by Susan Rice
Then I made matters worse the next day on the ABC News Sunday show. Most of the interview went off unremarkably, until the end. In an effort to insist that Bergdahl was worthy of our efforts (which I still very much believe), and that any American who volunteers to serve in uniform deserves our gratitude and respect, I spoke unartfully and off-the-cuff. Responding to a question about the circumstances of Bergdahl’s disappearance, I said, “He served the United States with honor and distinction. And we’ll have the opportunity eventually to learn what has transpired in the past years.”
As soon as we left the studio, my press aide said, “I think you will get hit for saying he served ‘with honor and distinction.’ ” At first, I didn’t take his point. I meant that Bergdahl’s service shouldn’t be denigrated (particularly at this moment) without a full investigation into why he left his base and whether he committed any crime or misdeed. In other words: innocent until proven guilty. Yet many had concluded already that he was a villain; and I had praised him excessively. Despite my benign intentions and that it is ingrained in me to show respect for all of our men and women in uniform, I misspoke. I wish I could take those words back and revise them. Instead, my mistake remains an exhibit in the right wing’s bill of indictment against me as a “liar.”
For the duration of the administration, from 2014 to 2016, we spent countless hours in the Situation Room debating the future size, role, and disposition of the U.S. and NATO military presence in Afghanistan. Originally, President Obama wanted to draw down U.S. forces to the minimum necessary in Kabul by the end of his term—enough to continue training Afghans at the ministry level, protect the U.S. embassy, and target foreign terrorists who threatened the U.S.
Our military has always resisted significant reductions in Afghanistan, arguing (every year for eighteen years) that more time and more troops are needed to build the Afghans’ capacity to fight the Taliban effectively without us. The Intelligence Community and DOD consistently (and sometimes bitterly) diverged over the likelihood of ever reaching that point, with the Intelligence Community maintaining that we faced an eroding stalemate that gradually favored the Taliban, and DOD asserting that, with more U.S. support, the Afghan Security Forces could ultimately turn the corner.
In my view, the Intelligence Community and Vice President Biden (who from 2009 argued for only fighting foreign terrorists like Al Qaeda and not the indigenous Taliban) have proved more correct than DOD. I have long tended to favor a posture that would enable us to sustain counterterrorism efforts without perpetually propping up the Kabul government, which remains poor, weak, and ineffectual—unlikely to defeat or even hold back the Taliban without a continued, significant U.S. troop presence. Yet, risking the Afghan government’s collapse, after years of U.S. sacrifice, is hard to contemplate. That is why, for years, we tried to pursue Afghan-led peace talks with the Taliban. Not surprisingly, given the Taliban’s intransigence, the talks had yielded little progress.
Ultimately, President Obama heeded the pleas of most of his Principals, from Ghani and Abdullah, and from NATO leaders (especially Angela Merkel), to leave close to ten thousand U.S. troops in Afghanistan. President Obama also decided to give DOD more latitude to assist the Afghans with air and other tactical support without reengaging directly in fighting the Taliban.
Thus far, the Kabul government continues to hang on; the threats from Al Qaeda and the “Islamic State” emanating from Afghanistan and Pakistan endure even if they have been substantially diminished. President Trump approved a 50 percent increase in U.S. forces in 2017 (from roughly ten thousand to fifteen thousand), but the Taliban remains strong and increasingly threatens major population centers. Reversing course the next year, against the advice of his cabinet, Trump threatened unilaterally to halve the U.S. troop presence. It remains unclear for how long and with what mission a significant number of U.S. troops will stay in Afghanistan. Whatever reductions we make need to be careful, gradual, and conducted in close consultation with our allies and the Afghan government. At a significant cost, the U.S. could sustain indefinitely our presence in Afghanistan at current troop levels, which for the foreseeable future should suffice to prevent the Taliban from taking Kabul or other big cities. Yet, in doing so, we risk continually failing to wean the Afghan Security Forces off of critical U.S. and NATO support. Nearly twenty years after 9/11, I believe we need a rational and measured exit strategy from Afghanistan that preserves the political and security gains enjoyed by the Afghan people, particularly its women, and that limits our enduring commitment to preventing the resurgence of foreign terrorist organizations that directly threaten the United States.
South Sudan’s corrupt and venal leaders never fail to disappoint.
In 2013, South Sudanese president Salva Kiir and his then–vice president, Riek Machar, were the Grinches who stole Christmas. A shootout in December between their respective security details escalated into a full-blown civil conflict with tribal overtones. Kiir accused Machar of attempting a coup, as Machar mustered a breakaway rebel group that aimed to replace the existing government. John Kerry spent hours on the phone trying to mediate between Machar and Kiir. I taped a message appealing to the people of South Sudan to unify to save their nascent country and also tried to talk sense into Kiir. As ever, they both were selfish and dismissive of the interests of their own people.
Street battles enveloped the capital, Juba, forcing aid workers and foreign embassies, including our own, to withdraw most personnel. The U.S. embassy, the largest and the anchor of the international community in South Sudan, was threatened by violent factions on both sides. President Obama ordered forty-five U.S. servicemen into Juba to protect and reinforce the embassy. He was prepared, if necessary, to close the embassy and withdraw all personnel, but this was an outcome we wished to avoid. If and when the U.S. were to leave South Sudan, we knew every other foreign government was likely to follow suit. Even the viability of the beleaguered U.N. peacekeeping mission would be in doubt. Without the U.S., South Sudan doesn’t have a chance.
As clashes diminished in Juba, heavy fighting broke out in the north between the South Sudanese army, an undisciplined and abusive force, and Machar’s equally nasty rebels. U.S. citizens, including dual nationals, were scattered around the country. To rescue stranded Americans, President Obama ordered U.S. military helicopters to fly north to Bor. As they descended, one Osprey helicopter was hit by ground fire, wounding four U.S. military personnel just days before Christmas and causing the mission to be aborted.
Fighting persisted, and the threat to U.S. personnel intensified to the extent that I had no choice but to convene the Principals every day from December 21 through December 27, 2013, including remotely on Christmas Day. That holiday summons made me especially unpopular with my colleagues and staff, but the American president has no higher priority than the safety and security of American citizens. We could not and would not risk leaving Americans in proximate danger—especially barely a year after Benghazi.
Neighboring Uganda intervened militarily to buttress Kiir’s government, bringing needed security to the capital and helping the U.S. embassy and other foreign missions to remain operational. We got through the holidays with no more U.S. casualties.
Ongoing U.S. and regional diplomacy served to calm but not resolve the fundamental conflict. Neither an augmented U.N. force, regional leaders’ negotiating efforts, the suspension of U.S. military assistance, nor President Obama’s own personal involvement sufficed to persuade Kiir and Machar to resolve their differences in any lasting way.
To put muscle behind our diplomacy, the U.S. led the Security Council in imposing sanctions on individuals blocking peace efforts in 2015. We also threatened additional measures, including an arms embargo on South Sudan. But in a twist of irony, Russia and China, which historically had little interest in South Sudan and always favored Khartoum over Juba, became active protectors of Kiir’s government at the U.N. As we sought to increase pressure on the South Sudanese government, t
hey resisted any additional sanctions.
Inside the Obama administration, we differed over whether and when to impose an arms embargo. Samantha Power and John Kerry favored doing so earlier on. I didn’t, reminding all that an arms embargo, which is always applied territorially, punishes one side disproportionately in a civil conflict (the government) and doesn’t prevent rebels from acquiring weapons via neighboring countries where they take refuge. I also believed that once we imposed an arms embargo, we would lose any remaining leverage on the government. Those were rational arguments, but I was wrong to believe that, by husbanding our leverage, we could move Kiir’s government to mitigate its behavior and accept a negotiated solution. Perhaps out of personal history, unrealistic hopes for the people of South Sudan, and an overestimation of U.S. influence, I was too slow to conclude that neither side had the will to end the conflict nor agree to a unity government.
It was not until 2016, when the specter of genocide appeared on the horizon, that I finally concluded we had to drop the hammer on South Sudan’s hopeless leaders. It had been almost seventeen years since I first visited that often forgotten country. For so long, I had hoped that the people of South Sudan might at last enjoy the freedom and security they had long been denied. It pained me enormously to concede defeat of such a righteous dream as self-determination. But South Sudan’s brutal leaders would not allow it to be fulfilled. That belated realization freed me to endorse the U.S. push in the Security Council for an arms embargo, which repeatedly failed to muster enough favorable votes. Only in July 2018, five years after the start of the civil war, did a U.S.-sponsored resolution to impose an arms embargo eventually gain the bare minimum number of votes to be adopted by the Security Council.
Despite yet another ceasefire agreement between Kiir and Machar, signed in September 2018, as of this writing, lasting peace and national unity remain elusive. Tribal and factional divisions within South Sudan persist, and hundreds of thousands of innocent South Sudanese have been displaced, raped, starved, and killed over the course of this continuing conflict. To date, South Sudan remains a stillborn state. Few things sadden me more, having put my heart and soul into such a worthy cause for so long.
There is no such thing as a short phone call with Vladimir Putin.
In the almost three years following Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea in March 2014 and its invasion of Eastern Ukraine, President Obama and the Russian president spoke over a dozen times by secure phone. A typical phone call lasted ninety minutes, prolonged by Putin’s tedious monologues and the necessity of translation. The conversations typically began with a comical game of chicken, in which each side’s communications staff tried to ensure their leader was last on the line. It was a game that Obama found ironic but not important, and he would simply busy himself with desk work or Scrabble on his iPad if Putin was slow to come to the phone.
Staffing presidential phone calls was a frequent responsibility. My team and I prepared a detailed briefing memo with background and recommended talking points. Prior to the call, the NSC experts (usually the relevant regional senior director and director) would join me in the Oval to provide the president any last-minute update or answer any questions he had after reading his memo. The team would stay with us in the Oval Office for the duration of the call, taking notes and scribbling down any additional arguments to hand to the president as the call progressed. An NSC staffer from the executive secretary’s office, which handles administrative functions, oversaw the logistics from the Oval—communicating with the Situation Room downstairs, relaying when the president was ready to take the call, and ensuring that the translator at a remote location was ready to go.
“Introducing President Obama,” the White House Situation Room announced. Obama picked up the secure phone on the Resolute Desk. My staff and I sat on the parallel couches or sometimes on the floor near the phone, if the other side of the conversation was hard to hear. “Hello, Vladimir,” Obama began. Putin responded, “Hello, Barack, how are you?” Their conversations, while sometimes pointed and often unsatisfactory in substance, were always civil and mostly respectful.
Despite the number of times the two engaged, they were unable to resolve our stark differences over Ukraine. The crisis derived from Russia’s enduring fear that Ukraine wanted to join the European Union and NATO, thus leaving the Kremlin’s orbit. In November 2013, Russian pressure led the Moscow-backed government of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych to back out of free trade and political agreements with the European Union. This decision sparked popular protests in Kiev against Yanukovych. The demonstrations were relentless, despite violent police repression, and culminated in February 2014 with Yanukovych fleeing the country. Russia angrily denounced his departure as a Western-backed “coup” and used it as an excuse to annex Crimea illegally, a strategic Ukrainian peninsula with historic ties to Russia.
Then, Russia massed troops on Ukraine’s eastern border, threatening for months to invade, before eventually moving forces across their common border. Russia’s invasion, which blatantly violated Ukraine’s sovereignty as well as international law, spurred the U.S. and Europe to impose increasingly harsh, coordinated sanctions on Putin officials, crony oligarchs, Russian banks, and defense and energy entities.
President Obama spent untold hours on the phone and on videoconferences rallying our partners in the G7 and European Union to ratchet up economic sanctions on Russia. Our aim was not just to punish Russia for its actions but to pressure it to withdraw its military from Ukraine and restore its sovereign border. President Obama coordinated closely with France, Germany, Italy, and the U.K., to expel Russia from the G8 and to bolster NATO’s military presence and readiness in Eastern Europe. After Russian-backed Ukrainian rebels shot down a Malaysian passenger airliner over Eastern Ukraine in July 2014, killing 298 innocents, Obama led the Europeans to crank up sanctions on Russia to near crippling levels.
At the same time, the president was careful to leave the door open to Russia. He continued his fraught communications with Putin, seeking to point him to an “off-ramp,” and actively supported the diplomatic processes led by German chancellor Merkel and French president Hollande. Merkel and Hollande initiated a dialogue with Putin on the margins of the seventieth anniversary of D-Day in June 2014, which continued through the duration of the Obama administration with the elusive aim of achieving the withdrawal of Russian forces and restoration of Ukraine’s control over its east.
My role was to support the president in his diplomacy by working with my national security advisor counterparts, especially the Germans and French, to prepare for and implement the decisions of our leaders. I also led the Principals Committee, aided invaluably by my deputies Tony Blinken and then Avril Haines—who both ran a relentless Deputies Committee process that enabled the Principals to propose to the president: the contours of successive sanctions packages designed to maximize pressure while keeping EU partners on board; increased U.S. military assistance to Ukraine; and billions in U.S. and IMF economic support to help stabilize the Ukrainian economy. We also recommended the establishment of the multibillion-dollar European Reassurance Initiative that ensured NATO countries maintained a rotating, continuous presence of forces and stockpiled equipment in Poland and the Baltics to deter future Russian aggression.
At Obama’s behest, Vice President Biden took on primary responsibility for dialogue with Ukraine’s leaders, investing large amounts of time in direct diplomacy. Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland and NSC senior director Charles Kupchan spearheaded day-to-day U.S. efforts to support the diplomatic process, including through close coordination with their German, French, and Ukrainian counterparts and a painful series of meetings with key Putin advisors.
Biting sanctions worked to limit the extent of Russia’s annexation of Ukraine. Yet, to date, no country, neither Germany, France, nor the U.S., has been able to move Putin to resolve the Ukraine crisis. Putin, for his part, has never forgiven the U.S. and Europe
for imposing tough sanctions, which ultimately failed to force Russia to return what it stole from Ukraine. Appropriately, at the end of the day, the West would not resort to military power to reverse Russian aggression in Ukraine, since it is not a NATO member. To compound the challenge, President Trump has sent mixed messages by at once agreeing to provide lethal weapons to Ukraine and also hinting that he may be willing to accept Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea. Five years after Russia’s initial aggression, fighting persists in Ukraine’s east, sanctions remain in effect, diplomacy is dormant, and Moscow has stepped up its pressure on Kiev and retains effective control over a sizable, stolen portion of Ukraine.
I couldn’t stop staring at the hockey stick. It blew my mind.
Tom Frieden, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), passed a chart around the Situation Room table projecting the trajectory of the West African Ebola epidemic. It was late August 2014, and the line on the chart that resembled a hockey stick predicted that by the end of 2014, there could be as many as 1.4 million people in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone infected with this deadly disease that causes victims to bleed out of their orifices.
Knowing West Africa well and its extreme vulnerability to the rapid spread of disease, I was terrified by the implications of a potential Ebola pandemic on that scale. It could spread across the globe and kill hundreds of thousands, potentially millions, while sinking West Africa and much of the rest of the African continent under the weight of economic collapse, conflict, and massive refugee flows. The global economic implications were also mind-boggling—a halt to much international air travel and commerce, quarantines of whole regions, panic, and a Hobbesian inferno where no man helped another out of fear.
