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Susan Glasser: I’m Susan Glasser, and welcome back to The Global POLITICO. I’m really delighted and honored that our guest this week is former Defense Secretary Ash Carter. He was the last defense secretary running the Pentagon for the last few years of the Obama administration, which means he’s been out of office for just a little bit more than a year. He’s returned to perhaps a more congenial perch up at Harvard, from where he’s speaking with us this week for The Global POLITICO.
Secretary Carter, first of all, thank you for joining us.
Ash Carter: Thank you for having me, Susan. I’m glad to be here with you.
Glasser: Well, there is so much to talk about. It’s hard to know where to begin, but I think we’ll start big picture. It has been just about a year since the Trump administration took office, and the Obama administration left. Just the other day, you had the heads of all the intelligence agencies taking a very global view and talking about the worldwide threat picture. So, I guess I want to start by asking you, what, if anything, has surprised you or changed in the national security picture in the year since you have left the Pentagon?
Carter: Well, the world doesn’t change nearly as fast as obviously our own internal dynamics in the United States can sometimes seem to, and so from my point of view, what I used to call the big five, remain the big five, namely Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, and ISIS particularly, but terrorism more generally. They’re all there, and with respect to Russia and China, I think that we long needed to do more.
I used to say that when I was defense secretary, given not only their growing strength, which by itself could be okay if the second part, which is their intentions, were different. But Russia is clearly been and has been for quite a long time a country which defines in part its interests as thwarting the United States, and that is a—if somebody can seize their interest that way, it’s very hard to align yourself with them, as we have done in the past. And I’ll just remind you, Susan, I mean, back in the days of the Cold War, and then in the 1990s, I dealt with the then-Soviet Union first when I worked way back for Paul Nitze, who was the arms control negotiator for Ronald Reagan, all the way up through the Nunn-Lugar program in the 1990s, which took all—controlled the nuclear weapons of the former Soviet Union.
And I remember Vladimir Putin when he sat in the back of meetings which I would attend with Boris Yeltsin and Bill Clinton. So, I’ve known him and seen him for a long time, and this is an aspect of his thinking that isn’t going to go away.
Glasser: Well, that’s right. So, Russia is a good starting point, really, for this conversation, because the intelligence agencies, that was the big news, really, was them saying, not only does Russia remain this very significant threat, but that one year and change after this extraordinary intervention in our U.S. election, that they are preparing and are, in fact, attacking us again. I believe that was the language used.
But also, here we are, more than a year later. Are you surprised that the United States has not done more to respond, and to retaliate for this Russian intervention?
Carter: I’m not surprised. And people ask me all the time, have we done enough about the Russian hacking of the election, and the easy answer to that is obviously not, because they’re still at it. It hasn’t changed the behavior of Vladimir Putin, and that means neither the Obama administration nor the Trump administration has done enough. Now, it is tricky when you’re dealing with things like that to impose penalties, but I believe it can be done, and it’s necessary in the age of cyber.
You don’t respond to what is essentially aggression in your country by not recognizing that fact, and you don’t necessarily respond in kind. But you do respond, and I think that it needs to be more strenuous and one of the things that hasn’t been tested yet in the new administration is its willingness to do that.
Glasser: Well, now, you were an advocate in the summer of 2016, the early fall of 2016 as the fact of this Russian intervention was starting to become clear inside the Obama administration. My understanding is you, in fact, were pushing to do more. You also, at the same time, were very wary of cooperating more with the Russians on the ground in Syria, which is something that was being pushed at the time, but you were resisting. Is that right?
Carter: Yes to both. In particular with respect to Syria, I thought the Russians who said they entered Syria with the intention of fighting ISIS and helping move Assad aside so that the tragic civil war there could be transitioned to an end, had done neither of those things. Instead, they had only fueled the civil war, and they weren’t of any help whatsoever in ISIS. It is us and our partners on the ground who defeated ISIS in Mosul and Raqqa, starting in 2015. The Russians did none of that, and I didn’t want the United States to be associated, either politically or morally, with what the Russians were doing.
And of course, they were intent upon trapping us, or beguiling us into what they called cooperating with them, and I was against cooperation. I said as far as I was prepared to go, and President Obama ultimately agreed with this, was that we would deconflict our operations there, we would continue the fight against ISIL, which we needed to do to protect our own people. They would continue to basically fuel and cause trouble in the Syrian civil war, and we would make sure that our forces and their forces didn’t collide, but that we could not further associate. We didn’t need their help and we didn’t want their association with what we were doing.
Glasser: And this was all playing out, really, in the summer of 2016 when that hacking was also occurring.
Carter: The hacking was also occurring. Now, I should tell you that the Defense Department, it being the aspects of it that were political were handled, obviously, by the White House, which is appropriate, it being an election season, and we in the Defense Department stood apart—and this is a proud tradition of many years, that I very much wanted to continue, especially in an election that was as kaleidoscopic as the long, multi-candidate 2016 election, that we keep the Defense Department out of it. And we did.
But, as a consequence, I was not involved in the political side of it, and as far as the law enforcement, and intelligence side, obviously that was Jim Comey and John Brennan and Jim Clapper who did that. But I was certainly alarmed by what they were telling me. I wasn’t surprised; it was what I saw on the military side the Russians doing in Ukraine, in the Baltics, and elsewhere, which is little green men, cyber-attacks, the big lie, and other ways of manipulating the information domain. And I wasn’t at all surprised that they were doing it in the United States.
But it’s not acceptable, particularly—this isn’t like the old ham-fisted stuff the KGB used to do in the Cold War days, which was offensive, but was never really consequential.
Glasser: What is the toughest thing that we could do to Russia that we haven’t done yet?
Carter: Well, I think an answer to Russia has to be a comprehensive one, which is in part a response to what they’re doing here, but it is a response to everything else they’re doing. Whether it’s in Ukraine or Syria or the Balkans or in nuclear matters, and that is to essentially, and I’m sorry to put it this way, Susan, but I—let me, in fact, put it this way instead. For 20 to 25 years, including most of the time I was in the Defense Department in the 1990s, we didn’t have—and the decade that followed also, as well as the Obama years, but also the Bush administration—during all that time, there was essentially no war plan for—or campaign plan for countering Russia of the kind that I lived with all during the time I was working in the Cold War defense.
The NATO plans, and the U.S. plans for the defense of Germany against Warsaw Pact invasion; all that stuff went away when the Wall came down, and then the Soviet Union collapsed, and we didn’t think anything like that was necessary. Three years ago, when I was secretary of defense, I said, “We’ve got to change that.” We need to put together a campaign plan that is military but also politico-military, and that pushes back—
Glasser: After Crimea—
Carter: This was after Ukraine, yes, which predated my time as secretary of defense, but I certainly watched it. And I had been coming to this conviction for some time, but by the time I became secretary of defense, it was to me obvious that this needed to be done. So, I think the answer to your question is, it’s part of a very broad response that has to recognize that Russia—I still hope to work with them wherever we can find areas where our interests align or can be aligned, but they’re really small now compared to those days of the past, and they need to feel the pressure come back on them, political, economic, and military, but there’s a military side to it.
Glasser: Do you think that the war plan that you started developing when you were the secretary of defense, is that ready to go? Is that something that Mattis now has available to him?
Carter: Yes, it is, but it’s something that constantly, like all our war plans, is constantly evolving, constantly improving as NATO adds new capability, as we position new forces in Europe, which I started to do, and my successor Jim Mattis has continued to do, and rightly so. As NATO continues to marshal its own response as NATO, and we learn new tactics and techniques for dealing with things like the little green men phenomenon, and so forth, we continue to improve that plan.
And that’ll be like that as long as this situation exists, which I think will certainly be at least as long as Vladimir Putin is the leader of Russia. Now, I don’t want a war, of course, and I don’t think that a war plan itself is all I’m talking about, Susan. I’m talking about something that is more a general politico-military plan to push back on Russia, not the same as Cold War containment, but a similar concept in that it is a comprehensive approach to a country that is defining its interests in opposition to yours, and you have no choice but to push back. We need to push back.
Glasser: So, on the pushing back front, I think, just to go one level of altitude up here, when it comes to the Trump administration, one of the things we’re all trying to understand as observers of what’s going on and how it is or isn’t different from the Obama administration is that if you look at the actual words and some of the rhetoric certainly that you hear from Secretary Mattis, or even Secretary of State Tillerson; the new National Security Strategy and, in particular, the new National Defense Strategy that have been released recently by the Trump administration, on paper, some of their views, certainly on this notion of great power competition being the main threat to the United States right now, from Russia and from China, it seems like you would agree with that, but I’m guessing overall that doesn’t—but that doesn’t mean you’re a fan of the Trump foreign policy.
Carter: Well, you asked specifically about the return—what is called the return to superpower—an attention in our National Defense Strategy to superpower challenges. Russia, China, the technology challenges that come with that, which are cyber and artificial intelligence and space and electronic warfare, those were exactly my priorities as well, and so I am pleased to see that represented in the documents. What I cannot speak to and of course it tends to be very difficult to speak to at all in the current circumstances is whether the policy of the administration as a whole, and in particular, the president, has settled down to this view, or not.
But I believed, and I said at the time, that we needed to continue to be good at counterinsurgency and counterterrorism, and you know, I spent as much time and energy as any leader in the Defense Department during all the almost eight years I was there, working on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And you have no choice. If we have people who are fighting, you have to be all in for them. So, it’s all absorbing to make sure they had, to the extent you could do it everything they needed to succeed and be safe.
At the same time, there’s no question that that was a substantial preoccupation for all of us in the leadership. I believe that as we—as that era would inevitably, I think, successfully be resolved, we needed to make sure we attended to things that we hadn’t paid enough attention to, which were Russia, China, and in a very different way, but also North Korea. And to the extent that is being continued, I’m all for it. It is necessary.
Glasser: Right. I am curious, though, what is your bigger picture framing around the Trump national security policy and the president himself? I’m sure you must get questioned all the time from foreign leaders, your former counterparts: What the heck is going on in Washington? What do you tell them?
Carter: Well, I am very careful what I would say to non-Americans about the American government, just out of propriety, and of course, nor do I, since I’m on the outside looking in, can I speak authoritatively for what’s going on. I will say that one of the ways that you get what you want in the world is to get people to want what you want. That is why we have alliances, why we have partnerships, why we have a non-transactional foreign policy, in which friends are friends, and opponents are opponents, in some way that is not tied to what is happening today.
That kind of stability is important in order for us to have the influence that we need to protect our interests and protect our people. And there is still a lot of turbulence. That’s normal early in an administration, but this is unusual in its intensity and its duration. And the other thing is, speaking as someone who ran the Defense Department, and a long-time, over several decades involved with defense and working there, clarity is extremely important.
If you want the government to do what you want it to do, and you want it to do that with excellence, you need to be very clear. And with the different signals coming from different levels, I think it’s very hard for the executive branch in general to be an effective executor of the public purpose here in the United States, and I think that goes outside of defense.
So, clarity and consistency. I also will say something just I’m going to say on my own behalf. I think conduct and civility matter, and I used to tell the troops that, and when our people didn’t live up to that standard, we fired them. And so—and I’ve been doing this a long time, Susan. I go back to Jim Schlesinger, former secretary of defense, former secretary of defense Bill Perry, national security advisor Brent Scowcroft. These are the people who kind of taught me the business.
And they behaved themselves and comported themselves very well. I do worry about the tone in our country of dialogue and conduct, and we’ve got a generation that will follow us that looks at us, and we have a world that, on a good day, would like to follow us. And as important as clarity and consistency of policy is conduct. So, those are the ways that I think we will have the best shot at getting what we want. Obviously, we’re the most powerful country, militarily, in the world. But you have to garnish and accompany that with economic, political, and ultimately, with moral power, as a force multiplier.
So, even as secretary of defense, I take an interest in the way in which we’re conducting ourselves, because I think it bears upon the likelihood that my instrument, which is the military, will be used, and that if it has to be used, that I continue to have all the friends. If you think about it, Susan, our opponents, or potential opponents—the great superpower so-called potential opponents, China, Russia—they don’t have allies all over the world of long-standing, like the United States does. And they don’t have them because people don’t like what they stand for.
Glasser: Well, I think, Secretary Carter, you’re making an excellent point. When it comes to what do we stand for at the moment, certainly consistency, clarity, and conduct are not the things that anyone is going to think are associated with the Trump administration. I thought your successor Secretary Mattis, once asked a version of this, had a very interesting comment that got a lot of attention last year. He basically told the troops, “Hold on. Bear with us. We don’t like a lot of divisiveness in our society right now. Just bear with us here.” How do you think he handles the challenge of communicating at a moment like this?
Carter: Jim Mattis I’ve known since—we served together for the first time in 1994. He is a person of impeccable character and conduct. You shouldn’t have any doubt about that. I certainly don’t at all. I was talking more generally about the tone in which dialogue and everything is taking place in—
Glasser: Absolutely. He’s gotten high marks here in Washington and probably everywhere for navigating a very delicate situation. I guess is what I meant, in terms of the rhetoric that comes out of the White House, and he somehow has managed to separate himself from that without being in open conflict.
Carter: When—way back, when I was still in office, and Jim Mattis was—the President-elect Trump indicated his intention to nominate Jim Mattis to be secretary of defense, I said right from the beginning, I’ve known Jim Mattis for a long time. He was an excellent military officer, and more importantly, he’s an excellent citizen and public statesman, and certainly somebody who can—in terms of the way he conducts himself, impeccable during all the years that I’ve known him.
And that’s the kind of thing that matters to the troops.
I don’t think there’s anything more noble that you can do. You sacrifice a lot when you do that, and they’ve done that, and they deserve to have at the top people who care deeply about them.
Glasser: Secretary Carter, you brought up North Korea, and that obviously has been, in many ways, one of the ongoing themes over the last year. We’ve seen since the Obama administration, a real focus on the part of the Trump administration. You have a very long and very particular history of views on this, and of course, ask anyone here in Washington, and they all remember very vividly a June 2006 article that you wrote in The Washington Post with Bill Perry. You mentioned him as one of your mentors, the former secretary of defense. The two of you at the time advocated more or less a preemptive military strike on the North Korea nuclear program.
I just want to read the last sentence from that article, which turned out, unfortunately, to be very prescient. You said, “Diplomacy has failed. We cannot sit by and let this deadly threat mature. A successful Taepodong launch unopposed by the United States, its intended victim, would only embolden North Korea even further. The result would be more nuclear warheads atop more and more missiles.” So, do you still think we have a window to execute such a military strike?
Carter: That was a very different circumstance at that time, and actually I’ve seen circumstances change all the way back since 1994, when I was part of the first military planning associated with the North Korean nuclear program. Let me just be—with respect to what is going on right now, of course I obviously can’t speak for the current administration, but I—and I don’t know exactly what they are doing, Susan. I do know what I would do at this juncture.
And first of all, I do believe that we have had some success from time to time over the years I have been involved in this matter. They didn’t last long, but they were productive for a time, with a form of coercive diplomacy with North Korea. And I believe, and I hope that we are trying or will try that, and by course of diplomacy, I mean something that is not a purely military or a purely diplomatic thing that mixes the two. That has been the—and the only way that has ever been successful, and what I would recommend at this juncture as well is when it was pursued step by step.
In other words, you didn’t say to the North Koreans, I want you to stop everything. You said, “Stop doing, for example, long-range missile tests, and if you do one, we will do the following to you. If you don’t, then you will get the following benefit.” And you try to stop and then walk back their program. The second ingredient that has been essential to the success of coercive diplomacy in the past, and I would give a try to today, it has only worked when the United States and South Korea and China and Japan are all working off the same script.
And the reason for that is that our collective carrots and sticks are more powerful than the ones each one of us has. For example, China has many carrots. The United States has a big stick. And so, it is necessary to get us together. I mentioned that also at a moment when the Olympics is going on, and people ask me all the time whether the Olympic moment will translate into something of significance for these negotiations, and experience tells me it will not, because the North Koreans don’t pay attention to the South Koreans, or at least not the South Koreans principally when it comes to missile and nuclear matters.
They pay attention to the United States and China, principally. And just if I can say, since that may not work, that diplomacy, this is important to say as a former secretary of defense, I spent a lot of time on deterrence and defense, because in the end, we have to protect ourselves. And it’s important to be ready to do so, and we are ready to do so. I have to tell you though, Susan, I’m sure you know this perfectly well, that war on the Korean Peninsula is a kind of tragedy and violence the likes of which the world has not seen in many decades. And that is not something that should be underestimated, and so is to be avoided if possible, in any way we can. So, coercive diplomacy and defense and deterrence for North Korea.
Glasser: So, you would not advocate any kind of preemptive strike right now, largely because the conditions have changed, just to be clear on that.
Carter: Well, we always have those options and you hear of people being asked to do them, but I don’t think we’re anywhere near the point of war. I think we need to, and have some opportunity to try coercive diplomacy, and in the meantime, we need to continue to improve our defense and deterrence.
Glasser: As someone who’s watched this program, the North Korean nuclear program, develop over time, what do you make of North Korea’s incredible progress in developing its missiles, and their long-range capability? I mean, they really seem to have had this leap forward. Is this something that was on your radar in the last few years of the Obama administration? Was this a surprise? Did they have help from the Russians or someone else?
Carter: It wasn’t surprising to me and shouldn’t have been a surprise to anyone. Remember they launched their first long-range—they first obtained plutonium for—capable of making nuclear weapons in 1994. They first conducted a long-range missile test in 1998. They conducted their first underground nuclear test in 2006. And so, this has been going on for some time. There was not actually some sudden inflection point that coincided with the U.S. presidential transition.
I think there—it got more attention at that time, both from the outgoing administration and the incoming administration, but that is not because all the sudden, something happened in North Korea. This has been something that’s been building for quite a long time. And so, it was foreseen, and I’ll give you an example. Six years ago or so, when I was the so-called weapons czar for the Pentagon, I wasn’t secretary yet, I was involved in the deployment and improvement of our missile defenses, especially in Alaska and California. That was controversial, Susan, because people said, “Why are you doing this? You don’t need to. There’s no threat today, and you will antagonize Russia and China.”
And my answer to that was, “I don’t want to get to the point where North Korea can actually put a warhead on a long-range missile and make one that is capable of hitting the United States, unless I first have ready a defense capable of intercepting it.” And that’s why I want to get started now. And with respect to whether the Chinese and the Russians are going to build up their nuclear arsenals in response, they’re building up their nuclear arsenals anyway, and we’re not doing this now.
So, we are not the reason why China and Russia are building nuclear weapons. They’re building that for their own reason, and I happen to believe that we also—that’s another reason why we need a nuclear triad and a recapitalization of the nuclear triad in the United States.
Glasser: Well, I’m glad you brought that up. I was going to ask. Just last week, the Nuclear Posture Review was released by the Pentagon, and it reemphasizes the centrality of that nuclear triad in our policy. Do you see any other major shifts or news coming out of that nuclear policy?
Carter: I think to the extent that the central point was to reinforce the need to support a plan for the recapitalization of the triad, that is exactly what I thought, and I think it’s extremely important. The bedrock of our military capability, and our security remains nuclear deterrence. We lost sight, perhaps—many people did—a little bit of that in the decades after the end of the Cold War, but it remained true. It was just something that was kind of in the background.
Now, with not just North Korea but China and Russia each in their own way acting more assertively, and in Russia’s case, at least, rattling nuclear weapons in a way that the leaders of the Soviet Union never really did—at least for decades did not. And also, of course, although the agreement seems to have successfully stopped that for now, then it was the agreement with Iran. You know, all of those places, those are all reasons why the United States continues—needs to continue to have a nuclear deterrent.
Now, I say that at the same time I spent an enormous amount of my time in the Pentagon on the tech future for the U.S. military. Nuclear weapons can sound old-fashioned, and the tech—the future does belong in important respects to drones and satellites and artificial intelligence and electronic warfare and cyber, which you and I have been talking about here. And I thought, and continue to believe, that it’s very important that the relationship between the Department of Defense and the disruptive technological change that characterizes today, that that link remain strong.
And by the way, Susan, I feel that way about all of public life. We have now technology that affects our politics, how we conduct ourselves as a society, much of it all for the good, but with technological change, there always comes a dark side, and I think it’s important that we recognize that. We’re going to have a biotechnology revolution, which will affect defense, but also the rest of our lives in the next couple decades that will make the digital tech revolution of the last few decades seem small in comparison, in terms of how portentous it is.
Glasser: You made an excellent point, that it can seem like looking backwards, but in fact, it remains that the pillar of our system—President Obama committed to a major nuclear modernization program, but as I understand it, there were real debates towards the end of his administration that you participated in about whether we should change our policy more to reflect the changing times, including possibly go to a nuclear dyad, and lose one leg of the triad. What did those debates tell you about where we are as a society with nuclear weapons?
Carter: Well, these debates have gone on as long as I’ve been associated with the nuclear weapons business, and these are weapons that are—whose consequences are so serious that debate is a good thing. On the other hand, I am very—was very grateful to President Obama for reaching what I obviously thought was the right conclusion, which is that it was necessary to recapitalize the nuclear triad, and I am glad that he made that decision, and he did.
And we laid it into the Defense Department budget, and into our plans, and I’m now pleased to learn in the Nuclear Posture Review of the current administration, that it shares that same view and that same plan. That is a necessity, I think, and I’m very, very glad to see that continue because it is a necessity—a sad necessity of our defense, but it is a necessity. But there are lots of necessities, and that’s why the high-tech and hiring the right people and making sure that women are in the armed forces, which is another decision I made because we need the best people, and half of our population are female and it’s important to be able to draw on them, if they have the right qualifications.
So, there are a lot of different dimensions to have enough money, which I now see we have a defense budget, which I never had.
Glasser: You must be a little bit jealous of that agreement.
Carter: Well, yeah, certainly envious, but pleased, because I pleaded and begged and was angry about the gridlock in Washington, and to the extent that that has been relieved, I am relieved. I do have to say, though, as secretary of defense, I of course welcome the additional spending for defense. I do think that it can be put to good use, although we have to always be careful about waste, but I think it can be put to good use.
I happen to believe also, Susan, that the rest of our public functions, and the rest of our government—R&D, infrastructure, education are an important—also part of our long-term strength, and as secretary of defense, I would always say, “I can’t be secretary of defense and only argue for the defense budget. I need to argue for a lot of the federal government.” Obviously, my sister agencies, like state, intelligence, law enforcement, homeland security—
Glasser: How much are you worried about what appears to be a fairly systematic and purposeful degrading and downgrading of diplomacy right now? Is that—I mean, other defense secretaries have said that’s actually a big problem for them, the militarization of American foreign policy. Now, it’s on hyperdrive.
Carter: I always argued for the State Department budget. I always argued that our policies and our operations should be known to the State Department, and they should be able to inform us and inform the president of the whole context in which the use of force was being done, and that we couldn’t be truly effective if we weren’t linked up with our State Department counterparts. I do understand, and this is now secondhand, but I—from colleagues who know the State Department better than I do, understand that there is a loss of talent occurring, which I think would be roughly equivalent to if many of the two-star and three-star generals in the Defense Department were suddenly to decide to retire.
You can’t grow a four-star general overnight. This is a great stock of experience; operational experience, world experience, and if this is right, which I’m pretty sure it is, because I hear it consistently from State Department colleagues, that doesn’t bode well for the health of the State Department going forward. Glasser: What do you think—you mentioned the budget and these future challenges like cyber, but also biological, development of new weapons perhaps of the kind we haven’t seen. What are the most important things to invest in that we’re not, that the Chinese and the Russians are?
Carter: Well, I’ll give you a few examples. I think the main thing that we were not investing in for a long time that the Russians were investing in was our nuclear arsenal, and I wouldn’t at all recommend doing the kinds of things that they were doing. But what they were doing was a reminder that we needed ours.
China is much more challenging in many ways. The Chinese are not only trying to catch up with us qualitatively and quantitatively—they have a long way to go, but they are trying. But they also are making targeted and much more strategic investments as a government, in technology. For example, in quantum computing, which will be revolutionary; in certain aspects of biotechnology. And remember, China is a communist essentially dictatorship, and so it is able to make these calls and to have consistency and a unity of military purpose, economic purpose, and political purpose that a liberal democracy like the United States—and we like it that way—cannot do.
And we need to protect our businesses as well as our values, like freedom. And our security from the ability of China to behave in this way. I believe that we have no adequate economic playbook for competition with China. Last time we competed with or had a long difficult strategic relationship with a large communist country was during the Cold War, and our approach to that was simply not to trade with them. Now, one of our largest trading partners is in fact a communist country, and I don’t think that the economists have given us much of a playbook to protect our companies and our people.
Glasser: Secretary Ash Carter has been very generous with his time in The Global POLITICO today. What’s one thing you don’t miss about life here in Washington?
Carter: Oh, it’s the—there’s a certain gamesmanship associated with Washington that is divorced from the results, the interests of the people elsewhere in the country, and that’s inevitable in the capital city of a country. But one of the—and I miss Washington—I miss the government, I miss the Pentagon in many ways, but one of the things that’s nice about being at Harvard and MIT or just another place, is that people have a little bit more distance, and they’re focused on what comes out of Washington, and not just what happens inside Washington. And I find that refreshing and it’s one of the good aspects of having moved out.
Glasser: Secretary Ash Carter, this has been the opposite in all good sense of a Twitter conversation. I really—I appreciate you spending the time with us, and I’m sure our audience at The Global POLITICO does as well.
Carter: I appreciate your providing the opportunity to actually have a conversation about things, and I appreciate all the work you’ve done, by the way, reporting on what we’ve done around the world, both—I know sometimes not always the—we haven’t done everything perfectly and you cover that, too, but you’re always very fair, and I’m grateful to you. Thank you.
Tom Williams 