I'm Dan Kurtz-Falen, and this is the Foreign Affairs Interview.
And sadly, you know, in all my experience in the Middle East over the years,
it 's the place where grand ambitions and, you know, ill-conceived strategies go to die.
And it is a place where pessimists always feel right at home.
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 protecting 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, 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 US-China competition,