Condoleezza Rice is the Tad and Dianne Taube Director of the Hoover Institution and a former US secretary of state and national security advisor in the George W. Bush administration. Rice joins Uncommon Knowledge with Peter Robinson at a perilous moment for the United States and the world at large, even more dangerous than the Cold War, Rice argues.
Drawing on her recent article in Foreign Affairs, Rice highlights the complex threats posed by global powers including China, Russia, and Iran. The conversation delves into China’s economic and military growth, Russia’s war in Ukraine, and Iran’s nuclear ambitions, while assessing the United States’ preparedness to face these challenges. Rice reflects on the strategic errors made in integrating China into the global economy and raises concerns about the potential for future conflicts, particularly in Taiwan and the broader Indo-Pacific region. Rice emphasizes the need for American leadership in a world threatened by authoritarian regimes, arguing that the US cannot afford to retreat from the world stage.
The interview concludes with a discussion on the upcoming election, with Rice offering advice to candidates and voters alike on the importance of considering foreign policy in determining America’s future.
Recorded on October 17, 2024.
OF FURTHER INTEREST:
- Bret Baier (Fox News) Interview on September 2, 2024
- Atlantic Council Event on September 24, 2024
- Foreign Affairs Podcast on September 27, 2024
- Brian Kilmeade Show on October 9, 2024
- Dana Perino (Fox News) Interview on October 9, 2024
- 16 News Now (WNDU Indiana) Interview on October 11, 2024
- Firing Line with Margaret Hoover (PBS) Interview on October 11, 2024
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
>> Peter Robinson (00:00):
The current period, I'm quoting here from the current issue of
Foreign Affairs, the currentperiod is not a Cold War redux.
It is more dangerous.
Former secretary of state Condoleezza Riceon Uncommon Knowledge now.
[MUSIC]
(00:24):
Welcome to Uncommon Knowledge.
I'm Peter Robinson.
The daughter of a pastor anda teacher, Condoleezza Rice,
grew up in segregated Alabama, then wenton to become the secretary of state.
She now serves as director of the HooverInstitution here at Stanford, and
is a member of the ownershipgroup of the Denver Broncos.
Before we get to pesky little matterslike the state of the world, three,
(00:47):
three season, is it time forbroncos fans to abandon Hope?
>> Condoleezza Rice (00:51):
I just wanna be four and three.
>> Peter Robinson (00:52):
Four and three, okay.
>> Condoleezza Rice (00:53):
Let's take them one game at a time [LAUGH].
>> Peter Robinson (00:54):
Okay, all right, good luck with the Saints.
First question from your article inthe current issue of Foreign Affairs.
The current period isnot a Cold War redux.
It is more dangerous.
During the Cold War, we had an opponentin the Soviet Union with massive
conventional forces arrayedagainst Western Europe.
(01:17):
With a navy that matched ours, at leastin numbers of surface vessels, and
with 5,000 nuclear weapons pointed us.
How could the current periodpossibly be more dangerous?
>> Condoleezza Rice (01:29):
Peter, we did not have real territorial conflict between us
after the Berlin crisis andcertainly after the Cuban missile crisis.
So for roughly almost 30years with the Soviet Union,
we lived in this kind of cold peace,as it's been called.
>> Peter Robinson (01:47):
Right.
>> Condoleezza Rice (01:48):
We could finish each other's sentences about nuclear
deterrence.
We had created a whole way of thinkingabout accidental nuclear war.
But the more important point is thatthe Soviet Union was a military giant, but
it was an economic andtechnological midget.
China is technologically, economically,
and militarily increasinglythe equal of the United States.
(02:12):
And so the adversary isdifferent this time around.
We also have a China that's completelyintegrated into the international economy.
So you have these aspects, great powerconflict, a technological arms race, and
probably the most important thing,
questions about whetherAmerica really wants to lead.
That's why I think it's more dangerous.
>> Peter Robinson (02:33):
Okay, so if we could, during this conversation,
let's go through the nature of the threat,China,
Russia, Iran, andthen I'll tell you why you're mistaken.
All of this means thatwe should return home.
We should pull in our horns,we should return to isolation.
I'll fight with you on that.
>> Condoleezza Rice (02:53):
That's a deal.
>> Peter Robinson (02:53):
And then we can close with some thoughts, because as you and
I speak today, there are a low doubledigit number of days between now and
election day.
All right,from your article in Foreign Affairs,
China now has the largestnavy in the world.
The growth in China's nucleararsenal is also alarming.
(03:15):
This comes against the backdrop ofan arms race in technologies, artificial
intelligence, quantum computing,synthetic biology, robotics, and others.
In the United States, the supply chain for
everything from pharmacological inputs torare-earth minerals runs through China.
And then there is Taiwan, close quote.
(03:37):
Here's the threshold question, in a way,
it's the theme of ourwhole conversation today.
Are we up for this?
>> Condoleezza Rice (03:46):
We have to be up for it.
First of all, we have to recognizethat it didn't happen by accident.
We actually had a narrative,
a belief in integrating China fullyinto the international economy.
When Deng Xiaoping decided to take Chinaout of isolation, we faced a choice.
Were we going to try to isolate 1.4billion people with a growing economy, or
(04:07):
would it be better to havethem fully integrated?
And that integration created exactly someof the points that you've just made.
The supply chains that ran throughChina because it was more efficient,
not worrying terriblymuch about whether or
not you were going to get rareearth minerals from China.
China was the place to manufacture,it was the place to assemble.
(04:29):
There was so much that was to bebeneficial about China's integration into
the international system.
>> Peter Robinson (04:35):
Beneficial for us.
>> Condoleezza Rice (04:36):
Beneficial for us, well, beneficial for the world economy,
and in [CROSSTALK] and
China did contribute to growth,it was very important.
But something happened,which is that I'm not much for
the great man power,great man theory of history, but
Xi Jinping's regime has been differentthan the regime's before it.
(04:58):
We always said, Peter, you cannothave both economic liberalization and
political control.
And for a while, right, and for a while,China was moving to private enterprise,
the big companies like Alibaba andTencent, and you were manufacturing there.
It seemed to be working.
And then Xi Jinping comes in andhe says, thank you very much,
(05:19):
I think I'll take political control.
And now it's a very different China.
And so the recognition that all ofthe investment that we were putting
in through venture capital and throughUS investment into Chinese technology.
Were we really doing that sothat that technology and
(05:39):
what China itself calledcivil military fusion, so
that that technology could be handedto the People's Liberation army?
So that they could force us out ofthe Indo Pacific with claims in
the South China Sea, claims against ourallies like Japan and the Philippines?
That was the realization that thishas somehow, this bet that we made on
(06:00):
integrating a country that hada fundamentally different social and
political system.
But was prepared to play the capitalismgame, that maybe that bet hadn't paid off.
>> Peter Robinson (06:11):
Just come a cropper.
>> Condoleezza Rice (06:13):
It's come a cropper.
>> Peter Robinson (06:15):
Could I dwell on that bet for a moment?
>> Condoleezza Rice (06:17):
Yeah. >> Peter Robinson
think every time I ask a question,of course,
feel free to correctthe question if you want to.
But it seems to me that understandingwhat went wrong is important
in understanding what we face now.
Okay, so, I mean,way far back as the Reagan days,
I was in the Reagan White House.
(06:38):
We had great hopes that China would followexactly as you said, this basic pattern.
First you get economic growth, andthen as your people get richer,
they will begin to push forpolitical freedom.
And by the way, it happened inSouth Korea, and it happened in Taiwan.
This was not a crazy idea.
Our late Hoover colleague Harry Rowan,writing in 1996, quote,
(07:02):
when will China become a democracy?
The answer is around the year 2015.
And nobody laughed at that whenHarry published it in 1996.
Okay, it didn't happen.
Is it the case that it didn't happen?
I'll put this crudely, but
is it the case that it didn'thappen because they're communist?
The South Koreans aren't,the Taiwanese are not.
(07:25):
As you know, our Hoover colleague StephenKotkin, if you ask him, what's the signal
finding of a lifetime that you, Stephen,have spent in the soviet archives?
If you could reduce it to a sentence.?
And he always answers,they were communists.
They really believed it, and that meantthey had permanent aims against us.
Is it because the Chinese are communist or
(07:48):
because we got stuck withthis unusual man, Xi Jinping?
And if the former is the case,that's one kind of problem, and
if the latter is the case,we can outweigh him.
Maybe, so you see the differencein your [CROSSTALK].
Yes, I do, and I want to come back to the point of,
can we outweigh him?
>> Peter Robinson (08:06):
Yes. >> Condoleezza Rice
That would be the easiest thing to do.
>> Condoleezza Rice (08:09):
I would be the first to say, having studied some communist
regimes myself, yes, it was inpart because they were communists.
>> Peter Robinson (08:15):
Okay. >> Condoleezza Rice
because this particular man had a viewthat communism couldn't evolve.
Communism had to remain the same,
you had to have absolutecontrol of the Communist Party.
He even didn't allow it to evolve in waysthat his predecessors had, remember,
one of the problems for
authoritarian regimes is that theydon't change power peacefully.
(08:37):
Right.
>> Condoleezza Rice (08:38):
They have too many presidents for life,
the Chinese Communist Party hadkind of fixed that problem.
They had term limits, you got two terms,they had age limits, they had a kind of
collective leadership where you had apremier who did things about the economy,
think Jurangie, andthen the president did everything else.
But the economy could kind of on itsown own dynamic, on its own logic,
(09:02):
move toward more private enterprise,less state owned enterprises.
China was leading the world in onlineeducational startups, leading the world.
They just shut them down becausethey couldn't control them.
So he was prepared to say, it has tobe absolute communist party control.
(09:22):
And I do think that put us on a different
pathway than had thisevolution taken place.
But I would be the firstto say he was right,
because once you start toget economic liberalization,
once people start to expect somethingdifferent, Hu Jintao told us once.
We need courts because people have tobe able to go and make a claim for
(09:46):
the land that was expropriatedby a party official.
And I thought,that's called an independent judiciary,
that's not gonna work sowell with total control.
So Xi Jinping maybe read it right,communism is a very fragile system.
>> Peter Robinson (10:02):
And Gorbachev read it wrong.
>> Condoleezza Rice (10:03):
And Gorbachev read it wrong, he believed,
he was a kind of true believer.
I knew Gorbachev pretty well,he really did believe that if you
took away the lies,if you took away the coercion,
people would kind of naturallybecome good soviet citizens.
What he didn't realizeis that communism is
(10:24):
in fact propped up by lies andby coercion.
And once you start to pull those pillars,it's going to.
>> Peter Robinson (10:31):
Once fear is gone, it's over.
>> Condoleezza Rice (10:32):
Once fear is gone, it's over, and so maybe Xi Jinping was
right, but that meant that our betabout a country that, by the way,
the second largest economy inthe world is now not a democracy.
When Ronald Reagan when you would havebeen in the White House when Ronald Reagan
and George Shultz started the G seven,
(10:53):
the largest economies in the world,they were all democracies.
And so this question of whether capitalismcan really coexist with communism,
I think the answer that we'regetting is no, that it can't.
It was probably,from my point of view, the right bet,
because what else were you going to do?
(11:14):
But there were elements,you ask, how did we get here?
There were elements that wedidn't keep our eye on the ball.
So how could it be, Peter,that semiconductors,
an industry created in the United Statesof America by people like intel.
>> Peter Robinson (11:30):
Single digit miles from where we sit.
>> Condoleezza Rice (11:33):
How could it be that the high end of that somehow ends up in
Taiwan, which is vulnerable to China?
How could it be that battery technology,which we invented,
once dominated China, now dominates?
And you see time andtime again that maybe too great of
an integration was the problem,not some integration, but
(11:58):
recognizing that this was a very differententity with a communist party at its head.
>> Peter Robinson (12:05):
One more note about China, and that, of course, is Taiwan.
Again, from your article inforeign affairs in Washington,
the discussion concerns how todeter a Chinese invasion of Taiwan.
But Beijing could blockade the island,or it could seize small,
uninhabited Taiwanese islands, orit could cut underwater cables or
launch large scale cyberattacks.
(12:27):
So we have again the cold warversus the present moment and
the difference inthe nature of the threats.
During the cold war, we looked at Europeand the whole game for whatever it was,
four and a half decades was to preventthe Soviets from invading Western Europe
through the Fulda gap.
They weren't gonna cut cables, that wasit, We'd put up tanks, seal up the okay.
(12:52):
The defense of Taiwan will require justas much cunning and determination and
ceaseless attention on our part asthe Chinese are willing to devote to it.
And that seems to be essentiallyinfinite attention and care and
pains and imagination.
Again, as currently configured,are the Pentagon and
(13:15):
the State Department up for this?
Just managing that one point of contact->> Condoleezza Rice: Just managing
that one point of contact, andwe'll come to the problem of overreach,
the fact that we have somany of these, right?
But let me just say a word about Taiwan,
one of the things that'sbeen concerning to me, and
it's something we've been trying to dosomething about at the Hoover institution.
(13:38):
Is that it's almost as if the thinking inthe Pentagon and in Washington is just
such blunt thinking, it's gonna bean amphibious landing on Taiwan.
The military people will tell you thatlooks like D-day times 100, Right?
China has many,
many other options vis a vis Taiwanbecause they don't have to occupy Taiwan.
They just have to change the politicsin Taiwan till it looks like Hong Kong.
(14:02):
And so that, you know, everybodytalked about one country, two systems.
When Hong Kong was given backto China by the British,
well, it became one country, one system.
And so what the Chinese would do,I think, for Taiwan, is to try to put so
much pressure that you have a very proChinese government in Taiwan, and then
(14:25):
just slowly but surely, it erodes Chineseindependence, Taiwan's independence.
Again, correct me if I'm wrong about this, but
my observation on Hong Kong.
A few hundred thousand people left whenthe Chinese got rough on Hong Kong.
But the business establishment, as faras I can count it, I'm not an expert,
(14:46):
you are.
Jimmy Lai is in prison andMartin Li is under house arrests,
that is two members of the Hong Kongbusiness establishment that stood
up to Beijing and everybody else,in effect, cut a deal for now.
>> Condoleezza Rice (15:01):
For now.
>> Peter Robinson (15:02):
Well, so why couldn't the Chinese say, look,
we did it in Hong Kong?
These people in Taiwanare business people,
they'll come to an accommodationonce we tighten up the situation.
Isn't that a reasonable fear,or is there a difference?
>> Condoleezza Rice (15:15):
I think there is a difference, and
I think Hong Kong was always special insome way, and I don't know that there
was a Hong Kong identity in the waythat there's a Taiwan identity.
They did a poll not too long ago, and
70% of Taiwanese do not thinkof themselves as Chinese.
They think of themselves as Taiwanese.
>> Peter Robinson (15:34):
That's a very basic fact.
>> Condoleezza Rice (15:36):
And that's a very different way of relating to the mainland,
but the mainland may intendto test that proposition.
And what I think we have to do is tofigure out how we deter the all out
military attack, but how we alsorespond when you have something like
the exercises that China hasjust been carrying out around.
(15:59):
Taiwan because they don't likewhat the president of Taiwan said.
We saw it when Nancy Pelosimade her visit there,
kind of denial exercises, quarantine.
We just need to expand our thinkingabout what we might be facing,
because at some point, if those kinds oftactics are employed, where do we respond?
(16:19):
When do we respond?
It becomes kind of salami tactics, and
that's what I worryabout more with Taiwan.
>> Peter Robinson (16:26):
We'll come to this, but
one answer is just forgetabout the whole problem.
We'll come to that.>> Condoleezza Rice: We'll come to that.
I want to at least touch on Russia and Iran.
February 2022, Russia invades Ukraine,it fails to subdue the entire country.
But as of today, Russia occupies abouta fifth of Ukrainian territory, and
the conflict has settledinto a war of attrition.
(16:48):
I mean, the fundamental dynamicsare not all that different from
the First World War.
Trench warfare, effectively.
The Russians, since the war began,since the invasion in February 2022,
the Russians have lost 120,000 dead andhalf a million wounded,
according to a Defensedepartment spokesman.
(17:10):
Russian losses in just the first year ofthe war, and now we're into the second,
of course.
In just the first year of war,
exceeded the total of all sovietlosses since World War II combined.
>> Condoleezza Rice (17:23):
Yeah.
>> Peter Robinson (17:24):
Putin has just taken more losses than Stalin, Khrushchev,
Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernenko,and Gorbachev combined.
>> Condoleezza Rice (17:36):
Yeah.
>> Peter Robinson (17:37):
What does he think he's doing?
What is in his head?
>> Condoleezza Rice (17:41):
What's in his head is he cannot lose this war.
What's in his head is Russian,
the Russian empire cannottolerate an independent Ukraine.
And he is doing it in a really quitegruesome way, because actually the British
numbers are higher than that,they're closer to 600,000 wounded.
But whether it's 500 or 600,five or 600,000 casualties,
(18:05):
whatever it is, they're not those blondboys from St. Petersburg and Moscow.
These are the poor kids from Dagestan.
These are the prisoners.
They're throwing unarmed, untrained youngmen, just cannon fodder at the front.
And in doing so,they simply overwhelm the numbers.
(18:28):
Russia is depending on something,he's always had mass to just
overwhelm a Ukrainian nation thatjust doesn't have that many people.
And that's what's in his head.
Eventually, the Ukrainianswill have to cry uncle,
because I can just keep throwing people.
>> Peter Robinson (18:44):
If the game is attrition, he can win.
>> Condoleezza Rice (18:45):
If the game is attrition, he can win it.
And that's what he thinks.
I will say this, the eastern part ofUkraine, it's a tough fight right now.
The Russians are making slow gains,they've made slow gains toward
even some relatively strategicplaces in the Donbass region.
(19:06):
But let's not forget whatthe Ukrainians have done.
Not only have they frustrated the ideathat you're just gonna overthrow
the Ukrainian government andinstall a pro-Moscow government,
they don't even have a navy,the Ukrainians.
And they have pushed the Russian Navyback from Sevastopol in the Black Sea.
Because they've beenable to use drones and
(19:28):
technology to threaten the Russian Navy.
As a result, thanks to their work andsome help from the Romanians and others,
they've been able to keep grain shipmentsgoing now through the Black Sea.
It's pretty remarkable.
And so the real question is, let's saythat it becomes something of a stalemate.
(19:51):
Nobody's gonna move too much in the next,in a couple of months,
nobody will move because it's permafrost,nobody will move.
We get to May or June, andit looks pretty much like it does now.
At that point, Ukraine needs tomake a decision about how much more
it wants to throw treasure andblood at this particular region.
(20:16):
But it's actually not a decision forus to make.
It's a decision for
the Ukrainians to make because theyhave achieved an enormous amount.
And the question for me,is there a pathway to
a prosperous Ukraine, a free Ukraine,
a secure Ukraine,even if there's a frozen conflict?
(20:39):
And one of the questionsthat will be asked of us is,
what will we do forthe security of Ukraine going forward?
And that's gonna be a harddiscussion inside the United States.
But I think some combination ofthe Ukrainians holding hostage,
some of what Russia cares about, forinstance, those naval bases and the like.
>> Peter Robinson (21:01):
So the parallel, cold war, we keep going, Cold War, the present,
there are parallels, they only go so far,but the parallel there might be Korea.
>> Condoleezza Rice (21:08):
Or Germany.
>> Peter Robinson (21:09):
We lost North Korea.
>> Condoleezza Rice (21:10):
Yeah. >> Peter Robinson
the rise of South Korea still representsone of the stunning accomplices- stunning
accomplices Of the 20th century.
Yes, and just one other thing.
People talk about a negotiated solution.
It's hard for me to see a negotiatedsolution to this war with Mr. Putin there.
>> Peter Robinson (21:27):
Is it? All right.
He's 60, hold on a moment.
He is- 72.
72, and the average life expectancy forRussian males is 67.
We can wait this guy out.
>> Condoleezza Rice (21:38):
We can wait him out, although the average life expectancy is
not the life expectancy ofpeople who live in the Kremlin.
>> Peter Robinson (21:45):
Who live in dachas.
>> Condoleezza Rice (21:46):
Yes, [LAUGH] Exactly.
>> Peter Robinson (21:48):
He has pretty good medical help.
>> Condoleezza Rice (21:49):
Yes, you are right.
>> Peter Robinson (21:51):
Iran, from your article in foreign affairs,
Tehran's proxies are a constantsource of trouble.
The Houthis in danger shippingin the Red Sea, do they ever,
Hamas recklessly launcheda war with Israel.
Hezbollah in Lebanon threatens to widenthat war into a regional conflagration.
Add to this observation an observationmade this past summer by your
(22:11):
successor as secretary of state,Antony Blinken.
Iran's breakout time, that is,the time needed to produce enough
weapons grade material fornuclear weapons, is now, and here,
I'm quoting Secretary Blinken, quote,is now probably one or two weeks.
>> Condoleezza Rice (22:29):
Yeah.
>> Peter Robinson (22:30):
Not years.
>> Condoleezza Rice (22:31):
Yes.
>> Peter Robinson (22:32):
Weeks, is, so, again, in this part of our conversation,
I'm trying to gauge the size of the threathere or the magnitude the danger.
Is the regime in Iran a problem to bemanaged or a threat we must eliminate?
>> Condoleezza Rice (22:47):
Well, this is written before the events that we've just seen
in the Middle East.
>> Peter Robinson (22:53):
Yes. >> Condoleezza Rice
I have to say what the Israelishave achieved in weakening Hamas,
I don't know how much they'veweakened Hamas, but quite a lot.
It has to be a lot, right?
>> Condoleezza Rice (23:04):
And then there's Hezbollah.
If you're a Hezbollah terrorist,aren't you looking at the other Hezbollah
terrorists and saying,which one of you is an Israel mole?
Because to penetrate thatorganization to know where
Nasrallah was,to then kill his second in command.
To be able to put a deviceinside of their walkie talkies.
(23:30):
And this is revolutionary,because Hezbollah, George Tenet,
the CIA director, once told us Hezbollahis the A Team of terrorism, he said.
And by the way, they run drugs downinto Latin America, they own Beirut.
And Israel has really put them nowon their back foot in a huge way.
(23:52):
Now, it doesn't mean there aren't risks,they can still fire rockets and the like,
but they have got to bewondering what hit them.
And Exposes Iran, because Iran hasbeen a somewhat cowardly state.
They've worked through these proxies,right?
Well, Hamas is in trouble,Hezbollah is really in trouble.
(24:13):
My view would be, why not put the Houthison the list and take care of this problem
while we're at it, maybe that'ssomething we should be considering.
And then you're the Iranian regime,you're exposed.
By the way, who wants to be in one ofyour guest houses when Haniyeh was
blown up in a guest house onan Iranian government installation?
>> Peter Robinson (24:35):
Could I try a provocative formulation just to see what
you do with it?
>> Condoleezza Rice (24:40):
Yeah.
>> Peter Robinson (24:41):
All that you said, add to that that the prime minister of Israel
has had to manage relationswith this country.
He's had to manage an extremely fractious,difficult domestic, political environment.
His party has a very narrowmajority in the Knesset.
And all of that said in the last month orso, he's changed the dynamics of.
(25:05):
Yeah, he changed it.
As we speak today in this year, 2024, Iknow you don't like the great man theory,
is Bibi Netanyahu the greatestman in the world?
>> Condoleezza Rice (25:16):
Well, that system, I would say, I know Bibi Netanyahu, and
look, he's something else.
[LAUGH] He's not the easiest personto deal with, but what he has done,
what that system has done,give credit, not just to Bibi,
give credit to Mossad,give credit to [CROSSTALK].
>> Peter Robinson (25:32):
This is a professional question, almost a technical question.
So when Hamas attacked a lot of people,including the person you're talking to,
one of the reasons I felt so depressed,of course, it was a horrible massacre, but
also our own interests.
I had been thinking that Mossad isthe best intelligence agency in the world.
They've got Tehran.
Tehran may be two weeks awayfrom a nuclear breakup, but
(25:53):
it's also a very unhealthy environment inwhich to be a nuclear physicist in Tehran.
Mossad has this one,and then we think, no,
maybe Mossad was neverwhat we thought they were.
So we have this failure,intelligence failure, at least in part,
an intelligence failure on October 7.
And now we have, they know where everybig shot is, they can plant these pagers.
(26:17):
We're back to the Mossad is invincible.
>> Condoleezza Rice (26:20):
Exactly.
>> Peter Robinson (26:20):
So which of these is true?
How do you weigh them as a professional?
>> Condoleezza Rice (26:22):
Do they may both be true?
I don't know, and eventually,there'll be a kind of reckoning for
what happened with the strategic failures,the intelligence failure on October 7th.
Some people say, look,they just didn't believe it possible,
the failure of imaginationthat we sometimes talk about.
But leaving that aside, what they havedone with Hezbollah is remarkable,
(26:44):
and it will do two very important things.
One, we talked about Iran has got tobe wondering, my goodness, our best and
brightest have just been taken down.
But secondly,it really does potentially free Lebanon.
Hezbollah has held Lebanon hostage fordecades.
>> Peter Robinson (27:03):
Decades.
>> Condoleezza Rice (27:04):
Decades, I was the secretary in 2006,
I negotiated resolution 1701.
Now, 1701 was supposed to haveHezbollah go back across the Latani.
They were supposed to flowthe Lebanese army in,
everybody now thinks the UN peacekeepersthere have not been very good.
I would be the first to agree with that.
(27:24):
We tried very hard to get UN peacekeeperswho would be under a UN security
blanket to be able to actually challengeHezbollah, we couldn't get it.
So now Israel has changedthe nature of things,
maybe Lebanon would finally have a chance.
Hezbollah assassinatedRafiq Hariri in 2005.
>> Peter Robinson (27:46):
The then prime minister.
>> Condoleezza Rice (27:48):
The then prime minister who really,
he was a bright light for Lebanon.
They haven't allowed a presidentialelection in Lebanon for
the last two years.
So when people think about the changein balance, think about Hezbollah
also not being able to dominateLebanon in the way that they have.
But I wanna come back to Iran.
I know that people talk about the progressof the Iranian nuclear program.
(28:13):
I was never much for negotiating withthe Iranians about this if they were
going to be allowed to reprocessthe fuel that they have now done.
That said, they have, we believe,the components, the fuel,
the bomb design, the delivery vehicles,>> Peter Robinson: We now know they have
ballistic missiles,because they've loosed them on Israel.
The question is, can they put it all together?
(28:35):
And in nuclear weapons, not so easy.
Not so easy to deliver, not soeasy to get the right level of explosion.
And so I think one thing you couldsay to the Iranians is, all right,
we know where you live andwe know what you've got.
Don't even think about trying tomake it a usable nuclear weapon.
And that's a little bit different thansaying, they're so close to the fuel,
(28:57):
they're so close to the bomb design,they're so close.
There's still a step that they have totake to be an actual nuclear power,
and it may be given their weaknessesthat you want to do that.
It says something, too, Peter,because, one of the lines that
I use from the Cold War, andit speaks to China, Russia, and to Iran.
(29:20):
George Kennan,in his famous telegram said,
we have to deny them the easycourse of external expansion, until
the day that they have to turn to dealwith their own internal contradictions.
>> Peter Robinson (29:37):
February 1946, if I recall correctly, and
he's writing about the Soviet Union.
>> Condoleezza Rice (29:41):
And I can tell you that being in that White House for
George HW Bush in 1989, 1990,1991,
it was the Soviet Union having to turn todeal with its own internal contradictions,
having been held in check for all ofthose years by American power, largely.
And maybe that's the lesson,that if this isn't a Cold War,
(30:04):
there is still onereally important lesson,
which is that these regimesare ultimately, fundamentally weak.
Ultimately, not today, not tomorrow,China is not the Soviet Union.
Let's not scare ourselves to death.
Let's let's make surethat they can't expand,
let's make sure that theycan't push American power out,
(30:24):
let's make sure that they can'twin the technological arms race.
And maybe the day will comewhen some young specialist for
a future American president is talkingabout the day when they had to deal with
their own internal contradictions.
>> Peter Robinson (30:38):
Okay, lovely, but now I'm going to tell you why that's
just sentimentalism, and you're all wrong.
And you're partly onto it yourself,I'm quoting you from foreign affairs.
After World War II,
the United States was a confident countrywith unbridled optimism about the future.
The United States is a different countrynow, I'm quoting you to yourself.
>> Condoleezza Rice (31:00):
Yes. >> Peter Robinson
a different country now, exhausted byeight decades of international leadership,
some of it successful and appreciated andsome dismissed as failure.
Okay, give me a moment ortwo to set this up.
At a minimum, this is an impulse thatanimates some very large portion
of the country and some very largeportion of both political parties now.
(31:24):
We're broke.
When Ronald Reagan tookoffice during the Cold War,
federal debt amounted to 30% of GDP.
Today, that figure is 120%,
a four-time increase in debtas a proportion of GDP.
Our military, totally inadequate.
Former secretary of defense, Robert Gates,
(31:45):
writing just this last fall,our army is shrinking,
our navy is decommissioning warshipsfaster than new ones can be built.
Our air force has stagnated in size, and
our defense industrial base cannotproduce major weapon systems.
In the number needed, or,as we have seen in Ukraine,
the vast amount of munitions required,close quote.
(32:09):
There are different ways of interpretingthe slogan, put America first.
Yeah.
>> Peter Robinson (32:14):
And one way of interpreting the slogan is, yes,
pursue our interests.
And pursuing our interests leadsto pursuing our interests abroad.
But another way of putting itis we're broke, we're exhausted,
our southern border is a mess,our politics are polarized.
We have no choice.
(32:34):
Let the rest of the worldtake care of itself.
Madam Secretary?
>> Condoleezza Rice (32:38):
Yes.
I am the one who wrote exactly those wordsabout this not very confident America.
>> Peter Robinson (32:45):
Right.
>> Condoleezza Rice (32:46):
But it isn't beyond the possibility
of humans to correctmany of these problems.
And so when you talk about our debt,we know that some answers to the debt
are gonna be very hard, but we'realso going to actually have to do it,
not just to be a factor abroad, butfor our own health and well being.
(33:10):
I mentioned the people who gotleft behind by globalization,
the people that J.D.Vance wrote about in Hillbilly Elegy.
Yes, we have to do something about that.
We have to educate them,we have to give them skills.
Yes, we do have to revitalizeour defense industries.
But we don't have to.
We have a huge defense budget.
(33:32):
We don't have to just do it by buyingall the same things we've been buying.
There are companies right here inthe Silicon Valley that have important
answers to some of ourmost dire military needs.
We've talked about drones.
We've talked about new technologies.
If we could just getthe Pentagon to organize,
to spend the $800 billion better, thatwould be a really important step forward.
(33:53):
And so it's not beyond us tosolve some of these problems and
I think we better do it.
Because the real answer to you, Peter, iswhy not let the rest of the world do it?
I say this in, great powersdon't mind their own business.
They don't.
They shape the world andthe great powers right now that
(34:15):
are in line if we leave the playing field,not Germany,
not France, it's Russia and it's China.
And do you really wanna live ina world shaped by Russia and China?
I look at this alliance ofthe three plus one, and I call it,
cuz the North Koreans,nobody really trusts very much.
>> Peter Robinson (34:38):
China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea.
>> Condoleezza Rice (34:40):
And North Korea, right.
>> Peter Robinson (34:41):
On a good day. >> Condoleezza Rice
All right.
>> Condoleezza Rice (34:43):
And I say to myself, first of all, they have a lot of contra,
they can do a lot of damage, right?
But they have a lot ofcontradictions among them, too.
You really think that hose xenophobes inRussia are thrilled to see the Chinese
dominating Central Asia, which usedto be a part of the Soviet Union?
You think they aren't a little unnervedby what's happening to Iran and
its proxies in the Middle East today?
(35:04):
I just saw Vladimir Putinwent to Pyongyang, right?
That, by the way,turned the South Koreans on a dime.
They're furious.
But it appears that little Olga andlittle Alexei, Russian children,
are going to go to Summercamp in Pyongyang.
>> Peter Robinson (35:21):
So it's real. >> Condoleezza Rice
That'll be fun.
So let's recognize that we havesome problems, some weaknesses.
We also have some incredible strengths.
We have, of course, an economy thatis still the envy of the world.
We have technological and capability and
innovation that just keeps,despite everything else.
(35:43):
And I just wanna make one more point.
Of course, of course.
>> Condoleezza Rice (35:45):
We have an energy bounty that if we don't mess it up,
we will be able torestructure the landscape for
one of the most importantelements of national growth and
international growth,which is the energy picture.
So we have our strengths,we have our troubles, but
the thing that we cannot dois cede the ground to others,
(36:08):
because we're not gonna like that groundif the others are the dominant power.
>> Peter Robinson (36:13):
You are addressing what I myself take to be the deep question
in the current election.
We'll come to the candidates in a moment.
>> Condoleezza Rice (36:21):
Yeah.
>> Peter Robinson (36:22):
This is just me talking, so
I haven't written this one down.
I'd just like to see what you make of it.
We've been talking againabout the Cold War, and
we have there a story of two decades.
In the 1970s in this country wherea period of economic stagnation.
>> Condoleezza Rice (36:39):
Right.
>> Peter Robinson (36:41):
A period of one small defeat after another,
as against the Soviets,they expanded their navy,
they took over countries in Russia, andyou had all these small defeats together.
And over the course of that decade,they have the initiative, and
we're on the defensive.
And then in the 1980s,we get economic renewal,
(37:02):
we get restoration of national morale.
>> Condoleezza Rice (37:07):
Yes. >> Peter Robinson
leadership, of course.
And I'm not saying these things are easy,but in one decade, we go from the capture.
The Soviets invade Afghanistan in 1979,
biggest land operation sincethe end of the Second World War.
And the Iranians capture Americansin the American embassy and
hold them hostage for a year.
(37:28):
And in 1989, just ten years later,
which is not that long in the life ofa human being, let alone of a nation,
the United States andour allies have undergone such a renewal
that the Soviet Union folds up,the Berlin Wall falls.
Exactly.
>> Peter Robinson (37:46):
Okay, so the question is,
I really do take this as the deepquestion in this election.
Are we washed up?
Are the Chinese right?
Was that renewal, a kind of lastefflorescence of patriotism and
american energy and know how?
Or is it possible again?
>> Condoleezza Rice (38:05):
It is possible again.
And it was a recognitionof our strengths and
the needs to mobilize them andtheir weaknesses.
I've always still thought that.
>> Peter Robinson (38:15):
It was hard analysis.
It wasn't luck and it wasn't science.
>> Condoleezza Rice (38:18):
It wasn't.
But I remember as a youngInternational Relations person,
Soviet specialist, when Ronald Reagancalled the Soviet Union and
communism a sad experimenton a hapless people and
talked about the fact that they wouldn'tsurvive in that famous British.
>> Peter Robinson (38:40):
Yes, yes, yes.
>> Condoleezza Rice (38:40):
Westminster.
>> Peter Robinson (38:43):
Marxism and Leninism will end up on the ashy heap of history.
>> Condoleezza Rice (38:46):
And I remember thinking, well,
that's a kind of undiplomatic thing forthe president of the United States to say.
But you know what?
It was calling out the truth.
And we've been calling out a lot of truthslately about our own challenges and
every leader needs to do thatbecause we need to address them.
But some leader also needsto call out our strengths.
(39:09):
The extraordinary resilienceof American institutions
throughout our now 240 plus year history.
The extraordinary notion that you canbring people from all over the world and
they can somehow find that they belongin a place where it doesn't matter where
you came from,it matters where you're going.
(39:29):
The extraordinary creativity andinnovation that we have and
then to say, we need allies, right.
I do believe NATO ought to pay that 2% andwe need allies.
But democracy, for all of its challenges,
(39:50):
is not as fragile as autocracy.
I want somebody to say that.
>> Peter Robinson (39:56):
Could I?
One other, this is.
The only time you and
I get a chance to have a realconversation is in front of cameras.
So I've got these other ideasI wanna try out on you.
But I have been struckthat in some strange way,
we always talk about what an examplewe are to the rest of the world.
And for decade after decade, that turnedout to be true, and in all kinds of ways,
it's true today.
(40:17):
And we hope it will becometruer in the years to come.
But you know who's an example to us?
Ukraine.
>> Condoleezza Rice (40:24):
Yes.
>> Peter Robinson (40:25):
You know who's an example to us?
Bibi and the Mossad andthe Israeli people.
Wait a minute, if Ukraine it's a bunch oftechno savvy kids in Ukraine who've saved
their country by figuring out drones andthis patching together new technologies.
We have the best educatedtechno kids in the world.
(40:46):
What are we doing for goodness sake?
Our ability forinnovation or Bibi, I mean,
I find him an impressive figure.
>> Condoleezza Rice (40:56):
Innovation and toughness.
>> Peter Robinson (40:58):
Innovation and toughness, okay.
>> Condoleezza Rice (41:00):
They need to go.
>> Peter Robinson (41:02):
Bibi tells the truth, and he's tough.
>> Condoleezza Rice (41:04):
And let me go back to Ronald Reagan in this regard.
>> Peter Robinson (41:07):
You can do that all day with me.
>> Condoleezza Rice (41:08):
Yeah, I suspect I can.
But what Ronald Reagan understood waskind of the essence of America, right?
And how to appeal to that essence.
But Ronald Reagan would never have said,let's just mind our own business and
leave the rest of the worldto whatever happens to it.
>> Peter Robinson (41:27):
That is true.
>> Condoleezza Rice (41:27):
He just never said it,
because he also understood that theessence of America is that we're an idea,
we're not just territory, we're an idea.
And if we really believe inthe universality of that idea,
then we have to give othersaccess to that idea, so
that we are safer when there are more ofus in the world who believe in democracy.
(41:50):
Now, political scientists have actuallyshown democracies don't fight one
another, right?
>> Peter Robinson (41:55):
And that also is really true.
>> Condoleezza Rice (41:56):
That's really true, they don't send child soldiers into war,
they don't terrorize other people,they don't invade their neighbors.
Now, there is an argument aboutjust the security side of this,
the practical side of it, butit is also the American people,
(42:16):
even if a little tired ofinternational leadership.
I've always said, Peter, Americanscarry two contradictory thoughts.
One is, can't somebody else do this,for goodness sakes,
we defeated the Soviet Union.
We unified Germany, we defeated al Qaeda,can somebody else step up.
But then Americans alsocarry in their heads,
(42:39):
you mean a larger country just wantsto extinguish its smaller neighbors.
We can't let that happen, we can'tlet people be beheaded on television.
We can't do that, soif nobody else will, maybe we should.
And I've been saying thisto some who want to talk
about America first as meaning,mind our own business.
(43:02):
I say, I don't wanna be the presidentof the United States on the day when
Xi Jinping andVladimir Putin are on their victory tour.
Having defeated the greatestcollective security organization
in human history of democracies, NATO.
I don't wanna be president cuz I reallydon't wanna be the president who says,
I could have stopped that.
(43:23):
I didn't have to put an Americansoldier in harm's way to do it,
I just had to give them the means todo it themselves, but I didn't do that.
And now Putin andXi Jinping are the powers in the world,
the American people aren't gonna like it.
And any political leader who believesthat they are going to skate by
(43:43):
on that day needs to think again.
>> Peter Robinson (43:46):
Right, okay, last question.
I mean, you and I have now cheeredeach other up, but of course,
we have to be very careful about saying,this, of course, will prevail.
Of course, we're Americans,no, hard work analysis, okay?
So as we sit here talking,we have only days remaining
until the election,let me set this up, listen to this.
(44:11):
Raphael Cohen of RAND,writing last year, for
years, American defense strategy arguedfor a two-war construct, namely that
the United States should have sufficientmilitary capability to fight and
win two simultaneous warsin different theaters.
Over the last decade, as Americas militaryshrank in size and its adversaries
(44:31):
grew increasingly capable, the UnitedStates backed off such aspirations.
So today we face, our military seemsto believe that were capable of
fighting one major war and some kindof defensive action in a minor theater.
One and a half theaters,okay, listen to this count.
(44:52):
Ukraine and the Baltic,Israel in the Eastern Med, Taiwan, and
the North Pacific, that's three.
And all three are really dangerous, okay?
Let's go through it, your advice, yourforeign policy advice for Kamala Harris.
>> Condoleezza Rice (45:09):
If you really do want the most lethal military in the world,
are you prepared to increasethe defense budget?
>> Peter Robinson (45:16):
Okay, your advice for former President Donald Trump.
>> Condoleezza Rice (45:22):
If you really do want to follow up on
that 2% contribution in NATO,I'm all for it.
But remember how important alliesreally are to the United States and
to the free world.
>> Peter Robinson (45:38):
Okay, and here's the last question.
Your advice for voters, early ballotingis down this year from four years ago,
there are ways of interpreting that.
But one possible reason for that maybe that Americans are actually taking
this one especially seriously,taking time to think this over.
(46:02):
So when it comes to foreign policy,what should the voters be weighing as
between Kamala Harris and the Democratsand Donald Trump and the Republicans?
>> Condoleezza Rice (46:13):
Look, I don't wanna personalize it to candidates because
I think it's the same question for
anybody who wants to bepresident of the United States.
And, that is, you see that there'sa chaotic and difficult world out there.
You American voter, you readthe newspapers, you see it on television.
(46:33):
Do you really believe that,that chaos is going to subside or
get better if America withdraws?
Do you really believe that?
And if you don't believe that, ask hardquestions of the people who want to lead
you as president of the United Statesas to what they're gonna do about it.
How are they gonna bring all of theseelements of American power, our allies,
(46:57):
our still considerable military power,our energy resources,
how are they gonna bring them together?
Our innovation, our creativity,how are they gonna bring them
together in a way that servesAmericans who felt they were left out,
so that the American dreamstill exists for everybody.
But also challenges all ofus to go into that world and
(47:20):
to try to make somesense out of this chaos,
cuz that's what we did after World War II.
We made sense out of the chaos.
Now, you talk about the two anda half, it was two and
a half wars when I was in,it was down to two and a half by then.
>> Peter Robinson (47:38):
[CROSSTALK] one and half now.
>> Condoleezza Rice (47:39):
All right, but it's really interesting that everybody talks
about having to fight a war here,fighting a war there.
And I'm gonna go back to,I worked for George H.W Bush, and
I always felt that he wasexactly the right person at
the time to put the Germans inthe lead on German unification.
He was a humble person who put himselfin the background and never wanted to,
(47:59):
To embarrass Gorbachev.
And therefore, I think, reallydelivered at the end of the Cold War.
He'd been set up by Ronald Reagan,who had a certain
audaciousness about him to saythat it is peace through strength.
He didn't say war through strength.
He understood that if you werestrong enough militarily,
(48:22):
if you could deter, you might neverhave to fight any of those wars.
And he understood, too,that if you could call out
the weaknesses of a regime thatis terrified of its own people,
which is what authoritarians are,then ultimately you could
put that regime into a situationwhere it had to face its people.
(48:45):
I'll tell you one final story.
We were in,I was with President Bush in Romania.
>> Peter Robinson (48:50):
Which Bush are we with?
>> Condoleezza Rice (48:51):
George W Bush.
>> Peter Robinson (48:52):
W Bush.
>> Condoleezza Rice (48:53):
In 2005, Romania had become a member of NATO.
We were there to celebrate, andthere was a square that they took us into,
and they said, this square wasfilled with 250,000 people.
When Ceausescu, the communist leaderof Romania, came into the square and
he was exhorting, you'd had revolutionsin Czechoslovakia and Poland and Hungary,
(49:15):
and he was exhorting the people forwhat he'd done for them.
And all of a sudden,one old lady Yelled Liard.
And then ten people Yelled Liard.
And then 100 people, andthen a thousand people, and
now 100,000 people are yelling liar.
And all of a sudden,Ceausescu knows that the fear
(49:36):
that he has held overhis people has reversed.
The fear is gone, and now he's just faceto face with the anger of his people.
Authoritarians know thatwhat I've always called
the Ceausescu moment isultimately there for them,
because that fear that theyhold will one day break.
(49:59):
That's what Ronald Reagan understood, and
he understood that you just had to,again, to quote George Kennan,
deny them the course of external expansionuntil that day comes was our job.
>> Peter Robinson (50:12):
Would you close by reading a passage from your article in
foreign affairs?
>> Condoleezza Rice (50:17):
Yes. >> Peter Robinson
The future will be determined by the alliance of
Democratic Free Market states,or it will be determined by
the revisionist powers harkingback to a day of territorial
conquest abroad andauthoritarian practices at home.
(50:41):
There is simply no other option.
>> Peter Robinson (50:45):
Condoleezza Rice, former Secretary of State,
Director of the Hoover Institution,thank you.
>> Condoleezza Rice (50:49):
It's a pleasure.
>> Peter Robinson (50:50):
For Uncommon Knowledge, the Hoover Institution and Fox Nation,
I'm Peter Robinson.
[MUSIC]
The current period, I'm quoting here from the current issue of
Foreign Affairs, the currentperiod is not a Cold War redux.
It is more dangerous.
Former secretary of state Condoleezza Riceon Uncommon Knowledge now.
[MUSIC]
(00:24):
Welcome to Uncommon Knowledge.
I'm Peter Robinson.
The daughter of a pastor anda teacher, Condoleezza Rice,
grew up in segregated Alabama, then wenton to become the secretary of state.
She now serves as director of the HooverInstitution here at Stanford, and
is a member of the ownershipgroup of the Denver Broncos.
Before we get to pesky little matterslike the state of the world, three,
(00:47):
three season, is it time forbroncos fans to abandon Hope?
>> Condoleezza Rice (00:51):
I just wanna be four and three.
>> Peter Robinson (00:52):
Four and three, okay.
>> Condoleezza Rice (00:53):
Let's take them one game at a time [LAUGH].
>> Peter Robinson (00:54):
Okay, all right, good luck with the Saints.
First question from your article inthe current issue of Foreign Affairs.
The current period isnot a Cold War redux.
It is more dangerous.
During the Cold War, we had an opponentin the Soviet Union with massive
conventional forces arrayedagainst Western Europe.
(01:17):
With a navy that matched ours, at leastin numbers of surface vessels, and
with 5,000 nuclear weapons pointed us.
How could the current periodpossibly be more dangerous?
>> Condoleezza Rice (01:29):
Peter, we did not have real territorial conflict between us
after the Berlin crisis andcertainly after the Cuban missile crisis.
So for roughly almost 30years with the Soviet Union,
we lived in this kind of cold peace,as it's been called.
>> Peter Robinson (01:47):
Right.
>> Condoleezza Rice (01:48):
We could finish each other's sentences about nuclear
deterrence.
We had created a whole way of thinkingabout accidental nuclear war.
But the more important point is thatthe Soviet Union was a military giant, but
it was an economic andtechnological midget.
China is technologically, economically,
and militarily increasinglythe equal of the United States.
(02:12):
And so the adversary isdifferent this time around.
We also have a China that's completelyintegrated into the international economy.
So you have these aspects, great powerconflict, a technological arms race, and
probably the most important thing,
questions about whetherAmerica really wants to lead.
That's why I think it's more dangerous.
>> Peter Robinson (02:33):
Okay, so if we could, during this conversation,
let's go through the nature of the threat,China,
Russia, Iran, andthen I'll tell you why you're mistaken.
All of this means thatwe should return home.
We should pull in our horns,we should return to isolation.
I'll fight with you on that.
>> Condoleezza Rice (02:53):
That's a deal.
>> Peter Robinson (02:53):
And then we can close with some thoughts, because as you and
I speak today, there are a low doubledigit number of days between now and
election day.
All right,from your article in Foreign Affairs,
China now has the largestnavy in the world.
The growth in China's nucleararsenal is also alarming.
(03:15):
This comes against the backdrop ofan arms race in technologies, artificial
intelligence, quantum computing,synthetic biology, robotics, and others.
In the United States, the supply chain for
everything from pharmacological inputs torare-earth minerals runs through China.
And then there is Taiwan, close quote.
(03:37):
Here's the threshold question, in a way,
it's the theme of ourwhole conversation today.
Are we up for this?
>> Condoleezza Rice (03:46):
We have to be up for it.
First of all, we have to recognizethat it didn't happen by accident.
We actually had a narrative,
a belief in integrating China fullyinto the international economy.
When Deng Xiaoping decided to take Chinaout of isolation, we faced a choice.
Were we going to try to isolate 1.4billion people with a growing economy, or
(04:07):
would it be better to havethem fully integrated?
And that integration created exactly someof the points that you've just made.
The supply chains that ran throughChina because it was more efficient,
not worrying terriblymuch about whether or
not you were going to get rareearth minerals from China.
China was the place to manufacture,it was the place to assemble.
(04:29):
There was so much that was to bebeneficial about China's integration into
the international system.
>> Peter Robinson (04:35):
Beneficial for us.
>> Condoleezza Rice (04:36):
Beneficial for us, well, beneficial for the world economy,
and in [CROSSTALK] and
China did contribute to growth,it was very important.
But something happened,which is that I'm not much for
the great man power,great man theory of history, but
Xi Jinping's regime has been differentthan the regime's before it.
(04:58):
We always said, Peter, you cannothave both economic liberalization and
political control.
And for a while, right, and for a while,China was moving to private enterprise,
the big companies like Alibaba andTencent, and you were manufacturing there.
It seemed to be working.
And then Xi Jinping comes in andhe says, thank you very much,
(05:19):
I think I'll take political control.
And now it's a very different China.
And so the recognition that all ofthe investment that we were putting
in through venture capital and throughUS investment into Chinese technology.
Were we really doing that sothat that technology and
(05:39):
what China itself calledcivil military fusion, so
that that technology could be handedto the People's Liberation army?
So that they could force us out ofthe Indo Pacific with claims in
the South China Sea, claims against ourallies like Japan and the Philippines?
That was the realization that thishas somehow, this bet that we made on
(06:00):
integrating a country that hada fundamentally different social and
political system.
But was prepared to play the capitalismgame, that maybe that bet hadn't paid off.
>> Peter Robinson (06:11):
Just come a cropper.
>> Condoleezza Rice (06:13):
It's come a cropper.
>> Peter Robinson (06:15):
Could I dwell on that bet for a moment?
>> Condoleezza Rice (06:17):
Yeah. >> Peter Robinson
think every time I ask a question,of course,
feel free to correctthe question if you want to.
But it seems to me that understandingwhat went wrong is important
in understanding what we face now.
Okay, so, I mean,way far back as the Reagan days,
I was in the Reagan White House.
(06:38):
We had great hopes that China would followexactly as you said, this basic pattern.
First you get economic growth, andthen as your people get richer,
they will begin to push forpolitical freedom.
And by the way, it happened inSouth Korea, and it happened in Taiwan.
This was not a crazy idea.
Our late Hoover colleague Harry Rowan,writing in 1996, quote,
(07:02):
when will China become a democracy?
The answer is around the year 2015.
And nobody laughed at that whenHarry published it in 1996.
Okay, it didn't happen.
Is it the case that it didn't happen?
I'll put this crudely, but
is it the case that it didn'thappen because they're communist?
The South Koreans aren't,the Taiwanese are not.
(07:25):
As you know, our Hoover colleague StephenKotkin, if you ask him, what's the signal
finding of a lifetime that you, Stephen,have spent in the soviet archives?
If you could reduce it to a sentence.?
And he always answers,they were communists.
They really believed it, and that meantthey had permanent aims against us.
Is it because the Chinese are communist or
(07:48):
because we got stuck withthis unusual man, Xi Jinping?
And if the former is the case,that's one kind of problem, and
if the latter is the case,we can outweigh him.
Maybe, so you see the differencein your [CROSSTALK].
Yes, I do, and I want to come back to the point of,
can we outweigh him?
>> Peter Robinson (08:06):
Yes. >> Condoleezza Rice
That would be the easiest thing to do.
>> Condoleezza Rice (08:09):
I would be the first to say, having studied some communist
regimes myself, yes, it was inpart because they were communists.
>> Peter Robinson (08:15):
Okay. >> Condoleezza Rice
because this particular man had a viewthat communism couldn't evolve.
Communism had to remain the same,
you had to have absolutecontrol of the Communist Party.
He even didn't allow it to evolve in waysthat his predecessors had, remember,
one of the problems for
authoritarian regimes is that theydon't change power peacefully.
(08:37):
Right.
>> Condoleezza Rice (08:38):
They have too many presidents for life,
the Chinese Communist Party hadkind of fixed that problem.
They had term limits, you got two terms,they had age limits, they had a kind of
collective leadership where you had apremier who did things about the economy,
think Jurangie, andthen the president did everything else.
But the economy could kind of on itsown own dynamic, on its own logic,
(09:02):
move toward more private enterprise,less state owned enterprises.
China was leading the world in onlineeducational startups, leading the world.
They just shut them down becausethey couldn't control them.
So he was prepared to say, it has tobe absolute communist party control.
(09:22):
And I do think that put us on a different
pathway than had thisevolution taken place.
But I would be the firstto say he was right,
because once you start toget economic liberalization,
once people start to expect somethingdifferent, Hu Jintao told us once.
We need courts because people have tobe able to go and make a claim for
(09:46):
the land that was expropriatedby a party official.
And I thought,that's called an independent judiciary,
that's not gonna work sowell with total control.
So Xi Jinping maybe read it right,communism is a very fragile system.
>> Peter Robinson (10:02):
And Gorbachev read it wrong.
>> Condoleezza Rice (10:03):
And Gorbachev read it wrong, he believed,
he was a kind of true believer.
I knew Gorbachev pretty well,he really did believe that if you
took away the lies,if you took away the coercion,
people would kind of naturallybecome good soviet citizens.
What he didn't realizeis that communism is
(10:24):
in fact propped up by lies andby coercion.
And once you start to pull those pillars,it's going to.
>> Peter Robinson (10:31):
Once fear is gone, it's over.
>> Condoleezza Rice (10:32):
Once fear is gone, it's over, and so maybe Xi Jinping was
right, but that meant that our betabout a country that, by the way,
the second largest economy inthe world is now not a democracy.
When Ronald Reagan when you would havebeen in the White House when Ronald Reagan
and George Shultz started the G seven,
(10:53):
the largest economies in the world,they were all democracies.
And so this question of whether capitalismcan really coexist with communism,
I think the answer that we'regetting is no, that it can't.
It was probably,from my point of view, the right bet,
because what else were you going to do?
(11:14):
But there were elements,you ask, how did we get here?
There were elements that wedidn't keep our eye on the ball.
So how could it be, Peter,that semiconductors,
an industry created in the United Statesof America by people like intel.
>> Peter Robinson (11:30):
Single digit miles from where we sit.
>> Condoleezza Rice (11:33):
How could it be that the high end of that somehow ends up in
Taiwan, which is vulnerable to China?
How could it be that battery technology,which we invented,
once dominated China, now dominates?
And you see time andtime again that maybe too great of
an integration was the problem,not some integration, but
(11:58):
recognizing that this was a very differententity with a communist party at its head.
>> Peter Robinson (12:05):
One more note about China, and that, of course, is Taiwan.
Again, from your article inforeign affairs in Washington,
the discussion concerns how todeter a Chinese invasion of Taiwan.
But Beijing could blockade the island,or it could seize small,
uninhabited Taiwanese islands, orit could cut underwater cables or
launch large scale cyberattacks.
(12:27):
So we have again the cold warversus the present moment and
the difference inthe nature of the threats.
During the cold war, we looked at Europeand the whole game for whatever it was,
four and a half decades was to preventthe Soviets from invading Western Europe
through the Fulda gap.
They weren't gonna cut cables, that wasit, We'd put up tanks, seal up the okay.
(12:52):
The defense of Taiwan will require justas much cunning and determination and
ceaseless attention on our part asthe Chinese are willing to devote to it.
And that seems to be essentiallyinfinite attention and care and
pains and imagination.
Again, as currently configured,are the Pentagon and
(13:15):
the State Department up for this?
Just managing that one point of contact->> Condoleezza Rice: Just managing
that one point of contact, andwe'll come to the problem of overreach,
the fact that we have somany of these, right?
But let me just say a word about Taiwan,
one of the things that'sbeen concerning to me, and
it's something we've been trying to dosomething about at the Hoover institution.
(13:38):
Is that it's almost as if the thinking inthe Pentagon and in Washington is just
such blunt thinking, it's gonna bean amphibious landing on Taiwan.
The military people will tell you thatlooks like D-day times 100, Right?
China has many,
many other options vis a vis Taiwanbecause they don't have to occupy Taiwan.
They just have to change the politicsin Taiwan till it looks like Hong Kong.
(14:02):
And so that, you know, everybodytalked about one country, two systems.
When Hong Kong was given backto China by the British,
well, it became one country, one system.
And so what the Chinese would do,I think, for Taiwan, is to try to put so
much pressure that you have a very proChinese government in Taiwan, and then
(14:25):
just slowly but surely, it erodes Chineseindependence, Taiwan's independence.
Again, correct me if I'm wrong about this, but
my observation on Hong Kong.
A few hundred thousand people left whenthe Chinese got rough on Hong Kong.
But the business establishment, as faras I can count it, I'm not an expert,
(14:46):
you are.
Jimmy Lai is in prison andMartin Li is under house arrests,
that is two members of the Hong Kongbusiness establishment that stood
up to Beijing and everybody else,in effect, cut a deal for now.
>> Condoleezza Rice (15:01):
For now.
>> Peter Robinson (15:02):
Well, so why couldn't the Chinese say, look,
we did it in Hong Kong?
These people in Taiwanare business people,
they'll come to an accommodationonce we tighten up the situation.
Isn't that a reasonable fear,or is there a difference?
>> Condoleezza Rice (15:15):
I think there is a difference, and
I think Hong Kong was always special insome way, and I don't know that there
was a Hong Kong identity in the waythat there's a Taiwan identity.
They did a poll not too long ago, and
70% of Taiwanese do not thinkof themselves as Chinese.
They think of themselves as Taiwanese.
>> Peter Robinson (15:34):
That's a very basic fact.
>> Condoleezza Rice (15:36):
And that's a very different way of relating to the mainland,
but the mainland may intendto test that proposition.
And what I think we have to do is tofigure out how we deter the all out
military attack, but how we alsorespond when you have something like
the exercises that China hasjust been carrying out around.
(15:59):
Taiwan because they don't likewhat the president of Taiwan said.
We saw it when Nancy Pelosimade her visit there,
kind of denial exercises, quarantine.
We just need to expand our thinkingabout what we might be facing,
because at some point, if those kinds oftactics are employed, where do we respond?
(16:19):
When do we respond?
It becomes kind of salami tactics, and
that's what I worryabout more with Taiwan.
>> Peter Robinson (16:26):
We'll come to this, but
one answer is just forgetabout the whole problem.
We'll come to that.>> Condoleezza Rice: We'll come to that.
I want to at least touch on Russia and Iran.
February 2022, Russia invades Ukraine,it fails to subdue the entire country.
But as of today, Russia occupies abouta fifth of Ukrainian territory, and
the conflict has settledinto a war of attrition.
(16:48):
I mean, the fundamental dynamicsare not all that different from
the First World War.
Trench warfare, effectively.
The Russians, since the war began,since the invasion in February 2022,
the Russians have lost 120,000 dead andhalf a million wounded,
according to a Defensedepartment spokesman.
(17:10):
Russian losses in just the first year ofthe war, and now we're into the second,
of course.
In just the first year of war,
exceeded the total of all sovietlosses since World War II combined.
>> Condoleezza Rice (17:23):
Yeah.
>> Peter Robinson (17:24):
Putin has just taken more losses than Stalin, Khrushchev,
Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernenko,and Gorbachev combined.
>> Condoleezza Rice (17:36):
Yeah.
>> Peter Robinson (17:37):
What does he think he's doing?
What is in his head?
>> Condoleezza Rice (17:41):
What's in his head is he cannot lose this war.
What's in his head is Russian,
the Russian empire cannottolerate an independent Ukraine.
And he is doing it in a really quitegruesome way, because actually the British
numbers are higher than that,they're closer to 600,000 wounded.
But whether it's 500 or 600,five or 600,000 casualties,
(18:05):
whatever it is, they're not those blondboys from St. Petersburg and Moscow.
These are the poor kids from Dagestan.
These are the prisoners.
They're throwing unarmed, untrained youngmen, just cannon fodder at the front.
And in doing so,they simply overwhelm the numbers.
(18:28):
Russia is depending on something,he's always had mass to just
overwhelm a Ukrainian nation thatjust doesn't have that many people.
And that's what's in his head.
Eventually, the Ukrainianswill have to cry uncle,
because I can just keep throwing people.
>> Peter Robinson (18:44):
If the game is attrition, he can win.
>> Condoleezza Rice (18:45):
If the game is attrition, he can win it.
And that's what he thinks.
I will say this, the eastern part ofUkraine, it's a tough fight right now.
The Russians are making slow gains,they've made slow gains toward
even some relatively strategicplaces in the Donbass region.
(19:06):
But let's not forget whatthe Ukrainians have done.
Not only have they frustrated the ideathat you're just gonna overthrow
the Ukrainian government andinstall a pro-Moscow government,
they don't even have a navy,the Ukrainians.
And they have pushed the Russian Navyback from Sevastopol in the Black Sea.
Because they've beenable to use drones and
(19:28):
technology to threaten the Russian Navy.
As a result, thanks to their work andsome help from the Romanians and others,
they've been able to keep grain shipmentsgoing now through the Black Sea.
It's pretty remarkable.
And so the real question is, let's saythat it becomes something of a stalemate.
(19:51):
Nobody's gonna move too much in the next,in a couple of months,
nobody will move because it's permafrost,nobody will move.
We get to May or June, andit looks pretty much like it does now.
At that point, Ukraine needs tomake a decision about how much more
it wants to throw treasure andblood at this particular region.
(20:16):
But it's actually not a decision forus to make.
It's a decision for
the Ukrainians to make because theyhave achieved an enormous amount.
And the question for me,is there a pathway to
a prosperous Ukraine, a free Ukraine,
a secure Ukraine,even if there's a frozen conflict?
(20:39):
And one of the questionsthat will be asked of us is,
what will we do forthe security of Ukraine going forward?
And that's gonna be a harddiscussion inside the United States.
But I think some combination ofthe Ukrainians holding hostage,
some of what Russia cares about, forinstance, those naval bases and the like.
>> Peter Robinson (21:01):
So the parallel, cold war, we keep going, Cold War, the present,
there are parallels, they only go so far,but the parallel there might be Korea.
>> Condoleezza Rice (21:08):
Or Germany.
>> Peter Robinson (21:09):
We lost North Korea.
>> Condoleezza Rice (21:10):
Yeah. >> Peter Robinson
the rise of South Korea still representsone of the stunning accomplices- stunning
accomplices Of the 20th century.
Yes, and just one other thing.
People talk about a negotiated solution.
It's hard for me to see a negotiatedsolution to this war with Mr. Putin there.
>> Peter Robinson (21:27):
Is it? All right.
He's 60, hold on a moment.
He is- 72.
72, and the average life expectancy forRussian males is 67.
We can wait this guy out.
>> Condoleezza Rice (21:38):
We can wait him out, although the average life expectancy is
not the life expectancy ofpeople who live in the Kremlin.
>> Peter Robinson (21:45):
Who live in dachas.
>> Condoleezza Rice (21:46):
Yes, [LAUGH] Exactly.
>> Peter Robinson (21:48):
He has pretty good medical help.
>> Condoleezza Rice (21:49):
Yes, you are right.
>> Peter Robinson (21:51):
Iran, from your article in foreign affairs,
Tehran's proxies are a constantsource of trouble.
The Houthis in danger shippingin the Red Sea, do they ever,
Hamas recklessly launcheda war with Israel.
Hezbollah in Lebanon threatens to widenthat war into a regional conflagration.
Add to this observation an observationmade this past summer by your
(22:11):
successor as secretary of state,Antony Blinken.
Iran's breakout time, that is,the time needed to produce enough
weapons grade material fornuclear weapons, is now, and here,
I'm quoting Secretary Blinken, quote,is now probably one or two weeks.
>> Condoleezza Rice (22:29):
Yeah.
>> Peter Robinson (22:30):
Not years.
>> Condoleezza Rice (22:31):
Yes.
>> Peter Robinson (22:32):
Weeks, is, so, again, in this part of our conversation,
I'm trying to gauge the size of the threathere or the magnitude the danger.
Is the regime in Iran a problem to bemanaged or a threat we must eliminate?
>> Condoleezza Rice (22:47):
Well, this is written before the events that we've just seen
in the Middle East.
>> Peter Robinson (22:53):
Yes. >> Condoleezza Rice
I have to say what the Israelishave achieved in weakening Hamas,
I don't know how much they'veweakened Hamas, but quite a lot.
It has to be a lot, right?
>> Condoleezza Rice (23:04):
And then there's Hezbollah.
If you're a Hezbollah terrorist,aren't you looking at the other Hezbollah
terrorists and saying,which one of you is an Israel mole?
Because to penetrate thatorganization to know where
Nasrallah was,to then kill his second in command.
To be able to put a deviceinside of their walkie talkies.
(23:30):
And this is revolutionary,because Hezbollah, George Tenet,
the CIA director, once told us Hezbollahis the A Team of terrorism, he said.
And by the way, they run drugs downinto Latin America, they own Beirut.
And Israel has really put them nowon their back foot in a huge way.
(23:52):
Now, it doesn't mean there aren't risks,they can still fire rockets and the like,
but they have got to bewondering what hit them.
And Exposes Iran, because Iran hasbeen a somewhat cowardly state.
They've worked through these proxies,right?
Well, Hamas is in trouble,Hezbollah is really in trouble.
(24:13):
My view would be, why not put the Houthison the list and take care of this problem
while we're at it, maybe that'ssomething we should be considering.
And then you're the Iranian regime,you're exposed.
By the way, who wants to be in one ofyour guest houses when Haniyeh was
blown up in a guest house onan Iranian government installation?
>> Peter Robinson (24:35):
Could I try a provocative formulation just to see what
you do with it?
>> Condoleezza Rice (24:40):
Yeah.
>> Peter Robinson (24:41):
All that you said, add to that that the prime minister of Israel
has had to manage relationswith this country.
He's had to manage an extremely fractious,difficult domestic, political environment.
His party has a very narrowmajority in the Knesset.
And all of that said in the last month orso, he's changed the dynamics of.
(25:05):
Yeah, he changed it.
As we speak today in this year, 2024, Iknow you don't like the great man theory,
is Bibi Netanyahu the greatestman in the world?
>> Condoleezza Rice (25:16):
Well, that system, I would say, I know Bibi Netanyahu, and
look, he's something else.
[LAUGH] He's not the easiest personto deal with, but what he has done,
what that system has done,give credit, not just to Bibi,
give credit to Mossad,give credit to [CROSSTALK].
>> Peter Robinson (25:32):
This is a professional question, almost a technical question.
So when Hamas attacked a lot of people,including the person you're talking to,
one of the reasons I felt so depressed,of course, it was a horrible massacre, but
also our own interests.
I had been thinking that Mossad isthe best intelligence agency in the world.
They've got Tehran.
Tehran may be two weeks awayfrom a nuclear breakup, but
(25:53):
it's also a very unhealthy environment inwhich to be a nuclear physicist in Tehran.
Mossad has this one,and then we think, no,
maybe Mossad was neverwhat we thought they were.
So we have this failure,intelligence failure, at least in part,
an intelligence failure on October 7.
And now we have, they know where everybig shot is, they can plant these pagers.
(26:17):
We're back to the Mossad is invincible.
>> Condoleezza Rice (26:20):
Exactly.
>> Peter Robinson (26:20):
So which of these is true?
How do you weigh them as a professional?
>> Condoleezza Rice (26:22):
Do they may both be true?
I don't know, and eventually,there'll be a kind of reckoning for
what happened with the strategic failures,the intelligence failure on October 7th.
Some people say, look,they just didn't believe it possible,
the failure of imaginationthat we sometimes talk about.
But leaving that aside, what they havedone with Hezbollah is remarkable,
(26:44):
and it will do two very important things.
One, we talked about Iran has got tobe wondering, my goodness, our best and
brightest have just been taken down.
But secondly,it really does potentially free Lebanon.
Hezbollah has held Lebanon hostage fordecades.
>> Peter Robinson (27:03):
Decades.
>> Condoleezza Rice (27:04):
Decades, I was the secretary in 2006,
I negotiated resolution 1701.
Now, 1701 was supposed to haveHezbollah go back across the Latani.
They were supposed to flowthe Lebanese army in,
everybody now thinks the UN peacekeepersthere have not been very good.
I would be the first to agree with that.
(27:24):
We tried very hard to get UN peacekeeperswho would be under a UN security
blanket to be able to actually challengeHezbollah, we couldn't get it.
So now Israel has changedthe nature of things,
maybe Lebanon would finally have a chance.
Hezbollah assassinatedRafiq Hariri in 2005.
>> Peter Robinson (27:46):
The then prime minister.
>> Condoleezza Rice (27:48):
The then prime minister who really,
he was a bright light for Lebanon.
They haven't allowed a presidentialelection in Lebanon for
the last two years.
So when people think about the changein balance, think about Hezbollah
also not being able to dominateLebanon in the way that they have.
But I wanna come back to Iran.
I know that people talk about the progressof the Iranian nuclear program.
(28:13):
I was never much for negotiating withthe Iranians about this if they were
going to be allowed to reprocessthe fuel that they have now done.
That said, they have, we believe,the components, the fuel,
the bomb design, the delivery vehicles,>> Peter Robinson: We now know they have
ballistic missiles,because they've loosed them on Israel.
The question is, can they put it all together?
(28:35):
And in nuclear weapons, not so easy.
Not so easy to deliver, not soeasy to get the right level of explosion.
And so I think one thing you couldsay to the Iranians is, all right,
we know where you live andwe know what you've got.
Don't even think about trying tomake it a usable nuclear weapon.
And that's a little bit different thansaying, they're so close to the fuel,
(28:57):
they're so close to the bomb design,they're so close.
There's still a step that they have totake to be an actual nuclear power,
and it may be given their weaknessesthat you want to do that.
It says something, too, Peter,because, one of the lines that
I use from the Cold War, andit speaks to China, Russia, and to Iran.
(29:20):
George Kennan,in his famous telegram said,
we have to deny them the easycourse of external expansion, until
the day that they have to turn to dealwith their own internal contradictions.
>> Peter Robinson (29:37):
February 1946, if I recall correctly, and
he's writing about the Soviet Union.
>> Condoleezza Rice (29:41):
And I can tell you that being in that White House for
George HW Bush in 1989, 1990,1991,
it was the Soviet Union having to turn todeal with its own internal contradictions,
having been held in check for all ofthose years by American power, largely.
And maybe that's the lesson,that if this isn't a Cold War,
(30:04):
there is still onereally important lesson,
which is that these regimesare ultimately, fundamentally weak.
Ultimately, not today, not tomorrow,China is not the Soviet Union.
Let's not scare ourselves to death.
Let's let's make surethat they can't expand,
let's make sure that theycan't push American power out,
(30:24):
let's make sure that they can'twin the technological arms race.
And maybe the day will comewhen some young specialist for
a future American president is talkingabout the day when they had to deal with
their own internal contradictions.
>> Peter Robinson (30:38):
Okay, lovely, but now I'm going to tell you why that's
just sentimentalism, and you're all wrong.
And you're partly onto it yourself,I'm quoting you from foreign affairs.
After World War II,
the United States was a confident countrywith unbridled optimism about the future.
The United States is a different countrynow, I'm quoting you to yourself.
>> Condoleezza Rice (31:00):
Yes. >> Peter Robinson
a different country now, exhausted byeight decades of international leadership,
some of it successful and appreciated andsome dismissed as failure.
Okay, give me a moment ortwo to set this up.
At a minimum, this is an impulse thatanimates some very large portion
of the country and some very largeportion of both political parties now.
(31:24):
We're broke.
When Ronald Reagan tookoffice during the Cold War,
federal debt amounted to 30% of GDP.
Today, that figure is 120%,
a four-time increase in debtas a proportion of GDP.
Our military, totally inadequate.
Former secretary of defense, Robert Gates,
(31:45):
writing just this last fall,our army is shrinking,
our navy is decommissioning warshipsfaster than new ones can be built.
Our air force has stagnated in size, and
our defense industrial base cannotproduce major weapon systems.
In the number needed, or,as we have seen in Ukraine,
the vast amount of munitions required,close quote.
(32:09):
There are different ways of interpretingthe slogan, put America first.
Yeah.
>> Peter Robinson (32:14):
And one way of interpreting the slogan is, yes,
pursue our interests.
And pursuing our interests leadsto pursuing our interests abroad.
But another way of putting itis we're broke, we're exhausted,
our southern border is a mess,our politics are polarized.
We have no choice.
(32:34):
Let the rest of the worldtake care of itself.
Madam Secretary?
>> Condoleezza Rice (32:38):
Yes.
I am the one who wrote exactly those wordsabout this not very confident America.
>> Peter Robinson (32:45):
Right.
>> Condoleezza Rice (32:46):
But it isn't beyond the possibility
of humans to correctmany of these problems.
And so when you talk about our debt,we know that some answers to the debt
are gonna be very hard, but we'realso going to actually have to do it,
not just to be a factor abroad, butfor our own health and well being.
(33:10):
I mentioned the people who gotleft behind by globalization,
the people that J.D.Vance wrote about in Hillbilly Elegy.
Yes, we have to do something about that.
We have to educate them,we have to give them skills.
Yes, we do have to revitalizeour defense industries.
But we don't have to.
We have a huge defense budget.
(33:32):
We don't have to just do it by buyingall the same things we've been buying.
There are companies right here inthe Silicon Valley that have important
answers to some of ourmost dire military needs.
We've talked about drones.
We've talked about new technologies.
If we could just getthe Pentagon to organize,
to spend the $800 billion better, thatwould be a really important step forward.
(33:53):
And so it's not beyond us tosolve some of these problems and
I think we better do it.
Because the real answer to you, Peter, iswhy not let the rest of the world do it?
I say this in, great powersdon't mind their own business.
They don't.
They shape the world andthe great powers right now that
(34:15):
are in line if we leave the playing field,not Germany,
not France, it's Russia and it's China.
And do you really wanna live ina world shaped by Russia and China?
I look at this alliance ofthe three plus one, and I call it,
cuz the North Koreans,nobody really trusts very much.
>> Peter Robinson (34:38):
China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea.
>> Condoleezza Rice (34:40):
And North Korea, right.
>> Peter Robinson (34:41):
On a good day. >> Condoleezza Rice
All right.
>> Condoleezza Rice (34:43):
And I say to myself, first of all, they have a lot of contra,
they can do a lot of damage, right?
But they have a lot ofcontradictions among them, too.
You really think that hose xenophobes inRussia are thrilled to see the Chinese
dominating Central Asia, which usedto be a part of the Soviet Union?
You think they aren't a little unnervedby what's happening to Iran and
its proxies in the Middle East today?
(35:04):
I just saw Vladimir Putinwent to Pyongyang, right?
That, by the way,turned the South Koreans on a dime.
They're furious.
But it appears that little Olga andlittle Alexei, Russian children,
are going to go to Summercamp in Pyongyang.
>> Peter Robinson (35:21):
So it's real. >> Condoleezza Rice
That'll be fun.
So let's recognize that we havesome problems, some weaknesses.
We also have some incredible strengths.
We have, of course, an economy thatis still the envy of the world.
We have technological and capability and
innovation that just keeps,despite everything else.
(35:43):
And I just wanna make one more point.
Of course, of course.
>> Condoleezza Rice (35:45):
We have an energy bounty that if we don't mess it up,
we will be able torestructure the landscape for
one of the most importantelements of national growth and
international growth,which is the energy picture.
So we have our strengths,we have our troubles, but
the thing that we cannot dois cede the ground to others,
(36:08):
because we're not gonna like that groundif the others are the dominant power.
>> Peter Robinson (36:13):
You are addressing what I myself take to be the deep question
in the current election.
We'll come to the candidates in a moment.
>> Condoleezza Rice (36:21):
Yeah.
>> Peter Robinson (36:22):
This is just me talking, so
I haven't written this one down.
I'd just like to see what you make of it.
We've been talking againabout the Cold War, and
we have there a story of two decades.
In the 1970s in this country wherea period of economic stagnation.
>> Condoleezza Rice (36:39):
Right.
>> Peter Robinson (36:41):
A period of one small defeat after another,
as against the Soviets,they expanded their navy,
they took over countries in Russia, andyou had all these small defeats together.
And over the course of that decade,they have the initiative, and
we're on the defensive.
And then in the 1980s,we get economic renewal,
(37:02):
we get restoration of national morale.
>> Condoleezza Rice (37:07):
Yes. >> Peter Robinson
leadership, of course.
And I'm not saying these things are easy,but in one decade, we go from the capture.
The Soviets invade Afghanistan in 1979,
biggest land operation sincethe end of the Second World War.
And the Iranians capture Americansin the American embassy and
hold them hostage for a year.
(37:28):
And in 1989, just ten years later,
which is not that long in the life ofa human being, let alone of a nation,
the United States andour allies have undergone such a renewal
that the Soviet Union folds up,the Berlin Wall falls.
Exactly.
>> Peter Robinson (37:46):
Okay, so the question is,
I really do take this as the deepquestion in this election.
Are we washed up?
Are the Chinese right?
Was that renewal, a kind of lastefflorescence of patriotism and
american energy and know how?
Or is it possible again?
>> Condoleezza Rice (38:05):
It is possible again.
And it was a recognitionof our strengths and
the needs to mobilize them andtheir weaknesses.
I've always still thought that.
>> Peter Robinson (38:15):
It was hard analysis.
It wasn't luck and it wasn't science.
>> Condoleezza Rice (38:18):
It wasn't.
But I remember as a youngInternational Relations person,
Soviet specialist, when Ronald Reagancalled the Soviet Union and
communism a sad experimenton a hapless people and
talked about the fact that they wouldn'tsurvive in that famous British.
>> Peter Robinson (38:40):
Yes, yes, yes.
>> Condoleezza Rice (38:40):
Westminster.
>> Peter Robinson (38:43):
Marxism and Leninism will end up on the ashy heap of history.
>> Condoleezza Rice (38:46):
And I remember thinking, well,
that's a kind of undiplomatic thing forthe president of the United States to say.
But you know what?
It was calling out the truth.
And we've been calling out a lot of truthslately about our own challenges and
every leader needs to do thatbecause we need to address them.
But some leader also needsto call out our strengths.
(39:09):
The extraordinary resilienceof American institutions
throughout our now 240 plus year history.
The extraordinary notion that you canbring people from all over the world and
they can somehow find that they belongin a place where it doesn't matter where
you came from,it matters where you're going.
(39:29):
The extraordinary creativity andinnovation that we have and
then to say, we need allies, right.
I do believe NATO ought to pay that 2% andwe need allies.
But democracy, for all of its challenges,
(39:50):
is not as fragile as autocracy.
I want somebody to say that.
>> Peter Robinson (39:56):
Could I?
One other, this is.
The only time you and
I get a chance to have a realconversation is in front of cameras.
So I've got these other ideasI wanna try out on you.
But I have been struckthat in some strange way,
we always talk about what an examplewe are to the rest of the world.
And for decade after decade, that turnedout to be true, and in all kinds of ways,
it's true today.
(40:17):
And we hope it will becometruer in the years to come.
But you know who's an example to us?
Ukraine.
>> Condoleezza Rice (40:24):
Yes.
>> Peter Robinson (40:25):
You know who's an example to us?
Bibi and the Mossad andthe Israeli people.
Wait a minute, if Ukraine it's a bunch oftechno savvy kids in Ukraine who've saved
their country by figuring out drones andthis patching together new technologies.
We have the best educatedtechno kids in the world.
(40:46):
What are we doing for goodness sake?
Our ability forinnovation or Bibi, I mean,
I find him an impressive figure.
>> Condoleezza Rice (40:56):
Innovation and toughness.
>> Peter Robinson (40:58):
Innovation and toughness, okay.
>> Condoleezza Rice (41:00):
They need to go.
>> Peter Robinson (41:02):
Bibi tells the truth, and he's tough.
>> Condoleezza Rice (41:04):
And let me go back to Ronald Reagan in this regard.
>> Peter Robinson (41:07):
You can do that all day with me.
>> Condoleezza Rice (41:08):
Yeah, I suspect I can.
But what Ronald Reagan understood waskind of the essence of America, right?
And how to appeal to that essence.
But Ronald Reagan would never have said,let's just mind our own business and
leave the rest of the worldto whatever happens to it.
>> Peter Robinson (41:27):
That is true.
>> Condoleezza Rice (41:27):
He just never said it,
because he also understood that theessence of America is that we're an idea,
we're not just territory, we're an idea.
And if we really believe inthe universality of that idea,
then we have to give othersaccess to that idea, so
that we are safer when there are more ofus in the world who believe in democracy.
(41:50):
Now, political scientists have actuallyshown democracies don't fight one
another, right?
>> Peter Robinson (41:55):
And that also is really true.
>> Condoleezza Rice (41:56):
That's really true, they don't send child soldiers into war,
they don't terrorize other people,they don't invade their neighbors.
Now, there is an argument aboutjust the security side of this,
the practical side of it, butit is also the American people,
(42:16):
even if a little tired ofinternational leadership.
I've always said, Peter, Americanscarry two contradictory thoughts.
One is, can't somebody else do this,for goodness sakes,
we defeated the Soviet Union.
We unified Germany, we defeated al Qaeda,can somebody else step up.
But then Americans alsocarry in their heads,
(42:39):
you mean a larger country just wantsto extinguish its smaller neighbors.
We can't let that happen, we can'tlet people be beheaded on television.
We can't do that, soif nobody else will, maybe we should.
And I've been saying thisto some who want to talk
about America first as meaning,mind our own business.
(43:02):
I say, I don't wanna be the presidentof the United States on the day when
Xi Jinping andVladimir Putin are on their victory tour.
Having defeated the greatestcollective security organization
in human history of democracies, NATO.
I don't wanna be president cuz I reallydon't wanna be the president who says,
I could have stopped that.
(43:23):
I didn't have to put an Americansoldier in harm's way to do it,
I just had to give them the means todo it themselves, but I didn't do that.
And now Putin andXi Jinping are the powers in the world,
the American people aren't gonna like it.
And any political leader who believesthat they are going to skate by
(43:43):
on that day needs to think again.
>> Peter Robinson (43:46):
Right, okay, last question.
I mean, you and I have now cheeredeach other up, but of course,
we have to be very careful about saying,this, of course, will prevail.
Of course, we're Americans,no, hard work analysis, okay?
So as we sit here talking,we have only days remaining
until the election,let me set this up, listen to this.
(44:11):
Raphael Cohen of RAND,writing last year, for
years, American defense strategy arguedfor a two-war construct, namely that
the United States should have sufficientmilitary capability to fight and
win two simultaneous warsin different theaters.
Over the last decade, as Americas militaryshrank in size and its adversaries
(44:31):
grew increasingly capable, the UnitedStates backed off such aspirations.
So today we face, our military seemsto believe that were capable of
fighting one major war and some kindof defensive action in a minor theater.
One and a half theaters,okay, listen to this count.
(44:52):
Ukraine and the Baltic,Israel in the Eastern Med, Taiwan, and
the North Pacific, that's three.
And all three are really dangerous, okay?
Let's go through it, your advice, yourforeign policy advice for Kamala Harris.
>> Condoleezza Rice (45:09):
If you really do want the most lethal military in the world,
are you prepared to increasethe defense budget?
>> Peter Robinson (45:16):
Okay, your advice for former President Donald Trump.
>> Condoleezza Rice (45:22):
If you really do want to follow up on
that 2% contribution in NATO,I'm all for it.
But remember how important alliesreally are to the United States and
to the free world.
>> Peter Robinson (45:38):
Okay, and here's the last question.
Your advice for voters, early ballotingis down this year from four years ago,
there are ways of interpreting that.
But one possible reason for that maybe that Americans are actually taking
this one especially seriously,taking time to think this over.
(46:02):
So when it comes to foreign policy,what should the voters be weighing as
between Kamala Harris and the Democratsand Donald Trump and the Republicans?
>> Condoleezza Rice (46:13):
Look, I don't wanna personalize it to candidates because
I think it's the same question for
anybody who wants to bepresident of the United States.
And, that is, you see that there'sa chaotic and difficult world out there.
You American voter, you readthe newspapers, you see it on television.
(46:33):
Do you really believe that,that chaos is going to subside or
get better if America withdraws?
Do you really believe that?
And if you don't believe that, ask hardquestions of the people who want to lead
you as president of the United Statesas to what they're gonna do about it.
How are they gonna bring all of theseelements of American power, our allies,
(46:57):
our still considerable military power,our energy resources,
how are they gonna bring them together?
Our innovation, our creativity,how are they gonna bring them
together in a way that servesAmericans who felt they were left out,
so that the American dreamstill exists for everybody.
But also challenges all ofus to go into that world and
(47:20):
to try to make somesense out of this chaos,
cuz that's what we did after World War II.
We made sense out of the chaos.
Now, you talk about the two anda half, it was two and
a half wars when I was in,it was down to two and a half by then.
>> Peter Robinson (47:38):
[CROSSTALK] one and half now.
>> Condoleezza Rice (47:39):
All right, but it's really interesting that everybody talks
about having to fight a war here,fighting a war there.
And I'm gonna go back to,I worked for George H.W Bush, and
I always felt that he wasexactly the right person at
the time to put the Germans inthe lead on German unification.
He was a humble person who put himselfin the background and never wanted to,
(47:59):
To embarrass Gorbachev.
And therefore, I think, reallydelivered at the end of the Cold War.
He'd been set up by Ronald Reagan,who had a certain
audaciousness about him to saythat it is peace through strength.
He didn't say war through strength.
He understood that if you werestrong enough militarily,
(48:22):
if you could deter, you might neverhave to fight any of those wars.
And he understood, too,that if you could call out
the weaknesses of a regime thatis terrified of its own people,
which is what authoritarians are,then ultimately you could
put that regime into a situationwhere it had to face its people.
(48:45):
I'll tell you one final story.
We were in,I was with President Bush in Romania.
>> Peter Robinson (48:50):
Which Bush are we with?
>> Condoleezza Rice (48:51):
George W Bush.
>> Peter Robinson (48:52):
W Bush.
>> Condoleezza Rice (48:53):
In 2005, Romania had become a member of NATO.
We were there to celebrate, andthere was a square that they took us into,
and they said, this square wasfilled with 250,000 people.
When Ceausescu, the communist leaderof Romania, came into the square and
he was exhorting, you'd had revolutionsin Czechoslovakia and Poland and Hungary,
(49:15):
and he was exhorting the people forwhat he'd done for them.
And all of a sudden,one old lady Yelled Liard.
And then ten people Yelled Liard.
And then 100 people, andthen a thousand people, and
now 100,000 people are yelling liar.
And all of a sudden,Ceausescu knows that the fear
(49:36):
that he has held overhis people has reversed.
The fear is gone, and now he's just faceto face with the anger of his people.
Authoritarians know thatwhat I've always called
the Ceausescu moment isultimately there for them,
because that fear that theyhold will one day break.
(49:59):
That's what Ronald Reagan understood, and
he understood that you just had to,again, to quote George Kennan,
deny them the course of external expansionuntil that day comes was our job.
>> Peter Robinson (50:12):
Would you close by reading a passage from your article in
foreign affairs?
>> Condoleezza Rice (50:17):
Yes. >> Peter Robinson
The future will be determined by the alliance of
Democratic Free Market states,or it will be determined by
the revisionist powers harkingback to a day of territorial
conquest abroad andauthoritarian practices at home.
(50:41):
There is simply no other option.
>> Peter Robinson (50:45):
Condoleezza Rice, former Secretary of State,
Director of the Hoover Institution,thank you.
>> Condoleezza Rice (50:49):
It's a pleasure.
>> Peter Robinson (50:50):
For Uncommon Knowledge, the Hoover Institution and Fox Nation,
I'm Peter Robinson.
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