Condoleezza Rice on the Future of American Power in the World

>> Condoleezza Rice: There are some pluses from the point of view of the United States and american power in this period. If you look at Europe, Europe is going to be transformed by this war. Russia will probably be isolated for a very long time to come. And that's sad because Russians, at least since the time of Gorbachev, had begun to break out of their isolation.

They traveled. You had them in classes, they worked in foreign companies. And now he's threatening to make it just a big North Korea. Russia has lost 1 million people have fled the country and it's sad because this is a really terrific people. They are creative, they are innovative, they're really smart, and the world would be better out with them than without them.

And so one question is, can you separate Russians from putinism and save that? But the rest of Europe, Europe has responded in a way that I think most people find even surprising. The energy landscape will change dramatically in Europe because the Germans, who were told from the time of Ronald Reagan not to become dependent on Russian natural gas.

Now recognize it was a bad idea to be dependent on russian natural gas. You will see them go to other sources. It'd be interesting to see to the degree that hydrocarbons are a part of our future for a long time to come, and they are. We'd all like to see a carbon transition from, to a less carbon intensive world.

But where will those hydrocarbons come from? Will it be through investment in the north American platform? In the United States, there are fields in places like Mozambique and Algeria that we're not being able to get investment, they will. Russia, on the other hand, because they no longer will have access to the technology from the Exxons and the BP's of the world.

Those fields in places like Sakhalin, which are very hard to get to and very old russian production will decline. On the other hand, who would have thought it? Finland and Sweden. I used to worry about the Arctic. Well, we're kind of there at this point. And so the expansion of NATO, as a friend of mine put it, Vladimir Putin managed to end german pacifism and swedish neutrality in a matter of months.

And so from the point of view of american alliances, they couldn't be stronger. True also in the Asia Pacific, in response to China, the Indo Pacific whether it's Australia or AUKUS, with Great Britain or Japan, which has begun to reassess its role in the world, to India. Which is a complicated place, but a place where we have had a, I think I steady development of better relations over time.

The Indians just as an example, they have trouble buying our military equipment because we have all of these end user requirements, but they're buying from Australia and from Great Britain and from Israel. My view is, that's okay. Team blue is good. And so relations with India are, I think, solidifying and improving.

And then when you look at the rest of the world, the so called global south, as people call it, I think the real issue for the United States there is going to be to be careful not to have loyalty tests with people. This is even true with India.

We Americans have a kind of force or against us mentality sometimes. When actually, if you will, let countries go with their natural, their natural interest, particularly in the case of, in India, for instance, they'll come your way. Because does India really want to continue to be reliant on that russian junk called military equipment?

Do they really want to be reliant on the Russians? When the Russians are in relationship with the Chinese, who's India's biggest problem? And so I hear a lot about the global south and whose side are they on? It would be good if we didn't repeat the mistake that led to the non aligned movement of insisting that you have to be in one camp or the other.

The other final thing that I'll say and then we'll get to questions is, you know, we've been through tougher times before, actually. And we have managed to get through them because the United States has a lot of strengths. I think the biggest issue we face right now is probably ourselves.

So I'm asked to talk about global hotspots, but any global hotspot can be dealt with if the United States has the confidence to deal with them. And right now we're not too confident a country, and it comes, it thinks, from kind of internal pressures, and we can talk more about those.

But getting to the place that Americans, again, are focused on what unites them, focused again on that sense that. It doesn't matter where you came from, matters where you're going, everybody can be a part of the dream. You will have a stronger impulse among american leaders to want to lead.

Because when I hear the american people actually don't want to be involved in international politics, there are two things Americans carry in their heads simultaneously, and they're somewhat contradictory. One is, can't somebody else do this finally, we've been at this for a long time. Why can't somebody else step up?

The other is, we can't live in a world where one country just tries to extinguish its smaller neighbor, or where syrian children are choking on gas. And the president who decides to play to the impulse that says, well, yes, it would be nice if somebody else did it.

There isn't anybody else to do it. It will have to be us. I think that's what I'm looking for when I listen to the upcoming debates. Okay with that? Let's go. Yeah. We've got plenty of questions. Good. Okay, we're gonna go one, two right here, and then I'll come to this section.

Yeah.

>> Audience 1: Right thank you so much for your talk, Secretary Rice. We really appreciate having you here. I don't know if you remember me, but I was here for your fireside chat last year with Betsy DeVos.

>> Condoleezza Rice: Okay, all right.

>> Audience 1: I think I had a question about charter schools, but that's for another day.

>> Condoleezza Rice: Yeah.

>> Audience 1: My main question is concerning the influence of social media on the culture of the United States. I know that when TikTok, and especially the pandemic came about, many Americans were concerned about the national security risk that came with the usage of TikTok. I wanted to know your perspective on TikTok's, I suppose, security threats on the national level, as well as its influence on the culture of Americans and their, I suppose, impotence on the national stake.

>> Condoleezza Rice: Yeah, well, look, I'm really glad that there wasn't social media when I was secretary. Because it makes life a lot harder, and I think it has. Look, it has a lot of value, and let's be real, Mark Zuckerberg just wanted to talk to his friends at Harvard.

He didn't think he was gonna be part of the infrastructure of the country. And so I think social media is beginning to adjust to its role in the world, and we have to help it adjust when it comes to. I'm gonna come back to one other point, by the way, but TikTok, I'm probably, as a national security person, I'm probably less worried about TikTok than most people.

I don't. Yeah, does it dull people's brains? Yes, but if it weren't TikTok, something else would be dulling people's brains. And so our answer has to be, how do we get those little things out of our kids hands so that they're not getting their brains dulled? Not is it TikTok that's doing it.

I don't think the Chinese are sending subliminal messages through TikTok. I will say on the social media piece one thing that worries me a lot is, when we start talking about disinformation, and we accept things as fact way too quickly. And sometimes fact becomes just, you don't agree with me, so you aren't following the facts.

And so I've been encouraging people to be a lot more careful about what they declare a fact and go ahead and debate people who may disagree. Right here, yes.

>> Audience 2: Hi, I'm Mevina from the University of Hong Kong, and I'm actually from Hong Kong. So when you talk about China, Taiwan and Hong Kong, I feel that in person.

The question I want to ask you, because your main theme of the book, democracy stories from the long world to freedom, is about democracy. From the title, I wonder, do you think democracy is the right question to ask about Russia?

>> Condoleezza Rice: Yes, well, I do think democracy is the right question to ask about any country and there are a couple of reasons for it.

One is the moral issue. And people ought to have a say in how their lives are going to develop. And I believe that the values of saying what you think, worshiping as you please, being free of the knock of the secret police at night and being able to choose those who are going to govern you, is universal.

So, that's the moral case. When it comes to the practical case. I just said it about authoritarians. Democracies don't do what Vladimir Putin just did. Democracies don't do what Xi Jinping is doing inside. Democracies make mistakes. But authoritarians when you have one person, who can decide the fate of his people, that's when you start to get the kinds of impacts that you have.

Democracies don't employ child soldiers because it would be all over the free press. Democracies don't threaten their neighbors because it would be all over the free press. And so I think there's both the practical case for democracy and a moral case for democracy. And usually the people who say, well, those people don't want democracy, are the people who are lucky enough to live in one and then can talk about those people.

So, I don't think there is any people on the face of the earth and I'm being very honest with you. I don't think there's any people on the face of the earth who would rather live in tyranny. And when you see what's happening in Chinese autocracy at this point, which is the one thing that China was delivering, which was prosperity but they were, of course, delivering without rule of law.

And so now, prosperity is under or undermined. I think we would be better off with democracies.

>> Audience 3: Thank you for your speech. I do have two questions. So I'm Ray from Taiwan, an incoming student at Georgetown. So my first question, my two questions actually not about Taiwan. I am sure someone else may ask that.

So you might be aware of there's a lot of signs on a shift on US foreign policy. Part of that, it's a shift from the Middle East to potentially Asia. And this given a time that Russia have their decline influence due to the war. So, I wonder such scenario is leave a strategic void for China.

So, how United States foreign policy should deal with such situation and how to manage the trade off in foreign policy?

>> Condoleezza Rice: Thank you. I'm going to just take one question, okay. So others can ask. So, I never liked the idea of the pivot to Asia away from other parts of the world.

The United States is a global power, and we actually have to be able to exercise our interests and our values globally. And so, when you think about the Middle East, I understand that there was concern about two wars and the lack of democracy there and the Palestinians and Israelis, and I understand all that.

But there's actually a new opportunity in the Middle East right now, thanks to the Abraham accords. I think that the war that the Gulf Arabs are in the process of actually ending the state of war with Israel. And they're doing it not because they've suddenly awakened and loved the Jewish democratic state of Israel.

They're doing it because, they recognize that they have to diversify their economies. The 800 pound gorilla in the Middle East in terms of technology is Israel. And the number of business, military, even intelligence relationships that are growing up in the Middle East that web that's growing up. I think that's something that we ought to be actively supporting with our diplomacy.

I've read that maybe the Biden administration is thinking about something like that. They should be, and that's why the United States you can't pivot to one place. When you're secretary of state, you don't come in and say, okay, I think I'll just do Asia today. That's not how it works.

You might be planning your trip to Asia, and all of a sudden there's a problem in Lebanon, and you've got to be there to deal with it. And so a great global power has to be able to do more than one thing. And when it comes to our military capabilities, we do need to rebuild our military industrial base, which has I think, continued to suffer.

And we do need to make sure that, for instance, that the carrier battle groups are able to deploy. Right now, apparently we can only deploy one, that's a problem. But I don't think this is a matter of choosing. I don't think the United States has that luxury. And you're right, if the United States tries to exercise that luxury, it will open up path for somebody else.

Okay, I'm gonna go all the way to the back. Back there.

>> Audience 4: Yeah, so thank you for your talk. I really appreciated it. I do have one question. Whenever we're talking about the liberal international order that has kind of characterized the post war history of the world. I was just wondering, do you think it's based more on the ideas of the liberal international order or based more on the power, economic, military, even diplomatic, of the United States?

And how can it be maintained? If it's the latter, how can it be maintained as the US's share of GDP kind of continues to decline over time?

>> Condoleezza Rice: Yeah, well, I think you have the idea first and then if you don't have the power the idea doesn't matter.

So, I wrote an article once called a balance of power that favors freedom. And the point was that it's not, people want to distinguish you've studied political science many of you, between realist and some people call it idealism, that's not what they really mean. But between realist and liberalism, or the search for what the internal characteristics should look like.

Now, I think American policy, foreign policy, when it's at its best, has both of those elements. So it has a set of ideas about how it wants the international system to look. And by the way, great powers are not, they don't mind their own business. Great powers want to shape the international system.

And if you're shaping it around a set of ideas, you have to have the power and the assets to do that. Military power, economic power, etc. I know the arguments about declining GDP, but it's still the dominant GDP. It now looks like China will not surpass. And I never worried that even if China did surpass that it was gonna surpass in a way that really mattered.

And when you look at things that we don't measure in GDP, innovation, for instance, Like how many new companies are getting started? You can't measure that. I think the United States is still far and away, the dominant power. What I do worry about is that some of our strategic allies, I worry a lot about Europe in this regard.

So if you look at where most of the innovation and technology is taking place, it's not in Europe. There are kind of two centers, it's the United States and it's China. And I don't think that's a good place to be. So I probably worry more about the stagnation in European economies than about our own.

I mean, we have a lot of problems that we have to resolve, and we shouldn't be borrowing so much money and spending money, we know all of that. But when you look in the kind of aggregate, and when you take a 30,000 foot view, the United States still looks pretty powerful.

I think the liberal order is giving way because of other things, largely because I think internally, a lot of countries haven't been able to deliver, and that's caused this kind of populist revolt and populism, protectionism, nationalism, nativism, kind of all come together. I used to call them the four horsemen of the apocalypse, so they tend to come together.

Yes, right there.

>> Audience 5: Hi, good morning, Secretary Rice, my name is Casey Jane Keast, and it's such an honor to hear from you this morning. Thank you. I was curious, with your expertise on foreign policy, what are your current thoughts on the US giving more aid to Ukraine with the American people currently struggling, border crisis, cities in ruin, et cetera?

>> Condoleezza Rice: Yes, thank you. Yeah, again, I think great powers have to be able to do a lot, and on Ukraine, we are giving a lot of aid, and we should be giving a lot of aid. But the Ukrainians are doing the fighting, and they're doing the fighting to establish an extremely important principle that none of us want to live without, which is that big countries shouldn't extinguish their neighbors.

And if it ever becomes okay, that big powers can extinguish their neighbors, that's not a world that's gonna be very attractive. It's also the case that because of what I talked about earlier, I really would ask any American politician who doesn't wanna aid Ukraine to the point that they can, and how they win or what win means, I think, is a question.

But anybody who wants to make that argument, I would say, how are you gonna feel on the day when Vladimir Putin is on his victory lap with Xi Jinping and you could have stopped it. I wanna see you make that speech to the American people. That will make the speech after the disgraceful withdrawal from Afghanistan look like child's play.

So I don't think that they have a choice, we have a choice. We'll see where this war is. Permafrost will start to set in late October, early November. Hitler and Napoleon learned that you can't fight in that territory. You don't start a war in September in that territory.

So I think it will be a question of where the battle lines are drawn then, if the Ukrainians are able to break through to the Sea of Azov, because what the Russians tried to do was to bisect Ukraine and leave it landlocked. And it's not viable if it's landlocked, it's viable if it can get through to the Black Sea.

And so at that point, I think we'll have a sense. But for now, I think we just have to give the Ukrainians what they need. I think the Biden administration has done that. I would have done it faster. It seems that every time, well, we won't give them long range artillery, well, then we did.

We won't give them missile defense, then we did. We won't give them tanks, then we did. How about you just sort of decide, okay, whatever we're gonna need? Because the idea that you were somehow causing escalation with Putin always seemed not very smart to me. Yeah, let's see.

I'm gonna go to the middle right here. You've got on the, yeah, you.

>> Audience 6: Ma'am, good morning. Monty al Saini, active duty army officer station in Hawaii. So dealing with a lot of issues, of course, in the Indo Pacific, my question is a little bit different. So there's this theory that I've heard in the past that benevolent dictatorship can establish the steps to maybe a genuine democracy.

So Singapore, maybe a little bit further in the past, Turkey with out of Turk. To what extent do you believe in that? And how should the United States interact and integrate with countries in the developing world, especially in light of some of the geopolitics we're facing now?

>> Condoleezza Rice: The problem with benevolent dictators is they don't tend to stay benevolent, and they don't tend to know when to leave office, right?

So if I could absolutely make a bet that, actually probably the closest, in some ways was Singapore, where, and it's a city state, right, it's very small. It's not all that complicated, although ethnically, it's complicated. And I don't think that there's any doubt that the leadership there was extraordinary.

But you don't get that many leaders like that. And so usually what you get with dictators is you get people who rape and wreck the country on their own behalf, and then the country has to recover from them before they start to get decent governance. So as a general principle, I don't think it works.

In very specific circumstances, it may work, and so I wouldn't encourage it because I don't know the circumstances in which it's gonna work and the circumstances in which it's not. I'll give you a very good example of this. Museveni in Uganda. We worked really well with Museveni around Aids, and he was a great partner.

And then he got older and he got more entrenched, and now he's just a dictator. And so I think that's more often the path than, I mean, like I said, Lee Kuan Yews don't come along that often. And so I think we have to be careful in encouraging it.

>> Audience 7: Hello, thank you so much for this talk. And just long story short, I'm from Russia, and thank you for having me here. I really appreciate that you do involve people like me.

>> Condoleezza Rice: Me too, yes.

>> Audience 7: But I study in London, so basically I do some politics there.

And I have a question. I don't want to ask any precise questions. I do have a lot, but here in this extraordinary setting, like a lot of people from different contexts with different expertise and everything, like incredible people, what can we do? How could we act? And what's our mission here?

Like, maybe we should collaborate. Maybe we should come up with something. What can we do?

>> Condoleezza Rice: Yes, thank you. Well, the first thing that you're doing is that you're showing interest and you're getting educated about it. You're learning, you're developing expertise. I think with your generation, and it was probably true with my generation, too, you're in a hurry to do things.

You wanna make a difference, and you will. You'll make a difference because some of you will go and serve in governments at some point in time. Some of you will go and hopefully take up the cause of people in your country who can't take up their own cause.

In fact, that may be the most important thing that people can do, which is to speak for the voiceless, and you do that if you can work in an organization that does that and so forth. But there's nothing wrong with mobilizing other people to do that as well, petitioning governments on behalf of having that happen.

But at some point in time, and I'll speak specifically to Russia. The weight of the innovativeness, and the creativity, and the intelligence of the Russian people is gonna create another opening for a different Russia. It was there a couple of times, and it closed, but that doesn't mean it will close forever.

And so I hope that more people like you will continue to be in our Universities, whether they're in London or here, so that you can prepare for that time. Now, as I said, I was in the Government when the Soviet Union fell. The Baltic states, which had been forcibly incorporated into the Soviet Union in 1941 and had lived in captivity for all those years when conditions changed, they were ready.

They had a strong diaspora. The first presidents of the Baltic states actually had lived in places like Canada and the United States, and other places, but they were ready to go back. And so that being in exile, in a sense, is not a pretty picture, but I just want to give you confidence that I think the time for Russia will come again, and that's why we've got to keep bringing.

I have many Russian students, and I've trained many Russian students, got to keep coming and being a part of the world here so that they are prepared to go back.

>> Audience 8: Good morning, Doctor Rice, thank you for coming. It's a privilege to see you today. Your friend and colleague, Doctor Madeleine Albright, once remarked that foreign policy is much like a game of billiards.

Cuz of many effects recently on uncommon knowledge, which was produced here, of course, with Peter Robinson. You said, and it's a rough quote, I was thinking of it as it was sitting here. Russia has been plagued by 300 years of bad politics, and that has led to their aversion to democracy.

Given that, view, what can we do as Americans as a great power to promote democracy in our interest, and interests of the Russian people in Russia?

>> Condoleezza Rice: Yeah, well, yeah, you're right. I said 300 years of bad politics by political leaders, not by the Russian people, who don't deserve what they've gotten in political leadership.

I continue to think that we have to keep pressure on the regime. There is a story, I think it was yesterday, that the ruble is really now finally sinking. This really, good central banker that they've had, Navalina. He's now turned to blaming her, saying it was loose money that's causing the problem.

And so you have to keep pressure on the Putin regime because ultimately, they can't. He won't be able to fight this war forever. I used to say that time was on his side. I don't think so anymore, both by the turbulence inside his own inner circle and because of what's starting to happen to the economy.

But I think we help Russians or Ukrainians or any people who are, particularly those who are trying to find their way toward democracy, in two ways. One is, as I said, have people, I keep saying we have to have russian students here. We have to have Russian PhDs in our programs.

We have to bring Russian scientists, that people to people piece is important. But the second, I'll make an argument, is more philosophical. The United States of America gets impatient with people who are trying to make the journey to democracy. We got impatient with the Afghans. We get impatient with the Iraqis.

We get impatient with the Russians, well, maybe they just don't have the DNA. And there are no people on the face of the earth who don't have the DNA. There was once a time when Germans were too martial. Well, they seem to have done all right with democracy.

When I used to teach a course back in the 1980s, believe it or not, on civil military relations, I could always teach about some Latin American junta. They don't have hunters anymore, people used to say Latin Americans preferred Cadilles. Africans were supposed to be too tribal. Well, there's some functioning, flourishing democracies in Africa.

And so, and by the way, Asian societies, you know, two Confucian into. Well, a few of them are doing okay, including Taiwan. And so I think you have to, as an American leader, as an American government, recognize that democracy is actually really hard. I'm often asked, why do democracies fail, I think it's more interesting that they succeeded.

Because you're asking human beings to set aside clan, and family and individual and trust these abstractions, institutions, elections, and constitutions and rule of law, and that takes time. And by the way, the United States of America, more than any country on the face of the earth, ought to recognize this.

Because it's taken us a really long time, and we're still trying to live up to the words of 1776 and 1789, and so why we become so impatient with others? I remember doing a, I was testifying before Congress, and we were talking about the Afghan constitution. And the Afghan constitution starts out by saying, we will obey both individual rights and Sharia law, so everybody goes, what does that mean?

And the senator says, well, he says, that's a terrible compromise. How could you ever have agreed to that compromise? And I said, senator, it's not half as bad as the compromise that made my ancestors three fifths of a man, so that you could go ahead and sign a constitution.

So the United States, maybe more than any country in the world, ought to be patient and prepare and help people prepare for the day when that opening comes. Okay, thank you.