The Back Channel Quotes

“Russia is providing graphic evidence that declining powers can be at least as disruptive as rising ones, increasingly convinced that the pathway to revival of its great power status runs through the erosion of an American-led order.”
― William J. Burns, The Back Channel: A Memoir of American Diplomacy and the Case for Its Renewal

“Shaping the principles of policy debate, I learned, is often the first step toward winning it.”
― William J. Burns, The Back Channel: A Memoir of American Diplomacy and the Case for Its Renewal

“in a Time of Peril. New York: Viking, 2011. Albright, Madeleine. Madam Secretary: A Memoir. New York: Miramax”
― William J. Burns, The Back Channel: A Memoir of American Diplomacy and the Case for Its Renewal

“garbled and unsatisfying, even with the benefit of a decade and a half of hindsight. Part of it was about loyalty to my friends and colleagues, and to Secretary Powell; part of it was the discipline of the Foreign Service, and the conceit that we could still help avoid even worse policy blunders from within the system than from outside it; part of it was selfish and career-centric, the unease about forgoing a profession I genuinely loved and in which I had invested twenty years; and part of it, I suppose, was the nagging sense that Saddam was a tyrant who deserved to go, and maybe we could navigate his demise more adeptly than I feared.”
― William J. Burns, The Back Channel: A Memoir of American Diplomacy and the Case for Its Renewal