Ambassador Daniel Fried on NATO Enlargement, the Free World Strategy, and the X Factor in Diplomacy

Daniel Fried's diplomatic career took shape against the central drama of the late twentieth century: the Cold War, the Soviet empire, and the unresolved question of whether Eastern Europe would ever escape the settlement imposed at Yalta. When the communist order collapsed, he was inside the machinery of American foreign policy as it struggled to make sense of what had happened and what obligations followed. The transformation he witnessed - the democratic breakthrough in Poland, the dissolution of Soviet authority across the region - was one of the genuine discontinuities of modern history, and what came after was less a triumph (Fried makes this clear) than a prolonged argument: over NATO enlargement, over what the West owed to nations that had liberated themselves, over how far American power and American principles could travel together.
In this conversation, Fried reflects on what it meant to conduct diplomacy in a Europe being remade in real time, how the debate over NATO enlargement looked from inside government, and why conclusions that now seem self-evident were anything but settled in the early 1990s. He also speaks with unusual candor about the craft of diplomatic advancement - a discipline shaped by judgment, timing, and what he calls the "X factor": the capacity to break with convention precisely when convention proves inadequate to the moment.
The conversation closes on strategy, alliance politics, and the long American argument about the country's role in the world. Fried's contention is that the transatlantic alliance was a rigorous framework in which American interests and American values moved in the same direction - worth defending on those terms rather than any softer ones.

- Ambassador Daniel Fried is a veteran American diplomat, former assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, and former U.S. ambassador to Poland.

Europe, the Cold War, and the Problem of Order
Ben Wolf: Ambassador Fried, thank you for joining me. Let's start with Europe. When did Europe stop being for you just a regional assignment and become the central strategic problem of your career? Was there a moment early on when you realized this region was not just about diplomacy, but about the future of the political order itself?

Ambassador Daniel Fried: The question doesn’t quite apply to me, because I entered the Foreign Service wanting to work on Soviet affairs, East European affairs, and the Cold War generally. So I didn’t join the Foreign Service and then discover Europe. I was interested in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, as we called it then, and joined the Foreign Service so I could be active in those areas.
So I was always committed.

BW: On that same note, you worked on Europe in the aftermath of the Soviet collapse, when the dominant mood in the West was often described as triumphal. What did you see earlier than others about how unfinished that moment really was?

DF: Well, I was working as the Polish desk officer, not a high-level position at all, sort of a lower-middle-level position, from 1987 to 1989. In other words, I was working on Polish affairs in 1989, through the elections and the Round Table negotiations, by which Solidarity out-negotiated the communists, and then the famous June 4 election, where they won.
So that was sort of the best thing ever, to watch the Solidarity movement, which was both a trade union and a national pro-democracy movement, succeed. It was just wonderful.
I then went to Poland for three years to work in the embassy, came back, and joined Bill Clinton’s NSC staff during his first term, where we started working on the shape of Europe after the Cold War.
I wouldn’t call it triumphalism. That is too dismissive. The Clinton people and the George H. W. Bush people before them were well aware of all of the difficulties. Yes, they were aware that democracy had succeeded and the Soviet Union had collapsed, but they were thinking about how to shape the future in a way that would be stable, leave a place for post-Soviet Russia, and not exclude the newly self-liberated Central and East Europeans.
So people working in government were not triumphalists walking around strutting. They were thinking about the problems and were well aware of them. In fact, in the early 1990s, even as late as 1993, it was not clear to most people that the transformations in Central and Eastern Europe would generally be successful. I was optimistic, but I had been in Poland.
Most people thought it was still an open question whether the Poles would succeed. We now know that they succeeded in spectacular fashion. I was confident that they would, but that was not the general view.
So your use of the label triumphalism, I think, is misplaced. I know where it comes from. It’s reasonable of you to start thinking in those terms, but that is a broad-brush attribution that doesn’t actually apply to the way things were on the ground.

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NATO Enlargement and the Post-Cold War Settlement
BW: I appreciate that clarification. I think your perspective really is valuable here in considering post-Soviet Europe. You mentioned that when you were with Bill Clinton’s team, you were helping to shape what post-Cold War Europe would look like. What does that mean practically? Was that talks with other nations? Meetings? Drafting memos? What was the concrete work that went into that shaping?

DF: Well, the biggest issue that I worked on was the question of NATO enlargement, which was really about whether or not we would extend the line of the Cold War into the post-Cold War era and leave the Poles, the Czechs, and the Romanians in a kind of gray zone, or whether we would enlarge, whether we would open the doors of the institutions of the West to the countries that wanted to be part of the West and had earned that by virtue of their own effort to overthrow communism and liberate themselves.
So that was the issue, and it was hotly debated within the Clinton administration. In fact, about 90 percent or more of the U.S. foreign policy establishment was against NATO enlargement as late as 1993.
So you ask what the work consisted of concretely. Yes, it was memos and meetings, but it was really making the argument that NATO enlargement was a better answer to post-Cold War Europe than leaving in place the line of the Cold War as a kind of mental line beyond which the institutions of the West could not cross.
This was a big debate, because most U.S. government experts didn’t think much about Central and Eastern Europe, and when they did, they considered it a kind of gray zone unto itself. “Non-Soviet Warsaw Pact” was the uncharitable term of art.
So even though it was the Poles mainly, but also the Czechs, Slovaks, Hungarians, and Romanians in the streets, who overthrew communism, there was little understanding that these countries had the capacity to enter the European mainstream. There was a great deal of dismissal of their capacity to build free-market democracies on the ruins of communism.
Now, to be fair, this was an enormously difficult task, one that had never been attempted, not even contemplated. No one in 1988 thought that communism would fall, so in 1989 there was no Western expertise on what would come next.
So the Poles and the others were making it up as they went along, with some U.S. advice. But basically, they were the ones doing it. U.S. advice was not critical. It was second-order.
And I was there on the ground in Poland when they were making these decisions. So the work in the early years after 1989 was understanding what was happening in these countries and helping them to the degree we could. There were things the Bush administration did that were solid. Then the Clinton administration had to open NATO’s doors or decide on the alternative. After much debate, furious debate inside government, a debate in which the Poles and Czechs themselves participated rather skillfully, the Clinton administration made the decision, and NATO’s doors were opened.
It made the decision to enlarge NATO, however, in parallel with the decision to work with Russia, to develop a NATO-Russia relationship which could be, as one of the authors of it said, “an alliance with the alliance.” Such were our hopes in the early days.
So this was a dual-track policy that we settled on by, oh, I don’t know, 1994 or 1995, and then we implemented it.


What People Get Wrong About the Foreign Service
BW: A lot of students hear “Foreign Service” and imagine the prestige, the travel, the policy influence. What is the part of diplomatic life that is most misunderstood by people looking at it from the outside?

DF: Well, you talked about the prestige. There’s not a lot of prestige in serving in a combat mission in wartime Iraq, and there were a lot of my colleagues who did that. There’s not a lot of prestige in being a junior officer at a large U.S. embassy. The work can be isolating. It is difficult on families. It is hierarchical, so when you’re a junior officer, you may think you’re not much and that you’re very low on the pecking order.
However, the Foreign Service gave me professional opportunities I could have obtained in no other fashion. How else would I have been able to live in Poland during the critical years of the early post-communist transformation? There were other people there, students, some volunteers working with Solidarity, so it wasn’t the only way. But it was a way in which I could be a witness to this transformation and, as an official of the U.S. government, help contribute to its success by letting Washington know what was going on and by making recommendations.
As the Polish desk officer, I had the opportunity to help make some of the early recommendations for the George H. W. Bush administration that helped the Poles in a critical fashion. I was able to do that because nobody expected anything would happen in Poland in 1989, and when it did, the young Condoleezza Rice sort of brought me into the policy picture because I made the call.


The “X Factor” and Knowing When to Break the Rules
BW: You mention Condoleezza Rice bringing you into that picture. I’m always curious about how one climbs the ranks in the federal government. Is it about who you know? Is it about working hard and getting lucky? Is there some skill to it that people should know when they are trying to reach the levels that you have?

DF: Working hard and getting lucky is part of it. Knowing the right people is part of it. And also, there's a kind of X factor.
The Foreign Service will teach you the rules, and if you’re good and follow the rules and are skillful and diligent, you will get to a good rank. The system will reward quality fairly, to that degree. But there’s an X factor, which is that you have to know when to break the rules.
I’ll give you an example. I’ve referred to my position in 1989 as somebody who saw the changes coming in Poland. I was practically the only one who did, outside of the U.S. embassy in Warsaw, that absolutely nailed it. Very few others could listen seriously to what was happening there.
Condoleezza Rice was willing to listen to me when I said, “You better watch this space. Communism could be coming apart at the seams. Solidarity could win these negotiations.” She had the intellectual self-confidence to actually take this seriously, and she knew something about Central and Eastern Europe because she had studied with Madeleine Albright’s father, Josef Korbel, at the University of Denver. He had taught her about Czechoslovakia. She knew something about it, so she had a feel for it.
So in March 1989, she called me up and said, “Look, Dan, it’s possible that Solidarity is going to succeed in these negotiations with the communists, and if they do, President Bush wants to welcome this. Can you draft a speech?”
Well, desk officers at the State Department are not supposed to draft presidential speeches. She either didn’t know or didn’t care. Anyway, she asked me to draft a speech. So I drafted a speech and sent it upstairs through the system. I explained the background and noted that Director Rice of the National Security Council staff had requested this draft for the State Department to convey to her.
It was rejected within about a half an hour of my sending it up, with a derisive note that read, “Dan, you’re giddy,” which was a patronizing putdown.
I got this and realized there was no way I would get it through the system, so I called up Condi Rice. This was before email. I said, “No way. The only way you can get this draft is if it appears by magic on your desk. In other words, I’ll walk it over to you in a plain brown envelope.”
She said, “Yeah, okay. Do it.”
So I hand her the speech. A couple of weeks later, Bush gives a speech in Hamtramck, Michigan, welcoming the Round Table talks, and it was the speech I drafted.
Now, I had engaged in an act of insubordination. The State Department had said no, and I did it anyway. The only excuse for the insubordination I showed is when you win. I had just drafted a presidential speech. What were they going to do, fire me? No.
And what I said to Condi Rice, handing her that speech, was, “Condi, from this moment forward, I work for you.” And she started giving me assignments. Like, “If you had $100 million for Poland, what would you do with it?” That became the Enterprise Fund, which was one of our more successful initiatives. Congress funded it at $240 million.
Another Foreign Service officer and I drafted the concept paper for the Enterprise Fund in an afternoon and sent it to Rice and her people. We didn’t ask permission.
So this is a long way of illustrating the answer to your question: sometimes you have to break the rules. And then, when you do it, you better win. Notice, I didn’t say when you’re right. Being right is not always enough. It helps. But you have to win.
The Foreign Service will not teach you that. They will teach you all the skills you need to succeed in your career, and these are valuable skills. Pay attention to the training. But there’s always something different.
My Foreign Service colleagues who succeeded often had various versions of the X factor. Think of Toria Nuland. She’s famous for her, let us say, acerbic wit. Look what she’s done. Look at her career. It’s brilliant. Or Nick Burns. All of these people had an X factor, a willingness to push.
They were also people who were not principally interested in their own careers. I mean, you’ve got to be ambitious. I’m not saying that they were saints or that I was. But it wasn’t about getting ahead. At some point, you cannot game the system to plot your advance like it’s some office-politics exercise. You can try, but I remember people who did that, and I don’t remember what happened to them.
All I know is that I didn’t think in terms of my own career advancement. I did very much think in terms of the work. That sounds naive, but it worked out pretty well for me.


Views, Strategy, and the Debate Over the Transatlantic Alliance
BW: Looking toward today, when you look at the modern debate over Russia and European security, what is the most important thing that younger analysts, who perhaps don’t have your historical expertise, still get wrong because they confuse having a view with having a strategy?

DF: Right now, there’s a larger debate within the Trump administration and within the United States about the value of the transatlantic alliance, or the free world strategy of the United States that we’ve had since Pearl Harbor. A lot of other ideas, with roots in pre-World War II America, have come back. It’s called isolationism, but I don’t think that’s entirely accurate. It’s more like unilateral transactionalism and an emphasis on power and narrowly defined American interests rather than a free world strategy.
Well, don’t complain about the debate. Think about the arguments for where values and interests overlap and how best to advance them. Your generation will have to fight this all over again.
I am a believer in the free world grand strategy of the United States. I think it works. It’s got the right-wing variant, which is Ronald Reagan. It’s got the Franklin Roosevelt variant. But they’re basically consistent in that they hold that American values and American interests advance together, which is not, as some critics say, naïveté or charity or do-gooderism.
The free world strategy is based on the assumption that a values-based foreign policy is really good for the United States, that we will come out on top if it is an open world rather than a world divided into competing empires.
Now, Woodrow Wilson had many problems. He was a bigot, for one thing, a racist. But he also understood that American values were a pretty good way to construct American foreign policy, and he wasn’t doing it because he was a nice guy. He did it because he knew that American interests would advance faster if we had a values-based foreign policy.
It’s not naive. It plays to America’s strength, or what used to be America’s strength, which was what we used to call Yankee ingenuity. It meant that we had entrepreneurial excellence and exuberance, massive advantages from a continental country loaded with natural resources, as well as skilled people, as well as industry and power coming out of the Civil War. That launched us to world leadership by the turn of the twentieth century.
And we advanced values because it was better for us. It turned out pretty well after 1945. People who say it didn’t really work out well should compare Pax Americana to the alternatives, which are nineteenth-century European imperialism or, let’s say, Nazism and communism. We look pretty good, which is why the Europeans were so happy to work with us.
Never, as far as I can remember, did a leading world power attract the kind of voluntary support that we did. Voluntary, because our system worked best when it worked for everybody. Which sounds obvious, but that’s not the way previous systems worked. That’s not the way Putin would have the Russian empire work, not at all. Pax Americana worked for everybody, which is why a lot of people signed up for it and why people like the Poles after 1981 wanted to be part of it, because it was a good deal.
But don’t take my word for it. Deng Xiaoping said once, I think thirty years ago, “I don’t know much about foreign affairs, but I have noticed that America’s friends tend to be really rich countries.” A rather sly, clever statement.
Who are America’s friends in Asia? South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Singapore. Winners, every one. And don’t you want to be part of that system? Deng Xiaoping did. Things have gotten sideways with China since. But my point is that the American grand strategy was not based on nothing.
My advice to entering Foreign Service officers is that they think about it. What is it that you’re trying to achieve? Now look, as a junior officer, you’re not going to be doing grand strategy. I promise you. No way. That won’t come for years and years. I get that. But it helps to start thinking about this stuff early.
When I was a junior officer in the Soviet Union, I started trying to put what I was seeing on the ground into a larger framework. It helped organize my thinking. It made my political reporting better. That’s my point. You don’t start thinking strategy because you think you’re going to be Henry Kissinger tomorrow, because you’re not, and you may never be. But thinking about strategy will help inform your work, and it will make it better, and you’re going to enjoy it too.


Trump, NATO, and the Risk of Squandering Alliances
BW: As we begin to wrap up here, I want to ask: when you see headlines about Trump considering pulling out of NATO because the allies don’t want to help in the Strait of Hormuz, or because they’re not adequately financing what’s going on in the Middle East or in Ukraine, where do you see that ending up? And where do you think it should end up?

DF: Well, it should end up with a renewed transatlantic alliance, with greater European capability, more European contributions, and frankly, a greater European voice. On the other side of whatever it is we’re going through can be a renewed transatlantic alliance with a more equal contribution between the U.S. and Europe. That’s the constructive side of Trump’s argument, and he’s right.
The problem is that, having been right and having won the argument, which he did last year at the NATO summit, where allies agreed to pony up the money, his trouble is taking yes for an answer.
The skepticism about NATO has its roots in pre-World War II American foreign policy thinking, but I’ve got little sympathy for it. If you want to build a coalition to help with Iran, then build a coalition. Don’t go off on your own and then tell everybody, whistle, and expect everybody to fall in line.
Look, you can think what you want about the Iraq War, and I’m not trying to defend it. But when the Bush administration wanted to build a coalition, it went out and did it. For all of the problems, we ended up in a better place because we had a coalition than we would have without one.
So it won’t do just to snarl at people. Moreover, if you look more closely at the Trump administration, the arguments tend to weaken. So Trump wants European countries to help out with Gulf security. Right, got it. What’s the one European country that is doing the most right now? Why, arguably, Ukraine, which has offered its drone technology that nobody else in the world can offer, nobody else in the free world anyway.
Have we thanked them? Has Trump claimed that this is his success because it proves that a U.S. investment in Ukraine was right? No. Instead, we’ve brushed it aside.
The French and British offered something rather vague to help with the Strait of Hormuz. But publicly, I know what I would have done with that: grabbed it, run with it, turned it into something. Don’t disparage it. If you dump on it, you won’t get anything at all. But if you try to pump it up, maybe you’ll have something you didn’t have before. That’s diplomacy: make something out of not much.
And it won’t do just to snarl.
Since we were talking a lot about Poland, as I was listening to Trump and Pete Hegseth complaining about allies, I thought of repurposing the opening lines of an epic Polish poem: “Alliances, you are like good health. We miss you only when you’re gone.”
Well, right. Try not to screw it up, is my advice.


Judgment, Compromise, and the Crooked Timber of Humanity
BW: One of the things Pathway is ultimately about is how people build judgment over time. After decades in public service, what do you believe now about diplomacy that your younger self, even a very smart younger self, would have resisted hearing?

DF: Don’t be too pure. This is a game of compromise, half measures, taking what you can get. And understand that diplomacy, like human beings, is made of the crooked timber of humanity, to borrow from Immanuel Kant. No straight thing can ever be built.
But that doesn’t mean nothing can be built.