"Chas Freeman: The Collapse of American Diplomacy"
by Glenn Diesen
(May 31, 2025)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zgfWODxluXk

Chas Freeman argues that domestic rivalry within the US political establishment has reduced its ability to engage in constructive diplomacy, and the result in a bias toward confrontation and war

2:17 I think we have to start here with the organization for foreign policy of the United States. We have had, particularly since the Kissinger era a very elaborately organized inter-agency system for vetting situations and proposing approaches to managing or solving them. And this has, under the Trump administration, essentially disappeared. The National Security Council which historically – well, it began with one man, Andy Goodpaster, who was later [Secure] and chief of the Air Force – under Eisenhower he was the National Security Council staff. Kennedy expanded that to six people. Famous names: McGeorge Bundy, Walt Rostow and so forth. And they basically did an end-run around the bureaucracy and got us into Vietnam. By the time the Kissinger-Nixon era ended there were 48 staffers in the National Security Council. By the time Obama left it was around 600, many of them off the books, on temporary assignments from other agencies, and it became utterly unwieldy. And its functions changed from the two that it had which were, First, coordination of policy and monitoring of its implementation by agencies; and, Second, the occasional conspiracy with members of the permanent establishment to change policy. A good example being Nixon’s opening to China, which was accomplished by Kissinger working with people outside the normal channels, official channels. I was one of them on the China Desk at the time. And he simply bypassed the Secretary of State and the whole bureaucratic organization to change the course of the ship of state.

4:27 Anyway, we’ve come to a point where the function of the National Security Council seems to have evolved to be to protect the President from the domestic political consequences of foreign policy. Not to devise strategies for solving problems or advancing American interests. Of course, defending American interests, but doing so basically to avoid embarrassment at home. And most discussions in National Security Meetings have focused more on how to manage the Congress and domestic opinion, what they can get away with, in those terms rather than a purposive approach to strategy and tactics in foreign affairs.

5:23 So, there is no coordination, there is no conspiracy going on between the White House and the permanent government. Permanent government is in fact being savaged, progressively expertise eliminated. The new test for hiring government employees involves a loyalty examination, loyalty to Mr Trump and his ideas, such as they are. And so, at home we don’t have the coherence, we don’t have the mechanism for synthesizing a national interest from special interests. And very often, special interests prevail.

6:13 And that’s directly relevant to the negotiations that are going on under Mr Witkoff, the all-purpose amateur diplomat with Russia, with the Israelis and Hamas, with Iran. And so far, blessedly, not China.

6:34 However, the pattern that has emerged is that Mr Witkoff, who is a very intelligent man who learns from listening to people and is apparently a good negotiator, at least in the real-estate context, who listens to the opposition, let’s say Vladimir Putin, and draws certain conclusions, offers suggestions of what might be offered by the United States to address Mr Putin’s concerns and then goes home and has everything he said re-negotiated by contending factions within the Trump administration all of whom have the ear of the President who is rather erratic and persuadable by, it is said, the last person to speak with him.

7:26 And Mr Trump, who is directing all this personally does not avail himself of the intelligence community’s understandings of foreign affairs. He meets once a week on Wednesday to hear a briefing. He doesn’t read the Presidential briefing report that is prepared. Vice President Vance apparently does read that and asks good questions. Mr Trump doesn’t. And so he comes into decision making without the benefit of an expert council with the burden of various prejudices and biases and erroneous assumptions that he has. And as I said, Mr Witkoff, although he has Mr Trump’s confidence, can be overruled by domestic factions. We’ve seen that in the case of Ukraine. We’ve seen it in the case of Gaza. We’ve seen it in the case of Iran. And we can go through that each example.

8:33 In the case of Ukraine, which you asked about … the President basically appears to have started, and Mr Witkoff started, on the basis of Western propaganda attributing all sorts of objectives and motives to the Russians that they don’t have. So, basically, the Russians are assumed to be wanting to conquer all of Ukraine, absorb all of Ukraine, which we know is not the case. They have the capability to conquer all of Europe, which they’ve demonstrated in Ukraine they don’t. And the answer to all this is a ceasefire.

9:17 “Well, there are a number of problems with that. The losing side, which is the one we’re on, does not get to impose a ceasefire on the advancing side, which the Russians are. So, this has not gone anywhere. But beyond that, it doesn’t address the questions that the Russians have posed consistently for almost three decades, the end of the Cold War. What kind of security architecture in Europe can reassure the Russians and Western Europeans alike against the threat that each poses to the other? For such an architecture to work, in the Russian opinion, Ukraine must be neutral, as indeed it was at its independence. Finally, of course, there is the issue of the Russian-speaking population and the other minorities in Ukraine who were deprived of their linguistic and cultural rights after the 2014 coup.

10:20 “Ukraine has failed at its attempt to forcibly assimilate the Russian-speaking minority. … depriving them of the right to use Russian in school or government, backfired and produced a rebellion which the Russians supported. And the Russians have basically taken that issue off the table by annexing Lugansk, Donetsk, Zaporizia, and Kherson. And they now threaten if the war continues to perhaps extend those annexations. Clearly … there is no desire on the part of the Russian-speaking majorities or substantial pluralities in the areas that Russia annexed to be subjugated by western Ukrainians who forced them to speak Ukrainian and abandon their mother tongue. That is not going to happen and Russia is not going to ask them to join Ukraine in a subordinate status. So that issue has been pretty much a waste of time in terms of negotiations. It has been decided on the battlefield.”

11:45 “The question of whether Ukraine should be neutral or join NATO was actually addressed and agreed at Istanbul in March and April of 2022, right after the Russian invasion but the Ukrainian government, under the influence of the United States, UK, and NATO has adamantly refused to reiterate a pledge to be neutral and sought to continue to seek, until very recently, admission to NATO, or at least the right, eventually, to join NATO.”

12:27 “The final issue is most important, and that is How can we craft a peace in Europe that does not rest on the division of Europe and confrontation between the Russians and everybody else? And we’ve been refusing to address that question, in no small measure because, while the United States has gone rogue in terms of diplomacy and we do things without consulting with allies that deeply affect their interests, we have not gained the support of the Europeans for an end to the war on that basis.”

13:06 “So, to sum all this up, in order to end the war in Ukraine, you have to address the broader question of peace in Europe and Ukraine’s position in that. And we have not done so. So, that is actually emblematic of the state of confusion in American diplomacy at the moment which seems to be entirely captive to domestic political pressures and not very responsive to foreign realities. I’ll stop here.”

13:30 Glen Diesen … no trust in NATO so we’re undermining our own interests … [more needs to be added here]

16:42 “President Trump says that this is not his war but it is the United States’ war. The fact that he does not recognize the difference between his own personality and leadership and that of the US Government is one of the problems we have constitutionally in the United States at the moment. The United States has been a co-belligerent, very much so, in this war. You cannot instantly then shuck that identity and become a neutral mediator. We are not a neutral mediator. We’re still arming Ukraine. We’re still supporting Ukraine. And so, the notion that somehow we are mediating, as the Turks and Israelis did at one point, between Ukraine and Russia is simply preposterous and it doesn’t have any credibility.”

17:33 “Second, I believe there is an unstated, very naïve presupposition at work here. And that is that there is a dichotomy. You’re either fighting or you’re negotiating. But as we saw in Korea, we saw in Vietnam and elsewhere, in fact fighting can continue while negotiations proceed. And indeed, the level of combat becomes an element in the negotiation. It is a support for your position. I see no contradiction between the Russians agreeing to go to Istanbul apparently June 2nd and resume discussion with Ukraine or to meet with NATO, if that were on offer, which it isn’t, but at the same time to intensify their attacks on Ukraine in order to strengthen their negotiating position.”

18:38 “So, basically what we have here and in the other cases – and I should mention that, of course, one thing that is at work in the case of the Russians, is the Fallacy of Sunk Costs. We have sacrificed so much blood and treasure that we can’t possibly compromise. There are many in Russia who feel that way. It’s understandable. I’ve seen that sentiment at work in the United States on multiple occasions. It accounts, in part, for our foolish persistence in Afghanistan. But it has to be addressed.”

19:20 “Here we come to the last two issues you mentioned among the seven. One is that if you approach negotiations on the basis of delusions about what the enemy’s motives and objectives are, that is, attributing to the enemy motives and objectives it doesn’t have while failing to heed the statements that the enemy makes about what its objectives and motivations are and what its bottom line is, you get nowhere. And when you compound that as I said earlier with a domestic situation that demands a renegotiation of what your envoy has achieved, you get worse than nowhere.

20:05 And you come to your final question which is How can anyone trust what President Trump says when from one minute to the next he changes his mind? And as the senior Singaporean official said, the United States has gone from maintaining global order to becoming a global disruptor and now to become something like a landlord seeking rent. This is quite an evolution, and it has only taken, what, 5 months. So, you know, the United States agrees to things, Gaza being a perfect example, Mr Witkoff arranged a truce, a ceasefire, in three phases. After phase one was complete the Israelis repudiated it and we supported the Israelis. What sort of mediation is that? So, I think there’s a serious problem of a lack of confidence in the word of the United States because Mr Trump doesn’t regard himself as the United States. He regards himself as President Trump. And his word doesn’t even bind him, let alone the US Government.”

21:39 Glenn Diesen: “Is there something, what could Trump do differently, the way you see it, in Ukraine especially, before moving on?”

21:52 Amb Chas Freeman: “Well, I think the main issue, as I suggested by talking at the beginning about the structure of decision-making in the United States Government on foreign policy, the main issue is to re-engage what Mr Trump derides as the deep state: that is, the accumulated expertise and professional council of those who have spent their lives studying these issues and understand them. At the moment we’re going in the opposite direction. That is obviously one solution. Get our own act together. Empower the President and his negotiators with expertise of which they’re denied.

Now when you see Mr Witkoff going to see Vladimir Putin with nobody but a Russian interpreter there, you see a diplomatic practice that is wanting on several levels. First, of course, there is no record of the conversations to be incorporated into the American understanding of what happened. Mr Witkoff listens to Mr Putin and says to Mr Trump, the President, ‘This is what I heard.’ Maybe he heard it accurately. Maybe he didn’t. That’s one problem. You’re not engaging the government. You’re engaging Mr Trump’s personal envoy with no record of the discussion.”

Second, there is the issue of lack of council for Mr Witkoff. No one can pass him little notes saying ‘You’re misinterpreting that and you need to reframe your discussion accordingly,’ which is a normal practice in negotiation. There is no ability to break for a consultation with a staff group. And the third problem, of course, is reliance on the other side’s interpreters, means that some of the nuances you may have intended to convey will not get through because those interpreters are not aware of your negotiating position if you have a formal one, or your thinking on the issue. So, this is a very amateurish way to approach things. I don’t wish to denigrate Mr Witkoff. I hope he succeeds. But I don’t envy him because the position he’s been put into is rather anomalous. And then he has to go back to Washington and defend what he concluded after speaking to Vladimir Putin, or for that matter Foreign Minister Alaqchi, the Iranian foreign minister, or Hamas spokesman, or Prime Minister Netanyahu. And this is a filter. It puts too much burden on him.

25:13 If you have a number of people in the room who are taking notes and listening, then you have the ability to stand your ground in a discussion back home. ‘Yes, indeed. He did say this. Yes, indeed, he did mean that. Yes, indeed, there is this opportunity.’ But Mr Witkoff is all by himself. He’s a real-estate billionaire. He’s used to making decisions on his own, of course, as President Trump has been. But his is a perversion of normal government practice and it doesn’t work.”

25:50 Glenn Diesen: “I think that, first of all, that Trump’s experience with his first administration, that the permanent government, as you call it, or keeping some of the status quo in place, that he saw this as undermining his government. So, it seems that he’s trying to drain the deep state [enemies?] but which also has the unfortunate consequence of also draining the people with expertise. This whole division now between the America-firsters and the neocons, it does seem that it’s the America-firsters wanting more I guess wanting a more modest role for the United States in the world so it won’t exhaust its resources, so it won’t provoke a collective balancing by China, Russia, all these countries together. While on the other side you have the more neocons seeking security through global primacy. It does appear that the tensions are between these two groups. Even people like Marco Rubio it doesn’t seem like he’s chosen quite which camp he’s in. He repeats a lot of the ideas of the America-first ideas, that you have to readjust to multi-polarity. On the other hand, he’s still got a lot of the mentality of, you know, if we just knock out this country, that country, we could be back, you know, on top of the throne. Do you see it in a similar way, or how can you understand, I guess, this disorder? Is this a Trump thing, or is Trump a symptom of it? I can’t always make sense of it”

27:25 Amb Chas Freeman: "Trump is the battleground between these two factions. His basic instincts are restraint in foreign policy. He does, I think, want peace. In order to get peace, however, he’s going to have to rely on people whose loyalty he will have to earn. And going back to the first Trump administration, I was out of government by then, of course, a long time. But I observed what happened. I don’t think he made a really realistic effort to enlist the loyalty of the people serving him. In fact, he had a very disloyal group of people immediately around him. People like John Bolton, you know, and others who then wrote scathing recollections of mistakes that Mr Trump had made and ridiculed him. I don’t know that it was the permanent bureaucracy that resisted him. I think it was his own appointees as much as anything else. But he attributes that to the deep state. And he is the prisoner of an ideology which proposes to destroy the deep state or the administrative state, as Steve Bannon calls it."

28:51“We’re going to see a really interesting playoff between the factions in Secretary of Defense Hegseth’s visit to the IISS Shangri-la Forum in Singapore. The Chinese are not represented. That is a very interesting, and I think rather ominous development, which we could discuss, because they have consistently been there in the past. But they’re not sending their defense minister this time. Hegseth has to reassure Asians that that the United States is on their side. It’s not usually put that way, but they want the United States on their side. They want China on their side, too. And the formula in Washington leaves no room for them not to choose between China and the United States. So that will be interesting.”

29:49 “As for Marco Rubio, his previous involvement in foreign policy was always Latin America. He’s a Cuban-American, the son of people who left during the Batista era before Castro came to power but who are very much part of the Cuban exile community. And that community is very right-wing and has specific concerns about security in Latin America focused on countries like Venezuela as well as Cuba, Bolivia – which has been wobbly politically – and, of course, Nicaragua where they sponsored, in the Reagan Administration, a war against the so-called Contras. So Mr Rubio is in that arena very combative, very hegemonic in his impulses and in that context he probably counts as the equivalent of a neoconservative. That is, favoring coercion rather than persuasion, the use of force rather than diplomacy. Elsewhere, he may have a different view, but he is new to the other arenas. So I agree with you he seems to be straddling the two tendencies to some extent. I don’t know in the end which will win out.”

31:22 But I have a feeling, as Elon Musk appears to have learned, incompetence leads to your departure from government. That is, Mr Musk attempted to run the moral equivalent of Mao Ze Dong’s cultural revolution on the government. They unleashed a bunch of digital delinquents to tear down the government. They knew nothing about the government and how it worked and they wreaked havoc. So that we now have a situation where the farmers who need weather reports and predictions can’t get them because the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NOAH, which provides these reports has been mutilated and is not adequately staffed.”

32:12 “And, of course, we have other things going on which greatly diminish the credibility and the confidence internationally in the United States. Take Harvard University, for example, or Columbia. There is a broad assault on the intellectual superstructure of the United States going on. There is a broad assault on science, technology, research and development going on. We're seeing faculty members from prestigious universities seek to leave the United States to find the ability to practice their arts in Europe or in China or in Candada or Australia, or somewhere else. And so the United Staes is engaged in multiple acts of self-sabotage. This is not reassuring and Mr Hegseth has a difficult task ahead of him in Singapore to convince people that if he says the United States is going to stay in Asia that we will in fact in the long term have the capacity to do so. And that is now in doubt. So, this is not a pretty picture.”

33:22 Glenn Diesen: ...

. . .

39:38 Amb Chas Freeman: "Well, I think the more general issue that you raised at the outset has to be addressed. What is the objective of the United States in these negotiations over tariffs and sanctions? Which is what they are. And I think the foreign parties in these negotiations can be forgiven for concluding that their purpose is not economic but political subjugation. And that is to say this is a power play, not a trade policy. The objective is to have everybody acknowledge the supreme leader as Donald Trump and the United States in its hegemonic role."

40:26 "But the world, of course, as we've discussed before, is moving beyond not just unipolarity but into what I call a multi-nodal framework where medium-sized countries, middle-ranking powers, and smaller countries, regain agency and freedom of maneuver. And it is not a case of Superpower G3 or something like that emerging. And so I think that is the first problem that there is no coherent economic objective. The objective does seem to be political subordination. And not surprisingly, a country like Iran is not prepared to accept that given its history."

41:14 "Second, you made the point -- it's a very important one, I think -- that when countries have agreed with the United States on an interim solution of some sort, they get no reward at all for that. Basically, they give and the United States takes, and they don't get a clear benefit."

And this reflects the third point I would make. And that is the Trump technique is to act (do something) absolutely outrageous that causes a huge problem for everyone, and then after a while back off a bit so that its merely outrageous not absolutely outrageous and the problem has been reduced somewhat, but it is still vastly worse than where everybody began." [Note: CHUTZPAH - Yiddish for "brazen, shameless, unmitigated gall"] And he claims that's the solution".

42:04 "This is not much of an incentive for countries to yield elements of their sovereignty or offer to kowtow to the United States. In the case of Iran, finally, Mr Witkoff seems to have understood and agreed with the notion that the Iranians put forward that enrichment to the 3.67% level which is adequate for nuclear reactors and power supply as well as the medical uses you mentioned would be OK. But he went back to Washington and was overruled in effect by the Zionist lobby. He is himself a Zionist (as he has demonstrated in the cockamamie negotiations between Hamas and Israel). I think he was embarrassed by that and he had to correct himself and say 'No, it has to be an entire elimination of enrichment'."

43:06 "Well, the Iranians are not going to accept that. For many reasons. Among others, a legal reason, the non-proliferation treaty gives them the right to enrich. That is a right under international law. And the United States proposes unilaterally to take it away from them. I think, therefore, that this is an intrusion into their sovereignty and a violation of their place in the international order, and they won't accept it."

43:35 "I wrote a book used in some diplomatic training academies and things called Arts of Power: Statecraft and Diplomacy. And I opened the book with a discussion of the hierarchy of interests because people throw around terms like 'vital intests' of so-and-so and so-and-so, but they don't measure the intensity of the interest. And the Supreme Interest in my view is the independence and cultural identity of a nation. A nation will sacrifice everything for that."

"A Vital Interest is an interest that bears importantly on the security and well-being of the state but is not necessarily existential, as the first, Supreme Interest is."

44:27 "A Strategic Interest, is an interest that if neglected will evolve into a vital, a challenge to vital interests."

"And finally, there are just interests. You know, we want to have our nationals treated properly when they go to Norway and not be mistaken for Swedes and suffer prejudice from Norwegians. This is an interest of the United States, I suppose, but it's not very compelling and we certainly wouldn't go to war over it. "

44:54 "So, I don't think we're thinking clearly. In the case of Iran, sovereignty, identity, cultural integrity are the Supreme Interests, and they're simply not going to sacrifice that. They can make compromises on other things, but not on that. So, if you don't recognize that, you are engaged in an exercise in futility."

45:25 Glenn Diesen: ""