A Conversation with the Counselor: Derek Chollet on Navigating the World

War on the Rocks

News, Politics

4.6 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 13 April 2022

⏱️ 43 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

A veteran State Department official and scholar, Derek Chollet is serving as counselor to the secretary of state. He sat down with Ryan to discuss the various challenges facing U.S. foreign policy. Don't miss their wide-ranging conversation on the diplomacy that preceded the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the diplomacy that continues to keep Western allies on the same page, the withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the difficulties of balancing an increasingly competitive strategy in the Indo-Pacific while dealing with a brutal war in Europe.

Transcript

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0:00.0	You are listening to the War on the Rocks podcast on Strategy, Defense and Foreign Affairs.
0:14.2	My name is Ryan Evans.
0:15.6	In this episode I sat down with my old friend Derek Shalay, the counselor to the Secretary of State.
0:20.9	We had a wide-ranging conversation starting with what the counselor actually does, going from Russia, Ukraine, of course, to Afghanistan to other major issues facing the United States today.
0:37.8	What does the counselor to the Secretary of State does? It's probably the most nonspecific title in government, but it seems like it's a
0:41.2	pretty cool job. Well, my joke is my family thinks it's an entirely made up title.
0:46.2	And I can see it does sound that way, but the job has existed for over a century actually, and I'm quite humbled by some of the people who've held this job in the past from
0:58.4	George Cannon to Walt Rostow to Bob Zellick and Wendy Sherman. Our current deputy secretary was the
1:03.8	counselor to Secretary Albright. So it's it's I'd say more than half my time is
1:08.9	spent with Secretary Blinken helping him navigate his life as Secretary and helping him work through his priorities,
1:17.0	blocking and tackling on policy issues.
1:20.0	But I'm also have the good fortune of not administering a large bureaucracy in this job.
1:27.0	Most of my colleagues here all have a lot of people who report to them.
1:31.0	I have a lean and mean team that reports to me and that enables me to have the bandwidth to take on projects, issues that either by default or demand come my way.
1:42.4	And so in the last year, I've done everything
1:47.0	from Russia, Ukraine to Myanmar to Middle East to Southeast Asia.
1:56.5	So I kind of have a wide variety of things
1:58.6	that I work on.
2:00.5	And you know, I see myself as kind of my job is in some ways to help everyone else's jobs be a little easier.
2:07.0	And so, if I'm thinking of analogies, this might date me, but a little bit of the wolf from Pulp Fiction you know here to here to fix problems
2:16.0	that's the first but maybe a little bit of Ed McMahon that's going to date me big time
2:21.1	kind of a side man for Johnny Carson anyway so
	...

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