AMNA NAWAZ: No other American diplomat has spent more time with Russian President Vladimir

Putin than William Burns.

And in a candid conversation with Judy Woodruff about his new memoir, "The Back Channel,"

the former deputy secretary of state under President Obama, who earlier served as ambassador

to Russia, didn't hold back in his criticism of the Russian leader or of President Donald

Trump.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Ambassador Bill Burns, thank you very much for joining us.

WILLIAM BURNS, Former U.S. Deputy Secretary of State: It's great to be with you.

JUDY WOODRUFF: The book, "The Back Channel: A Memoir of American Diplomacy and the Case

for Its Renewal," you are cheerleading for reconstructing something that you say in the

book is largely invisible.

You say it's an unheroic, quiet endeavor unfolding in back channels, out of sight and out of

mind.

If that's the case, in this noisy 24/7 world we live in, why do we need to restore it?

What happened to it?

WILLIAM BURNS: Well, I think there has been a drift, to be honest, that predates the current

administration, going back through the post-Cold War period.

After the end of the Cold War, when we were the singular dominant player on the landscape,

I think we became a little complacent.

Diplomacy didn't seem quite as important.

Then came 9/11, a huge shock to our system, and an even greater emphasis on the military

and relatively less emphasis on diplomacy.

What I would argue President Trump has done is taken that drift and accelerated it and

made it infinitely worse.

JUDY WOODRUFF: You write about the U.S. having a diminished role in the world.

How much of it was outside events -- events out of our control and how much of it was

what the United States did?

WILLIAM BURNS: It was a combination.

I think, in the natural order of things, China's rise -- it's hard to predict the pace of that

- - was bound to happen.

I think Russia's resurgence, again, we may not have gotten a sense of the pace of it

right, but it was coming, but also there were unforced errors on our part.

I mean, I think the most obvious of them was the war in Iraq in 2003, where we kind of

accelerated that shifting landscape a little bit.

JUDY WOODRUFF: You did mention President Trump a minute ago, and people talk about how he

is somebody with strong opinions.

He makes decisions very quickly.

And people compare him with President Obama, who was seen as cerebral, deliberative, sometimes

too deliberative.

WILLIAM BURNS: I have very high regard for President Obama, and I thought his very careful

and thoughtful style made a lot of sense and continues to make a lot of sense for the United

States.

I think, you know what, you see in President Trump is a tendency to see diplomacy more

as an exercise in narcissism than the kind of hard work and reliance on institutions

that his predecessors, in different ways, I think, all appreciated as well.

President Trump was asked a little more than a year ago about the number of senior vacancies

in the State Department, and he said: I don't really care about that.

I'm the only one who matters.

And I don't -- I think that's a very ineffective way of looking at the way in which the United

States promotes its interests in the world.

JUDY WOODRUFF: You write a lot in the book about Vladimir Putin, about Russia and about

Vladimir Putin.

I think you spent more time with him than any other American diplomat.

You first started dealing with him, what, in the early 2000s?

WILLIAM BURNS: Yes, I was ambassador from 2005 to 2008, and so spent a lot of time.

JUDY WOODRUFF: And you write, among other things, that you think you saw the seeds of

what would go on to happen in 2016, when the Russians interfered in our presidential election.

What did you see early on in him?

WILLIAM BURNS: Well, I will never forget my first meeting as ambassador with President

Putin, when I went to present my credentials, which any new ambassador does.

And the Kremlin, which is where this ceremony happened, is built on a scale that's meant

to intimidate foreigners, and particularly new ambassadors.

And before I could even hand over my letter of credentials or get a word out of my mouth,

President Putin said: "You Americans need to listen more.

You can't have everything your own way anymore.

We can have effective relations, but not just on your terms."

That was vintage Putin, in my experience, unsubtle, a chip on his shoulder, and defiantly

charmless.

JUDY WOODRUFF: What do we know about him that should inform how we think about Russia going

forward?

WILLIAM BURNS: Well, he has a sense of grievance.

I mean, his world view is that, at Russia's moment of historical weakness in the 1990s,

the West, and in particular the United States, took advantage of that weakness.

Now, that's his view.

I think it's largely unjustified in terms of how history actually unfolded.

But he is an apostle of payback, and so he was determined, as he was surfing on $130-a-barrel

oil and Russia's economy returned, to push back.

And he did that at a number of different instances.

But I think he was also convinced -- he drew a straight line from the Color Revolutions

in Georgia and Ukraine in 2003 and 2004 to what he saw to be our own efforts to undermine

him and undermine his regime.

And so, when he saw an opportunity in 2016 to sow chaos amidst the polarization of our

own political system, he took advantage of it.

JUDY WOODRUFF: The Middle East.

Still questions persist today about what happened during the Obama administration, when President

Obama made the decision not to go into Syria when the Syrian leader had used chemical weapons.

And people are asking today still, was there sufficient awareness then of what a destabilized

Syria would mean?

WILLIAM BURNS: I think honest answer is, none of us anticipated the scale of the human catastrophe

or the geopolitical tragedy that the civil war in Syria would become.

So, the honest answer is, it was, I think, a failure of imagination on all of our parts.

I did believe personally at the time, and I continue to believe, that we should have

responded militarily when Assad, after we had set a red line, used chemical weapons

and killed more than 1,000 innocent Syrian civilians.

I think that was one place where we could have avoided any slippery slope, because Assad

had crossed such a very clear international red line with regard to the use of chemical

weapons.

JUDY WOODRUFF: You have referred several times to President Trump.

You talk about his erratic leadership leaving America and its diplomats dangerously adrift.

Can that be fixed?

WILLIAM BURNS: I think we're digging a deep hole for ourselves today.

And my concern is, when we stop digging, which we eventually will -- the sooner, the better,

I hope -- we're going to climb back to the surface and look out over a landscape that

I think in some ways will have hardened against our interests and our values, because adversaries

are taking advantage, rivals are taking advantage.

I think many of our closest allies are beginning to lose faith and beginning to hedge a little

bit.

And the institutions that we worked so hard to shape, in our own enlightened self-interest

over the last seven decades, are beginning to teeter.

So what I worry about is the long-term corrosive damage we're doing to ourselves.

You know, if we understand the significance of diplomacy, we can certainly repair a lot

of the damage, but I just worry that some of that corrosion is going to endure for a

long time.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Ambassador Bill Burns.

The book is "The Back Channel: A Memoir of American Diplomacy and the Case for Its Renewal,"

Thank you.

WILLIAM BURNS: Thank you so much.