(photo by Jason Reed / Reuters)

 

Passport: You have been [Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee] for six months, and on the committee for 26 years. What is the Kerry doctrine?

 

Senator John F. Kerry: The United States still remains — in a much changed world with a lot of different power relationships — the critical partner for most issues on the planet in terms of security and international relations. We need to play a thoughtful, strategic role to assert our interests in ways that connect with the rest of the world and build stronger support structures for our values and our principles.

 

We spent 60 years in the Cold War. Most of the 20^th century was simply the American century. While we remain the predominant both economic and military power we no longer live in that sort of simple division of both challenges and responsibilities and other countries are asserting themselves in the post-bipolar, Soviet-U.S. struggle in many different ways.

 

Ethnic and sectarian ambitions have been unleashed that were contained by that other struggle for a long period of time, and developmental issues in many countries have transformed those countries to the point that the competition for resources and markets is very different from anything that existed previously. So the result is that there are very different plays available to you, very different sets of strategic opportunities and ways of asserting our interests and our values. And we have not adjusted, frankly, to all of them.

 

For example, in Pakistan, we do not yet do a good job of communicating effectively what we are about and what our relationship ought to be about. And the bad guys represented mostly by Al Qaeda and so forth have done a better job of defining us than we have defining them or ourselves.

 

There are a lot of examples like that around the world, where we need to engage still further. I think the president had done an excellent job of reaching out to Iran. I think that is an example of the new paradigm. But it is just a very different world.

 

Foreign policy is effectively the assertion of many individual countries intersecting on the global marketplace. And you have to figure out how to get your interest served in a way that meets the interests and needs of these other folks.

 

Passport: Do you perceive there is an Obama doctrine?

 

Senator Kerry: I think it is not dissimilar to what I described. It is a view of this different world which says we have got to be engaged. We don’t have the luxury of just proceeding down the road and telling people what to do the way the Bush people tried to do it. Or ignoring people the way the Bush people tried to do it. That is why his extend to Iran. That is why his speech in Cairo.

 

You may recall in my campaign for president in ’04 I used the language, we have to restore America’s moral authority. I think we have heard that language repeated in recent months and I talked about even reaching out to the Muslim world, so I think we are in sync, very much, in terms of what is needed here and I think he has started a lot of efforts that are very important.

  

Passport: You are the point man for the Senate’s constitutional role, of watchdog . This is an administration filled with some big names and egos – Clinton, Holbrooke, Mitchell and Biden – and a lot of  special envoys, each with their own ideas and ambitions….

 

Senator Kerry: You will define who has the name and who has the ego, right? [Laughter]

 

Passport: There has been some criticism of the National Security Council for not doing a good job coordinating [global diplomatic initiatives] and I wonder how it looks to you.

 

Senator Kerry: I think they are doing well. They are proceeding quietly and closely. There are some things I think could be done better and I privately have made some suggestions. And I prefer to keep them private.

 

I think George Mitchell is a consummate professional. He is the ideal selection to handle the job of special envoy if you choose to have a special envoy. And likewise Holbrooke, who is a capable diplomat who has a lot of experience in difficult places making things happen.

 

I worry about stripping the ability [to engage in diplomacy] at the appropriate desks at the State department. But we have a lot of catching up to do. In the last 8 years we have lost so much momentum in so many places that there is a greater urgency in having [that] more specialized and focused through an envoy.

 

I think there are, as I said, some places where they need to put a little more energy and effort, and I said as recently as this morning at breakfast with the Secretary of State I communicated some of those. I prefer to advise privately rather than through the media.

 

With respect to oversight, let me make it clear that we are not going to abrogate our responsibility publicly with respect to the committee as a whole … we will have hearings ….

 

Passport: Well you have had a lot of hearings, but you haven’t had hearings on the Fulbright model …

 

Senator Kerry: That is because Senator Fulbright had broken with Johnson on the war.

 

I would say end of summer, early fall we are going to take a hard look at Afghanistan, and obviously continue to have major oversight of the Pakistan issue, and Iraq. We are going to begin to see where we are in terms of withdrawal of the troops … the drawing down of the troops.

 

Passport: Is it going well?

  

Senator Kerry: Right now we are. Right now it is going pretty well. There is a fair level of optimism that some things are taking hold. Obviously there are some key things that have to happen in the next months. They remain the same key things that have been outstanding for the last five or six years. The oil wealth sharing. The north, Kirkuk. The constitutional/federalism and how it is going to work. And the Sunni/Shia relationship. I think those are the biggies. Even there, there is a sign that Iraqis are kind of finding a way to work some things out ….

 

Passport: Is the administration paying enough attention to that?

 

Senator Kerry: I think they are. We have an outstanding ambassador there, with Chris Hill and I think people are very attentive to making this work. And the recent visit of Vice President Biden, Hillary has been there. Chris Hill was just back here, I met with him and got an update … he is going to testify in a couple of weeks. So we are keeping track of that …

 

Passport: In the House, Representative Jim McGovern and some 50 Democrats opposed the Afghan funding. I asked him why and he said, “I don’t know what the end is, I haven’t seen how we get out.” He didn’t have the experience you had in Vietnam, but said it sounds to him like the Gulf of Tonkin resolution.

 

Senator Kerry: I think we gave them a fairly defined and limited scope of engagement, but I remain concerned about the nature of the footprint and how this is going to be implemented.

 

I think in fairness to the administration they have done what prior administrations did not do which is accurately define a mission and a rationale for our presence which is not longer this grand sweeping democratic state and so forth but is the much more limited mission of achieving a sufficient level of stability that the Afghans can work things out for themselves, and we have the ability to prosecute Al Qaeda and not allow them to attack the U.S. from their soil. That is a pretty limited goal.

 

The key here is how Petraeus and company actually implement and define the use of those troops. I think you have to be very, very careful about the civilian casualty component which they had not been sufficiently in the past. And I think you have to be very careful that this is an Afghan operation and not an American one. You have to have local communities that believe in what they are doing and invest in what they are doing and if they don’t do that this will not succeed …

 

Passport: Are we talking with the Taliban?

 

Senator Kerry: Not directly. Well, some of the military folks may be in some ways. We have offered to. There are different kinds of Taliban. Let me clarify that. I seen no problem in talking to the Taliban for hire, the Taliban for a day, the Taliban for a month, for whatever … the Taliban-for-rent folks. And there are a lot. That is the majority, frankly. They don’t have a job, don’t have money, get sucked in, they are intimidated in.

 

The majority of the people in Afghanistan do not believe in the Taliban leadership. The hard core Taliban, the [Mullah] Omars and so forth, there is nothing to talk to them about. So, where local troops have the ability to turn people or bring them out of there we are going to try and do that and we should. That is just smart counterinsurgency.

 

Passport: At your own hearing, with Colonel Kilcullen, he basically said, just don’t do it half way. If you are going to do counter insurgency make the investment to do it right …

 

Senator Kerry: I agree. It is what are we doing? Are we doing it at a level where it will take or won’t? That is a good question. That is what our hearings are going to look at. I don’t have the answer for that right now.

 

So the judgment on how much it takes to do counterinsurgency — the Afghans know how to do it themselves if you get them invested in that. But they have to see there is a light at the end of the tunnel. Up until now there has been no strategy, no global strategy for the country, and a huge growing distrust of Kabul and of the Karzai government and of the corruption and so forth. If they have faith that their needs are being addressed …

 

Our foreign policy over the course of the last 25-30 years has missed the importance of tribalism and I believe we need to factor tribalism in much more than we do, not just in Afghanistan and Pakistan but all through the Middle East and Africa, the Arab world, south Asia …

 

Tribalism is a very powerful force ... some of what we are inheriting here are the consequences of British colonialism and other colonialism where Lord Somebody or Sir Somebody Else drew a line through the tribes and said here is a border and for hundreds of years those borders meant nothing to them. But countries were defined by them and people were placed on thrones or people were placed who didn’t have legitimacy and subsequently gained it through the barrel of a gun and oppression.

 

I am talking about Pashtun, for instance. There has never been an integrated Pakistan in all its history. And there is a reason.

 

Passport: Do they get it now, the Pakistanis? Now that the Taliban threat has become real?

 

Senator Kerry: The Pakistanis have made moves that no Pakistan government has previously made. I think the government is ahead of the establishment in Pakistan, and the establishment in Pakistan still has to move, but has moved somewhat. They are beginning to understand the nature of the threat and are beginning to move. But you know they have had the privilege of taking the money out of the country and protecting their own safety and doing other things so we need to get everybody on the same page and we still have to work on that.

 

Passport: Your committee also has the responsibility to move treaties through the Senate. In a speech this spring you said you could not get the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty through this year because of Republican opposition …

 

Senator Kerry: I didn’t say I didn’t think we would get it through. I said it [will be] difficult and we are going to have to take a careful measured process of preparations. Not just Republican, incidentally, but Democratic too. It’s been what, 15 years since we had the last vote? We have a lot of new senators.

 

Passport: Is the Senate still a place where bipartisan support can be assembled for a treaty like this?

 

Senator Kerry: If it is a good treaty. If the treaty answers the concerns of people.

 

Passport: So we have not reached the stage where any treaty is going to be a target for the opposition to hurt the president politically?

 

Senator Kerry: I am hopeful we are going to pass a couple of treaties shortly. We are working for them now. That will be a test of that.

 

We are not ready for the CTBT yet. For a lot of reasons. There is a nuclear review going on. The Start treaty negotiations are going on. What happens with them will have some conditioning on how you view the CTBT. We need to get the science from the laboratories. We need to get better information from the stockpile stewardship program so we know exactly the status of warheads and where we are in terms of their reliability. There is information that needs to be gathered. And the committee is going to lay groundwork in a series of hearings leading up to that.

  

Passport: Climate change?

 

Senator Kerry: The vast majority of my time right now is on climate change. I am meeting with senators individually. Senator Boxer and I are working on the bill. We hope to introduce it maybe next week, and then have hearings on it in her committee.

 

We are really working hard to build on what the House did. I think the House did an outstanding job. They deserve enormous credit for what they achieved. We are not going to try to reinvent the wheel completely. A lot of the battles we were going to fight here were fought there. We respect the needle they threaded and with respect to a lot of those interests we are going to model it on what they did.

 

There are some places where we believe we can tweak it and improve some things and we are going to try and do that. For instance on perhaps the trade enforcement piece, regulation of the marketplace itself with respect to trade. There are various thing we can do to strengthen it.

 

I have met with many, many foreign ministers in these months. Went to China for a week. Met with all their leaders on the issue of global climate change and we are making some progress there. And the next step is India, we have got to make some progress there, and that could be enormously helpful for Copenhagen, to get both of them moving down the same road. So I am very hopeful, I am very, very hopeful, we are going to get this out of committee in the Senate before September 18 and then probably have the debate here in the Senate somewhere in October. And try to get it done. It is of enormous consequence. Making Copenhagen a success is one of my goals, obviously.

 

http://www.globalpost.com/passport/newsmaker-interview/090709/senator-john-f-kerry