Bill Burns: The Iran War Gave Putin a Lifeline - and the Stakes in Ukraine Are Higher Than Ever

Bill Burns has spent more time across the table from both Vladimir Putin and senior Iranian officials than perhaps any living American. As CIA Director, he flew over a million miles, recruited Russian agents via Telegram, and delivered nuclear warnings to the Kremlin. Now, watching from the outside as the US wages a war of choice against Iran, Burns sees two clear winners: Russia and China. In a conversation with Foreign Affairs, he argues the stakes in Ukraine remain higher than in the Middle East - and that America is inflicting generational damage on itself by demolishing the very institutions that set it apart from its lonelier rivals.

The Post-Cold War Era Is Over

Dan Kurtz-Phelan: I'm Dan Kurtz-Phelan, and this is "The Foreign Affairs Interview".

William Burns: And sadly, in all my experience in the Middle East over the years, it's the place where grand ambitions and ill-conceived strategies go to die. And it is a place where pessimists always feel right at home.

Dan Kurtz-Phelan: In 2024, when he was director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Bill Burns wrote in an essay in Foreign Affairs about "the plastic moments that come along only a few times each century" and argued that "the United States faces one of those rare moments today, as consequential as the dawn of the Cold War or the post-9/11 period."

If that claim seemed bold at the time, events in the past couple of years have made it undeniable: a major war in Europe, two wars in the Middle East, sharpening U.S.-China tension, an American administration committed to projecting power in new and disruptive ways. Inflection point is an overused term, but this is a moment when, as Burns argued in that essay, it really does fit. Before becoming CIA Director, Burns was one of the most highly respected diplomats in recent American history. He started the secret negotiations that led to the Iran nuclear deal. He served as ambassador to Russia. As the State Department's top Middle East official, he warned internally of the consequences of invading Iraq in 2003. He has spent years sitting across the table from American allies and adversaries trying to understand what drives them and how Washington should and should not deal with them. I spoke to Burns on the afternoon of April 1st about the course and consequences of the war in Iran, about Vladimir Putin and the war in Ukraine, and Xi Jinping and U.S.-China competition, about the future of intelligence, and about what the Trump administration will mean for the future of American power.

Bill, thank you for doing this. I'm thrilled to have you on the podcast, just as I'm always thrilled to have you in our pages.

William Burns: My pleasure, Dan. It's really nice to see you, and thanks so much for inviting me.

Dan Kurtz-Phelan: There is an enormous amount happening in the world today that I'm eager to get your insight on. Obviously, a war in the Middle East, war in Europe, the risk of a U.S.-China war, the impact of technology on national security and geopolitics, much more. But I want to start by stepping back. Your remarkable career in American foreign policy culminating, at least thus far, in your stints as Deputy Secretary of State and CIA Director, mostly coincided with the post-Cold War era. In the essay you wrote for Foreign Affairs in 2024, when you were CIA Director, you pronounced the post-Cold War era definitively over. And we're now two years away from that essay and that pronouncement. How do you understand and describe the new era we're in?

William Burns: Well, Dan, again, it's great to be with you, and I should start by saying that I loved the nearly four decades in public service. And somehow the republic survived all that service on my part. After three and a half decades as a career diplomat, I did not expect to become Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, but it's a job that I loved, and after four years I developed enormous respect and admiration for the women and men who animate that institution. My wife and daughters were a little bemused, I think, when I became CIA director. They thought I had managed to carefully conceal my inner James Bond or Jack Ryan or Jason Bourne. In fact, when President Biden asked me if I would become director, I was driving a 2013 Subaru station wagon, not an Aston Martin. But I knew that I'd have to earn people's trust at that agency. I had worked very closely with CIA officers over many years as a diplomat. But the CIA is a tough crowd. One of my friends, a former senior career CIA officer, once described the mood of the workforce waiting for a new director as kind of like the Scottish tribes waiting for the English King: so skeptical. But I traveled well over a million miles over those four years, mostly to see our officers doing really hard jobs in really hard places. And as I said, I truly loved the experience.

Over that million plus miles, what I saw was a landscape in the midst of a profound transformation, a geopolitical landscape. As you and I have discussed before, one of those moments that comes along maybe two or three times a century. And I had served through, as a diplomat, the last decade or so of the Cold War and then a quarter century of what we unimaginatively called the post-Cold War era, in which the United States really did enjoy uncontested primacy in the world. And by the time I took over as Director of the CIA, we had clearly entered into a new era marked by many features, but two of which were most striking to me. First was the return of major power competition with China and, to a lesser extent, Russia, after 20 years in which we were preoccupied with the post-9/11 huge challenge of terrorism. And then secondly, and related to the first challenge of major power competition, was a revolution in technology, which is still literally transforming the way we live, work, fight and compete.

In that new era, on that new landscape, I still believe that even if the United States was no longer the only big kid on the geopolitical block, we had a stronger hand to play than any of our rivals. And the question, of course, coming back to your original point about what's happened in the last couple of years, is how do you play that hand?

Enlightened Self-Interest vs. the "Self" Part

William Burns: For the six presidents, three Republicans and three Democrats, that I served over many years as a diplomat, the United States generally applied, through Republicans and Democrats, a form of enlightened self-interest, which was, at least as I always saw it, a blend of hard power and soft power - a blend of the coercive influence that a strong military and strong economic leverage can bring to bear, and then the more persuasive power of diplomacy and economic and development assistance as well. Backed up by institutions, strong national security institutions, with apolitical public servants who could make that work, and a network of allies and partners that set us apart from relatively lonelier rivals like China and Russia. And all the major achievements through that era, the Cold War and the post-Cold War era, reflected that blend, including the Marshall Plan just after the end of the Second World War and the PEPFAR program under George W. Bush, which laid out the power of our example in saving tens of millions of people around the world from HIV/AIDS.

There is an alternative way of approaching this, and that's what we saw previewed in the first Trump term. And I think on dramatic display over the last almost year and a half now in the second Trump term. And that takes that concept of enlightened self-interest and puts a much sharper focus on the "self" part and less on the "enlightened" part. To be fair, I think one of the sources of the appeal of that alternative approach have been some of the mistakes and the grave errors that we made when we didn't act in so enlightened a way. Iraq 2003 being one of the biggest examples of that. But this is a different concept as well, which is much more focused on hard power at the expense of soft power, very dismissive, I think, of the institutions and the whole tradition of apolitical public servants, and dismissive, if not hostile, toward some of those alliance relationships, in particular today, NATO. And it's built around a worldview, I think, that holds that most big decisions should be made by three big guys sitting around a small table - Putin, Xi and President Trump. And recalling the famous saying by Thucydides thousands of years ago that the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must. That's a much different view of how the world works, and that's sort of where we are today.

And I think the danger in all that, and I've written this before, is that with the demolition of some of those institutions, that tradition of career public service, the diminution of focus on the importance of a network of allies and partners, and a preoccupation with hard power almost exclusively, is a form of slow-motion major power suicide, achieving for some of our biggest adversaries exactly what they hope to achieve over the decades. But the fact now is that it's mostly self-inflicted.

Speaking Truth to Power

Dan Kurtz-Phelan: There's a lot I want to pick up on there, but I want to linger for a moment on this big picture point that you're making and what this ends up - what kind of hand we have. I think the intelligence community and the CIA at its best moments is supposed to be speaking truth to power. As I believe a motto in the lobby of the building you sat in as well.

William Burns: I passed it every day on the way to work, yeah.

Dan Kurtz-Phelan: That's right. And there is a pervasive sense - I think this animates a lot of the support for Trump and Trump's rhetoric, but I think it is more pervasive in the American foreign policy world and American society right now - a real kind of sense of pessimism about our place in the world, a sense that we botched our opportunity in the post-Cold War era, and you mentioned some of those mistakes, but I think a much deeper sense that we missed whatever opportunity we had. As you left the CIA a little over a year ago, how did you understand America's position in the world? Did you agree with that sense of pessimism or is that too grim?

William Burns: No, I mean, I'm generally an optimist. I'm a realist about some of those mistakes over the years. I'm a realist about the shifting nature of power on that landscape we were just discussing. But I'm an optimist in the sense that, as I said, I still believe the United States has a better hand to play than any of our rivals. And the question is how do you play it? But over the last year and a half, I've been increasingly worried about the erosion of trust on the part of our allies, and the corrosion of institutions and alliance relationships too. And I think that can make it much more difficult to play that hand wisely. And that's really what I worry about, because we're doing generational damage to ourselves right now, I think. You've had 25% of the career officers in the State Department either removed or pushed out. And I worry that in the intelligence community, what you're seeing is the emergence of a kind of looking-over-your-shoulder culture, where people are no less committed to speaking truth to power and providing, collecting the best intelligence they can, conducting the best operations they can, providing the most straightforward analysis that they can. But it's a world in which I think people sometimes wonder, even the best people, about whether all of that effort has much of an audience when you have the court politics of this administration and a president who still to this day seems convinced that he knows better than anybody else does.

The Erosion of Intelligence Partnerships

Dan Kurtz-Phelan: One really striking feature of the essay you wrote for Foreign Affairs a couple of years ago was the emphasis you put on intelligence diplomacy and intelligence sharing and working closely with our allies, both in the Five Eyes intelligence network, but also more broadly. There has been reporting about increasing hesitance on the part of some of those allies to share intelligence with us, given the effect on those institutions that you've described. Do you worry about intelligence sharing, both in this moment in history, but also going forward given what we're seeing in intelligence institutions and some of the fears we're starting to hear?

William Burns: Yeah, I do worry about that too, and I don't base that on any inside evidence at this point. I think there's still a lot of effort put into intelligence partnerships, and we certainly during the four years I was at CIA put a great deal of effort into doing that, recognizing again that they're huge assets for the United States. Even given the size and strengths of the US intelligence community, we benefit by working with others as well, and it becomes an important part of the overall relationships with a lot of countries. But I do worry that that erosion of trust can produce a diminution of some of the most important of those partnerships too. As I said, I think they're still treated with a great deal of importance, and I think on both sides, the U.S. side as well as our allies and partners, there's a sense of the importance of preserving it. But I do worry over time, if you erode trust, it tends to affect everything in national security relationships.

Dan Kurtz-Phelan: And what would threaten that trust, again without getting into specifics, what would kind of threaten that trust in a lasting way, to your mind?

William Burns: Well, part of it is just in the broader geopolitical sense - worried about if, to the extent the president keeps talking about NATO no longer being as important to the United States as it has been for decades and decades, and not necessarily pulling out of NATO in a formal way, but sort of de-emphasizing it as well, that tends to then spill over into intelligence relationships as well. And certainly for the culture of most intelligence services, including the CIA, people are very careful about sharing intelligence, particularly human intelligence, because you're potentially putting at risk some of your most important assets and putting their lives at risk as well. And so that's an area where in any era, culturally, intelligence services are very protective, but I think particularly against the backdrop of an erosion of trust, it can make people even more wary about that too. I hope very much that's not the case, but that would be the sort of worry as you look a bit further down the road.

Human Intelligence in the Age of Surveillance

Dan Kurtz-Phelan: I was also struck in reading that essay by the emphasis you put on human intelligence, even in a moment when technology is transforming so much of what happens in the intelligence world and more broadly. I think there's a popular sense that it's becoming harder or close to impossible to really perform human intelligence, especially in challenging situations in China and Russia or elsewhere, where there's so much surveillance and it's harder and harder to get people in. But you projected, at least in that essay, a sense of assurance. How do you see the changing role of human intelligence and how do you see adaptation to what are surely greater challenges to carrying it out than would have been the case a decade or two ago?

William Burns: Yeah, certainly, just as you said, Dan, in a world of smart cities and biometric data and facial recognition, it's a lot harder to conduct traditional human intelligence, especially in places like China or Russia. But it's not impossible, and the challenge is to master those emerging technologies as well or better than our rivals do. And we put a lot of effort into that. I'm certain that that's continuing today. And we took advantage of what was a kind of once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to recruit Russians once Putin launched his invasion of Ukraine and made significant advances in recruiting Russians. Even to the point of putting out a series of three videos that aired on Telegram and reached pretty wide Russian audiences, never once mentioning the name Putin, but appealing to people's sense of genuine national purpose and appealing to their sense that corruption was at the core of the rot in that political system as well, and produced, as I said, significant results there. And we set off on the same kind of effort with regard to China as well and also made similar progress. And I think that's been built upon in the last year and a half.

Iran: A War of Choice

Dan Kurtz-Phelan: I want to come back to both China and Russia, but first I want to focus a bit on Iran. Because that's of course top of mind for most of us right now. You've spent I think probably more time negotiating with senior Iranian officials than almost anyone in the United States at this point. You and Jake Sullivan led the initial secret negotiations that eventually resulted in the Iran deal, the JCPOA, in the Obama administration. It was I think a surprise to many observers that the Biden administration did not get back into JCPOA, but of course we got to 2025 with setting the stage for some of the Trump moves that we've seen in the last year. As you saw the problem, the Iran challenge, a year ago, how did you assess both Iranian capabilities and intentions, especially when it came to the nuclear program, which is top of the list of our concerns when it comes to Iran?

William Burns: Yeah, well certainly negotiating with the Iranians is probably the source of much of the grey hair you see on the screen. And the first thing I would say is I don't need anybody to persuade me of the dangers that this Iranian regime poses. Iran's an issue that hung over most of the nearly four decades of my career as a diplomat and then as an intelligence officer. I took the exam to join the U.S. Foreign Service in November of 1979, a day after the seizure of the hostages at our embassy in Tehran. In the spring of 1983, I had friends and colleagues from both the State Department and the CIA killed in the terrorist attack on our embassy in Beirut, which was guided and directed by the Iranian regime. And then as you said, fast forward 30 years later, I led the secret talks with the Iranians on the nuclear issue, which produced an interim agreement and then a year and a half later the comprehensive nuclear agreement, which was not a perfect agreement. Perfect is rarely on the menu in the Middle East, but it was certainly a solid and good enough agreement, and I think it was a serious mistake when in 2018 in the first Trump administration, the White House decided to pull out of that. Just as I fear that it was a mistake 5 weeks ago to launch what in effect is a war of choice, along with the Israelis, against that Iranian regime.

I think the reality is that after the 12-day war in June of last year, in June of 2025, the Iranian regime objectively has been in its weakest position in the 47 years since the revolution. With its nuclear program not obliterated, but severely degraded. Same with its ballistic missile inventory. Same with its proxies, in particular Hezbollah in Lebanon. Same with its air defenses as well. And so that was the reality that this administration faced 5 or 6 weeks ago as well.

And I say "war of choice" because I don't believe there was any imminent threat to the United States. And I think the intelligence community, from everything I read in the media, believed the same thing. And as best I can tell, the rationale for going to war 5 weeks ago was partly about finishing the job, taking advantage of that moment of historic weakness, and part of it was also the perceived opportunity to bring about regime collapse - to push this regime over the edge after all the popular demonstrations at the very beginning of 2026, and produce either true regime change or a more pliable regime. In part, I think, based on the deceptive analogy of the operation to snatch Maduro in Venezuela, the theory that there was a Delcy Rodriguez within this Iranian regime who was waiting to raise his hand - in this case, because it wouldn't have been a woman sadly.

And I think it's also a reminder of the truism that wars are a lot easier to start than they are to finish, especially when you have only a hazy idea of where you think the finish line is. And I think furthermore, there were two fundamental misreadings of this Iranian regime. The first is about its durability. This is a regime that is inept at many things like managing its economy, but it is designed to preserve itself and designed to repress its own people, and designed to withstand even the decapitation of its senior leadership. And then the second misreading was about how it would react to the launching of that war. And I think it was sadly entirely predictable that it would react by trying to regionalize and even globalize the conflict. Because I think it was animated by the view that it could absorb more military pain than the United States could absorb the economic and political pain that it could inflict by disrupting traffic through the Strait of Hormuz and by taking advantage of the relative vulnerability of energy infrastructure in the Gulf Arab states as well. And that's what we've seen unfold, and it's left, I'm afraid, us in a position where we're in a pretty deep hole right now, and all the options for getting out of that hole are difficult.

The Durability of the Iranian Regime

Dan Kurtz-Phelan: I imagine you were not especially surprised by the remarkable level of penetration of Iranian decision making and military systems by both the U.S. and Israel. Was there anything in that Iranian response that surprised you though? If Trump had been listening to his briefers, would he have expected all of this or have there been surprises that we've seen?

William Burns: No, I think as I said, the durability of this regime, the fact that it would find a way even if you decapitated the senior leadership, including the former Supreme Leader - they had been preparing not just since the 12-day war last June, but for many years before that, to withstand that kind of a war. Something that they unfortunately anticipated for a long time. And that they would react asymmetrically in the sense that they knew they couldn't compete with the US and Israeli militaries. And in some ways that becomes a classic intelligence, but even more policy problem, of a failure of imagination. You draw analogies from the experience in Venezuela and assume that you're dealing with the same kind of players in the Iranian regime who are going to be very transactional about this. These are folks, especially in the Revolutionary Guards, but also on the part of many of the theocrats in that regime, who see this as kill or be killed. That's a much different kind of mentality that I think we faced. And that even with the objective demolition of lots of the means that this regime had - ballistic missiles, nuclear program, the demolition of their air defense system, they didn't have much of a navy or air force to start with - they still have no shortage of drones. They still have an ability to inflict economic and political pain. And I think that was all pretty predictable.

The New Faces of Tehran

Dan Kurtz-Phelan: You've spent time negotiating with Abbas Araghchi, the current Foreign Minister. I imagine you've been tracking the new Supreme Leader, the younger Khamenei, for a long time, the Speaker of the Parliament, Qalibaf, who is said to be powerful at this point. How do you understand these different players? How do you assess decision making within Iranian policymaking circles at this point, to the extent we have any sense of what those dynamics are like?

William Burns: Yeah, I think what we're left with today is not regime change, even though I know the president has asserted this. It's a change of personnel within the regime. In some ways it's certainly a much weaker regime, but it's also one that's even nastier and more radical, and less open even to the kind of compromises that may have been possible before the war, from what little I understand of the negotiations that were going on before then. It's a regime and a group of people that is still capable of decentralizing some of the decision making in terms of their responses to steps that we take during the war. And still has even in its weakened state the ability to inflict pain as well. And I think it has had the sense since this war began that victory is survival. And that if this regime still survives - and it looks like it will right now - it's going to see that as a triumph. Even though it'll be kind of hollow in many ways because they're still left with a badly dilapidated economy and with no real ability to build on that, and the popular animus that still exists.

What I fear is - I've believed for a long time that this is a regime that's on a kind of one-way street to its eventual collapse. But I worry that in this war what we've done rather than accelerate that moment of collapse is slow it down a little bit. Even if I believe at the end of the day, whenever that is - a year, two years, three years from now - you're going to see a regime that's very hard to sustain itself because it's so deeply unpopular at home. And its broader strategy is just unsustainable given all the damage that's been done to it. But I don't think that's what's going to emerge as a direct result of this war.

Three Options, All Difficult

Dan Kurtz-Phelan: If you were in one of your old jobs, one of your diplomatic roles as Assistant Secretary of State for Middle East, or Under Secretary of State, both jobs you held under presidents of both parties, and you were charged with going to negotiate with the Iranians this week or next, whether those happen in Turkey or wherever else. How would you be trying to wind this down? What's a plausible positive scenario?

William Burns: Yeah, first, this is one of those situations that keeps your nostalgia for public service under control because it's, as I said before, a very difficult set of choices right now. The negotiating positions at least as I understand them have very wide gaps right now between the 15 points that the US administration evidently suggested and where the Iranians are right now. The Iranian regime seems intent on ensuring two things because they're looking to avoid a situation where, as the Israelis put it, the grass is going to get mowed every 6 months or so. So they're looking for some form of long-term deterrence and security guarantees, which would be very hard for us and the Israelis to do, and not just a simple ceasefire. And second, they're going to look to maintain the leverage that they've rediscovered by disrupting traffic through the Strait of Hormuz and use that to obtain at least, if not direct material benefit - they've insisted on war reparations which aren't going to happen - but whether it's setting up a toll booth effectively in the Strait of Hormuz or anything else, so that they recognize the huge challenge of economic recovery coming from this. And they're going to be looking for some means of being able to manage that as well. So that sets up a really difficult negotiation right now.

The second option is escalate - military escalation - and people have focused a lot of attention on some of the possibilities: take Kharg Island, the main bit of Iranian energy infrastructure at the northern end of the Gulf, or some of the islands in the Strait of Hormuz, or going after the apparently fairly large stockpile of 60% highly enriched uranium, whether it's in Isfahan or Natanz, to ensure that the Iranians can't use that if they try to weaponize their nuclear program. Or even trying to take at least some points along the Iranian shore in the Strait of Hormuz to try to reopen the Strait itself. But all of those carry huge risks.

And then there's the third option, which is effectively declaring victory - the inversion of the old Colin Powell Pottery Barn rule, which was "we break it, we own it." Instead it would be "we break it, you own it." And it's over to you guys, whether it's European allies or Gulf Arabs or anybody else to ensure safe passage through the Strait of Hormuz. And that becomes a kind of hollow declaration of victory, I think, in a lot of ways. Especially given what doesn't get as much attention today, but the wider consequences of the first 5 weeks at least of this war, which is to create two big winners: Russia and China.

A Lifeline for Putin and a Gift for Xi

William Burns: I know we'll talk about Russia in a minute, but for Putin this has been a lifeline - both in terms of more revenue as a result of higher energy prices and his ability to export more, and a diminished military inventory on the part of the United States for the kind of things that the Europeans want to acquire from the United States and then provide to President Zelensky in Ukraine, especially air defense interceptors as well. So from Putin's point of view, at a moment when he was beginning to feel genuine economic pressure and quite significant battlefield losses - well over a million killed and wounded on the battlefield - this is, as I said, a lifeline. And for China, I think the consequence at least so far, even though they're obviously worried about their access to Gulf energy, has been that every week, every month that the United States is preoccupied in the Gulf or in the Middle East is a week or a month or a year in which the United States is less focused on the Indo-Pacific as well, which from the long-term strategic point of view of the Chinese as well as Putin and Russia is a positive.

Iran's Nuclear Dash

Dan Kurtz-Phelan: Is there any risk in the aftermath of this war that Iran would in fact be able to dash toward a bomb and we would either not see it or not be able to stop it? Is that something that keeps you up at night?

William Burns: Yeah, it does. It's something that worried us in the last year or two that I was Director at CIA - the possibility that they could make a dash in the absence of the kind of intrusive verification and monitoring that the comprehensive nuclear agreement had set up, and which had largely atrophied in the years after the Trump administration pulled out of the nuclear agreement, that they could try to do that. Although we didn't see any evidence that there had been a decision by the Supreme Leader to reverse his edict at the end of 2003 to at least pause their weaponization program. So it's possible. I think given the quality of Israeli and US intelligence, there's a fair chance that we would see it happening, but it's a lot more complicated right now in the absence of having inspectors on the ground. But it's a significant worry. Even if you're not talking about recreating or reassembling the entire nuclear infrastructure, much of which has been destroyed now - if you decided to make a determined effort to build a crude nuclear device, you still have the know-how to do that and you still have a significant amount, like over 400 kilograms of 60% highly enriched uranium. You could have the means to do that. I'm not certain that this Iranian regime would set off down that path. They've got a lot of other preoccupations right now. But given what I said before, that you now have a regime that's weaker in many ways but also even nastier and more radical, this is a regime that will certainly seriously consider trying to do that.

The Lessons We Don't Learn

Dan Kurtz-Phelan: I went back and read the memo you wrote ahead of the Iraq war when you were the Assistant Secretary overseeing the Middle East warning against exactly some of the consequences of that war. It's kind of remarkable that we're at another moment, more than 20 years later, where the 82nd Airborne is back on its way to the region and we're talking about regime change and sending troops into another Middle Eastern country. How do you make sense of the intractability of these problems, the fact that we seem to keep repeating these mistakes?

William Burns: We don't learn a lot. We don't learn all the lessons that we should. And we sometimes have a short attention span for issues like that. The war in 2003 in Iraq seems a little bit distant right now, and it shouldn't, because the lessons of that experience ought to have been seared in our memory as we weigh choices like the one the President made 5 weeks ago to go to war with Iran. Especially when, as I said before, it's a war of choice - it's not something that was driven by an imminent threat. And sadly, in all my experience in the Middle East over the years, it's the place where grand ambitions and ill-conceived strategies go to die. And it is a place where pessimists always feel right at home. That ought to be instructive for us at least to weigh those kind of choices very carefully.

And I just think also, when I talked about some of the institutional damage that's being done - all of us bitched and moaned sometimes about the number of interagency meetings and everything else in different administrations I worked in. But I'd much rather err on the side of having too much process than no process at all on some of these issues. That enables you to think about issues like, well, okay, what happens if the Strait of Hormuz is blocked or disrupted? What should we be thinking about in terms of evacuating American citizens from places in which they might face considerable risk? How should we think about managing our embassies overseas? And there's lots of different questions like that that sometimes just don't get the attention they deserve when you have an absence of process.

Putin and the War in Ukraine

Dan Kurtz-Phelan: In addition to being the American who has probably spent the most time negotiating with senior Iranians, you have also spent as much time as anyone with Vladimir Putin, both as Ambassador to Russia during the Bush administration and also in your more recent jobs. I'm fascinated by a couple of moments with regard to the war in Ukraine when you were at CIA. The first is this moment in the fall of 2022 when all the reporting suggests that people within the administration were pretty acutely concerned about nuclear use. This was a moment when Russian troops were losing ground and there was fear of a precipitous collapse of Russian lines and reportedly the intelligence community thought there was a 50% chance of Russia using a nuclear weapon. People can read in Foreign Affairs and elsewhere that the Biden administration was overly sensitive about such risks. But I realize it feels different when you're in those chairs. And the fact that you were one of the people making that warning, I think, made people take it seriously. I'm fascinated by how you thought of Russian decision making in that moment and what made you take that risk seriously.

William Burns: Well, I think first, whenever you're dealing with a significant nuclear-armed power like Russia, and you're near the President of the United States, you have to take risks seriously like that. And we had collected some intelligence which suggested that there was at least some contingency planning going on. And this was a moment where the Russian military had broken and ran east of Kharkiv in the eastern part of Ukraine, where the Russians were in an untenable position on the other side of the Dnipro River in Kherson and were pulling back. And I think our judgment at the time was that if a situation emerged in which the Ukrainian advance continued at a rapid rate and put at risk Putin's grip on Crimea, that would be a circumstance in which he'd at least consider the possibility of using tactical nuclear weapons.

We didn't believe that there was a high likelihood that his grip on Crimea was going to be put at risk then, just because the Ukrainians, thanks to their courage and innovativeness, had made huge progress. But also they needed to regroup as well. And the Russians had begun to use their head and pull back across the Dnipro to more defensible positions. So I didn't think there was a high likelihood that that circumstance was going to emerge. But it was sufficiently serious even if it was a marginal likelihood that we had to act. And we did that. The President sent me to talk to one of my Russian counterparts, Sergey Naryshkin, the head of their external intelligence service, the SVR. I met in Turkey in November of 22. Four hours of my life that I'll never get back. Because he was as polemical as you can imagine. But he did get the message. And this was one instance where the Chinese both privately and publicly made clear that they didn't want to see any use of nuclear weapons as a result of the war in Ukraine. And Xi's was a voice that Putin couldn't afford to ignore as well. So for all those reasons, I think it was right to react energetically to that kind of a potential threat. Even if the likelihood of it happening was not particularly high.

Strategic Declassification

Dan Kurtz-Phelan: The other really essential role that intelligence has played in the Ukraine war is through strategic declassification, as you put it in the Foreign Affairs essay - the release, the declassification of intelligence about Russian intentions, to make clear what is going on and what is going to happen. This in some ways I think really determined some of the early Russian failures in the war. As you were sitting in CIA in that job, how did you balance risks and rewards? What was the discussion around strategy? And do you think we've lost the ability to use it just given the lack of trust in our institutions at this point?

William Burns: Well, I think that's a real challenge too, because there were a lot of skeptics in the run-up to the war when we became increasingly convinced that Putin was going to launch a massive invasion against Ukraine. And that was reinforced for me when the President sent me to talk to Putin and some of the knuckle-draggers around him in early November of 2021. And I found Putin utterly unapologetic. I laid out in pretty graphic detail, unusually, what we knew about their invasion planning and also the consequences that would flow from his going ahead with that invasion plan. And he was, as far as I could tell, convinced that this was his moment strategically to control Ukraine and its choices. About which he had had a singular fixation for many years, certainly over the years that I had known him as well.

And I'm also proud of the fact that we provided credible early warning of what was coming. It was a kind of lonely period because it was really only the British intelligence services that shared that conviction that an invasion was coming. Many of our other closest allies were pretty skeptical. And we invested a lot, going back to 2014 and the annexation of Crimea, in working with the Ukrainian services to put them in the best possible position to defend themselves. I think the credibility of our intelligence helped the President to build a strong coalition of countries to push back against Putin's aggression and help the Ukrainians defend themselves.

And then I think the strategic declassification, for which President Biden deserved credit, was very useful. I had watched Putin over many years create false narratives or stage what are called false flag operations to try to pin the blame on the Ukrainians for provoking exactly what he planned to do anyway, which was a war. And I think by carefully exposing the falsity of a lot of those narratives and putting out in unclassified form a lot of what we knew, that turned out to be a very wise investment and a pretty effective tool.

Now, the challenge: the easiest way to lose good sources of intelligence, whether it's human or technical, is to overdo it. And Washington is a place where oftentimes people think anything worth doing is worth overdoing. We had to be careful about that, but I think both the process for making those judgments and President Biden's ultimate political instincts on this were very sensible, and I think they paid big dividends. Now you can't necessarily do that in every instance. And I do think your last question is an important one, Dan, because to the extent we're less trusted as an ally, as a partner, people are going to also be a little bit wary of assertions we're making about intelligence we have. We built up a fair amount of credibility, I think, especially in the run-up to the war in Ukraine and in the first year of the war. And I think that paid big dividends, but you can squander that too if you're not careful and if you let trust erode.

The Tight Circle Around Putin

Dan Kurtz-Phelan: Did Putin seem surprised by the amount we knew, by what you were laying out to him in that November 2021 meeting?

William Burns: Not particularly. He's professionally trained to keep his game face on in a way on issues like that. Ironically, a couple of his senior officials, I think, genuinely didn't know. He had kept this in a very, very tight circle. And at least one of the very senior intelligence people that I met with then I think was actually quite sincere in his protestations that, you guys, the CIA doesn't know what you're talking about and there's no plan to invade, we're not going to do it. And I think that was because he was largely cut out of the planning.

Putin's Theory of Victory

Dan Kurtz-Phelan: How do you understand Putin's theory of success in Ukraine right now? What is he - how does he understand his own strategy and what would he settle for? What might an end to the war look like?

William Burns: I think he's quite cocky right now, unfortunately. And when you look at a million killed and wounded, it's kind of hard to explain cockiness right now too. But I think he has seen the consequences of the Iran war as benefiting him. I think he is convinced that time right now is on his side. That he can continue to grind down the Ukrainians. And that eventually, the United States is going to lose interest - and that's how I think he reads the President's impatience sometimes, President Trump's impatience. And he looks at the increasing fissures in the transatlantic alliance right now. And that also feeds his sense that if he just keeps at this, eventually he's going to extract something that he can portray to Russians, who have lost a lot in this war, as a victory.

And some of the components of that would be achieving at the negotiating table control of all the Donbas, including parts of Donetsk Oblast that he hasn't in more than 4 years of war been able to gain on the battlefield. But he thinks he can drive a hard enough bargain in negotiations that the United States, that this administration, will want to drive to an agreement. I think he thinks he has convinced the White House that it's only a matter of time before he wins. And therefore we should negotiate a solution sooner rather than later as well.

I just have not believed that. I think there are ways in which we could puncture some of Putin's hubris, despite the benefits that have accrued to him as a result of the Iran war. His economy is not in great shape. And his military has its vulnerabilities as well. And thanks in part to our support but mostly to the courage and tenacity of Ukrainians, they've managed to offset some of the obvious manpower and munitions advantages that the Russians have by the use of drone technology, electronic warfare, a lot of other things too. So I think it's a mistake for us to accept the Putin argument that the Ukrainians are going to lose sooner or later, so we should just negotiate an end to this now. Because I think that's a prescription for what would be not only an unfair outcome for Ukrainians but also set a precedent for European security, for the Indo-Pacific because Xi is watching this all very carefully too, that we'll regret. And I think also, in many respects, strategically, the stakes are higher in the war in Ukraine than they are in a war of choice against Iran right now.

What a Good Deal Looks Like

Dan Kurtz-Phelan: If I could ask you to indulge in nostalgia in this case too, and imagine yourself charged with trying to craft a strategy that would lead to some kind of negotiated end to the war. What would a good outcome look like that we could potentially get to over the course of this presidential term?

William Burns: Well first, I'm all for the efforts that the Trump White House has made to negotiate. I think that's important as well. But the question is always leverage, and how do you create leverage to produce a fair outcome. And I think the Ukrainian government understands that they're not going to regain Crimea anytime soon, even if they're not going to accept Russian sovereignty. I think that's probably true for much, but not all, of the Donbas right now too. But I think what Putin is also going to drive at is to hollow out any set of security guarantees that we and our European allies might provide to the Ukrainians, as well as commitments to continue to support their military, which is in many ways better than pieces of paper as deterrence against a repetition of this by either Putin or some successor in Moscow as well. So it seems to me the basic tradeoff is swallowing what will be some very painful compromises for the Ukrainian government, but being able to point to sufficiently strong security guarantees on the other hand, that as unpalatable as this is for most Ukrainians who have suffered so much, it gives them some reassurance that they're going to be in a position where they can prevent a repetition of this, that the West is still going to be supporting them, and that they have the space to strengthen both their democratic system and economic recovery.

The China-Russia Partnership

Dan Kurtz-Phelan: Have you been surprised by the speed and depth of development of the China-Russia relationship over the course of the past few years?

William Burns: No, I think it's been far more than a marriage of convenience that people sort of talked loosely about some years ago. And it's not just about the relationship between Xi and Putin, although that's certainly a part of this as well. It's not a formal alliance in the sense that NATO, at least as we've known it until now, is. But it's a pretty strong partnership born of mutual interest right now, a partnership in which the Russians and Putin are very much the junior partner, dependent on the Chinese in a way that the Chinese are not dependent on the Russians. And it really is only because of Chinese support in dual-use technologies and economic support that the Russians have been able to continue the conduct of the war in Ukraine.

I've always thought, as someone who spent a lot of time in Russia as a diplomat, that sooner or later Russians are going to chafe at being the junior partner of China, just as they chafed at the notion of being the junior partner of the United States after the end of the Cold War. But that's a ways down the road. And so I think for the foreseeable future, we should base our own policy on the assumption that that's going to remain a pretty strong partnership.

Xi, Taiwan, and the Boa Constrictor Approach

Dan Kurtz-Phelan: You made headlines in 2023, I believe it was, when you noted about Xi Jinping and Taiwan that he has in fact instructed his military to be ready to conduct a successful invasion by 2027. And I believe you said that "I wouldn't underestimate President Xi's ambitions with regard to Taiwan." As you've watched those ambitions develop over the past few years, and especially as Xi has watched the war in Iran and further developments in the war in Ukraine, how do you assess that risk at this point, both the intentions and the capabilities when it comes to a Chinese invasion?

William Burns: Well, 2027 was a readiness goal, which we knew that President Xi had instructed the PLA, the People's Liberation Army leadership to aim toward, but it's not a decision to go to war in 27 or 28 or 26 for that matter. I think, partly as a result of Xi's perception of the battlefield in Ukraine, which tended to sober him and deepen his doubts a little bit about what an objectively weaker player could do on defense if sufficiently motivated and sufficiently supported, he still probably has some lingering doubts about the capacity of the Chinese military to achieve at acceptable cost a successful all-out invasion of Taiwan.

I think his preference right now, as far as I can see it, President Xi's preference, is a kind of boa constrictor approach where you squeeze the will to resist out of Taiwan, where you try to chip away at what has historically been a US commitment to help Taiwan defend itself, you chip away at the conviction of some of our allies in the Indo-Pacific that they have a stake too in Taiwan's survival. And you buy time in a sense. This is one case - Taiwan - where for half a century, kicking the can down the road may not win you a Nobel Peace Prize, but it's actually the best of the available choices.

I think the other reality is, given the fact that Xi has unleashed the most sweeping purge of senior military ranks in the PLA since the Cultural Revolution under Mao, that tactically the disarray that inevitably flows from that probably creates some obstacles in the path of serious consideration of an all-out invasion. That's the good news. The bad news is that I think it probably also reflects a strategic conviction - for all the tactical problems that it may create, it reinforces the strategic conviction, and you quoted something I said before, that we shouldn't underestimate Xi's conviction that controlling Taiwan and its choices is something that he wants to accomplish, I think, over the course of his professional lifetime or at least in the near term for China as well. I don't think he's in any rush to do that, but I think one of the things he'll try to do when he and President Trump meet in Beijing in the middle of May, is going to be to chip away at declaratory US policy on Taiwan. And he probably thinks he's in a good position in the wake of wherever the Iran war is at that stage to get more concessions on high-end technology from the US as well. And he knows that the President at that point, again depending on how the Iran war turns out, may be looking for something that he can portray as a success and change the channel a little bit on Iran, and certainly a significant trade agreement would be a part of that. But Chinese leadership will extract something for that. And I think Taiwan and technology are the two areas where they'll be most sharply focused.

The Autocrat's Dilemma

Dan Kurtz-Phelan: The underlying question when we all try to understand what's happening with these purges and other decision-making in Beijing is to really understand the dynamics of power within the Chinese elite. And what Xi's grip on power is, to what extent there is internal resistance to him, real debate about Chinese strategy. What is your assessment of Xi's power, and how much debate is there about the direction of Chinese foreign policy beneath the surface in ways that are kind of hard for outside observers to really detect?

William Burns: Yeah, I suspect the debate that may have occurred a decade ago is less likely to occur now because he's consolidated power so effectively. And that's always a mixed blessing for autocratic leaders because what it means is that whether it's in Chinese intelligence services or in the PLA, there's a tendency to tell a very deeply entrenched autocratic leader what he wants to hear. As opposed to generating real debate about choices right now. And I suspect that that's probably increasingly the case, especially since Xi has been so effective in consolidating power and authority right now. The flip side of doing that is that you expose yourself more to ill-thought-through decisions sometimes because you don't have people who are challenging your assumptions. Because they've learned a long time ago it's not career-enhancing to do that.

Dan Kurtz-Phelan: It's disquieting that when you look at the three most powerful countries on earth today, you have those court dynamics in all three capitals, with Trump, Xi, and Putin.

William Burns: Yeah, in different ways, but you're exactly right. And coming back to our earlier part of the conversation about the erosion of not just trust with allies, but of institutions and career public servants - I'd be the last person to argue that career public servants have a monopoly on wisdom. That's certainly not the case. But you create a process where people feel comfortable and actually feel an obligation sometimes not just to speak truth to power, but to challenge assumptions. That in many ways is the best insurance against making bad decisions sometimes.

And I think whether it was Putin's decision to go to war in Ukraine based on false assumptions - and I heard Putin say this to me for decades, like I was kind of a dim 4th grader - "You don't understand, Ukraine is not a real country." It's not just a question of Russian entitlement to control Ukraine, but "they need Russian guidance as well." And that was the assumption on which the FSB, the biggest of the Russian intelligence services, was providing advice to Putin. He thought this was going to be a walkover. And vastly underestimated the determination not just of President Zelensky, but of Ukrainians - because Putin, through his aggression in Crimea in 2014, helped create a sense of Ukrainian national purpose that didn't exist in the same way before that. And you can see some of the same dynamic with Xi and some of the decisions that he makes as well. And I think certainly you've seen some of that contribute to the decision making, at least as I understand it, before this war in Iran.

Dan Kurtz-Phelan: It does seem that we in the United States and people in capitals around the world also underestimated the Ukrainians ahead of the invasion - that we were surprised by just how effective they were and how strong the leadership was.

William Burns: Yeah, I think the fair way of putting it is that we did overestimate the capacity of the Russian military. We looked at Putin's modernization of the Russian military over the two decades before that when it was a shambles. I remember seeing the Russian military in the first Chechen war when I was serving in the embassy in Moscow in the mid-1990s, and it was like a street gang more than a strong conventional military. But I think we assumed too much, much as Putin did - we assumed too much about Russian capability. And part of that may have been because the decision-making circle was so tight that you had a lot of relatively senior Russian military officers who were kind of making it up as they went along in the first months of the war. And you saw that in the shoddy performance of the Russian military. But a lot of that, of course, was also the determination, the courage of Ukrainians too. So I think it's fair to say that we overestimated the strength of the Russian military and underestimated the determination of Ukrainians to resist.

AI and the Future of Intelligence

Dan Kurtz-Phelan: We talked earlier about the importance of human intelligence. I want to make sure before we close that we talk a bit about technology because that is certainly under your tenure, but I assume now is still continuing to transform the CIA and the intelligence community more broadly. How do you see AI especially changing the way intelligence works? I think we're probably just at the beginning of integrating these tools, but I'm curious how you see that change happening.

William Burns: Well, certainly emerging technologies, but particularly artificial intelligence, are critical to the future of any good intelligence service, including the CIA. And so whether you're an operations officer, a case officer trying to recruit and then manage assets in complicated places overseas, you need to use artificial intelligence to navigate smart cities and be able to defeat facial recognition and biometric data collection. And we put a lot of effort certainly in the 4 years I was director - and I'm sure John Ratcliffe, my successor, has continued that - not just in investing in the pool of technological expertise that's in the agency, because more than a third of all the career officers in the agency spend every day working on digital, cyber, science and technology issues. So it's a pretty strong in-house set of expertise. But unless we build better relationships with the private sector, there's just no way we're going to be able to compete effectively with the Chinese.

And so that's what I tried to build on - some of the efforts that my predecessors had made to strengthen those private sector relationships - both as a tool so that we can take advantage of new technologies to conduct those operations, or to help analysts, through the use of large language models, digest the enormous amount of information that's out there, whether it's open source, generally available or clandestinely acquired, to put the best human analysts in a place where they can do what I think ultimately only they can do, which is tell a president: here are the choices that we see, here are the second and third order consequences of decisions that you might make. And so we put a lot of effort into applying large language models and AI both for analysts and for operations officers too.

And then we tried to develop more flexible approaches to career paths. Because while we welcome officers who say they want to spend 30 years as a technologist in the CIA, the truth is that increasingly you're talking about a generation of officers who may be very much interested because of their patriotism, their commitment to the mission, their commitment to working with other smart people to deal with some really complicated challenges - they'll spend 8 or 9 years, but then they may also have an interest, because they're putting their kids through college or whatever, to go into the private sector for a while. And so we put a lot of effort into trying to keep the door open for people to come back and bring back the benefits of experience in the private sector too. So I think all of those are areas in which we made some headway, but which we just - I recognized at the time - need to move even faster because the pace of innovation is such that just keeping up with it, let alone getting ahead of it, is a huge challenge. But it matters as much as anything else, if not more so, than any of the other priorities that I had at the agency.

What We're Not Paying Attention To

Dan Kurtz-Phelan: Let me close by asking you if there are two or three issues that you think aren't getting adequate attention in the broader foreign policy conversation. We've talked about the headline threats. We could have added Gaza or Venezuela or lots of other things to that list, but what do you think we're not paying enough attention to?

William Burns: Africa is a continent that's often suffered, I think, in administrations of both parties that I've worked for, in different ways from benign and sometimes not so benign neglect as well. And I think if you just look at the objective realities of a population of a continent that's going to double at least by the middle of this century, that has both incredible potential, if you look at some societies that have been able to fight corruption and are well governed, but also huge challenges of urbanization, the movement of people to cities, the challenges of job creation that that creates, the potential for migration of peoples that other parts of the world then have to deal with as well. So it just seems to me there are too many other issues that tend to crowd out a focus on Africa. And I think that's really important.

I think it's to this administration's credit that they focused more attention on the Western Hemisphere, which in many ways is the natural strategic home base for the United States. Now, we've also managed - and this takes particular effort for Americans - to piss off the Canadians, which I think is unfortunate. And I think we have to be careful that we don't shoehorn too much in the Western Hemisphere through the prism of counternarcotics. As huge a challenge as that is, there are a lot of other dimensions to successful strategy in the Western Hemisphere as well. And Mexico is obviously hugely important for the United States for lots of different reasons too. So that's a credit to this administration, even if I don't entirely buy the Monroe Doctrine or the notion of almost brute force American dominance in the Western Hemisphere. I think American power is enormously important, but paying attention to a range of other issues - whether it's what the US Agency for International Development used to do before it was demolished - makes a big difference too in building the kind of position in the Western Hemisphere that's seen as a kind of shared benefit by leaderships in the region as well as by the United States.

Terrorism and counterterrorism remained a very high priority for me and all of my colleagues at the CIA, because even as we tried to focus attention and resources on major power competition and the revolution in technology, we have to take very seriously potential terrorist threats.

Cyber issues also I think get a lot of attention. And I worry that in this administration budgetary resources for cyber defense have been cut, as I understand it, even as resources have been increased for cyber offense, which I think is a good thing. But I worry a little bit that we become more exposed to cyber attacks, particularly with formidable players like China's Ministry of State Security, who have penetrated a lot of the critical civilian infrastructure that matters so much to the United States. So I worry that we haven't focused as much attention and resources on that.

Dan Kurtz-Phelan: It's also striking how much Gaza and developments in the West Bank and elsewhere in Israel have kind of fallen out of the conversation as a result of the war in Iran. I have to think that will come back as a challenge.

William Burns: Yeah. And I say that as someone who is deeply committed to Israel's long-term security interests. But if you look at the pace - people used to talk about creeping annexation in the West Bank. This is at a gallop right now, in terms of settler violence and a lot that's going on there. The Gaza situation seems kind of frozen in a way right now, with Gaza itself being physically divided between an area that the Israel Defense Forces controls and an area where most of the population of Gaza is, where Hamas is reemerging as well. And even though it's not fashionable to think about the Palestinian issue as something that matters, and it's fashionable to think that the two-state solution is dead, the problem is, without some progress, some credible pathway over time - not overnight, but over time - toward a demilitarized Palestinian state, I don't see how you serve the interests of a Jewish, democratic, secure state in Israel, let alone the legitimate aspirations of Palestinians or the interests of neighboring countries like Jordan too. So you're right, I think that should be an increasing concern, particularly what's going on in the West Bank right now.

The Demolition of Institutions

Dan Kurtz-Phelan: Well Bill, thank you so much for doing this. We could obviously go on about a bunch of these topics. I will say that both your 2024 essay and also some of the work you did before going back into government about the State Department and American diplomacy is still well worth reading. There was a piece you did in 2019 called "The Demolition of US Diplomacy", which in some ways those concerns look quaint compared to what's happened since, but the warning you issue in that piece I think is still well worth hearing.

William Burns: Yeah, and I do worry. When you asked about what keeps you up at night right now - I just think we're going to regret the demolition of institutions and career public servants as well. Nobody should think that it's as neat as turning the clock back to the way things were before the second Trump term. There was not a perfect system and serious streamlining and reform by any of us who served in those institutions was essential. But what's happening right now I think is just going to put us in a weaker and weaker position to compete in an unforgiving world for years and years to come. And the kind of gleeful indignity with which people have been treated, apolitical career public servants, people without a political bone in their bodies, I think is shameful on the one hand, but it's also in practical terms very dangerous for the United States over time.

Dan Kurtz-Phelan: Well, on that grim note, thank you so much Bill. And we'll look forward to having you back in our pages I hope before too long.

William Burns: Thanks, Dan. Very much. Take care.

Dan Kurtz-Phelan: Thank you for listening. You can find the articles that we discussed on today's show at foreignaffairs.com. This episode of "The Foreign Affairs Interview" was produced by Elise Burr and Kanishk Tharoor. Our audio engineer is Todd Yager. Original music is by Robin Hilton. Special thanks as well to Irina Hogan. Make sure you subscribe to the show wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you like what you heard, please take a minute to rate and review it. We release a new show every Thursday. Thanks again for tuning in.