WE ARE ENTERING
THE FOURTH
QUARTER AND
REALLY IMPORTANT
THINGS HAPPEN IN
THE FOURTH
QUARTER.
—PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA
These were the exact words printed in black ink vertically on small, white three-by-five cards embossed with “THE WHITE HOUSE” in blue across the top. Chief of Staff Denis McDonough personally delivered these cards to White House staff in early January 2015. A tall, lean, chiseled former football player from Minnesota with close-cropped, silver hair (despite his relative youth), Denis has something of the coach in him—complete with sometimes hokey team-building techniques.
When he came by my office to hand me my card, I probably offered a perfunctory thank-you and kept on working. Rather than toss it into the trash, for some reason I placed it on my desk next to my computer, where I kept it and saw it multiple times a day for the next two years.
We still had a lot to get done, and no one was taking their foot off the gas, least of all the president of the United States. As evidenced by his campaigns, Obama is the classic closer—a fourth quarter player. That’s when he ups his game to even higher levels, pulling off the win, sometimes after coming from behind. That’s how 2008 felt through the primary and early general election. That’s how 2012 felt after Benghazi and a poor first debate performance.
That’s how it felt to me as I managed Obama’s second-term national security agenda. Two thousand thirteen and 2014 were unrelenting, crisis-filled years with little to celebrate. But after Cuba in December 2014, we started racking up wins—from the Iran deal to the Paris Climate Agreement that enabled us to close with an Obama-strong fourth quarter.
The same was true on the domestic front. One of the most joyous days at the White House was June 26, 2015, when we learned the Supreme Court had validated the right to same-sex marriage. There were hugs and whoops and tears of joy throughout the building when the president spoke in the Rose Garden, as colleagues heralded this landmark decision and friends for whom this issue was deeply personal saw their lives transformed. That evening, I celebrated with staff on a balcony of the Old Executive Office Building, watching as the White House was lit up in the colors of the rainbow when night fell. Ian and I cherish a picture of the two of us outside the colorful White House taken as we joined tourists and passersby in affirming that love is love. Two days later, we rejoiced again as the Supreme Court upheld the Affordable Care Act ensuring that millions of Americans could retain their newly accessible health insurance. We were “getting shit done.”
Behind the scenes at the NSC, we would continue full throttle until the moment we were asked to turn in our badges and cell phones. Our aim was to leave to our successors the best possible security landscape for the American people. A tall order in a tough and unforgiving world.
Even though, for the most part, I performed the traditional role of point guard who calls the plays, runs the offense, and passes the ball, on occasion I also played the position of shooting guard—the player on the team most expected to drive to the basket and score.
One of my most gratifying initiatives was leading the NSC Principals’ push to diversify the national security workforce. Ever since I entered government as a twenty-eight-year-old staffer, I had been mindful that there were few like me at any given policymaking table. Few women, few minorities, and even fewer women of color. There were also few Muslims, few Chinese and Farsi speakers, too few Latinos, and almost no Native Americans. This diversity deficit didn’t concern me simply because I was outnumbered and likely more misunderstood than I appreciated.
It troubled me mainly because I found that people from similar backgrounds—for instance, white male graduates of the Ivy League—tend to approach complex issues in similar ways. They might miss nuances of language and gender, while dismissing insights that others from different backgrounds might more readily embrace. On a wide span of issues—ranging from how many refugees to admit from each region of the world, to sexual assault in the military, how best to counter violent extremism, and the kind of support we provide families of Americans held hostage overseas—I saw firsthand the benefits of incorporating the sometimes divergent perspectives of female, LGBT, Muslim, and other minority voices in the policy debate.
We are the most diverse nation on earth, and it benefits the U.S. to model that diversity to the world; yet all too often we fail to leverage our greatest strength. By choice, we are battling to defend our people and our interests in a complex world with the equivalent of one hand tied behind our back. It makes no sense to me. Meanwhile, numerous recent studies have validated that, whether in the private sector, nonprofit world, or government, more diverse teams make better decisions and achieve measurably better outcomes.
The fundamental equality of all human beings is the closest thing I have to a life’s creed. My parents taught me and my brother that it is our sacred obligation to pave the pathways for those who have had fewer advantages than we. Lifting others up, diversifying opportunity, has been my family’s enterprise—from my great-grandfather’s founding of the Bordentown School in the late nineteenth century to my mother’s work to establish and sustain the Pell Grant program and my brother’s founding of Management Leadership for Tomorrow. I carry that same responsibility with me wherever I go, including to the White House—where, as an African American woman, I had the privilege of serving as national security advisor to the first African American president of the United States. How fitting and right it felt when I had the chance to tackle the diversity challenge head-on, with the full backing of my boss. I could not have slept well at night if I didn’t try.
Back in 2011, President Obama issued an executive order prioritizing diversity and inclusion throughout the federal workforce. From the outset of the administration’s efforts, we were mindful that one area of government lagged behind the rest: the national security agencies. Frustrated by the persistently lower levels of racial, ethnic, religious, sexual orientation, and gender diversity in the national security workforce, I decided to elevate the issue to the attention of NSC Deputies and Principals.
Though nearly 40 percent of Americans are people of color and, by 2044, it is estimated that the U.S. will be “majority minority,” the national security workforce (especially its senior ranks) does not reflect America. Minorities collectively comprise well under 20 percent of senior foreign service officers and under 15 percent of senior military and intelligence officers. Neither I nor President Obama saw this as a human resources challenge; improving workforce diversity is a “national security imperative.” I consistently stressed the national security rationale for a diverse workforce, arguing that a collection of leaders from diverse backgrounds can often come up with more creative insights, proffer alternative solutions, and thus make better decisions.
The best part of leading this initiative was that I met zero resistance; at every stage, I was pushing on a wide-open door. My cabinet-level colleagues were each deeply committed to this effort, and several had already taken important steps to increase diversity and inclusion. Not one cabinet secretary or agency head offered excuses. Not one delayed or deflected responsibility. In fact, they competed with each other around the Situation Room table for who could boast the most progress. Jim Clapper and John Brennan proudly detailed the strides the Intelligence Community had made in promoting the advancement of LGBT officers. Ash Carter heralded the recent advances for women, gay, and transgender people in the military, starting with the repeal of the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy in 2011 and culminating in the decision in 2016 to lift the ban on transgender people serving openly in the military. John Kerry lamented the State Department’s long-standing shortcomings and pledged personally to prioritize diversifying the foreign service. These were by far the easiest and most enjoyable Principals Committee meetings I chaired.
In October 2016, President Obama issued a presidential memorandum codifying the U.S. government’s commitment to promoting diversity and inclusion in the national security workforce. The memo, which was the product of the NSC Deputies’ and Principals’ efforts, required all national security agencies to: collect, analyze, and publicize demographic data, including on recruitment and retention; to enhance professional development opportunities consistent with merit; and to hold senior leaders accountable for their results. One of the last memos I sent to President Obama, in January 2017, was a ninety-day report on progress in implementing this new policy. Given the scope of our work over eight years, promoting diversity in the national security workforce was a relatively small effort, but it was one that I pursued with pride and personal passion.
In the last year of the administration, I took on another responsibility for the sake of posterity—negotiating the memorandum of understanding (MOU) that would determine the specific terms and the value of the next ten-year security assistance agreement with Israel. In lengthy sessions over almost a year with my Israeli counterpart, Jacob Nagel, and many intervening engagements very ably led by NSC senior director Yael Lempert, we reached an agreement in September 2016 to provide Israel with $38 billion in military assistance over ten years (starting in 2018) and to modernize our security assistance relationship so that American defense suppliers, and no longer just Israeli defense companies, would fully benefit from this largesse.
Our commitment provided a hugely beneficial package for Israel—the largest in history—but, of course, Netanyahu wanted more and strongly resisted changes to the traditional terms of the grant. In what was then a budget-constrained Washington, we were constantly reminded that $38 billion is a huge sum for a developed country, even one as important as Israel, and that this money might have been used for pressing domestic purposes like Pell Grants or making community college accessible to every American who wanted to attend.
Nonetheless, President Obama gave me great latitude to do the right thing for the U.S. and Israel, even at a time when his personal relationship with Prime Minister Netanyahu was sorely strained. With his support, we concluded a mutually beneficial MOU that emphatically underscored President Obama’s unshakable commitment to the security of Israel. This unprecedented package ensured that Israel will maintain its “qualitative military edge,” thus enhancing Israel’s ability to defend itself by itself.
Despite this and other achievements, I was disappointed to find after I returned to Washington to become national security advisor that some of Israel’s staunchest advocates came to cast me as a grudging partner, at best, and, at worst, as hostile to Israel. In the wake of the Iran negotiations and nuclear deal, the relationship between Obama and Netanyahu deteriorated, and supporters of Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud party increasingly leveled dishonest ad hominem attacks against the president and his closest advisors, including me. I found these charges frustrating and unfair, particularly in light of the work I did every day to defend and support Israel at the U.N.
Nevertheless, when we gathered on September 14, 2016, in the Treaty Room at the State Department to sign the MOU, I spoke from my heart:
For as long as the state of Israel has existed, the United States has been Israel’s greatest friend and partner. That ironclad bond has endured l’dor v’dor—from generation to generation—across parties and administrations.
This is the single largest pledge of military assistance to any country in U.S. history. At a time when we’re tightening our belts across the board… this MOU nonetheless greatly increases our military assistance commitment to Israel. And that’s not an accident. It’s a reminder of the United States’ unshakeable commitment to Israel’s security.
… I’ll note that this MOU is not just good for Israel, it’s good for the United States. Our security is linked. When allies and partners like Israel are more secure, the United States is more secure. Moreover, our Israeli friends will be able to buy more of the advanced capabilities produced by the United States, which will support American jobs. Like so many aspects of the U.S.-Israeli relationship, this MOU is a win-win.
At the signing ceremony, I was also proud to offer tribute, one last time, to my friend and hero Shimon Peres. He had recently fallen gravely ill at ninety-three, and his prognosis was not good.
Twelve days later, on September 28, 2016, Shimon Peres passed away. I was honored to join President Obama in paying our last respects at his funeral in Jerusalem and took some small measure of comfort from knowing that the MOU had come to fruition on his watch.
Sadly but not unexpectedly, Peres’s life dream of achieving two states for two peoples—a secure Jewish state of Israel living in peace alongside a viable, contiguous Palestinian state—never came to pass during his lifetime. This long-standing, bipartisan objective of U.S. policy remains in my view the only way to resolve the conflict, meet legitimate, long-deferred Palestinian aspirations, and preserve Israel as both a Jewish state and a democracy.
For five years, until 2014, the Obama administration expended great effort and political capital trying to achieve this goal, hoping that both sides would view the U.S. as a committed, honest broker. It was deeply disappointing, if not surprising, to find yet again that neither party was interested in making the hard compromises necessary for peace. President Abbas of the Palestinian Authority consistently lacked the will and the confidence to make a deal, despite knowing that he would likely not again find a more fair or sympathetic American partner. Prime Minister Netanyahu of Israel never seemed interested in a two-state solution, but rather spent eight years thwarting any progress toward peace.
In late 2016, following years of intensified and accelerated Israeli settlement activity that rendered the prospect of a viable Palestinian state ever more remote, the Obama administration decided to take a different approach. At the U.N., Ambassador Power was instructed to abstain on a British-drafted security council resolution, allowing to pass by 14–0 a text that condemned settlements and reaffirmed that their establishment “has no legal validity and constitutes a flagrant violation under international law and a major obstacle to the achievement of the two-state solution.” In a significant rebuke to the Palestinians, the text also condemned “all acts of violence against civilians, including acts of terror, as well as acts of provocation, incitement and destruction.”
The Obama administration’s decision to abstain was harshly criticized by Israel, some American Jewish organizations, and by the incoming Trump team, which worked improperly behind the scenes during the transition to try and thwart adoption of the resolution. Despite the negative reaction our abstention engendered in some quarters, I thought it was appropriate to demonstrate that America would not continue to defend at all costs an eroding status quo. Clearly, neither party was interested in peace; meanwhile the Netanyahu government continued to build settlements with abandon and take other steps that dim any prospect for peace through a two-state solution.
The U.S.-China relationship, as President Obama often said, is the “most consequential bilateral relationship in the world.” And, as a matter of history, custom, and efficacy, it fell to me as national security advisor to manage it on behalf of the president. Ever since 1972, when Henry Kissinger occupied my NSC office, U.S.-China relations have been led from the White House. State, DOD, and Treasury, of course, play vital roles, but China has long preferred dealing directly with the White House on bilateral affairs. More importantly, from the U.S. point of view, given the complexity of the relationship, its many economic and strategic facets, and the need to ensure that multiple, disparate agencies sing from the same hymnal, strong White House leadership makes sense.
As NSA, I embraced this responsibility. Having dealt intimately with China as U.N. ambassador, I had gained a good understanding of their interests and idiosyncrasies. In that period, at least, played correctly, the U.S.-China relationship need not have been dangerously adversarial, nor zero-sum, but rather more of a potentially combustible mix of competition and cooperation. The challenge, as President Obama and I viewed it, was to manage our economic and strategic competition effectively—gaining advantage for the U.S. wherever possible while avoiding unnecessary conflict—and, at the same time, maximizing our cooperation.
We had vigorous disagreements with China over its trade policy, currency manipulation, theft of intellectual property, and the disadvantageous restrictions it places on U.S. businesses operating in China. The U.S. strongly opposed China’s aggressive acquisition of and construction on disputed land in the South China Sea, its cyber-enabled theft of proprietary American commercial information, its pressure on Taiwan and Hong Kong, its crackdown on NGOs and religious freedom, and its myriad human rights abuses. We also sought closer Chinese cooperation and stepped up economic pressure to address the North Korean nuclear and missile threat. These were among the most contentious issues in the bilateral relationship that risked conflict, if not managed effectively.
In 2011, President Obama implemented the “rebalance” to Asia, shifting more of our strategic assets and focus to optimize U.S. influence in the Asia-Pacific region. Under this policy, the U.S. augmented its military presence. We reinforced our alliances with Australia, Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines (until the May 2016 election of President Rodrigo Duterte whose erratic and authoritarian leadership limited the potential to do more). We strengthened ties to the countries of Southeast Asia, especially Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, and Vietnam, joined the annual East Asia Summit, and secured the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement to establish a high-standards free trade network among a dozen of the world’s economies. The objective of these combined efforts was to advance U.S. interests and check China’s expanding role in Asia. Our approach to China was not reactive but rather embedded in a far-sighted and multifaceted strategy for the Asia-Pacific region and India.
Even as we directly confronted the various areas of competition and concern with China, President Obama and I believed that expanded cooperation was not only important but possible to achieve. From 2013 to 2017, I held numerous meetings in Washington, New York, and Beijing with my Chinese counterpart, State Councilor Yang Jiechi, as well as China’s foreign minister, senior military leaders, economic advisors, and party chiefs. These discussions were invaluable to forging progress on a wide range of issues. I traveled five times to Beijing as national security advisor, making it a habit to visit in the summers to prepare for upcoming summits between our presidents.
On each of my solo trips to Beijing, I was greeted with senior-level access and exceptional protocol arrangements, which to the Chinese are particularly important. Each time I arrived, whether in Beijing or Shanghai, the Chinese would shut down the highways and provide a police-escorted motorcade, which is usually a gesture reserved for visiting heads of state. I met for hours on each visit with my Chinese counterpart and other senior leaders. They hosted elaborate lunches and intimate dinners and, most importantly, I was always accorded a meeting with President Xi Jinping in a cavernous state room in the Great Hall of the People. These roughly forty-five-minute meetings, which began with brief comments before the international and Chinese press, were meant to underscore the importance the Chinese assigned to the U.S.-China bilateral relationship and their understanding of my proximity to the president of the U.S. The Chinese also always sought to ensure that their leaders were accorded the utmost respect, proper protocol, and unfailing security in the U.S., so they treated me with the expectation of reciprocity.
While the Chinese tend to emphasize form, Americans like to focus on substance. On each of my visits, I came with a detailed set of topics that I did not just want to discuss but to make real progress on and, ultimately, reach agreement. On areas of divergence, my aim was to deepen mutual understanding, plainly lay out U.S. concerns, explore ways to narrow our differences, but always to make clear where we would not bend and what the adverse consequences of their oppositional policies might be.
My first visit to China as NSA came at a low point in bilateral relations. In asserting a new style of bold, unchallenged leadership, President Xi had tried to constrain U.S. and international flights over the South and East China Seas. Weeks before my arrival, there had been a near disaster when a Chinese fighter jet buzzed a U.S. P-8 reconnaissance plane flying in international airspace, coming within thirty feet of the U.S. aircraft. In my meeting with Chinese military officials, I insisted, “We will continue to fly where we choose in international airspace,” even if close to Chinese territory (which they hated). But I also revived an earlier proposal by President Xi that we reduce mutual risk by negotiating formal confidence-building mechanisms (CBMs)—rules to govern our encounters in air and sea to minimize the potential for unintended conflict. We were later able to sign detailed CBMs.
On the same trip, I emphasized the importance of increasing pressure on North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons and ballistic missile program and of coordinating policy approaches between the U.S. and China. We subsequently established and sustained a bilateral dialogue on Northeast Asia, which helped shape our shared thinking about future contingencies in the region.
I also stressed the value of the U.S. and China leading the international community on climate change by each setting ambitious new targets for the reduction of carbon emissions, and thus smoothing the path to the Paris Climate Agreement. This was an initiative that Secretary Kerry and White House counselor John Podesta conceived and ably pursued. With pushing and prodding, we were able to get the Chinese to agree to announce our joint targets and unprecedented collaboration during President Obama’s Beijing summit with Xi in November 2014. Similarly, I pressed collaboration between the U.S. and China on global health, Ebola, nonproliferation, development cooperation, nuclear security, the campaign against ISIS, and peacekeeping—all areas where, ultimately, we were able to make progress. Our efforts were driven by President Obama’s conviction that, “When the U.S. and China are able to work together effectively, the whole world benefits.”
In other areas, confrontation was more appropriate than cooperation. This was true, of course, on key aspects of the economic relationship as well as China’s aggressive and unlawful assertion of its claims in the East and South China Seas. The U.S. continued to insist on our right to fly, sail, and operate wherever international law allows. We underscored that policy in 2015 by resuming regular “freedom of navigation operations.” On these missions, the U.S. Navy would sail within twelve nautical miles (the legal nautical boundary) of land features—occupied by China or other countries—in order to emphasize that we do not recognize the legality of their claims. President Obama also made plain to President Xi that any Chinese effort to take or build on land occupied by a U.S. ally would activate our treaty obligations regarding mutual defense and could escalate into U.S.-China conflict. That message was received and respected, at least through the duration of the Obama administration. At the same time, the Defense Department made deliberate enhancements to our Pacific posture to improve our readiness to defend U.S. interests and that of our Asian allies and partners.
One of the biggest disputes in the U.S.-China relationship involved China’s cyber-enabled theft of American intellectual property to give their companies a commercial advantage. For years, the Chinese government, military, and private entities have hacked into U.S. companies’ proprietary systems and stolen information that they have then used for competitive gain. Over years, this unabated theft has cost U.S. companies billions of dollars, despite Justice Department indictments of Chinese military personnel and vigorous demands that China stop.
The issue is not about spying; frankly, we know (and they know) that we spy on each other as best we can through cyber and other means. In my business, espionage is fair game. What is utterly unacceptable to the U.S. is cyber theft of private company information for commercial gain. China had grown adept at stealing American companies’ intellectual property and using it to make advanced products that compete against our own.
By August 2015, when I visited Beijing alone for the second time as NSA, the U.S., as my dad used to say, had already had “a bellyful” of their behavior. Diplomacy had not yielded results. Repeated warnings had failed. I came to Beijing with a strong and clear message: If China doesn’t stop stealing our stuff, we will sanction you on the eve of President Xi’s first state visit to the U.S., which was scheduled for late September. I repeated our position privately at every opportunity, including more diplomatically with President Xi. We meant it and, as I reminded my Chinese interlocutors, the president had already signed an executive order giving us the tools to swiftly sanction any foreign actor for malign cyber deeds.
I delivered our points clearly. Knowing how sensitive the Chinese are to any potential embarrassment, much less serious turbulence surrounding their president’s foreign travel, I hoped our message had been received. So, at first, I was chagrined to read, as I was leaving China, an unsourced Washington Post article reporting that the administration was preparing to impose sanctions on China. I hate all leaks and was pissed in principle. In this case, specifically, I worried initially that the Chinese would perceive bad faith on our part by going to the press before our final efforts at diplomacy had played out. Yet by the time we were wheels-up from Beijing, my concern about the leak quickly and cynically turned to appreciation for the prospect that the article might serve to amplify the seriousness of my message.
Within a few days of my return, the Chinese system kicked into gear. Worried that sanctions would upend Xi’s visit, China asked to send a very high-level delegation immediately to Washington to try to resolve the issue. The proposed visit was scheduled to start on September 9, the precise day we had planned internally to announce sanctions against Chinese individuals and entities. Inside the White House, we had a robust debate as to how to proceed. I argued that we should wait to see what the Chinese delegation had to say before pulling the trigger on sanctions. We could still implement the sanctions before Xi arrived if we were unsatisfied. Several of my colleagues wanted to sanction China preemptively and then double down with additional measures if China’s envoys failed to meet our demands.
Though we all doubted these discussions would yield any progress, President Obama decided that we would hold off on sanctions and receive the Chinese delegation. Lisa, Avril, and I, though not originally in agreement on when to levy sanctions, came together (as always) to press the divided agencies to fall in line behind the president’s decision to give diplomacy one more serious try.
The Chinese side, led by Politburo member and senior security czar Meng Jianzhu, met with Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson, Attorney General Loretta Lynch, and FBI director James Comey, before coming to see me in the Roosevelt Room at the White House. Their posture was respectful, but they recited the usual complaints about U.S. misdeeds and denied Chinese bad behavior. I laid out our terms pointedly: absent a groundbreaking new understanding to halt their commercially motivated cyber theft, we were headed to a bad place on the eve of Xi’s visit. I outlined the terms of what we needed in any potential agreement.
Later, I held a private follow-on conversation with another member of Meng’s delegation—Deputy Foreign Minister Zhang Yesui, my former Chinese counterpart during my first year at the U.N., with whom I had always had a collegial relationship. I told Yesui that, “We are really at a critical point. We are not bluffing, and I have no room for maneuver. If you don’t agree to our proposal, we are in for a rough ride.” Following our discussion, our staffs met for over thirty-six hours of nearly continuous negotiations at the White House and Chinese embassy. In the end, they reached an understanding, subject to ratification by Beijing and President Obama.
Nonetheless, early Saturday morning, after an all-night negotiating session and as the Chinese delegation was flying home, I received an alarming report from my team that the Chinese side had torpedoed the deal. At once, I called the Situation Room and asked them to rouse the Chinese ambassador to Washington, Cui Tiankai. After initial protests from his staff that he was unavailable, we were connected. I lit into him, telling the normally very calm but now quite agitated ambassador, “You need to fix this mess by Monday morning or be prepared to explain to your president why Washington will be his worst state visit to date.”
By Monday morning, the Chinese had reconsidered, and we had a deal that satisfied our concerns. To the shock of informed observers, the two presidents announced on September 25 in the Rose Garden: “Neither country’s government will conduct or knowingly support cyber-enabled theft of intellectual property, including trade secrets or other confidential business information, with the intent of providing competitive advantages to companies or commercial sectors.” The U.S. side also made plain that, if we saw evidence that China was violating the deal, we stood ready to impose sanctions.
This agreement between the U.S. and China largely held through the duration of the Obama administration, and seemingly until U.S.-China relations deteriorated markedly under President Trump, when aggressive theft resumed.
In our time, the U.S. Intelligence Community and the private sector consistently reported to us that they detected a marked reduction in Chinese commercial-related cyber theft (if not its complete elimination), assessing that continued suspicious behavior largely fell in the gray area abutting espionage. We also worked with China to translate our bilateral agreement into multilateral understandings at the G20, U.N., and other international venues to induce more countries to adhere to cyber norms. Progress on tough issues like cyber theft and currency manipulation, the unprecedented cooperation we achieved in a range of new areas, plus the growing personal ease between President Obama and President Xi, enabled us to leave the potentially antagonistic U.S.-China bilateral relationship on a stable footing for our successors.
Vividly, I recall President Obama’s last trip to China in September 2016, when President Xi, as host of the G20, took the floor at the conclusion of the summit in Hangzhou to give one final, lengthy statement. Before the assembled leaders of the world’s most powerful countries, President Xi warmly praised President Obama for helping guide the world away from the brink of financial collapse in 2009, for his wisdom as a leader, his contributions as a valued partner to each of them on all issues of global consequence, and as a man of vision, patience, and integrity. It was a remarkable tribute from a competitor, as unexpected as it was personal and seemingly genuine.
Xi’s comments also stood in sharp contrast to how our visit to Hangzhou began. When we arrived on Air Force One, the Chinese—who by now we knew to be notoriously heavy-handed and imperious hosts—were at their finest.
First, a tarmac dispute between the airport authorities and the U.S. Secret Service over who would drive the mobile staircase up to the side of the plane resulted in the Chinese refusing to allow the full-length staircase to be used by the president to disembark. With time wasting, the U.S. side decided to take matters into their own hands. Unwitting of any issue, and by nature unpretentious, the president walked off the plane using the short internal steps from the base of Air Force One, which made for a less grand descent than is customary. The traveling White House press corps erupted in outrage as if hell had just frozen over and started their reporting of the trip heralding a monumental snub by the Chinese of President Obama.
Their frenzy was heightened when a six-foot-three-inch goonish Chinese security guard abruptly body-blocked me as I tried to pass under a tape barrier to join the president in his limo waiting plane-side. Initially, I plowed ahead without paying him much heed, but he kept stopping me. When my explanation of who I was and where I was going failed to satisfy the guard, my lead Secret Service agent, Tom Rizza, nearly came to blows with my Chinese barrier. To ensure I reached the vehicle before the motorcade moved out, I imagine Rizza spoke into his wrist giving his fellow agents a heads-up, Point Guard moving to join Renegade in the Beast.
All this drama happened under the noses of our traveling press corps assembled beneath the plane’s wing, reinforcing their commitment to the narrative that we were being bullied even before the first meeting began. It was a bogus story, not least because it was one of Xi Jinping’s staff who recognized me and helped me join the president in his vehicle, overruling the ignorant local security guard. And “stair-gate” was an equal exaggeration, having nothing to do with official intent on either side but rather a staff-level skirmish. Still, our press had already decided that the visit was off to a bad start, but in this case their overheated reporting failed to sabotage it.
Through eight years of deep engagement with the Chinese on various issues, I found that with vision and tenacity, the U.S. has the capacity to broaden areas of cooperation with China while at the same time directly confront our profound differences with the appropriate combination of fortitude, firmness, and care. China’s power and global influence will continue to grow. So too will its transgressions and provocations. In the last few years, China has intensified abuse of its own citizens and doubled down on construction in the South China Sea and its pursuit of nefarious trade and technology policies. How the U.S. manages this dynamic—alone or with allies, with confidence and calm, or with fear and fatalism—will substantially define the global landscape in the twenty-first century.
“Susan, do you have a few minutes to stay back and talk privately?” I heard John Brennan asking me, as fellow members of the PC quickly departed the meeting we had just concluded on a busy day in early August 2016.
John, a tough, loyal, burly man of Irish descent who had devoted his whole career to keeping America safe by ably defeating terrorists and other adversaries, was one of my favorite colleagues. Sometimes irascible, but always a straight shooter with a generous heart, I trusted John’s judgment and experience implicitly.
We had the Situation Room to ourselves. He pulled a paper out of his lock bag and said without drama, “We have strong evidence that Putin himself is trying to interfere in our election. This is not a low-level operation. It comes from the top.” He showed me the smoking-gun report and detailed the credibility of its sourcing.
I took a couple of seconds to collect my thoughts and said, “We gotta go upstairs and tell the Boss.”
On the way into the Oval, we rounded up White House chief of staff Denis McDonough. Ferial directed us back to the president’s private dining room at the end of a small hallway off the side of the Oval Office. Obama, sitting at the table reading, looked up. Brennan repeated the same message he had given me and handed the president the report. The president read over the paper and instructed us to convene a select group of Principals as soon as possible.
From that moment in early August through Election Day, President Obama and a tight circle of senior officials wrestled with how to counter a Russian threat that far exceeded anything we had seen to date. Russia had previously hacked into U.S. government and private entity systems. It had spread disinformation. Since the Cold War, it had employed propaganda and other means to influence U.S. elections. It had messed with elections in European countries, but we had not previously experienced this particular variety of Russian cyber espionage in the U.S., which combined hacking into party systems, official propaganda, social media manipulation, and attempts to penetrate state electoral systems. The Russians coordinated all these hostile elements in a concerted effort to interfere in a U.S. presidential election. Nor had we before possessed such strong evidence that the order came directly from the top. For weeks, my stomach churned with a low-grade, intermittent nausea.
It was not immediately clear what Russia’s motives were. A range of possibilities included: 1) to help Trump; 2) to discredit Clinton; 3) to hamper Clinton’s ability to govern effectively if elected; 4) to sow domestic discord and distrust in the results of the election; 5) to discredit democracy globally; or, 6) all of the above. Regardless of the motive, what worried us most was that Russia might gain access to state electoral systems and manipulate the voter rolls by excluding voters or adding ineligible voters, or even try to falsify the vote count in strategic jurisdictions. We also feared that Russia might not only steal and release hacked emails, as they had done with the Democratic National Committee and later would do with Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s personal emails, but that they might also doctor stolen messages to embed false, derogatory information and make it look real.
In our initial meetings, we quickly determined that we had to pursue a multitrack counterstrategy.
First, we asked the Intelligence Community to increase collection and accelerate efforts to produce a unified assessment of what exactly the Russians were doing and why, so that we could share the findings with the American people. Given the gravity of the issue, it was important that the conclusions of the IC be agreed to by all its components and that they could collectively affirm “high confidence” in their validity. This impartial IC assessment was a prerequisite to informing the American people, which we deemed urgent and essential, and we hoped it would be backed publicly by the bipartisan leadership of Congress. Unfortunately, it took the IC until the end of September to reach a sufficient level of confidence and unity in their assessment, and we were unable to get congressional agreement on a bipartisan statement, which would have underscored that what we were announcing was not motivated by partisan politics.
Finally, on October 7, we were able to issue an unprecedented, flashing-red public warning from the director of national intelligence and the secretary of homeland security, the senior officials we believed were best placed to deliver such a finding. Some have wondered why President Obama or the White House did not issue the statement, given its significance. Since the president and the political arm of the White House were engaged in the campaign, we thought that any announcement from the White House would muddy the message that the warning was to be understood as a purely nonpartisan, national security matter. The October 7 statement revealed:
The U.S. Intelligence Community (USIC) is confident that the Russian Government directed the recent compromises of e-mails from U.S. persons and institutions, including from U.S. political organizations.… These thefts and disclosures are intended to interfere with the U.S. election process.… We believe, based on the scope and sensitivity of these efforts, that only Russia’s senior-most officials could have authorized these activities.
News of this high-level U.S. government warning about Russian interference in our national election was quickly overtaken by other events. Not long after I had sent Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak packing from my office, having informed him we were about to call out publicly Russia’s intervention in our election, Denis walked into my office.
He said, “Have you seen the video?”
“What video?”
“Just go online and you will see.”
Holy shit, I thought, as I watched the Access Hollywood tape of candidate Trump boasting about sexually abusing women. How in the hell can he survive this? How can such a misogynist be president?
And then came, almost right away, the curiously timed WikiLeaks release of John Podesta’s hacked emails.
Suffice it to say, these two dramas knocked our stark announcement of Russian electoral interference down “below the fold” on the front pages of our national newspapers. The impact that we hoped the DNI statement would have on public understanding was more than diluted by the subsequent news of the day.
Second, in early August, the president ordered Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson to convene the secretaries of all fifty states urgently to inform them of the threat and enlist their cooperation to harden their states’ electoral systems so that hackers could not penetrate them effectively. Johnson did so but was surprised to find that many Republican secretaries of state forcefully rejected Johnson’s suggestion that DHS designate their state electoral systems as “critical infrastructure,” which would have given the federal government greater latitude to assist the states. Numerous “red states” viewed this proposal as an infringement on their sovereign rights and pushed back with such force that Johnson relented, calculating that it was better to get as much voluntary cooperation as possible, rather than engender additional resistance by pressing the “critical infrastructure” designation, even though it would have helped.
Third, President Obama directed John Brennan to brief bipartisan congressional leaders (the so-called “Gang of Eight”) as soon as possible on the same threat report he had received. We needed not only congressional leaders’ awareness but their cooperation to convey to the American people that we faced a serious threat to the integrity of our democracy that could affect all voters and candidates in both parties up and down the ballot. We wanted Congress’s help to underscore the truth that Russian interference was not a partisan concern but a serious national security threat.
It took over a month for all eight leaders to make themselves available to receive Brennan, who was ready to fly to meet them anywhere over the August congressional recess. Certain Republican leaders were not willing to be briefed until after Labor Day. When finally informed, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell cast doubt on the credibility of the reporting and deliberately downplayed the threat. McConnell’s motivations appeared plainly partisan, as he somehow sensed this revelation might harm candidate Trump.
In early September, President Obama personally asked the four bipartisan leaders of the House and Senate to coauthor a letter underscoring their shared concern with the Russian threat and advising states to take it seriously, but McConnell continually blocked the effort to issue a timely bipartisan warning to the American people. We also requested a public bipartisan statement regarding Russian interference that would serve to make clear to the American people that this was not and should not be construed as a partisan issue. For weeks, Senator McConnell refused to budge. When, finally in late September, he relented, McConnell would only affix his name to an anodyne, hard-to-decipher letter that didn’t even mention Russia.
Fourth, we set out to deter Russia from taking actions that went beyond their activities to date (the previous hacking, the strategically timed release of hacked information, and propaganda activities) and to prepare an appropriate response to their egregious conduct. We knew there was much more Russia could do—falsely smear a candidate; release faked versions of stolen information; penetrate the election systems to disenfranchise voters; or more difficult, but not impossible, attempt to alter the vote count in certain places. We assessed that much of what Russia had stolen they had already transferred to third parties, including WikiLeaks. Those cats were likely already out of the bag.
Our aim now was to prevent a worst-case scenario. Brennan delivered a stark warning to his Russian counterpart making plain that we knew what they were doing. President Obama cornered Putin for a one-on-one conversation after their formal meeting at the G20 on September 5, in Hangzhou, China. Obama delivered a carefully crafted, forceful message telling Putin, in essence—We know exactly what you are doing, we will be watching carefully, and, if you do anything further, we will punish Russia in ways you have not experienced before. While deliberately ambiguous about the nature of the consequences, Obama left no doubt that he was serious. As expected, Putin denied and deflected, falsely trying to shift blame to the U.S. for stoking the so-called “color” revolutions in former Soviet states. A month later, Obama reiterated and amplified his warning in a private, written message to Putin, which I delivered through Ambassador Kislyak.
Meanwhile, a subset of the NSC Deputies and Principals, along with a very few staff experts, readied the economic, diplomatic, cyber, and other measures to punish Russia not only for what they had done but also in the event they went further and, for example, tried to affect the vote. These measures were prepared so that they could be deployed when the president determined the time was right. It is not the case, as has been reported, that I quashed further work on cyber options. That work proceeded. Rather, I insisted that knowledge of this highly sensitive effort be restricted to a very small group of senior officials and that it be considered along with other punitive response options, not in isolation.
Since our aim, in the first instance, was to deter more detrimental Russian interference, President Obama did not deem it wise or necessary to preemptively punish Russia for what they had already done before the election, unless we saw evidence that Russia had crossed the line the president had drawn. Preemptive U.S. penalties on Russia might well have provoked precisely the kind of more hostile actions we were trying to deter. We assumed that part of Russia’s aim was to sow public doubt about the integrity of the election process. At the same time, we were mindful that candidate Trump’s repeated, unfounded allegations that the election would be rigged only fed such doubts. We did not want to do the Russians’ dirty work for them. Therefore, the administration sought to avoid steps that could unintentionally cast doubt on the credibility of the election, unless Russian escalation forced us to do so.
President Obama was deeply determined to act and be seen to be acting in an apolitical, unbiased manner in dealing with the Russian threat, even as he served simultaneously as the leader of one political party. Above all, he did not want to put any weight on the scales of our electoral process; equally, he prioritized maintaining public confidence in the integrity of our democracy.
Inside the administration, we studied Russian actions closely, looking particularly for evidence that they were trying to manipulate the mechanics of the voting process. All the while, we remained locked and loaded, ready to retaliate before the election, if necessary.
Prior to the election, the Intelligence Community did not in fact detect evidence that Russia was corrupting the mechanics of the voting—by fouling voter rolls or vote tallies. Nor did we see Russia falsify stolen information. What we all did see was the continued, strategically timed release of stolen emails that had been handed over to WikiLeaks and others in the spring and summer of 2016. We also observed sustained efforts by the Russian outlets, RT television and Sputnik news service, to publish content favorable to Trump and unfavorable to Clinton.
However, both the Intelligence Community and administration policymakers were less focused on the potential impact of Russia’s ongoing manipulation of social media—its use of bots, troll farms, and fake personas—to plant false or misleading content aimed at biasing voter opinions. In retrospect, we substantially underestimated the pervasiveness and severity of Russia’s social media manipulation in the run-up to the 2016 election. Only after we left office, when further information reached the public domain, did I and others fully appreciate the influence of Russian social media activities on shaping public sentiment.
After the election, the Principals Committee reconvened to take stock and revisit the punitive options we had formulated in August and September. The IC provided an updated, far more stark assessment of the purpose of Russia’s interference, which they concluded was to harm Secretary Clinton’s electoral prospects and to advantage Donald Trump. President Obama tasked the IC to compile a comprehensive assessment of all available information about Russia’s role in the 2016 election and to provide a classified version to him, the president-elect and his team, and Congress by early January, as well as to prepare an unclassified report for the American people.
The Principals refined and sharpened the menu of potential punishments to levy against Russia. In late December, the president announced that we would punish Russia by: sanctioning two Russian intelligence services as well as malicious entities and individuals; publicly exposing the cyber tools and tricks Russians used to infiltrate our systems; closing two Russian compounds, or “dachas,” in Maryland and New York used by Russian diplomats for vacationing and clandestine activities; expelling thirty-five Russian “diplomats” who we believe acted as spies; and continuing “to take a variety of actions at a time and place of our choosing, some of which will not be publicized.”
We knew at the time that these sanctions and other punitive actions, while serious, were not the maximum measures the U.S. could take. The toughest sectoral sanctions we considered would have adversely impacted our European allies, not just Russia. We were reluctant to harm our allies, particularly as we sought to solidify their fragile support for sustaining strong European Union sanctions on Russia for its actions in Ukraine. In addition, we were mindful that President-elect Trump remained dismissive of Russian interference in the election and seemed open to lifting previous U.S. sanctions on Russia for Ukraine and other misbehavior. Recognizing the risk that, if we imposed maximum penalties, Trump might turn around and lift them soon after his inauguration, I and others sought to avoid a potential reversal that would be detrimental to U.S. credibility.
Indeed, we were surprised that soon after our sanctions announcement, President-elect Trump publicly congratulated Putin on refraining from immediate retaliation. This strange tweet raised questions as to whether the Trump transition team had suggested to Russia that they may later undo our sanctions. Our worries were later validated.
In early January, President Obama and select senior advisors received the highly classified findings of the Intelligence Community assessment of Russian interference in U.S. elections. It was in this context that we received for the first time a highly classified, brief summary from the IC of the so-called “Steele Dossier,” named for the British former intelligence officer who compiled the report containing salacious allegations about Trump’s behavior in Russia. President Obama, like the rest of us, was revolted by this information and protested even hearing about it. I insisted he receive at least the bare minimum, because President-elect Trump was to be briefed on it, and there was always the possibility that it could become public knowledge. This exchange was one of my most uncomfortable with President Obama in the Oval Office.
In retrospect, I wish that in December 2016 we had hit the Russians harder with powerful sectoral sanctions that shook the foundations of the Russian economy. We refrained in order to spare our European allies and to avoid any adverse boomerang effects on the U.S. economy. Nevertheless, given continued Russian interference in our democracy, I believe we must still impose maximum costs to try to prevent future interventions. Regrettably, neither Congress nor the Trump administration has yet wielded nearly the full force of our economic power against Russia.
Dealing with Russian interference in our 2016 presidential election was a uniquely challenging policy problem. Each judgment we faced was difficult—when to go public; who should announce the Intelligence Community’s findings; how to deal with a divided and suspicious Congress; how to inform the public without scaring them unduly; when and how to punish Russia; how to deal with a candidate who was stoking fears of voting fraud, praising WikiLeaks, and encouraging Russian hacking of his opponent’s systems? We were operating in substantially uncharted territory where the stakes couldn’t be higher. To my knowledge, no one in the Obama White House was ever informed by the FBI or Justice Department that they had opened an investigation into whether anyone affiliated with the Trump campaign coordinated with Russia on its election interference. I learned of the fact of the investigation only after leaving office, when FBI director James Comey testified before Congress to that effect. Still, the pressure we faced through the late summer and fall of 2016 in confronting the unprecedented scope of Russian electoral interference was enormous. Each step of the way, we made the best decisions we could for the right reasons. Yet we knew at the time we could never make every judgment flawlessly, and we did not, as is evident with the benefit of hindsight.
As I reflect on the course of President Obama’s eight-year tenure, I am struck by the degree to which he largely adhered to the principles and priorities he laid out at the start of his presidency. His consistency defied the range of unforeseen challenges we faced—from the Arab Spring to the rise of populist nationalism and elected authoritarians, from the emergence of an ISIS “caliphate” to Brexit, from Russian aggression in Ukraine to its interference in our election. Through an active national security decision-making process, the Obama administration was able largely to manage such complex crises, while at the same time, “put points on the board” by accomplishing important goals that we opted to pursue.
I remain convinced that President Obama’s foreign policy agenda was strategically sound. Ultimately, if inevitably, our record was mixed—though I would argue, on balance, positive. Though I am very proud of what the administration accomplished, my pride is tempered by recognition of what we may have done better.
We fell short of achieving several important objectives, including closing Guantánamo, even though we reduced the prison population dramatically. To our lasting frustration, Congress consistently blocked Guantánamo’s closure by preventing the transfer of those remaining inmates to maximum security U.S. facilities. We were also unable to resolve the conflict in Syria, stabilize Libya, or move the needle on intractable, inherited challenges such as brokering Israeli-Palestinian peace or eliminating North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs.
Our failures had various roots. In some cases, we suffered from a mismatch between our stated objectives and the means we were prepared to employ to achieve them—as in Libya, Syria, Ukraine, and, arguably, Afghanistan. During the Arab Spring and in the president’s 2009 Cairo speech, we inadvertently raised expectations about the speed and ease with which major change could occur in the Middle East and the role that U.S. policy could play. Elsewhere, we remained reluctant to exert maximum pressure on our partners to take steps they resisted—whether on the Saudis to end the war in Yemen or the Israelis and Palestinians to negotiate in good faith. Finally, short of using force, we were unable to persuade or compel determined dictators—from Vladimir Putin to Kim Jong Un—to abandon hostile policies that bolstered their domestic power and international standing.
I also believe we underestimated the extent to which growing domestic partisan divisions were hampering America’s ability to lead on the world stage. Opposing political parties too often consider withholding or blocking congressional support for a presidential foreign policy initiative that could advance U.S. interests, simply out of a desire to deny the sitting president a “win.” That calculus appears to have animated many Republicans in Congress who withheld support for Obama’s plan to use force to confront Syrian chemical weapons, sought to thwart the Iran deal, ridiculed the Paris Climate Agreement, and (like McConnell) failed to condemn Russian interference in the 2016 election in a forceful and timely way. Similarly, traditional GOP supporters of free trade (unlike most Democrats) who normally would have been inclined to support the twelve-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership to promote American exports and balance an economically rising China, could not countenance handing the administration even that foreign policy success.
Despite such headwinds, President Obama and his team succeeded in many important respects, starting with taking the necessary actions domestically and internationally to prevent a global economic catastrophe. We responsibly brought home the vast majority of our troops from Iraq and Afghanistan, while taking bin Laden off the field and decimating core Al Qaeda. Though we did not anticipate quickly enough the gathering threat ISIS posed in Iraq and Syria, we adjusted and devised a sound strategy that resulted in its battlefield defeat. The Obama administration fully and verifiably rolled back Iran’s nuclear program and thus averted another potential major war in the Middle East through the skillful mix of diplomacy, economic sanctions, and the threat of force. Following the bitter acrimony over the Iraq War, we managed crucially to heal deep wounds with our European allies, despite the tensions reignited by the Snowden disclosures.
We positioned the U.S. to lead more effectively in the Western Hemisphere, particularly by normalizing relations with Cuba. In Asia, the Obama administration invested new resources and attention toward building our relations with India and Southeast Asian countries along with our treaty allies in Japan, Australia, South Korea, and the Philippines. We demonstrated the ability of the U.S. to simultaneously compete and cooperate with China, as most vividly illustrated by the understandings we reached on climate change. In Africa, President Obama hosted the first-ever U.S. Africa Summit and implemented numerous initiatives to bolster economic development and security sector capacity.
The landmark 2015 Paris Climate Agreement grew out of years of relentless personal diplomacy by President Obama, starting at the U.N. climate conference in Copenhagen in 2009 and culminating in groundbreaking agreements with China, and later India, which were critical to achieving international consensus. Further, he demonstrated the power of effective U.S. leadership on numerous other global challenges from combating ISIS and global health security threats like Ebola to spearheading historic advances in arms control and nuclear security as well as landmark development initiatives to reduce poverty, boost food security, increase access to electricity, and empower girls and young leaders.
Our most notable successes were born largely of President Obama’s willingness to take risks and our collective determination to be proactive and persistent in pursuit of an affirmative agenda rather than simply manage the in-box of proximate threats and challenges. There was also the intangible persuasive power of an unlikely and inspirational American president whose election, reelection, and steady leadership reminded the world both of America’s ability to grow and change and of our collective potential to rise to meet even the most daunting challenges. On the international scene, as on the domestic front, progress resulted substantially from careful orchestration and coordination of effort among leaders in the Obama administration, who envisioned, pursued, and successfully implemented a wide range of initiatives that benefited the American people and countless others around the world.
Many of these important gains, along with the world’s faith in the constancy of American leadership, would later be sorely challenged, and in some cases undone, by what would come next—a new president with a very different temperament, principles, and priorities, as well as a dysfunctional national security decision-making process.