Great-Power Rivalry and the War in Ukraine

>> Condoleezza Rice: So the thing about the 2001 situation, though, that I'd like to remind you of, or perhaps share with you, because many of you were not really conscious of that period of time. There still was no great power rivalry attached to this, in fact, I think you would argue that the great powers cooperated.

The Russians, for instance, were the greatest source of war material for the Northern alliance, which was a part of the coalition that overthrew the Taliban in Afghanistan. The international community agreed on UN Security Council resolutions that made it possible to track terrorist financing across international borders. The proliferation Security initiative was created, which allowed countries to stop suspicious cargo at ports or to deny landing rights to aircraft that were thought to be carrying suspicious cargo.

90 countries were a part of the proliferation security initiative, including Russia, China and others. And so this was a period in which the great powers seemed to find common purpose in fighting terrorism. And very important to note that this was especially true with Russia. Vladimir Putin really believed that he had found a new strategic rationale for relations with the United States, and it was around fighting terrorism.

Because President Bush said, in the war on terrorism, if you're either for us or against us, and included all terrorist activity in our concerns, including what was going on in Chechnya. Not the brutality of the Russians in Chechnya, but the fact that there were a lot of Chechens who really had come into bad company.

When we liberated Mazar Sharif in Afghanistan, we found Chechens among al Qaeda. And so there was a kind of coming together of Russian strategic objectives and American strategic objectives. And Russia turned out to be one of our strongest allies, both in terms of intelligence and in terms of law enforcement.

Seems like a long time ago that that was the case, but that was how Vladimir Putin saw it, and that was how it played out. But that world would not last, it would start to break apart for a number of reasons. And the first comes back again to what happened with the two great powers that we believed we had made a kind of permanent strategic alliance with after the end of the cold war.

Let's take Russia first I mentioned that Vladimir Putin believed that he had found a strategic rationale for the US Russian relations, and it was the fight against terrorism. The problem was that the Bush administration saw the fight against terrorism not just as counterterrorism, but needing a positive story as well.

And so the freedom agenda became the other part of the war on terrorism. In other words, you couldn't just be negative and fight terrorist, you had to give people a more hopeful future, and we believe that meant a democratic future as well. It explains why in places like Afghanistan, the United States didn't go there to bring democracy.

It was a security situation, but it was felt that we should leave a decent Afghanistan and that decent Afghanistan would be a democratic Afghanistan where women and everyone else could prosper. Similarly in Iraq, that once you overthrew Saddam Hussein for security reasons, because we thought there were weapons of mass destruction there.

You would have to have an idea about what followed next and we believed a democratic Iraq. And now all of a sudden, Vladimir Putin says, wait a minute, I didn't sign on for this freedom agenda part, I didn't sign on for this democracy part. And so as the freedom agenda, the democracy part, began to spread, particularly into parts of the former Soviet Union.

Vladimir Putin really felt betrayed, and it was most neuralgic for him when it spread to Ukraine. The origins of what we're seeing today are in Vladimir Putin's concern about internal developments in Ukraine, which were leading Russia to be supplanted, in his view, by a western orientation in Ukraine that was more democratic.

I have to stop here to just laid arrest one argument that's out there, which was that this is all about NATO expansion. In the eight years that I worked with Vladimir Putin, he did not mention NATO expansion to me or to President Bush. If it had been that important to him, you would have thought he would have mentioned it.

The only time that NATO expansion became an issue was when we decided we would put missile defenses in Poland and Romania and possibly in the Czech Republic. Then he said that it would be a threat, but the idea that NATO expansion was a problem for him is simply ahistorical.

So back to our story about the emergence of problems for the international system. Russia now begins to emerge not as a partner, as we had hoped after the collapse of the Soviet Union, but as a particular kind of rival. And the Russia that emerged, of course, was not a particularly strong Russia, in fact, it was a declining power.

If you thought about Russia's economy on any given day, it was, at best, 11th or 12th in the world. If you thought about, if you think about whether you had ever bought anything made in Russia that wasn't made from petroleum, and don't say vodka that would be bought in France these days.

The Russians were a weak, declining power, but a power still with plenty of capability to make trouble in the world. Whether through cyber attacks, interference in people's elections, or, as we've seen, the decision to actually invade Ukraine, and turn the clock back on the collapse of Russian power in eastern Europe.

Russian attitudes toward Ukraine led Putin to make this set of miscalculations that led directly to the hotspot that we now call the Ukrainian war. For Vladimir Putin, Ukraine was not a real country, in fact, he told us that Ukraine was a made up country, now, what did he mean by that?

He meant that in the Russian way of thinking about it, and this is actually true not just of Putin, but many Russians. Ukraine had not really been an independent country for very much of its history. In fact, Ukraine, they believe, Putin believed, was just kind of little Russia.

There is a Tchaikovsky suite called little Russia, it is about Ukraine that tells you something About how deeply held in the Russian culture this idea is. But of course, the Ukrainians are a distinct people with a distinct language. I speak Russian. I can easily make mistakes translating from Ukrainian because they are distinct languages.

It is a country that has come, particularly over the last 30 years or so, to see itself as even more distinct. And so when Putin invaded Ukraine, thinking that Ukrainians would welcome Russia, it was based on this view that Ukraine isn't really a country and that people like Zelensky were really pretenders to the throne for the Ukrainians.

And so the first miscalculation was not understanding the Ukrainians. The second miscalculation was believing that the west would not act, perhaps thinking that Afghanistan and the messy withdrawal from Afghanistan was evidence of America's inability to act, surprised then at the level, depth, and breadth of sanctions that have been levied.

And then the third and perhaps most important miscalculation. He actually thought his army was good, and it turns out it isn't. After the debacle, and it was a debacle in 2008 in Georgia, they spent billions and billions and billions of rubles rebuilding the armed forces, and they've turned out not to be very good after all.

And so this has led to this miscalculation by Putin and the decision to invade Ukraine. Now, this, of course, makes great power, takes great power rivalry to a completely different level, because what we've done in response is something that we've never tried before. In contrast to the integrationist economic narrative that the United States has always had, we have sought to, with our allies, isolate the 11th largest economy in the world and take it out of the international economy.

That will have consequences. But it is just one of the ways of thinking about how far great power rivalry has gone in this case. Of course, the other big rival and the other big challenge to the system comes from China. And the seeds of that great power rivalry also come from the period between 1989 and roughly 2001, when China decided to become a part, under Deng Xiaoping, of the international economy.

The west faced a choice. You could say to the Chinese, good luck on your own, and try to isolate 1.4 billion people because they were not a democracy, because their economic principles did not conform to WTO standards. Or you could decide, you can't leave a billion, four people outside of the system.

And so we will bring China into the international economy, frankly, prematurely. In hopes that being a part of the WTO, being brought into the international economy, being a part of the answer to international economic growth, China will actually start to conform to those standards. But of course, that didn't happen.

China continued to be a problem for intellectual property rights. China continued to refuse to allow foreign companies into large parts of its economy. And China continued to champion national champions who would then take that IP or joint ventures that didn't work out. And so what had been a lot of hope about how China would integrate into the international economy became skepticism, even disappointment about it.

That was happening before the rise of Xi Jinping. But with the rise of Xi Jinping, we had another factor. China under Hu Jintao, who was the president that I dealt with, and Jiang Zemin, who was in power when we first came to office, China had engaged in something called hide and bide.

In other words, don't try to act like a great power. Just bide your time, grow stronger, and one day China will have its day, but don't force it. In fact, this sometimes made it difficult to get China to do useful things in the international economy. We made China the chair in what was called the six party talks on North Korean nuclear weapons.

And it was very hard to get China to act in an assertive way. Well, Xi Jinping had a very different view, which was that China ought to act in a very assertive way. And on the basis of chinese economic growth, which a couple of years ago, people were starting to talk about the Chinese economy surpassing the US economy, Xi Jinping decided that this was his moment.

In deciding that this was his moment, China began to make claims and military moves in the South China Sea. China moved hard against Hong Kong, one of the elements of what Xi Jinping hopes to be the restoration of China before colonialism. Moving hard against Hong Kong, completely abrogating the decision, the agreements of 1997 of one country, two systems, and of course, in some ways the biggest threat.

Beginning to use language about Taiwan and beginning to engage in activities about Taiwan that make people suspicious to this day that Xi Jinping intends to complete the restoration of China so that he can be in the pantheon of great leaders. That would mean doing something about Taiwan. This, of course, leaves the United States in a situation having a one China policy, that is, recognition of China, but also obligations to Taiwan under the Taiwan Relations Act, to know precisely how to react to this Chinese aggression.

It didn't help that Xi Jinping also laid out a strategy, an ambition to surpass the United States in frontier technologies like AI and quantum computing, and to build China's domestic indigenous capability in areas like semiconductors. And so all of a sudden, this decision to invite China into the international economy to hope for Chinese economic growth some say it looks as if it backfired.

Because China took advantage of the international economy without really, really conforming to its rules, and then begin to act on that economic power to further Chinese strategic and military goals. Military buildup in a way that looks like it is trying to push the United States out of the Indo Pacific.

So great power rivalry with Russia, a declining power, but a disruptive one that is showing how much disruption it can actually carry out. And China, a power that has risen and is also a problem of how to manage that rise, particularly given that China has become more aggressive.

Now, I'm just gonna comment on one final point, and we can open up for questions. There is an argument out there that this great power rivalry should be understood not in terms of the kind of 19th century notions of great power rivalry. But really, in ideological terms, authoritarian versus democracy, you would have heard Nancy Pelosi use that as her justification for going to Taiwan.

And it's easy to see why that argument would be a strong argument. After all, Putin and Xi Jinping are both authoritarians. They have made clear that they intend to have what they called a relationship without limits. And there is a lot of rhetoric and a lot of writing out of both countries about how the decadent west, the failing west, that they are the future, whether the Chinese believe it's through a kind of technocratic communism.

Or the Russians who actually claim to be the heirs to the cultural heritage of the western world, they do have a strong ideological bent in their rhetoric and in the way that they work together. It's also true that sinologists will tell you that Xi Jinping has become the most Marxist Leninist or really the most Maoist leader in China since Mao, with ambitions for a China that would push its, its system past its borders.

But I will argue to you that while it is possible to make that argument about this great power rivalry, it might be a mistake to cast it in those terms exclusively. And that is because if, in fact, the United States is going to have the will and the capability to actually deal with this period of great power rivalry.

To have the patience that we did not show in Afghanistan, to be able to deal with the continuing terrorist threat as well as the great power of rivalry threat, it's going to have to be with allies and with friends. And not all of those who wish to sign on to this project will be democracies.

I say that as somebody who believes very strongly in the democratic peace, but I also believe in broad coalitions of countries that will understand the challenges of Russia and the challenges of China. And if you look in particular at what we see in the Indo Pacific, we see that chinese aggressiveness has actually led countries to balance against China.

We have a tendency with the Chinese and with authoritarians in general to have what I'll call authoritarian envy. Authoritarians are so smart, they can build great airports, they're strategic. The Chinese believe in Sun Tzu, 5000 years of history and so on and so on and so on. Well, I think you could argue that this last couple of years of Chinese foreign policy has been among the dumbest foreign policies that I have seen in my entire time.

As a foreign policy specialist, what do I mean by that? Who goes to the Himalayan border and beats up Indian soldiers with baseball bats on a border that has been silent for 40 years? Who calls Australia in the wolf warrior diplomacy gum under the shoe of China, who threatens countries if they dare leave Huawei and so forth and so on.

And who, in their pique and anger about Nancy Pelosi's visit to Taiwan, who fires missiles that end up in Japanese waters, hardening the already hard Japanese attitudes about its role in the Asia Pacific. And so the United States has a lot going for it in trying to deal with this.

It has a strong industrial base. It has a strong economy, but it also has something that the Chinese do not have, which is allies and friends. And we need to make sure that that coalition is as broad as possible. And so I think that this is, in fact, authoritarians and democracies.

But we need to enlist those who may not find that language completely appealing while we continue to try to build the democratic peace.