_The following transcript has been lightly edited for clarity._
**Interviewer:** Ambassador Bodine, thank you for joining us today. Over the course of your 30 plus year career in the foreign service, you worked extensively on Arabian Peninsula and Persian Gulf affairs. In that time and since, the US military, particularly the Navy, has been deeply involved with partners in the region, working to prevent piracy and protect vital economic shipping lanes. But you had been working behind the scenes. What do people need to know about how diplomacy lays the groundwork for that military presence?
**Amb. Bodine:** Thank you for the invitation to be with you today. I appreciate this opportunity to talk about how diplomacy makes military security possible. My first engagement with this was with the tanker regime in the late 1980s. And if you go on Wikipedia, the tanker regime lasted for 12 months from 1987 to ‘88. My involvement with the tanker regime and diplomacies in the State Departments was for two years. Wikipedia has the Kuwaitis having a problem and the Navy showing up. It took a year to get from the Kuwaitis having a problem, international shipping in the Gulf having a problem, and the Navy and Operation Ernest Will actually being able to launch. And that interim time was spent laying the policy groundwork, the political groundwork, the diplomatic groundwork to make it possible.
The first issue that we had was we knew that the Iranians were interfering with commercial shipping in the Gulf. We had a policy, the Carter Doctrine, which was territorial integrity, sovereignty, and the free flow of oil. And the Navy has had a traditional mission of keeping sea lanes open for international commerce. So, they were all coming together in the late 80s. But we had never done an actual commercial shipping protection regime. What do we need to do with the Kuwaitis? What do we need to do with the Gulf States? What allies do we need to bring in? Who else has capabilities that we may not have? And that took a full year to realize.
One of the issues that we had to face is the Gulf States, particularly then, were still somewhat sensitive. They had just gotten their independence from being British protectorates, and so protection was a bit of an issue. The Kuwaitis, for example, did not want their flagged vessels to be protected by the U.S. Navy. So, they wanted to re-flag them as American flag vessels. That was a bureaucratic nightmare, but we did it. We had to get the Gulf States involved, and then we had to get allies involved. And so there was a full year to make Operation Ernest Will even possible.
**Interviewer:** And over the course of that year, what did the day-to-day job of being a diplomat look like? And what was your role in putting this coalition together?
We were all deeply engaged. And for those of you who follow the small print, you know, a lot of principals meetings and deputies meetings, so there was a lot of the preparation on that. But it was the role of the diplomat, not just me, but my colleagues, working with our friends in Abu Dhabi and Muskat and Doha, Kuwait, Riyadh, London, Paris, Rome, to, you know, what is the issue? How should we address it? What will it take to address it? What will we do? What can’t we do? What do you want? And I should have added Tokyo to that list of partners. So, this was an all-hands State Department (at least the Middle East Bureau) engagement, certainly working with our naval colleagues. But it was our job to deal with all of these governments to get them on board as part of this coalition
**Interviewer:** What would you say has been the lasting impact of this work and what are some of the lessons for some of the issues being experienced in the region today?
**Amb. Bodine:** Well, a lot. As I said, this was our first real engagement. We had the Carter Doctrine in 1980, but this didn’t start till 1988. So, we were starting from a cold start on what did our presence in the Gulf look like. We had never put together this kind of a coalition. The fact that it was successful, and it was a very difficult time—we were engaged with the IRGC—but the fact that we were able to do it, that we took the words of the Carter Doctrine, and we actually put U.S. diplomacy, U.S. military behind it, meant that two years later, when the Iraqis invaded Kuwait, we had the template to put together a coalition of states to defend Kuwait, territorial integrity, sovereignty, free flow of oil. So, it really helped make Desert Shield/Desert Storm happen. And we’ve used the template several times since then. Most notably, the antipiracy effort off the coast in the late second half of the of the Georgia W. Bush administration, and that had a much larger group of states involved. That one was so successful that we had the Russians, the Chinese, and the Indians all as part of the antipiracy, including more Gulf States involved and our NATO allies. And then we have it again with the anti-Houthi coalition in the Red Sea at this point. So, this idea of a diplomatic effort in order to set the stage for a military response to threats to commercial shipping is now something that we’re getting pretty good at. Unfortunately, we have to keep doing it.
**Interviewer:** How has this work advanced US interests and benefited the lives of Americans back home?
**Amb. Bodine:** Fundamentally and directly. The three major pillars of U.S. foreign policy are national security, economic prosperity, and values. Our ability to work with our military partners, our regional partners, international partners, to make sure that sea lanes stay open and that they’re safe and secure allows globalized trade to happen. And that directly affects everything that we sell abroad, everything we buy from abroad, and, as I said, the whole globalized economy. So, this is a direct, immediate return for the American taxpayer to have diplomats, as well as the military, making sure that our economy can continue to operate.