OPINION — “We are, as President Biden reminds us, at an inflection point. The post-Cold War era is definitely over. Our task is to shape what comes next — investing in our foundational strengths, and working in common cause with our unmatched network of alliances and partnerships — to leave for future generations, a world that is more free, open, secure and prosperous. That is a very tall order.”
The speaker was Central Intelligence Agency Director William J. Burns, giving the 59th annual lecture on July 1 at the prestigious Ditchley Foundation in England. A longtime diplomat, once ambassador to Jordan and later Russia, Burns also served as Deputy Secretary of State.
Burns talked a bit about his past activities. For example, he told the Ditchley audience that in 2004, when he was Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs, he saw “our collaboration with British diplomats and intelligence officers to persuade [Libyan President] Muammar Qaddafi to get out of the business of terrorism and give up his rudimentary nuclear program — an adventure full of strange meetings in the middle of the night in the middle of the desert with Qaddafi, to this day the strangest leader I’ve ever met.”
In 2008, as President George W. Bush’s ambassador in Moscow, he perceptively wrote to then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice saying, “Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite (not just Russian President Vladimir Putin)…I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests.”
In 2013, as President Obama’s Deputy Secretary of State, he initiated secret talks with Iran through Oman, that helped lead ultimately, to the 2015 U.S-Iran nuclear deal. In August 2021, Burns met secretly in Kabul for talks with the Taliban leadership, who were the new de facto leaders of Afghanistan.
In a March 2019 interview, while he was President of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, he showed himself a realist when he told an interviewer, “There’s not a chance in the world in the foreseeable future that Kim Jong Un is going to fully denuclearize. I think he sees the continued possession of nuclear weapons and sophisticated missiles as essential to his security and to the survival of his regime. So, the question for diplomats is what can you do to reduce the dangers, even if you retain—as we should—full North Korean denuclearization as an aspirational goal?”
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In November 2021, three months before Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, President Biden sent Burns to Moscow where, with then-U.S. Ambassador to Russia John Sullivan, they met with Putin’s national security advisor, Nikolai Patrushev. Burns disclosed that U.S. intelligence knew of Russia’s invasion plans and that the West would respond with severe consequences if Russia proceeded.
I lay out this bit of history to show that Burns is someone to whom “attention must be paid,” a phrase used by many but originating with the character Linda Loman – the wife of Willy Loman – in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman.
At Ditchley, Burns spoke of Putin and Ukraine saying: “It is always a mistake to underestimate Putin’s fixation on controlling Ukraine and its choices, without which, he believes it is impossible for Russia to be a major power, or him to be a great Russian leader. That tragic and brutish fixation has already brought shame to Russia and exposed its weaknesses and evoked the breathtaking determination and resolve of the Ukrainian people.”
Burns also called attention to mutinous Wagner Group warlord Yevgeny Prigozhin’s “scathing indictment of the Kremlin’s mendacious rationale for its invasion of Ukraine, and of the Russian military leadership’s conduct of the war. The impact of those words and those actions will play out for some time, a vivid reminder of the corrosive effect of Putin’s war on his own society and his own regime.”
Coming as a prediction from a CIA Director, I would expect the Agency, or some other branch of the U.S. Government will find a way to keep reminding the Russian people of Prigozhin’s exact words: “What was the war for? The war [was] needed for [Russian Defense Minister Sergei] Shoigu to receive a hero star…The oligarchic clan that rules Russia needed the war…The mentally ill scumbags decided: ‘It’s OK, we’ll throw in a few thousand more Russian men as cannon fodder. They’ll die under artillery fire, but we’ll get what we want,’” Prigozhin had said.
Burns did not disappoint. Later in his speech he said, “Disaffection creates a once-in-a-generation opportunity for us at CIA – at our core – a human intelligence service. We’re not letting it go to waste. We recently used social media — our first video post to Telegram [website], in fact — to let brave Russians know how to contact us safely on the dark web. We had 2.5 million views in the first week, and we’re very much open for business.”
As for China, Burns described it as “the only country with both the intent to reshape the international order and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to do so.” He added, “We study carefully what leaders say. But we pay special attention to what they do, and here [Chinese] President Xi’s growing repression at home and his aggressiveness abroad — from his no-limits partnership with Putin to his threats to peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait — are impossible to ignore.”
But having seen the potential threat from Beijing, Burns recognized “in this new era, our competition is taking place against the backdrop of thick economic interdependence and commercial ties. That has served our countries [the U.S. and China], our economies and our world remarkably well — but it has also created strategic dependencies, critical vulnerabilities, and serious risks to our security and prosperity.”
Burns was wise enough to then say, “The answer to that is not to decouple from an economy like China’s, which would be foolish, but to sensibly de-risk and diversify by securing resilient supply chains, protecting our technological edge, and investing in industrial capacity.”
But Burns went on to warn, “We do not have the option of focusing on a single geopolitical pacing threat,” referring to China.
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Instead, he said, “We face an equal threat to international order and indeed to the lives and livelihoods of our people from shared or transnational challenges, of which the climate crisis poses the most clear and present danger. We can no longer talk about ‘tipping points’ and ‘catastrophic climate impacts’ in the future tense. They are here and now, imperiling our planet, our security, our economies, and our people.”
It’s worth pointing out that June 2023 was the world’s hottest month on record, according to data from the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service.
Burns described climate change as “the quintessential ‘threat multiplier’ — fueling energy, health, water and food insecurities, setting back our progress on economic and human development, turbocharging what is already the worst period of forced displacement and migration in history, and further exacerbating instability and geopolitical tensions and flashpoints.”
Recognizing that the U.S. and China will need to work together to help deal with the transnational nature of climate change, Burns shrewdly said, “Competition in many ways, makes cooperation more difficult. But we’re going to have to do both.”
Ironically, while Burns was speaking out about the need to deal with climate change, back in the Congress, Republicans on the House Appropriations Committee were cutting $1.4 billion for programs mitigating climate risk from the Biden administration’s fiscal 2024 Defense Appropriations bill, arguing in their report language that these were misguided “partisan spending priorities.”
But back to Burns. He wasn’t finished yet in addressing challenges, telling his Ditchley audience that advances in computing-related technologies represent a revolution “more profound than the industrial revolution or the dawn of the nuclear age.”
The trend line has been, he said, “outstripping our expectations, imaginations and capacity to govern the use of enormously powerful technologies — for good or for ill. Nowhere is that more evident than in biotechnology and bio-manufacturing — which can unlock extraordinary climate and health solutions and boost our economies, but whose abuse and misuse could lead to catastrophe.”
Since U.S. leadership in technology and innovation has underpinned U.S. economic prosperity and military strength — and China is investing heavily in emerging technologies — Burns said this area will be “a central dimension of our strategic competition.”
To meet the challenge, Burns said he has set up the first single-country mission center at CIA, to coordinate work on China, throughout the Agency. Over the past two years, he has also doubled the percentage of our overall budget supporting China activities and hiring and training more Mandarin speakers.
And while saying CIA officers across the world are increasing competition with China, Burns also said, “We’ve also sought to quietly strengthen intelligence channels with China, including through my own travels. These discreet channels are an important means of ensuring against unnecessary misunderstandings and inadvertent collisions and complementing and supporting policymaking channels.”
The U.S. is lucky at this time, to have Bill Burns in government, and at the job he now holds.
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