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THE GLOBAL POLITICO

Condoleezza Rice: The Full Transcript

By SUSAN B. GLASSER | May 15, 2017

John Shinkle/POLITICO

Susan B. Glasser is POLITICO’s chief international affairs columnist. Her new

podcast, The Global Politico, comes out Mondays. Subscribe here. Follow her on THE FRIDAY COVER
Twitter @sbg1.

Subscribe to The Global POLITICO on iTunes here. |

Subscribe via Stitcher.

“Words do matter. I hope that we will say even more

that the world is a dark place when the United States
of America is not involved. It’s a dark place when we
don’t stand up for those who just want to have the same basic values that
we have.”
Read more
Susan Glasser: I’m Susan
Glasser, and that was Condoleezza
Rice, the former secretary of state
and our guest this week on The
AD
Global Politico. Rice has a new
book out, Democracy: Stories
from the Long Road to Freedom,
and in it she’s pushing what can
only be described as a foreign
policy that is the exact opposite of that of President Donald Trump and the
new secretary of state Rice personally recommended to Trump, former
Exxon chief Rex Tillerson. She set out to write the book in a very different
time — but of course it’s being received in the post-Trump world, when
there are urgent questions not just about the fate of democracy around the
world, but right here in America.

Rice was always the soul of diplomatic discretion in public even when she
was George W Bush’s top foreign policy adviser amid the controversies of
America’s post 9/11 wars. But Trump has clearly put her in a bind — one
that to me sort of encapsulates the foreign policy challenge of the
Republican Party these days. Do you hit Trump publicly or influence him
privately? Cheer his evolution — or warn of his failings?

We spent about an hour together the other day for this interview in the
midst of the unfolding uproar over Trump’s firing of FBI director James
Comey, and she had lots to say about the American institutions she
believes are constraining the president, why Vladimir Putin hacked the
election — and the backstory as to why she thought her golfing buddy,
oilman Rex Tillerson might make a good secretary of state. I thank you for
listening to The Global Politico, and hope you enjoy this conversation.

Well, I’m Susan Glasser and welcome back. This week’s guest is the great
Condoleezza Rice, secretary of state, who is joining us here in Washington,
D.C., where she’s back on a book tour for her book Democracy. She
started writing this in a completely different context than the one in which
it is appearing and by the way, I am a good student. I’ve read the book. So
I promise we’re not just going to—

Rice: Thank you. I really appreciate that. [LAUGHTER]

Glasser: And by the way, it is not only a very timely book to look at
democracy but it really takes us on a tour around the world in a way that
you don’t see a lot of former high-ranking public officials looking at what
happened to democracy in Colombia, democracy in Africa. And so it’s a
good read among many other things. But it is timely and we would be
remiss if we didn’t start with actually the headline that just came out.
Right before our conversation, my friend Carlos reviewed your book more
or less positively in the Washington Post. The headline that they put on
the piece, I think, tells you a little bit about this situation. It basically says,
“Condoleezza Rice’s book is a repudiation of Donald Trump’s ‘America
First’ philosophy.”

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I don’t know if you view it that way but certainly, that is the context in
which it’s being read today.

Rice: Well, since I started the book more than three years ago, there was
no America First policy to which to react and repudiate and indeed, I think
of it as really helping Americans to understand the great sweep of
America’s involvement in democratic transitions, the promotion of
democracy, trying to help us understand it from the context of our own
democracy and the very long road that it took us to get to a stable
democracy. In fact, before I get to today’s context, people have asked me,
“Well, why did you want to write a book about democracy?” I think at
some level, I’ve always wanted to write it because as a child, I grew up in
Birmingham, Alabama, when black citizens did not experience full
democracy.

We couldn’t go to a movie theater or to a restaurant and indeed, I have one

event in mind or one time in mind that really sort of encapsulates it for
me. I was being picked up from school by my Uncle Alto, my mother’s
brother, and I was probably 6 years old or so. It was Election Day, the day
that George Wallace was about to be elected the governor of Alabama. And
there were long lines of black people standing ready to vote and I said to
my uncle—I said, “So Alto, if all of those people vote, then Wallace can’t
win.” Because I knew in my own 6-year-old way that he wasn’t good for
black people, and my uncle said, “Well, no.” He said, “We’re still a
minority. He’s going to win.” And I said, “So why do they bother?”

And he said something that I’ll never forget. He said, “Because they know
that one day, that vote will matter.” And I then have watched long lines of
Afghans and Iraqis and Liberians waiting to vote because they know that
one day that vote will matter. And so this mysterious thing that we call
democracy where people place their aspirations and their fears in the
hands of institutions is really quite a remarkable story and it’s remarkable
in America and it’s remarkable across the world.

Glasser: So one thing that’s a big takeaway obviously, is that your faith is
undiminished even at a time when there are lots of people here in the
United States and around the world, including in the West for the first
time we are saying—in certainly my adult lifetime, we are questioning
some basic questions about what we assume to be the march of progress
and the march of democracy. But look: Donald Trump. Nobody right now,
except for you, is thinking about your childhood in segregated America.
It’s an extraordinary journey… but is this a step backward? Are you trying
to tell us it’s okay if Donald Trump is president because our democracy, in
the long run, will be fine?

Rice: I’m trying to tell Americans that they were bequeathed the best
institutions that anybody has ever been given and that one of the
characteristics of those institutions was that they had had a constrained
executive. The Founding Fathers were quite concerned about executive
power. They didn’t ever want the presidency to just be about whoever
happens to occupy that office. They created Article I, the Congress, and my
good friend, David Kennedy, a Pulitzer Prize-winning American historian,
talks about the fact that most of the discussion of the government in the
Constitution is actually about the legislature and most of it about the
executive is how to get rid of him if necessary.

And so it was constrained and it was constrained not just by the legislature
but by courts, which can rule on constitutionality. A free press, which they
respected. Governors, federalism, and then civil society. And so the
American presidency has to be understood in the context of all of the
scaffolding for democracy. Because democracy is built for disruption.
People are going to challenge the institutions, but the institutions I have
absolute faith in, and whatever we’re going through now, I have
tremendous faith in them and that they’re going to hold.

Glasser: I don’t want to dwell too much on whatever it is we’re going

through but I did see Charles Krauthammer on TV yesterday saying,
“Okay, we’re going through something at the FBI and I have a candidate
for you, Congress and Mr. President.: Condoleezza Rice would be the
perfect new director of the FBI.” In his view, because of your background
in Russia at a time when this investigation of the president potentially and
certainly his team is unfolding at a time when there are questions about
the independence and integrity of our institutions. Are you prepared to
serve, if asked?

Rice: I appreciate that very much. Anything I can do from California I’m
prepared to do. I’m a very happy professor. We will get good people into
these positions -- but we do need to know what happened. Something very
objectionable happened here. The Russians tried to interfere in our
elections. Now, they have tried to interfere in our elections for a long time.
It’s just that with cyber, they have a more efficient way of doing it and they
have a broader way of doing it. I am furious that they tried to but I’ve also
thought that Vladimir Putin was kind of an eye-for-an-eye person, would
have interfered because, in his view, we called his elections fraudulent in
2012, which they were.

And now, he’s going to demonstrate that he can undermine our confidence
in our elections. So I would have preferred to say, “We know you did it,
Russia. At a time of our choosing, we will punish that.” But we have
confidence in our institutions. We have confidence in our electoral system
and because I can just imagine that in the Kremlin, there’s a lot of kind of
chuckling about how much they have challenged and caused a lack of
confidence in our electoral system.

THE GLOBAL POLITICO

Condi Rice on Trump: ‘Words Do Matter’
By SUSAN B. GLASSER

Glasser: President Trump just yesterday hosted in the Oval Office a day
after firing James Comey, Sergey Lavrov, who you know well.

Rice: Yes, I do.

Glasser: You and I have talked about him before… and the Russian
ambassador to the United States. It’s the first time he has been welcomed
in the Oval Office of the United States since 2013. President Putin
personally, according to my reporting, asked President Trump to receive
him. President Obama had refused repeated requests in recent years
because of the Russian takeover of Crimea and because of the various
other actions in the last few years by Russia. Was that a mistake?

Rice: Well, Putin received Rex Tillerson, so I have no problem with

President Trump receiving Sergey Lavrov. I hope the messages were pretty
strong that we are never going to accept the forceful incorporation of
Crimea. Susan, you will know that for 45 years, we did not accept the
forceful incorporation of the Baltic states. We couldn’t do anything about
it but we didn’t accept it. We didn’t legitimize it and then when conditions
changed, the Baltic states were among our best friends and now members
of NATO because they remembered that. And so you can send long-term
messages but I think because President Putin had received Secretary
Tillerson it was probably appropriate for President Trump to receive
Sergey Lavrov.

Glasser: Let’s get back to the theme of democracy. You mentioned

Secretary Tillerson. Just last week, he gave a speech, a very unusual
speech for a secretary of state to give to the employees of the State
Department, in which he appeared to separate American values like
freedom and democracy from American interests. He said, “Even though
those values are constant, such as our support for human rights, there are
times when overriding interests dictate that we should set such values
aside.” In effect, declaring that it will stand for liberty only when the costs
of doing so are sufficiently low. You recommended Secretary Tillerson to
President Trump, which is interesting and I want to get your back story on
that. Is that your view? Do you agree with that?

Rice: Well, I did recommend him and I think he’s doing a fine job as
secretary of state. I read the speech with a little bit greater nuance than the
way I think it’s been portrayed. Because I remember very well, when I
went to Egypt and I gave that speech about democracy in 2005 in Cairo.
And after I gave the speech, people were saying, “Well, then how can you
meet with Mubarak?” Well, because sometimes in America’s interest or for
policy, you have to meet with people who don’t share your values, who
might even assault your values, but the United States of America isn’t an
NGO, and so yes, we sometimes, for policy reasons, have to deal with
people who don’t share our values. I think we’re always better, in the long
run, to remember that we are safest, most secure and most prosperous
when our values and our interests are inextricably linked.

We just need to remember the history here. We need to remember that we

took a risk that a democratic Germany was never going to invade its
neighbors again and it didn’t. We took a risk that a democratic Japan was
going to be a peaceful part of Asia, and it is. And so remembering that in
the long run, we are always better served by countries that share our
values is extremely important, even if one day you’re having to sit across
from Muammar Qadafi, as I had to do as secretary of state.

Glasser: Well, he, as we all know, had a fascination with you.

Rice: Now why did I bring that one up? [LAUGHTER]

Glasser: You brought it up. You can go read those cables yourselves, but
why did he have this fascination?

Rice: I really don’t know. I just remember that—

Glasser: He wrote this song too?

Rice: Yeah, I remember “Black Flower in the White House.” It was one of
the weirder moments as secretary of state. That’s when you think, “Okay,
time to get out of here and go to Algeria.”

Glasser: Remember, it was Donald Trump who rented him the tent for
$200,000.

Rice: Well, somebody had to rent him a tent, I guess. [LAUGHTER]

Glasser: Okay, you’ve just made actually a super important point,

though, about this Tillerson speech, and what does it mean and how
should we interpret it? I think it gets to the question of the bully pulpit and
the need or requirement, to the extent we think there is one, of the
secretary of state and of the president of the United States to be speaking
out on behalf of democracy and human rights. The president of the United
States was inaugurated; he never mentioned the word “democracy.” He
never mentioned the word “freedom.” That’s a pretty stark contrast from
President Bush’s second Inaugural.

We’ve come a long way from the words that you so articulately spoke in
your Cairo speech that you mentioned or in President Obama’s Cairo
speech. Has America changed direction?

Rice: These are early days for this administration and it is a pretty steep
learning curve for a president who has never been in government before,
never has carried those responsibilities of the presidency. It’s a learning
curve for every president but if you’re a senator, you’ve been in and
around the Oval and you know what that room means. If you are a
governor, you’ve been in and around the Oval. Certainly, if you’re the son
of a president, you’ve been in and around the Oval, you know what it
means. I see, though, a president who is beginning to feel the weight of
that office. You can’t sit at Roosevelt’s desk and not remember the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

You can’t look at Washington or Lincoln and not feel the weight of the
history of our country and all that it’s been through for democracy. When
the president decided to strike Syria, for instance, after the chemical
weapons use by the Assad regime, it was a very interesting moment
because he said, “I can’t let that stand. Syrian babies choking on chemical
weapons.” He might as well have said, “I am the president of the United
States and I can’t let that stand.” And so let’s see how this evolves. I am
looking forward to the president having a chance to go and see what
American support for small states, like Estonia and Latvia, has meant for
decades, but now as a part of NATO.

To go to a place like Israel and see what it’s like to be a democracy in a sea
of countries that would have destroyed you had it not been for your
toughness and your will. And so these are early days and I think the
president and many around him have not been in government. Let’s give it
a little time.

Glasser: Just so I understand where you’re coming from, though, on the

foreign policy, do you see that the Republican Party has changed its views
toward the role of democracy promotion and freedom and human rights in
our foreign policy? That has been associated very much with the Bush
administration. Is it still your Republican Party?

Rice: Well, I listen to a lot of our senators, whether it is—of course, John
McCain or Lindsey Graham, but also listen to Dan Sullivan sometimes talk
about these issues or listen to Joni Ernst. These are people who served for
these values and who risked their lives for these values, people who served
in the military. And so I don’t think my party is going to walk away from
the principles. And yes, George W. Bush stood for these principles but they
were probably most strongly articulated by Ronald Reagan. Because when
Ronald Reagan talked about peace through strength, he wasn’t talking
about peace as the absence of war. He was talking about an environment
in which justice and liberty could thrive. And so no, I don’t think the
Republican Party is going to walk away from this and ultimately, I don’t
think the president of the United States is going to walk away from it.

Glasser: That would be a big flip-flop, though. You do acknowledge that?

That that would be a marked change.

Rice: That’s why I don’t think it’s going to happen. Look, I understand,
Susan, why Americans get a bit jaded about quote “democracy
promotion.” And one thing I wanted to do with this book was to say to
people, “Democracy promotion is not Iraq and Afghanistan, right?” I
would never have said to President Bush, “Let’s use American military
divisions to go and delivery democracy to Afghanistan and Iraq.” We had
security problems in both of those places. Once we had overthrown the
dictators—one, because they were harboring Al Qaeda, the other because
we thought he had reconstituted his weapons of mass destruction and he
had been a threat in the region and was still a threat in the region. Once
we overthrew them, we had to have a view of what we ought to try to help
bring about after.

And so that was a separate decision, that, “alright, we should try to help
the Iraqi or Afghan people get on a road to democracy.” But democracy
promotion is usually not that dramatic. It usually comes rather out of
circumstances like the way that we helped Colombia to take back its
country from almost failed state status through democratic security, as
[Colombian President Alvaro] Uribe called it, support for that through
Plan Colombia that had started with President Clinton and with President
Bush and continued under President Obama, bipartisan over a long period
of time. It means helping Kenya to get through a bad election into a place
where they can accept the consequences of the next election. It means
trying to help the Ukrainians deal with the most difficult circumstances: A
neighbor that is constantly trying to dismember it as it’s trying to find its
own way to both identity and to liberty.

So I wanted this book to say to Americans, “Don’t think about democracy

promotion as something that we do with hundreds of thousands of
American forces. We usually do it in much more subtle ways. And, oh, by
the way, we are best served to do it with our allies while they can still
reform.” If Mubarak had continued the reforms that he started in 2005,
we might never have had him thrown out of office in 2011.

Glasser: Well, it’s interesting. I was reading that section of the book and
it reminded me of the late, great Soviet poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, and his
“fatal half-measures” poem. And I think actually many of the anecdotes
and the examples in your book could fall under the heading of fatal half-
measures, where reform is usually—it’s not that it’s never tried, right? It’s
often that it’s too late or incomplete or—

Rice: It’s either too late or incomplete, or in the case of Mubarak, people
get scared. He got frightened when the Muslim Brotherhood won big in
the elections, the legislative elections, even though the presidential
election had gone relatively well. But you have to keep pressing people
because the same frustrations and disappointments that led to the Arab
Spring aren’t going away in the Middle East. Now, you can keep a lid on it
for a while, but eventually, it’s going to explode and we have a lot of
interest in having our lives reformed before there are people in the streets.

Glasser: Well, that’s a pretty important point and you brought up Iraq
and you wrote a very interesting thing in your book, basically making the
point that unfortunately, because of this association with Iraq and
Afghanistan and the overall trend of violence in the region, that now some
people have associated democracy or democracy promotion with violence
and instability. And that’s not just true in the Middle East. You could
argue that Vladimir Putin--that was the case he made to the Russian
people was basically democracy equals chaos and instability.

Do you think there’s anything to that critique that perhaps the invasion of
Iraq has discredited the more general idea of democracy in the region?

Rice: Well, there’s no doubt that the way that Iraq played out and I talk in
the book about some of the mistakes that we made in not understanding
what institutions we might have used. There’s no doubt that it’s caused
people to say, “Well, is it possible then to have democracy in the Middle
East?” But Iraq and to a certain extent, Afghanistan, were sort of the most
stressing cases because you had totalitarian regimes with nothing
underneath. My definition of a totalitarian regime comes really from the
way that Mussolini talked about totalitario, in which he said that it is the
state, all in the state, all for the state, nothing outside the state. So the
perfect example is one that we know well. In Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Russia,
Prokofiev and Shostakovich are persecuted for not writing music that’s
socialist enough.

When you think about that, that’s what you mean by a totalitarian state
and then you don’t have any institutions and it’s extremely hard to do
anything and so that’s what happened in Iraq. But the Middle East is more
than just that kind of circumstance. You have a wide variety of kinds of
regimes in the Middle East.

Glasser: No, I know that. But this specific question, right, is not really
about that, right? Everybody understands that defeat may be an orphan
but that in reality, it had many fathers there. But the specific question of
the American invasion of Iraq and what that has done to discredit
democracy promotion, including within our own government. President
Trump has said invading Iraq was a terrible mistake even though he was
probably for it at the time.

Rice: Yes, before he was—well, look, the fact is we didn’t invade Iraq for
democracy promotion and I want people to understand that.

Glasser: Right, no, I understand that but—

Rice: And the fact that it was hard after—but let me just be very clear: I
would rather be Iraqi than Syrian today. I would rather be Iraqi with a
prime minister who might be weak but he’s accountable to the people.
With 25 different newspapers and radio stations and Arab satellite
available and where my government doesn’t actually use barrel bombs and
chemical weapons against me. So when I hear about how poorly the Iraqis
are doing, I want to say in regards to what or in comparison to what?

So you can posit that it was better for the Iraqis to continue under a
dictator who was putting 300,000 people in mass graves if you want to
make that case. I don’t want to make that case and when people say, “Well,
Iraq is such a disaster”; I want them to explain to me why they think that
under Saddam Hussein it was a bucolic, benign dictatorship.

Glasser: So you mentioned elections. I think the Middle East has some
amazing case studies, obviously, of both the promise of elections but also
the failures and the perils. And you write in your book about that moment,
that shock when you realized that Hamas, who had not been expected to
win was going to win the elections, basically free and fair, more or less,
elections to take over Gaza. That dealt a serious blow to your own
peacemaking efforts between the Israelis and the Palestinians. It was not
expected. You had pushed hard for the elections.

You write about that moment. There are a lot of other moments in the
book and not in the book. Right now, I’m thinking of the elections that
Vladimir Putin has repeatedly won in Russia or to take Europe, you have
Viktor Orbán in Hungary who has won elections. This is a member of the
European Union and now he talks about something called “illiberal
democracy.” In Turkey --and by the way, President Trump is going to
receive President Erdoğan here next week in Washington -- you have a
dramatic rollback of democracy. There’s no other way to talk about it. And
now, just held, a referendum that expanded the president’s powers. And
yet you seem to have undiminished faith in the power of elections to one
day matter. How do you reconcile these things?

Rice: Well, my undiminished faith is that elections have to happen, right?

And then the question is, can you improve the context in which they
happen? And there are a couple of ways that you can do that. I think one
mistake we made with Hamas was we really should have said they had to
disarm if they were going to participate in the elections, along the lines of
what was done in Northern Ireland, for instance. Or where Sinn Féin was
able to run for elections but the IRA couldn’t—there couldn’t be an armed
part of it.

So that’s one thing. Don’t let armed militias participate in elections

because they have a, shall we say, unfair advantage. It would be true, for
instance, of Hezbollah in Lebanon. But a more important one is that yes, if
you have elections and the only organized forces are Islamists, radical
Islamists, then you’re going to get a bad outcome. In Egypt, when the
Muslim Brotherhood did so well, there was a reason for that, which is that
the Muslim Brotherhood could organize in the radical mosques and the
radical madrassas. Whereas Mubarak had hounded liberal forces like
Ayman Nour and others, shut down their newspapers, closed it, put him in
jail. So when Mubarak would say to me, “I’m all”—he would say me,
Mubarak, “All standing that is between the Muslim Brotherhood and
Egypt,” I would think, “Yes, because you made it that way.”

Because you didn’t allow liberal forces to emerge. Now, if you look at
Tunisia instead, you have Islamists but you also have a nationwide labor
movement that was able to help check it and moderate it. You have
women’s movements that were able to moderate it and check it. So I think
we make a false choice when we say, “If you have an election, the Islamists
are going to win.” Well, yes, if you disable all other forces.

Glasser: So one takeaway as an American policymaker is that not all

elections are created equal? Basically, that different societies have
different election issues.

Rice: They have different election issues but you can work before those
elections are held to try to improve the landscape for other forces.

Glasser: But see here, I feel like you’re the sort of like a Progressive-era
reformer here in a way. You’re saying you, being America.

Rice: No, not America—

Glasser: And what if America doesn’t show up to help?

Rice: Not America. Helping the people on the ground who want to
improve their circumstances. We can’t do this for them. One of the things I
criticize in the book in liberal parties, particularly in Russia, that have no
answer for the widow in Perm who has just lost her benefits and want to
play power politics inside and around the Kremlin.

So we can’t stand in for these liberal forces but we can support them and
help them to the degree they can’t. But what Solidarity showed in Poland
by being a nationwide labor movement that was ready to move when the
democratic opening came; what has happened in Tunisia where you have
multiple kinds of civil society groups able to step forward; what you are
beginning to see in other places in Eastern Europe. Let’s take Poland, for
example, where even though there are challenges from the Law and
Justice Party to the democracy, you have a lot of other forces that are
fighting back.

Glasser: Do you think that if America had not shown up, in effect, in
some way in these countries at the end of the Cold War—as you pointed
out, Ronald Reagan made support for dissidents, made support for human
rights a pillar of his—not just of his rhetoric but it was a part of our policy
at other times. There’s always been the American example or the
American ideal, but there’s a long conflict in American foreign policy
between those who see the promotion of human rights as a pillar of what
we stand for in the world and those who project a more realistic point of
view, a realpolitik point of view. You started out your career and you were
known as more of a realist. But now, I feel like this book is your full-
throated acknowledgment, that no, that’s not what I came away from
government believing.

Rice: Absolutely. And let me just make a little distinction in terms

because it’s really important. Realism comes out of political science and
basically, it’s a theory that the international system is made up of billiard
balls that bounce into each other. It’s all about power. It doesn’t matter
what’s inside them. I think we have always found—and frankly, it was kind
of a European 19th century view. It was all about who could win more
power. And it was zero-sum. If I gave up power, you took it. Now, America
has valued a balance of power that favors freedom, meaning that we’ve
believed that what’s inside those billiard balls actually matters. That’s why
we advocated for a democratic Germany as part of the answer toward a
peaceful Europe after World War II.

Churchill is—

Glasser: Our allies didn’t want it.

Rice: No, I don’t know if it’s apocryphal, but Churchill supposedly said, “I
like Germany so much I’d like as many of them as possible. Okay, break it
up, make it weak.” That’s balance-of-power thinking. That’s realism. But
to bet on a democratic Germany, that was a novel idea and it’s worked.
Now, the other thing about—and the reason I wanted to say realism as
opposed to realistic is I would say that the most realistic thing to say is,
“What happens when you have democracies in the world?” They don’t
employ child soldiers. They don’t harbor terrorists as a matter of state
policy. They don’t invade their neighbors. If you’re realistic about
authoritarians, they do all of those things. And oh, by the way, they don’t
have the one important shock absorber that democracies have.

People can’t change their circumstances peacefully. And so when an

autocracy fails, you get an explosion. So I would say that the more realistic
policy is to recognize that what happens inside those billiard balls actually
really matters.

Glasser: A lot of people, certainly probably most people in the United

States, would agree with you. The question on American foreign policy is a
little bit more, “Well, do we have the power and instrumentalities to really
do something about it?” And here, you actually see a surprising kind of
commonality between Barack Obama, arguably, and Donald Trump. Both
saying, “Not that we’re against democracy or even disagreeing with your
argument but that this is not a moment when the United States has the
ability to shape those outcomes in the same way.”

Rice: That just isn’t very—it doesn’t have very great faith in America and
what it’s done for now almost more than a half a century. Because we have
shaped outcomes. Great powers who have a view of how human history
ought to unfold can have a big impact on the world. And if we had taken
the view that we couldn’t shape the international system, then a lot of
people might have been speaking either Russian or German. [LAUGHS]
And so the United States has the power with supporting others. You ask a
very interesting question. With Ronald Reagan, yes, he spoke about
human rights and he spoke about freedom and he went and told
Gorbachev to tear down the wall. But even well before Ronald Reagan, it
had been support through the Council for Security and Cooperation in
Europe going back to the ‘70s where these human rights advocates and
these civil society groups from inside the Soviet Union and inside Poland
and inside Hungary had been able to get out and go to a conference in
Geneva or a conference in Bonn and feel the support of others, even
though they couldn’t act at that moment.

And you know what? When the Soviet Union collapsed, they were there.
They were stronger. They were ready to lead the democratic transition.
Ronald Reagan, and I talk about it in the book—Ronald Reagan through
the CIA, the Vatican through Pope John Paul II and Lane Kirkland of the
AFL-CIO kept Solidarity alive when martial law was declared in Poland at
the beginning of the ‘80s. And by keeping Solidarity alive underground,
when the opening came, Solidarity was ready. That’s what we should do.

Glasser: I guess that’s my question, right, is if that were today, would that
happen? I’m assuming that you’re not in favor of a 30 percent cut in the
State Department’s budget?

Rice: Well, let’s wait and see if it really turns out to be a 30 percent cut
because of course, the administration proposes but Congress actually
authorizes and appropriates. I understand and look, I was provost of
Stanford. I had to make big budget cuts. Sometimes efficiencies are a good
thing. And I will say this: the State Department seems to have grown since
I have left so I don’t know whether there is room for cuts or not. I think
Rex Tillerson is the right person to take a look at that. But I sure hope that
some of the programs that have been really important—America’s
compassion through PEPFAR, the AIDS relief program, saving millions of
people in what was a pandemic that was threatening to wipe out most of a
continent. When you look at Millennium Challenge, which was a foreign
assistance program that is different in that it demands of the recipient that
they be governing wisely, that they’re governing democratically, that
they’re fighting corruption, and so it’s a partnership that has worked.

So whatever happens in the cuts, I hope that some of these more

important and signature programs will not. That they do it with a scalpel,
not with a hammer.

Glasser: So I want to make sure we get back to Russia but you’ve

mentioned Rex Tillerson a couple of times and your support for him. I
don’t know the back story. Did you know him before? Obviously, you’ve
worked with him. How did you meet him and why did you decide he was
the right person to be secretary?

Rice: I actually met him over golf. We were paired in the AT&T National
Pro-Am, and when you’re trekking around with somebody for three days,
you learn a lot about them. Bob Gates knew him from Boy Scouts going
back a long way and then we had done some work with him at Exxon. But
—

Glasser: Directly with him?

Rice: Yes, directly with him. But oilmen know the world like other people
don’t know it. I had been a Chevron director. I had seen this. They’d make
long-tail investments in difficult places. They have to deal with difficult
people. Their workers work in hostile circumstances. It sounds a little bit
like being secretary of state and I thought really that President Trump
needed a different kind of secretary of state. He needed maybe a business
peer and Rex would certainly fill that bill. But I know him as somebody
who really knows the world.

I know people said, “Well, he negotiated with the Russians.” Well, if you’re
an oilman, as the oil people say, “Russia has great geology.” Of course,
you’re going to negotiate with the Russians but as we’ve seen, he’s going to
uphold American interests. I’m not sure I would have been quite brave
enough going into the Kremlin to say that the Russians were either
incompetent or were not telling the truth about the chemical weapons
agreement with the Syrians, so good for him.

Glasser: Did you advise him on that first trip to Russia?

Rice: I did not advise him on that first trip to Russia but I watched it with
great amusement. It was great.

Glasser: You talk a little bit in the book about your first trip with
President Bush to see President Putin back in 2001, the famous “looked
into his eyes and saw his soul” moment. Dan Fried was one of our previous
guests on this podcast and he and I were talking about that on the podcast
and he said he was sitting next to you in the bleachers. Do you remember?

Rice: Yes, I do remember that.

Glasser: Yes, he said you gasped. Was it a gasp?

Rice: Well, it wasn’t exactly the way I would have put the relationship
with Putin. No, President Bush was trying. He was asked, “Do you trust
him?” And it’s kind of a hard question when you’re standing next to the
Russian president for the first time. Do you say, “Well, no, not really.” You
don’t want to repeat the “trust but verify” line. That’s Reagan. And I think
he was looking for a way to a do it. But what I was really thinking, Susan,
was, “Oh, why didn’t I warn him that that question was going to come?”
That’s why I gasped.

Glasser: Right, to always prepare your principal.

Rice: Exactly.

Glasser: That’s Jim Baker’s mantra, prior preparation. Now, Dan did
make a point of saying, “Yes, that was not in the talking points.”

Rice: Right, it was not in the talking points. He had a really good
relationship with Putin and I remember after 9/11, Putin was the first
foreign leader to call. He tried to help in Afghanistan. We really did a lot of
good work with the Russians and then they started to believe that the
Color Revolutions were aimed at them and what had happened in the
Ukraine and Georgia and then after the Russian invasion of Georgia, of
course, the relationship really soured. But there were a lot of years in
between in which we achieved a lot with the Russians.

Glasser: So I know this question is one that you’ve given a lot of thought
to but it seems very relevant given that you’re probably one of the people
who’s had the most experience in the United States with Vladimir Putin.
Was there a moment in time when the United States could have done
something differently that would change the outcome? A lot of people
these days have pointed to me this question of 2008 and the Russian
invasion of Georgia next door. Was that a turning point which made the
later taking over of Crimea and the current hostilities in Ukraine
inevitable? Was that the key moment? Do you date it back in time farther?
You say maybe 2004?

Rice: I think the relationship started to experience difficulty after the

Orange Revolution in Ukraine. Putin had an idea that the new U.S.-Russia
relationship was going to be built around the fight against terrorism and
he was right about that. But when part of the Bush administration’s
antidote to terrorism became the Freedom Agenda, now he wanted to get
off that train. And we still did a lot of good work together. But by 2008,
yes, Georgia happened. I don’t think it was a direct relationship to Crimea.
Crimea, as you know, because of its relationship to Russia historically was
in a sort of different category and what had happened in Georgia was also
unfortunate in that the Georgians allowed themselves to be provoked by
the Russians and we had actually talked about not having that happen. But
once the invasion of Georgia had happened, it was pretty clear that this
relationship was not going to be a close strategic relationship.

I think we did a good job in keeping them out of Tbilisi. I remember a

conversation with Sergey Lavrov in which he told me that the unspoken
Russian demand was that Mikheil Saakashvili had to go, the president of
Georgia. And told me it was a secret between us and I said, “You don’t
have that conversation with the American secretary of state and expect it
to be secret.”

Glasser: That’s right. You were on vacation, right at the Greenbrier—

Rice: Yes, right.

Glasser: But do you think we should have imposed tougher sanctions,

more akin to the ones we have right now?

Rice: Well, we certainly tried to get tougher sanctions but we also didn’t
want to expose the split with the Europeans.

Glasser: So they just weren’t willing to—

Rice: They were the sanctions that we could get done at the time.

Glasser: Well, and in fact, that is a consistent theme of a lot of the very
interesting writing that you have in this book, both about Russia and
Ukraine, that you were trying and balancing internal Bush administration
arguments over NATO expansion as well as with the European partners.
You recount this one fascinating shouting match between Radosław
Sikorski of Poland and the German foreign minister in effect over NATO
expansion and whether people in the former Soviet Union should get a
chance to join.

But on Ukraine, this is one of the big two items on the agenda right now
between Russia and the United States at a moment when Trump is a
novice, at a moment when there’s an investigation of his campaign’s
dealings with the Russians. These are very sensitive issues and you
recount this almost heartbreaking moment where first of all, you tell this
great story of Vladimir Putin basically introducing you to Viktor
Yanukovych, who then later became the president of Ukraine and in effect,
was Vladimir Putin’s man in Kiev.

Rice: It was quite a moment. Putin had this new office in his dacha and he
was showing it to me and we were looking out at his gardens and all of a
sudden, the door pops open and this really tall graying man walks over
and Putin says to me, “Oh, meet Viktor Yanukovych. He is running for
president of Ukraine.” And I thought he might have well have said, “Meet
Viktor Yanukovych, my man in Kiev.” And so yes, it was the way that he
was and with Ukraine, I remember another time when he called Ukraine
“a made-up country.”

Glasser: So you always knew it was on his radar?

Rice: I knew it was on his radar screen. And unfortunately, when it comes
to Crimea, it’s not an unpopular thing in Russia because many Russians
consider Crimea to be Russia, remembering that Crimea became
Ukrainian because Nikita Khrushchev in 1954 gave it to Ukraine as a gift
for 300 years of Russian-Ukrainian friendship, but of course, it was the
Soviet Union—

Glasser: At a time when it didn’t matter.

Rice: It was the Soviet Union. It didn’t matter. So we just have to say to
Putin, first of all, we’ll never recognize Crimea as a part of Russia. But
more importantly, I’m worried about what’s going on in the eastern
Ukraine, where there is really a low-intensity conflict going on every single
day. Ukrainian soldiers are dying there every week. The Russian
separatists, Russian-backed separatists are getting their arms and their
support and their training from the Russian military. And so Putin seems
to be very happy with the frozen conflict that he’s created in Ukraine
where Kiev can’t control that part of the country. And I, for one, think we
ought to look to arming the Ukrainians. I’ve thought this so for some time.

Glasser: Right, and Barack Obama resisted doing that.

Rice: Yes, but people ought to have the right to defend themselves.

Glasser: So that brings us back to Russia and its meddling not only in
Ukraine but in other parts of Eastern Europe and here in the United States
and our elections. President Trump hired at one point, a campaign
chairman, Paul Manafort, who had worked very closely with Yanukovych-
allied oligarchs and many of the people who are connected with this
conflict that’s unfolding in eastern Ukraine. That is now under
investigation by the FBI. Why is this serious? Why should Americans care?

Rice: First of all, it’s very serious whenever there is a charge with a
foreign power, particularly a hostile foreign power, and I think you could
probably count Russia today as hostile—is engaging in this kind of activity
inside the United States. Let me say one thing: this isn’t our first
cybersecurity problem with an outside power. We have the Chinese
rattling around in Office of Personnel Management files as well. So maybe
we also ought to be doing something about our cybersecurity. But that
aside, it’s a very serious matter. But let’s investigate it. Let’s find the truth
and if there is a punishment to be meted out, let’s do that. But I’m
concerned that it has reached a point where everybody is speculating,
everybody’s got an answer to what’s going on and what we need is for a
responsible body and I think that’s Senate Intelligence, to take a look.

They have access to everything. By all reports, they have bipartisan

leadership that looks very sound. So let them investigate it. Let them come
forward and tell us what happened and then we can move from there. But
I have to tell you, I come from California. As you know, I live in California
now and the level of pitch in Washington around these issues can’t be
healthy. It’s got to be investigated by people who can actually get the facts
and let’s get it done quickly so that the speculation can stop.

Glasser: Right, but other people would say that the flip side is if you’re
taking it too much as a matter of due course… You do agree that this is an
exceptional event in American politics.

Rice: It is exceptional. It’s not unprecedented. The Russians have been

messing around and trying to mess around in American politics for a long
time.

Glasser: Dick Cheney called it akin to an “act of war.”

Rice: Well, I think that might be a little strong. It’s certainly a hostile act
and our problem is the cyber part of this is new territory and I don’t think
we quite know what we’re going to do when we experience a cyberattack
that challenges us as a nation. But for now, I would really like to see this
investigated thoroughly and let’s get some answers so that the country can
move on.

Glasser: Do you think that our democratic institutions are under threat?
You talked about the strength of them and that they’re built up not to just
be a strong executive but there are a lot of people who worry today that the
apparently quickly executed and potentially arbitrary dismissal of the FBI
director, the criticisms of judges by the leader of a coequal branch the
president, represents threats to democracy, the undermining of freedom
of the press.

Rice: Our democracy is very strong and whatever someone says, I don’t
see a press that has been silenced. I see a press that is more active and
more vocal than maybe in many, many years. I see courts that continue to
act when they believe that constitutionality is an issue. I see governors
who are challenging executive orders. I see congresspeople, senators from
both sides of the aisle who are raising questions when they see problems.
So that’s the health of a democracy is that you have multiple channels,
multiple power centers which can do this. And on criticism of the courts,
we’ve been going down this road for a little while. I didn’t much like it
when President Obama with the chief justice sitting in the State of the
Union called out a justice or a Supreme Court decision.

And so maybe we’ve been eroding some of those lines between the
branches of government for some time and maybe we need to think,
everybody, about what the founders really said. They are three coequal
branches of government and they were very careful to give them their own
powers, their own authority and those need to be respected.

Glasser: The word “eroding” I think is a really interesting word right

now. You talked about the level of concern here but it probably exists in
California too. What I observe is that people are struggling to redefine
what is normal? What is exceptional about this moment in America
politics and what is normal? You’re actually in a really good position to
help us understand what’s the part that we should be concerned about and
what is the part that’s normal. Take us inside the White House a little bit.
You met not long ago with President Trump. You conjured this image of
him at the Roosevelt desk. What is normal about this administration and
what is not normal?

There’s a lot of infighting. Just the other day, somebody said to me, “Well,
Condi Rice was fighting with Dick Cheney so therefore, the Trump
administration’s infighting is fine.” Is it the same thing?

Rice: I can’t tell because I’m not inside every day. It’s not abnormal to
have people positioning within the White House. That is most certainly
not abnormal. But I can’t tell you the level of whether it’s unusual. I can
tell you that it is a steep learning curve for any president. It’s steeper for
this president because he really hasn’t been around the government. I
actually felt bad for him when he said that the job is harder than he
thought. Sometimes I think when you’re on the outside—and I’ve heard a
lot of business people say this, people that I respect, and they just don’t
see why it’s so hard getting things done in Washington.

Glasser: Did President Bush ever say that to you?

Rice: No, because President Bush had been around his father. He knew
how hard it was. But I can’t tell you how many business people say, “Well,
I don’t see why it’s so hard to get that done. Why can’t they change
entitlements? Why can’t they do this? Why can’t they do that?”
Sometimes, the press, there’s a little bit of—with columnists and reporters:
[asking] why can’t they just get anything done> And having been in those
positions, I want to say to people, “Try it for a few days and you’ll see why
it’s hard.” It’s hard because you do have equal competing power centers
that have to be accommodated.

Madison was very interesting on this. He said that there should be no

permanent losers in democracy. And by that, I think he meant that I don’t
want to defeat you when I win on a particular policy issue because the next
time around, I might need you. And if I could say anything that’s really
troubling to me about Washington as I watch it safely 3,000 miles away in
California, it’s that attitude. “I need to defeat you. I don’t just need to win
this round. I need to defeat you.” I heard something the other day that
really troubled me. Well, that Obamacare helped to defeat the Democrats
in the election and the new health care bill is going to defeat the
Republicans in the election and I thought, “Is that all this is about? I
thought this was about trying to do what’s right for the American people.”

And so I think that’s what is disturbing people and I think, Susan, as much
as I myself like social media and use social media, and as much as I like
the proliferation of possible sources of news these days, it’s a little bit too
much that I can go to my corner, my aggregators, my bloggers, my cable
news channel, never encounter anybody who thinks differently and now,
when I encounter people who think differently, I think they’re venal or
stupid. We’ve got to learn to talk across our differences. I tell my students
at Stanford if you are constantly in the company of people who say amen
to everything you say, find other company.

Glasser: Well, nobody’s going to accuse Donald Trump of saying amen.

You’ve been super diplomatic, as you always are, in this interview and
you’ve been very convincing that you have managed to not be cynical and
to retain your faith in democracy. But I’m going to give you one last
chance here, Secretary Rice. You are a true believer in democracy at a time
when a lot of people are really scared about it. You were in the White
House and at the Department of State and you were saying, “No, we can’t
torture people. That’s wrong and that violates our values.” You have a
president of the United States in your own party who campaigned and
said, “Maybe that’s a good idea.”

Doesn’t this upset you? Aren’t you scared by what’s happening?

Rice: I know a lot of things are said in campaigns. I’ll watch what the
president says as president. I think the president’s words matter and—

Glasser: So you don’t believe that we should not pay attention to his
words? Because a lot of people are saying—

Rice: No, I think words matter but I also think these are early days and I
see that we are seeing words that look to me like they are—and I’m
speaking now in the area that I know, foreign policy—more strategically
placed, for instance, than in the campaign and even in the early days of the
administration. I think, for instance, to say to the Chinese, “If you don’t
deal with the North Koreans, we will.” There’s nothing wrong with that
message. I think to say to the Syrians, “We are not going to sit by and let
you gas Syrian babies.” I think there’s nothing wrong with that message. I
think to say to Vladimir Putin, “Yes, I want to meet with you but at an
appropriate time.” I see nothing wrong with that message and I think it is
reflective also of the strength of the national security team that they have.
Rex Tillerson and Jim Mattis and H.R. McMaster and John Kelly.

But yes, words do matter and I follow every day what we’re saying. I hope
that we will say even more. That the world is really a dark place when the
United States of America is not involved. It’s a dark place when we don’t
stand up for those who just want to have the same basic values that we
have. The right to say what you think and worship as you please and be
free from the knock of the secret police at night and have the dignity that
comes with electing those who are going to govern you. Because it’s really
served us best when America leads from power and principle and I’m
hoping to hear even more of that.

Glasser: Secretary Condoleezza Rice, I do so appreciate you joining us on

The Global POLITICO today and of course, both of us appreciate all of you
listening to this conversation. You can listen to The Global POLITICO on
iTunes or whatever your favorite podcast platform is. I think we’ve had a
million plus downloads so far since we launched this in February and we
hope that you’ll keep listening to us. You can subscribe. You can rate us, if
you’d like. You can sign up for our new newsletter so you get the notice
every week when a new episode is up. I’m Susan Glasser and you can email
me anytime at SGlasser@POLITICO.com. Thanks again, Secretary Rice,
and thank you to you.

Rice: Thank you and thanks to your listeners.

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