Zarif, however, was not able to attend due to a “busy schedule.” But Chatham House director Robin Niblett said the institute planned to present it to him “at another time in the near future.”
Kerry also praised Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has the final word on Iran’s most important policy decisions. “I think ultimately to the credit of the ayatollah and Iran, they made a fundamental decision they were willing to submit to the scrutiny and give up that [nuclear] program,” Kerry said.
The following are excerpts from Kerry’s acceptance speech.
Secretary of State John Kerry
I am really gratified to receive this award for several reasons ….This occasion is a welcome chance to renew my own personal thanks to the many partners in this negotiation– without whom, there simply would not have been an agreement. Philip Hammond and our colleagues from Germany, from France, Russia, and China, and the EU. I want to acknowledge particularly my co-recipient, our Iranian counterpart, Foreign Minister Javad Zarif. I’m sorry that he isn’t able to be here. We tried to coordinate schedules and coordinate this event. But I want to make it clear that Javad is a very tough, very capable negotiator and a patriot all the time who fought hard for his nation’s interests while always trying to find a constructive way to solve the problems that we both understood were gigantic hurdles for both of our countries and both of our peoples, for our politics, and the divisions that exist at home for each of us.
At the end, you may recall, it was this more than 19 consecutive days and nights in Vienna. It took a lot of brain power, took a lot of sweat, and of course, a few hundred pounds of schnitzel, to turn ideas and ideals into documents, and documents into an agreement that is today ensuring that Iran’s nuclear program is exclusively peaceful, thereby making the world safer and also expanding opportunities for the people of Iran.
Presidents Obama and Rouhani had to make fundamental decisions, and both of them had to take on a political risk, both of them had a to share a vision here and have the courage to seek the diplomatic path which so many were, almost throughout it, ready to predict could only be resolved probably by bombing, by war, or wouldn’t be resolved certainly in the near term. It is a reminder and I think this is the significance and this is the way I accept this award; a reminder that despite decades of distrust and disagreements that continue to divide us to this day, when leaders are willing to at least talk and try, it turns out that not all fates are predetermined.
The third reason that I’m grateful to be here is because as we face multiple conflicts in a world that is changing at a pace that is difficult for anybody to keep up with, which is presenting a clash not of civilizations but of uncivilized people who attack civilization itself, a clash of modernity with culture and history and religion and ethnicity and sectarianism and a hundred different other emotions and motivations, we see particularly a time of sectarian, religious, and terrorist characteristics appearing in non-state actors, which is a very different phenomenon from that which characterized the last century.
In our lifetimes, it has been diplomacy, good diplomacy, and a vision and ideals and values that drive it that has established foundational global institutions which matter to us and which we need to nurture more. It has forged landmark principles of human rights and law, produced consensus goals for human development. I might mark that for the first time in human history we are now below 10 percent in terms of severe poverty on a global basis. And it is also that diplomacy that has provided a detente to prevail over the prospect of nuclear conflict and allowed us to avoid the devastation of a third world war.
So often in the world today, if you listen to the naysayers and the critics who second-guess the cost of every single action, you can easily overlook something greater – the cost of inaction, the price we pay when countries don’t talk, the debt that is compounded with interest that piles up over conflicts that just remain frozen, the expense that mounts when wounds aren’t healed, the danger that grows when threats aren’t addressed through cooperation and when later they can only be addressed through conflict. Those of us engaged in the practice of diplomacy are engaged in a constant competition with time. Every minute that we stand still – and this goes to what Philip may have been saying about my sense of urgency that drives this – every minute that stands still, breaches widen and wounds fester and another generation of young people are not put in school but their minds are subject to the minds of the exploiters, the extremists, the nihilists. We see that particularly true in a world that with massive new platforms of information and the raging impact of technology coupled with yet another wave coming at us in terms of artificial intelligence tells us we better find some ways to put these people to work and give them opportunity.
So new inventions and technologies can quickly become new sources of danger. Non-state actors, as I mentioned earlier, have a much greater influence on events than ever before, and the world is less hierarchical, and there are far more competitors for power and influence. Meanwhile, age-old plagues of extreme nationalism and sectarian conflict, which should have been relegated to history, and we all hoped had been, actually remain a force in our time. So we live in a world of instant communication across virtually every single border, and yet, too often our ability to understand each other remains suspended in amber. And that matters.
My father was a diplomat for a number of years and I learned from him that diplomacy begins with the ability to see another country through the eyes of the people who live in it. He taught me that lesson while our family was stationed in Europe, stuck in the shadows of World War II. Our first foreign post, Berlin, a divided city in the early 50s; London still rebuilding from 57 consecutive days and nights of bombing during the Blitz; France, where my mother saw her childhood home occupied by the Nazis, razed to rubble, bombed out and booby-trapped as they retreated. And as a child, I even played in the bunkers and tunnels that remained as the detritus of war. For me, these were real-time reminders at a very young age of the grim reality of even just and necessary wars. And it offered a powerful lesson that while some wars are unavoidable, those that could be prevented through persuasion and through perspective should be.
Decades later, I fought in a war that could have been avoided through the kind of diplomacy and through the ability to understand perspectives besides our own and to see other people in countries through their eyes – something we never did in Vietnam. It was a war that went on far too long while politicians were afraid to negotiate without preconditions and instead debated the size and the shape of the negotiating table. And needless to say, I learned many things in Vietnam. But above all, I learned that you should not go to war because you want to; you should go to war because you have to.
I also learned an enduring truth that may seem simplistic, but it’s a constant: Peace is better than war. And believe it or not, there is nothing inevitable about the conflicts that are raging in places like Syria, Yemen, Libya, South Sudan, Somalia, Nigeria, Afghanistan. If war is a choice, then peace is also a choice. And believe me, what we have the power to choose, we have the power to change. I believe that. And certainly, we in positions of significant power and responsibility have an important duty to try. I’d rather be caught trying.
Trying to understand adversaries is not a favor that we do for them; it’s in our interests. And talking to each other isn’t a favor that big countries do for small countries; it’s a strategic imperative for everybody. And trying to avoid conflict isn’t a weakness; it’s a strength. And I say that reminded that the British prime minister who said, “To jaw-jaw is better than war-war,” was named Winston Churchill, not Neville Chamberlain.
Now, that doesn’t mean that war is never an answer. I’m not a pacifist. But it does mean that, first, we have an obligation to explore every other avenue, use every tool, transparently summon every bit of reason, and deploy every moral, political, and economic argument at our command to avoid it, since, after all, it was no less a conservative than Sir Edmund Burke who argued, “A conscientious man would be cautious how he dealt in blood.”
So this afternoon, I ask that we, all of us, rededicate ourselves to a world in which peace is nurtured with greater fervor and resources than those that we devote to war, a world in which no nation is ever afraid to try to improve relations with every other, and for the very basic reason that life is better than death and peace is better than war. Thank you, very, very much. (Applause.)
MR NIBLETT: Can I just start with one very broad question? How do you balance this aspect of secrecy, being able to sustain public support at home even before you get to the negotiation on the other side?
SECRETARY KERRY: Well, it’s critical. Secrecy is a valuable element at times, and I know people – as long as your final result and your process is ultimately subject to some kind of scrutiny, some sort of test of legitimacy, I think it’s something you have to have. Because you may not get off the ground. You may never get started. There were powerful forces that were deeply opposed to this. I mean, it’s not often that a prime minister of another country comes to the Congress and in the middle of the Congress, speaks against the sitting president’s policy. That happened, and you can imagine the forces that were unleashed as a result, and the tension that existed.
I give you a sense of how this weighed on us. Because Congress was impatient for whether or not something real was happening, and because tweets were going out from various parties suggesting they’re giving away the score, they’re going to expose us to nuclear blackmail, or – they’re built up in impatience with the process, that required that we actually do something which was extraordinarily detrimental to the process, which was to be – I think it was in Lausanne – where we had to put out an interim agreement.
Now, I didn’t put out an interim agreement because I thought it was going to help the negotiations, or I thought it was going to make things easier. In fact, I knew it was going to make them harder. And it exactly did. Because once people who were taking for granted that this would ever go anywhere saw that there was a reality to what we were achieving, the opposition kicked into super gear and the politics became that much harder. And the only reason we had to go out publicly with that particular – at that particular moment was that had we not, we didn’t have any excuse for arguing to Congress why they shouldn’t pass another round of sanctions. And if they had passed another round of sanctions, that would have been a message to our colleagues with whom we were negotiating that we weren’t serious and that it was the same old, same old with the Satan of the West who paid no respect to the process, and was willing to sanction the hell out of people while they’re negotiating. You can imagine the impact.
So that yin and yang is a constant presence. And in a world of tweets and emails and podcasts and what have you, it became that much more complicated as we went on. But ultimately, I mean, the test is what you have graciously paid tribute to today, which is by staying at it and keeping people focused and by recognizing the stakes. And what I think drove us – and it’s not an exaggeration; I just ask you to imagine, if we didn’t have a protocol by which Iran was willing to live and prove to the IAEA top standards of the world’s best scrutiny, that this is a peaceful program, just imagine where we would be, at a time where I’m telling you there were people who were arguing vociferously we needed to go to war to prevent them from having a program.
So the stakes could not have been higher, and I think ultimately to the credit of the Ayatollah and Iran, they made a fundamental decision they were willing to submit to the scrutiny and give up that program. And we, on the other hand, made a fundamental decision we were willing to fight the fight of lifting sanctions in exchange for a set of standards of behavior that could guarantee us this program was peaceful. And that – and both of us had strong and powerful reasons for wanting to move down this road, which is also an essential ingredient of any negotiation. You can’t just will a negotiation to a conclusion. If the other party – I witnessed Israel-Palestine, which I spent two years working on. The leaders just weren’t prepared. It’s that simple. We had plenty of solutions, plenty of ways to go forward, but if people aren’t willing to assume the risk that President Obama and President Rouhani assumed, there’s nothing the negotiator is going to be able to do to change that. So you need fundamental decisions of vision and creativity and of hope, and sort of an aspiration that is expressed in the negotiation that both sides embrace.
MR NIBLETT: Do you have a most difficult moment?
SECRETARY KERRY: There were several of the most difficult moments. I’ve been accused a number of times of not being willing to walk away. But the truth, I’ve walked away several times, quietly. One was right here in London. I was poised to pull out of Geneva to negotiate, but because there had been a step backwards in the interim week, I informed them I wasn’t coming, and I stayed here in London. I actually had one of the most delightful days I’ve had in the country. (Laughter.) That should happen more. No – (laughter).
So, and then we managed to get back on track. But I was serious about it. I mean, there were moments – there were a couple of other moments. In Lausanne, in the last days of – it was a very tense moment where it wasn’t certain that we could get over a couple of hurdles so that people were serious about the effort to get there. And this is where there were – both sides, there were back-home skirmishes going on almost all the time.
MR NIBLETT: And that comment about back home, as we watched this agreement from London, obviously the UK being a signatory and key partner in this agreement, we can’t but help wonder, can agreements like this survive? Where does the executive power, the congressional power – let’s just talk about the U.S. side. We can come to the Iranian in a minute. But on the U.S. side, is this agreement designed in such a way that it can survive?
SECRETARY KERRY: Well, I mean, the answer is yes, providing that people don’t do dangerous things that can be interpreted as bad faith in the process. It is certainly designed on its face to more than survive. I mean, what people don’t realize about this agreement is that this is not a 10-year or a 15-year agreement, or a 20-year or 25 years, even though there are benchmarks in it for each of those things. For instance, 15 years you cannot have enrichment above 3.67 percent. For 15 years, you cannot have a stockpile more than 300 kilograms. So it is physically impossible, as long as you are verifying that— just on those two things— to not make a bomb. You cannot make a bomb with 300 kilograms. You can’t make a bomb at 3.67 percent enrichment.
So what we’ve built in, then, is beyond that 20 years of television cameras looking at the process of centrifuge production, and then 25 years tracking of all the uranium so that you have a cradle-to-grave knowledge of all the uranium they mine, which feeds in it and out of how much is available for production as yellow cake and on into a bomb.
So there are huge build-ins here, but the most important of all is the fact there’s a lifetime for the duration of this agreement, right under what is called the Additional Protocol of the IAEA, to be able to have a challenge, inspection, and test of the good faith of a particular facility, or if we had information leading us to believe something’s happening, we can in fact follow up on it. And then we always have the ability to bring back sanctions, or even – god forbid if you have to, but if you have to, you have to – have a direct confrontation over there with a compliance with it.
Now, Iran has complied with every part of it so far. They’ve dismantled centrifuges, they’ve dropped the stockpile, they’ve transported enriched uranium out of the country, lowered the stockpile. And we’re certain of this. So Iran deserves the credit of having met its part of the bargain, and it’s important for us and the rest of the world to meet ours, to make sure that the lifted sanctions are in fact not still impeding the ability to be able to do business, and to grant that Iran gets the benefit of the bargain that they made. And that is just plain, simple, good faith in international relations.
MR NIBLETT: As Chancellor Hammond said, he was going to be working on trying to make sure that there was the capacity to meet some of Iran’s expectations of access to financial markets. The sanctions removed under the agreement were those connected to the nuclear program, and the U.S. in particular has, as most people here know, a number of other sanctions.
SECRETARY KERRY: Because it’s important for people to understand that we have worked hard to make sure that we have lived up to every component of what is required of us here. And I wish that some of the larger banks were, in fact, ready to make loans and engage in opening accounts, because they can. They’re allowed to, but they’re still remaining somewhat risk averse for various reasons.
And what I have also made clear – and it’s in the agreement – is that we are not backing down on the other issues of importance that we had also had sanctions in place on. So we didn’t take our sanctions away for human rights abuse. We didn’t take our sanctions away for state sponsorship of terror. We didn’t take our sanctions away for illegal – for breaking the UN arms embargo and so forth. And we obviously still have real differences with Iran that I’d like to see us work out – namely, support for the Houthi in Yemen, support of Hizballah in Syria, support for Assad against all capacity to have a reasonable political outcome, and so forth. These are things that continue to be challenges for us, and my hope is that over time those too can be worked at in the same way that we were able to work at the fundamentals of the nuclear file.
But had we tackled each of those – some people have said, well, you were crazy; you should have resolved each and every one of those things before you made an agreement. Folks, we’d still be in Vienna eating good schnitzel and having a good time and celebrating another Fourth of July. But I have to tell you, we wouldn’t be any closer to an agreement on any of them, because some of them are deeper rooted to intricacies of the region and history and other things that are going to take longer to try to work through.
MR NIBLETT: And let me just bring Russia in for a second. Here we are – this was a place where Russia was a – to my understanding, a constructive – very much part of this negotiation. What did you take away about what the West, the United States can get and not get from Russia in multilateral negotiations? Is it just a matter of where the interests align, anything is possible, and where they don’t align, it’s not? Or was there some other dimension here? Because this was – you look at the agreement and Russia played a pretty important role, especially in some of the technical areas.
SECRETARY KERRY: Russia did. Russia was constructive in that, and Russia – in fact, right here in London I was asked the question at a press conference: Is there anything Assad can do to prevent himself from being bombed? And I said yes, he could agree to remove all the chemical weapons from Syria. Within an hour and a half, I had Lavrov calling me and saying let’s work on that, let’s see if we can do it. We’d actually already talked about it, so it wasn’t out of a whole sort of cloth that I had proposed this.
And within a week or two – I forget how long it was, but we were able to cut an agreement that got the – all the chemical weapons that were properly declared, as the saying is, were out of Syria, with a much better outcome than would have occurred if you’d spent a day or two bombing, obviously. But Obama – President Obama still gets blamed for not, quote, “enforcing the red line,” but in fact, he achieved the goal. Our goal was to prevent them from using chemical weapons, and by getting them all out we did a better job of that than we would have by sending him a warning militarily that he shouldn’t do it.
Bottom line is there are other things, obviously, where Russia has interests that we just – they don’t come close. Syria – Russia has had a client relationship with Assad for years. It is not new that Russia supports Assad. This is not something that developed in the Obama Administration. It expanded, but it didn’t begin. Russia built what is reputed to be the fourth most effective air defense system in the world. Russia built that and staffed it for Assad for years. Russia has had a port use at Tartus, and Russia has had obvious relationship with Assad. So it shouldn’t be a surprise to people that we are at loggerheads in our support for an opposition because we think Assad abused his people and Russia’s support for Assad for the reasons I’ve described and some others.
I think that it’s very dangerous right now, and there are – we are still engaged on a multilateral basis even now as I sit here, trying to see if there’s a way to forge a ceasefire. We have a proposal that’s been going back and forth, and we will see whether the Russians have a greater desire to bomb Aleppo into smithereens, claiming they’re going after a legitimate – the terrorists when in fact there are oppositionists there who are prepared to live by a ceasefire. And this will determine to some degree sort of where we go with respect to Syria in the long term.
MR NIBLETT: Well, I’m going to turn to the audience in just a second, see if I can – we’ll get a couple questions before you finish. But one last very difficult one for you: I suppose it strikes one listening to your comments here that because you are representing the U.S., you could work towards striking an agreement. When it becomes Syria, you’re trying to get other parties together; if they don’t want to do it, they don’t want to do it. The U.S.-Israel relationship after the nuclear accord and where it’s at – do you think this agreement has changed the Middle East in any way? People always say that in the end, the Arab-Israel conflict is sui generis, it sits in its own box. Just because you fix other parts of the Middle East doesn’t mean you’re going to fix this. And yet, the deal has certainly led to closer relationships between Israel and some of the Gulf states. I mean, how do you think this deal has changed? Has it made the context more difficult for pursuing the Middle East peace process, no impact at all? How would you look at that spillover?
SECRETARY KERRY: I personally still believe that the – that if the parties wanted peace in the Middle East, if both parties were prepared to take risks for peace, there is a very clear peace that is definable and achievable. Unfortunately, it’s moving in an opposite direction. I have said many times publicly, as had President Obama, that we are deeply concerned about choices being made – incitement in the case of some of the Palestinians, the arming in the case of some, acts of terrorism by some. But we’re also concerned on the other side by the continued incursion of settlements in the West Bank, which over a period of time can threaten the capacity for a two-state solution to be achieved. And we’ve tried to be a fair broker in articulating both. We are obviously deeply committed to Israel’s survival. We are its strongest ally in the world. We don’t shy away from that. We embrace that. And we’ve just embraced it in a $38 billion over 10 years memorandum of understanding – 3.8 billion, obviously, per year – in order to help Israel be able to defend itself by itself, and that is a fundamental tenet of our policy.
But at the same time, I would absolutely embrace the notion that there is a greater readiness of the Arab world to be part of this peace and to help to change the region that at any time previously. And I believe that if leaders in Israel are prepared to try to move forward in a genuine way, there is a new discussion that could be had and new opportunities to try to have a breakthrough that was unachievable a couple of years ago. And we will see. I may speak out on this in the next weeks, months, or over the year – hard to say. But people need to recognize that there is something different in the Middle East that is available to people now and we should not lose that opportunity.
QUESTION: As the last ambassador to the United States and one who began his career in Iran, I just want to say how much I echo and the whole Foreign Office echo our admiration for the resilience, the optimism – never-say-give-up approach that you took to getting this negotiation done. I watched it when we weren’t supposed to be watching it, when you were active privately – but with Hillary Clinton’s full support; let’s never forget that – and I watched it when it was in public and when the rest of us all came together.
You said that this helped to avoid a war. There was a lot of insidious stuff about let’s just add more sanctions, let’s get a tougher deal. Actually, there were also a lot of people who would have happily got us into a fighting war to deal with Iran’s nuclear program. You stopped that, and if you had not stopped that, somebody else might have begun it, dragging in America, dragging in Britain. There was a real risk of military conflict, and I think we all admire the efforts that you did to stop that. (Applause.)
Second thing I just wanted to say in the presence of some diplomatic colleagues is how rare it was for the rest of the P5+1 – the Russian, the Chinese, the French, the German, and the British ambassadors – to be able to help deliver an Administration objective on Capitol Hill at a time when, as you yourself pointed out, other governments were busy trying to kill this deal despite the fact that all of our governments had supported it and despite the fact that it was by a long way the least bad way of stopping Iran’s nuclear program. I think that was rare. I think it was unusual, and I’m glad we were able to do that.
My little question is just to say to you that I do think that the difficulty we’ve now got in getting business going with Iran is a real one. I do think that the European banks do have a problem. We are frightened because of our experience of the way in which bilateral U.S. sanctions are still in place. This frightens people. Is there any more, Mr. Secretary, that you can do, that the Administration can do to signal to us it’s safe to go back in the water? Because we all have an interest in making sure that the deal you negotiated succeeds.
QUESTION: You mentioned and a previous speaker mentioned the sanctions relief is an issue. What are the other challenges that you foresee in the next year given the election instability both in the U.S. but also in Iran? And you mentioned regional security. Do you think that’s going to impact the implementation of the agreement?
QUESTION: What is the heart for you now having this experience in dealing with Syria? What do you think is missing in that orchestra of multilateral efforts for the international community to somehow deal with problems in Syria? Thank you.
QUESTION: Could you contrast the relationship you have with Lavrov with that you have with Mohammad Zarif?
SECRETARY KERRY: The business piece. I want to say something about that. It’s very important. We met here in London with some of the key banks earlier while Philip was still foreign secretary, and we had the major banks there from Europe. It was a difficult session because clearly the banks were in a kind of – and not – I’m not blaming them; they’re a business and they have to bank this way, a sort of risk-reward analysis. And risk aversion was such that you could understand people making the decision, well, we have to take a little time and see how this shakes out, we’re not sure if there’s some designated entity out there that may be swept into the web of whatever this lending is, and therefore we don’t want to be exposed. So I understand the challenge.
The problem is that we agreed to lift certain sanctions. So OFAC, the Office of Financial Accountability[1], has come out and made it very, very clear that if you do due diligence in the normal fashion, no extra due diligence, just normal due diligence for whoever it is you’re opening an account or for ever – whatever lending you’re about to do, and later it turns out it was some unforeseeable entity that pops up, you will not be held accountable for that. And so what we’ve done is we’ve been trying to reduce the level of risk so that people will begin to engage in a broader range of lending. Why are we doing that? Because the deal we made was that sanctions would not continue to interfere with their ability to do a normal course of business, and regrettably because of some of the uncertainties about OFAC or some of the uncertainties about who’s doing what, it hasn’t been. And we’re trying to change that.
I must say though that we’ve made good-faith efforts way beyond what we agreed to do, I mean, like this meeting. I mean, I never anticipated I’d be sitting in the banks to try to get them to do this. But we have reached out way beyond what anything within the four corners of the agreement in order to try to make sure that it delivers in full.
So we would encourage the banks to take a hard look at this, and I am glad to say that both sides have lived up to, I think, their part of the bargain, but we will would like to see more transactions taking place because I think that’s in the interests of us to see an Iran that begins to – begins to become more a part of the international community with the belief that that can also affect long-term behavior and choices that Iran makes.
SECRETARY KERRY: Syria is a whole bunch of wars taking place in the same place. People don’t think of it that way, but you’ve got Kurd versus Kurd, you’ve got Kurd versus Turkey, you’ve got Iran and Saudi Arabia with its tensions and vice versa, you’ve got Turkey-Qatar which have a certain attitude about some groups, you have Persian Shia versus Arab Sunni, you have Sunni versus Shia, you have a lot of people against Assad, you have the challenges of Shia Iraqi militia coming in to Syria, and then of course you have Hizballah, a designated terrorist organization that’s supporting Assad.
So this mix is about as toxic as any diplomatic cocktail I can think of, and the result is that there are complications. Let me be precise. We make an agreement with Russia that because there is so little trust we need to see that they’re serious about a ceasefire. So you have a seven-day period during which Russia has to show that the Assad regime is living by its agreement not to fly and so on. Except that you have Nusrah there – al-Nusrah, which is a designated foreign terrorist entity, and you have ISIL, and you’re not going to have a ceasefire without either of them.
So if they choose to attack the regime, as they do, what happens is the regular opposition gets swept up with them – oh boy, a chance to attack Assad – and the other guy started it, so they get involved. All of a sudden, your ceasefire starts to shred. Likewise, Assad is a spoiler because Assad can say, well, I don’t have any restraint on my going after Nusrah or going after ISIL, and so he’ll just claim he’s going after them even as he just overtly bombs the opposition that has signed up to the ceasefire. So they then get angry and say he’s not keeping good faith, which he’s not, and it spirals downwards.
How do you begin? Do you begin on day one without any good faith? Well, the Russians want to get something for it. They want to know that we’re serious about going after Nusrah. Right now they’re blaming us, saying no, you’re not really serious, Nusrah is there because you’ve been using Nusrah in conjunction with your opposition to fight Assad.
So unraveling this very contorted web of interactions is as complicated as any challenge I’ve seen in the course of 30 years of involvement in these issues directly as a senator and now as Secretary.
I would say to you that there is a way to try to resolve this. If Russia were to test the stated willingness of Qatar, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia and the United States to try to separate Nusrah from the opposition, and if they would test it by standing back and not bombing for a period of time and give the legitimate opposition the opportunity to adhere to the ceasefire and separate from the true terrorists, then we could begin to get some, perhaps, cooperative breathing space where we might have an opportunity to be able to really put in place a ceasefire and, importantly, get to the negotiating table in Geneva, which, despite five years of warfare, has never really happened. People have stood at a distance in the hotel rooms arguing with each other but never really beginning the negotiation.
I remain the eternal optimist and hopeful that we can still try to push to that somewhere in these next couple of months. We have two and a half months left in this Administration and we’re going to work till the last moment to try to do that. And we are engaged even now in some discussions to see whether or not that is possible.
So I think, though, the overall region, because have seen this chaos and people have felt this spiral into a darkness that is unparalleled in terms of our ability to have a direct impact immediately, they fear it. And that fear is driving people together. There are shared interests between Israel and Saudi Arabia and the Emirates and Egypt, and you’re seeing that play out a little bit in the Sinai in the fight against Daesh in the Sinai. You’re seeing it play out in Iraq. And my hope is that maybe we can create a critical mass to see it play out yet in Syria.