The Middle East, China, and the Case Against American Isolationism

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

The world Americans face today is more complicated and dangerous than it’s been for decades. Yet there is a growing, and in many ways understandable, desire to turn inward, a sense that there’s little U.S. foreign policy can do to solve problems abroad and lots it can do to make them worse.

Condoleezza Rice argues against this impulse in a new essay in Foreign Affairs. “Great powers,” she writes, “don’t get to just mind their own business.” Rice served as National Security Advisor and Secretary of State in the George W. Bush administration. Much of what she grappled with then—Russia’s invasion of a neighbor, military collisions with China, and the last major clash between Israel and Hezbollah—has worrying echoes now, especially as conflict in the Middle East threatens to spiral into a wider war.

Secretary Rice, thank you so much for joining me.

CONDOLEEZZA RICE

Great to be with you.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

So there’s a lot in the essay you wrote for the September/October issue of Foreign Affairs that I want to cover. It has real historical sweep and also grapples with really all of the top-tier foreign policy challenges of this very complicated moment. But let me start with the warning you see in the history that you cover, which in many ways informs the response to those challenges. You write that “the current period is not a Cold War redux. It is more dangerous.” When you look at historical reference points, what do you find especially concerning and how does that lead you to your diagnosis of where we are today?

CONDOLEEZZA RICE

I think we’ve become very comfortable with the post–World War II order, the kind of liberal order in which the expectations of an international economy that was not zero-sum, where people didn’t actually fight over resources—despite the Cold War, where territorial wars between great powers really didn’t take place, especially once the Berlin crises were over in the 1960s—a sense that America was always going to be there for leadership. If you become too comfortable, you don’t see the erosion that’s happening. And I’m often asked, “Is this a revolution or an evolution?” And I say a revolution is what happens when you didn’t see an evolution coming. And I think we’ve been getting there for a while.

And so now I think some of the danger points are this territorial competition where China is making claims in the South China and East China Sea over the Second Thomas Shoal, over islands that belong to Japan, where Russia is literally using its military force to try to extinguish its neighbor in imperial aggression, and where we see American and other military forces of great powers bumping up against, for instance, the Chinese military forces. And that’s just dangerous at a different level. The possibility of an accidental war is very dangerous.

I also think it’s dangerous when you start to think of the international economy as zero-sum. There’s some things that are going to happen. We are decoupling from China—we probably will talk about that later—in technology. But the idea that through trade and free movement of goods and free movement of capital, we would be able to grow the international economy so that my gain didn’t come as your loss was at the base of the way the international economic system was designed after World War II.

And then finally, I worry that because what I’ve called the four horsemen of the apocalypse—populism, nativism, isolationism, and protectionism—tend to ride together, that we’re seeing pressures on particularly the United States, but a lot of countries around the world, to “mind your own business.” And great powers don’t mind their own business. They try to shape the world. And either we shape it or those who wouldn’t share our interests and values do.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

So you have a very clear line in the essay about the rising tide of populism and isolationism in the United States. That’s probably most flagrantly evident in the person of Donald Trump, but it goes beyond him, of course. How do you explain the return of these forces that in the immediate glow of the post–Cold War, we thought were mostly vanquished, mostly gone?

CONDOLEEZZA RICE

I wouldn’t, by the way, say that it’s only about Donald Trump. When is the last time you heard an American candidate on either side of the aisle talk about the importance of trade, for instance, without following it with tariffs and/or sanctions? So I think we’ve lost some sense that the integrationist narrative about the international economy is a good one. And that explains to me some of the rise of populism, because if you look back to “bear any burden, pay any price” of John F. Kennedy, it was an American middle class that was growing, an American middle class that felt upward mobility was a possibility for them. We still had the $18-an-hour unskilled labor job.

That’s now gone. And what has replaced it is that there are winners and losers out of this period of intense globalization. Those of us like myself who believed in globalization and the integrationist narrative, who still believe that it was the right choice at the time, perhaps weren’t attentive enough to what was happening to those people, the unemployed coal miner, the unemployed steelworker in Great Britain who says, “Thank you very much, I’ll Brexit.”

And so—somehow—the populists play in that pool. They come in: “Those institutions are not for you. The elites don’t share your values. You don’t have a way out.” And our educational system is not succeeding in countering that. The United States was always a place where, even if you didn’t have equality of outcome, if you had equality of opportunity, then you didn’t get the politics of jealousy. But when there’s a sense that it’s not equality of access, that’s when you get the politics of jealousy and the politics of, “You have, and you’ve therefore taken it from me.” And so that, I think, is very concerning—and it’s a secular trend, not a trend that I would associate with any particular person.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Whenever we at Foreign Affairs run a piece making the case for strong American leadership, there’s inevitably a slew of letters that come in from readers, some of them who have experience in the foreign policy world, some of them who don’t, who say, “Well, look at the record of American foreign policy in the last few decades,” since really the end of the Cold War.

You were part of the team that very skillfully navigated the dangerous end of the Cold War and dissolution of the Soviet Union. But when you look at the decades after that, a lot of people will say, “Well, we allowed trade to gut the American economy in certain ways. We were not attentive to the rise of China as a challenger and the resurgence of Russia as a problem. You had the fruitless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the ultimately failed war in Afghanistan.” The list could go on. As you look back at that record and you hear those critiques, what do you think is fair in that and how do you assess those decades of American foreign policy across parties?

CONDOLEEZZA RICE

Well, I’ll come back to the critiques and fully admit that we made mistakes over the years since the end of the Cold War, but I would ask people actually to look back at 1946 and ‘48 and ‘49, when Chinese communists triumphed, to look back the unresolved Korean War, with which we still live, to look back at the problems of Vietnam. It’s not as if we just woke up in 1989, 1990, 1991, and delivered Eastern Europe, the unification of Germany on Western terms, and the collapse of the Soviet Union. That was a story of almost 50 years of attention and American engagement in the world, which in the final analysis, as George Kennan put it, denied the Soviet Union the easy course of external expansion until it had to deal with its own internal contradictions.

And so I would say to people, let’s not judge the post–Cold war era just yet in those regards. We have to remember that despite the Russian invasion of Ukraine, there is an independent Ukraine that fought back. Despite what we have seen in Hungary, there is a Poland, there’s a Romania, there’s a Czech Republic. Despite the challenge to NATO, there’s a NATO that has Sweden and Finland in it today. Even if you look at the Middle East, despite the Iraq war, we don’t have an Iraqi government that’s putting its citizens in mass graves any longer.

And I don’t think Afghanistan had to turn out the way that it did. I really do question why after all of the commitment there, and not just to our own interests, but to the interest of the Afghan people, we felt that we had to leave strategic bases like Bagram. We should have told the Taliban, “You just try pushing us out and you’ll see what happens.” And so yes, there were mistakes, but I think the sweep argument—every decision has been bad since the end of the Cold War—is just not historically accurate.

I will say on China that there is disappointment in how the integration of China into the international economy turned out. We took something of a risk. Could you fully integrate into the international economy a country that had a completely different political value system, that would become the second-largest economy in the world? We remember that the G7, when George Shultz and Ronald Reagan founded it, they were all democracies, the seven largest economies.

So yes, that was a risk, but what were we supposed to do with 1.4 billion people? Were we really supposed to leave China outside? And for a while it looked like the maxim that you can’t have economic liberalization and political control was working in China. Despite Tiananmen Square, you were seeing over the next couple of decades the growth of a private sector that was changing the face of China, the Tencents and the Alibabas of the world. I remember a conversation with Hu Jintao about the need for courts in China where citizens could go and get justice.

And so it was a country that was changing. And I’m not usually the “great man” theory of history person, but if I can say that one person has had a huge effect, it’s Xi Jinping. His China, I think, was not Hu Jintao’s China, was not Jiang Zemin’s China, was not Deng Xiaoping’s China. It was a China that finally decided that all of the power that it amassed had to restore the China prior to imperialism. So that meant threatening Taiwan, it meant integrating Hong Kong so that it’s now just a province of China, and it meant using China’s power on the world stage in a way that I think none of us would have really expected.

So yes, there’ve been some mistakes, there’ve been some good things in this period of time, and I would just say it took us a long time to know what we would see in ‘89, ‘90, and ‘91.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Would you attribute similar “great man” influence—although that doesn’t seem like exactly the right way to put it, but similar agency—to Vladimir Putin when it comes to Russia? Was that outcome inevitable? Or was that really about leadership?

CONDOLEEZZA RICE

I struggle about Vladimir Putin in this regard because I knew him and because, despite the fact that I always knew first of all that he believed in the Russian Empire, not the Soviet Union—he told me Russia’s only been great when it’s been ruled by great men like Alexander the Second and Peter the Great; he didn’t say Stalin and Lenin.

So I knew that the ambition was there. I have to ask myself what caused that ambition to turn into an active plan. And there maybe it was some of the loss of credibility in the withdrawal from Afghanistan. Maybe it was that Ukraine was starting to move really pretty aggressively toward a European future. Maybe it was just miscalculation. We know that the Russian armed forces went with five days provisions and their dress uniforms for the parade in Kyiv, so clearly a miscalculation, a belief that the West wouldn’t respond. And so that ambition that I think he always held became now an active plan instead.

I do think in authoritarian regimes, a single strong man can push a country toward the precipice, as Vladimir Putin has done. We saw a million Russians leave the country, so not that popular a thing to do. But when you begin to limit so completely the circle around you, when you begin to make your voice the only one that matters, yes, you can change the course of human events, and I think we’ve seen that with Russia.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

As you look at the current state of the war in Ukraine, and given your knowledge of Vladimir Putin and of Russian history and the history of Russian strategy, what is your sense of what the end of that war might look like and how American policy can help it get there?

CONDOLEEZZA RICE

I do think that we have to keep reminding ourselves that Vladimir Putin has already lost the war that he intended to fight. He intended to be in Kyiv; he’s not. He intended to extinguish the Ukrainian nation; he’s emboldened it and strengthened it. His navy, the vaunted Black Sea Fleet, has been basically pushed out of Sevastopol, which has been the central part of the Russian Navy since Catherine the Great, and it was done by a country that doesn’t even have a navy in Ukraine. And so he’s also really crippled his country. The energy, which is such an important part of the Russian economy, with the withdrawal of majors like BP and Shell, who aren’t going back; Exxon, who aren’t going back; that asset, where you have oil fields that are hard to access and need technology, is just going to deteriorate. And it was really kind of sad seeing him say that Russian children will go to summer camp in Pyongyang. Can you imagine what a great thing that is if you’re a young Russian kid? So, he’s really wrecking his country, and we have to keep that in mind.

That means for me that the Ukrainians will want to assess how victory really looks. How do you get to a prosperous, united, and secure Ukraine? I will say that there are countries like South Korea that still don’t have territorial integrity that are doing very well, but they do have an American security guarantee. And one of the things that we in the United States are going to have to come to terms with once we’re through the election is, what are we prepared to say about Ukrainian security for the future? My own view is that we really should look to Ukraine eventually as a member of NATO. I don’t want to leave a vacuum in the middle of Europe again, which is what we essentially did. In 2008 at Bucharest, the Bush administration had argued for a membership action plan for Ukraine. I do think that was the right answer, but this is really going to be the question, is, how do we secure Ukraine, whatever the territorial circumstances turn out to be?

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Going back to your point about North Korean summer camps, you write in the essay about this convergence between not just China and Russia, but also increasing coordination with North Korea and Iran, including the war in Ukraine, now the war in the Middle East. How do you think we should address that axis or bloc or whatever you want to call it? Is it possible to split it to sow tensions, or do you think we need to treat it as an axis in a true sense?

CONDOLEEZZA RICE

Well, it may be a little counterintuitive, but my view is we ought to slam them together and not try to pull them apart, and make them have to deal with the internal contradictions in their little axis. If you are a Russian xenophobe, which they tend to be about Asians, what’s going on in Central Asia could not be heartwarming, as the Chinese are beginning to dominate in that region. If you are China, I’m not sure that being the secondary rider on Putin’s imperial ambitions is really what you had in mind, even though obviously Xi Jinping has decided he can’t afford to let Putin lose and the Chinese keep coming closer and closer to providing lethal aid to the Russians, because one man’s non-lethal aid is another man’s lethal aid, and I think we should be pretty tough on the Chinese about that. And he doesn’t need secondary sanctions at a time when the Chinese economy is already in difficult straits. And really, are they really pleased that the Iranian tentacles like the Houthis are threatening international shipping or that they are causing problems in the Middle East? And none of them trust Kim Jong Un. They don’t understand him, they don’t trust him. And so if they want to be friends and they want to have the friendship without limits, maybe we should say, “Fine, but you don’t get to have both.”

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

So effectively, rather than saying, “We don’t want a world of blocs,” responding by saying, “Look, you’ve chosen your bloc, and we think our bloc with the NATO allies and South Korea and Japan and others in Asia and our North American neighbors is a much stronger bloc than yours.”

CONDOLEEZZA RICE

It’s a stronger bloc. We proved that, by the way, the last time around, when the Soviet Union collapsed. But if you want to do international politics the reasonable way, then we’re open to that, but we are not going to simply countenance your veiled ways of cooperating that are leading to more and more trouble for the world.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Let me turn to the Chinese piece of that. You noted earlier that there was a sense that China might develop in a certain way. That was true certainly in the Clinton administration, through the Bush administration, and probably most of the way through the Obama administration. As you now see bipartisan agreement about China, as you noted in the essay—rare bipartisan agreement in Washington these days—do you worry about it becoming too rigid, too extreme in any way, in the way that political issues can? Is there anything in that consensus that you diverge from?

CONDOLEEZZA RICE

Well, there’s no doubt that we don’t do nuance very well, and so I think there’s a lot of disappointment. But disappointment is not a policy. So I would have really three principles. The first is, let’s try to avoid a shooting war with China and let’s be strong enough in our deterrent. And that means also that sometimes you’ll have to challenge China on things like freedom of navigation, as we do from time to time. Keep strengthening the alliance relationships, the friendships with countries like India. We need to get out of our own way on providing military equipment to India, recognizing that they don’t, I think, really want to be dependent on that Russian junk that they’re fighting with in Ukraine either. So we should really push to be better integrated with our allies. The Chinese don’t have allies. They have a couple clients, but they don’t really have strong allies, and that’s a really good thing for us.

I think we should also be cognizant of the areas where we can continue to still have a reasonable floor under the relationship. I would cite, for instance, issues around avoidance of accidental war. We had a very highly articulated, very sophisticated way of communicating with Russia to avoid an accidental war—and we’re probably not going to get there with China, but I’d like not to be in the situation we were in 2001, when they downed an American aircraft on Hainan Island. It was a Chinese pilot hot-dogging in international airspace, and they kept our crew for seven days. For three days they wouldn’t take our phone call. We need not to have that happen again.

And then finally, and here I’m not necessarily a part of the consensus, I think we need to stay open to the Chinese people and Chinese students. I don’t want to give up on the next generation of Chinese. All of the increasing evidence is that this leadership has lost the confidence and the trust of its young people. And so we need to stay open to the Chinese people and to Chinese students; and even, where we can—probably not in the technology sphere, but where we can—to Chinese private investment.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

There’s been a fairly impassioned debate about how we define the end state of our China policy, the objective of our strategy. Matt Pottinger, a former Trump administration official who’s now in your shop at the Hoover Institution, wrote a piece with former Congressman Mike Gallagher for us arguing that we should be fairly explicit about our aim of weakening China in some sense, of trying to change the nature of leadership in China and impeding its rise. Do you think that’s the right goal, even if not one that the U.S. government should state explicitly? Or would you define it in some other way?

CONDOLEEZZA RICE

Well, I go back to “deny them the easy course of external expansion until they have to deal with their own internal contradictions,” right? So it doesn’t become our policy, actually, to change China. It becomes our policy to deny China external expansion until they have to change policy. So I don’t think we have to be explicit about what we think the end state ought to be. I think we just have to play our cards correctly. And I think we will ultimately, maybe not in my lifetime—just like it wasn’t in Ronald Reagan’s lifetime or just like it wasn’t in Harry Truman’s lifetime—but if we play our cards right, we might find that we’re pretty pleased with the outcome.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Let me jump around geographically to the Middle East. We are having this conversation at a moment when the war on the northern border of Israel with Hezbollah seems to be escalating. You dealt with, I guess, the last really big war between Israel and Hezbollah in 2006 when you were Secretary of State. Let me just ask very simply, if you were back in that job or in the White House as National Security Advisor, what would you be doing to try to manage this situation right now?

CONDOLEEZZA RICE

Well, I negotiated 1701, and you’re right, it was the 2006 war. But we recognized something that I think maybe has to be recognized again, which is that Israel has undertaken to really damage Hezbollah, and that’s a good thing. I understand the toll on civilians. I watched it in Lebanon the last time around. It’s an awful set of circumstances and you do what you can for humanitarian purposes, and eventually this war will have to end. But if it ends with Hezbollah still capable of threatening the Israeli state and keeping Israelis out of their homes and Hezbollah having violated the 1701 so that they’re back across the Litani, then we haven’t achieved anything from this.

I know it’s very risky what the Israelis are doing. You have to admire the statecraft of the pagers and the blowing up of walkie-talkies. One wonders how Hezbollah is going to communicate. You read stories about internal turmoil as they try to figure out who was the mole that gave this away. They’re in a bit of disarray, and Hezbollah in disarray is not a bad thing.

Now, eventually, just as I’ve said about the war in Gaza, Israel has to think also about the day after. And Israel is a technological and economic powerhouse. It needs to be one after this is over, where a company’s not afraid to invest in Israel. It’s also the case that Israel was well on the way to ending the state of war with the Gulf Arabs. It’s going to be important to get back to that at some point.

So there’s always a point at which you have to ask, have we achieved our objectives? And I would just ask that the Israelis start to think about when they think they have achieved their objectives vis-à-vis Hamas, but also vis-à-vis Hezbollah. That is a conversation that Americans can have with them, but not on the front pages of the New York Times. You asked me what I would be doing; I would be talking about how a ground invasion would be devastating in Lebanon, as I did in 2006. But the Israelis have to trust that we’re not going to have that debate in public because they are facing existential threats, and we have to understand that.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

My understanding of the history of 2006, though I hesitate to say this to you, who was so centrally involved, is that there was a fair amount of, American pressure might not be the right word, but American persuasion when it came to ending that war fairly quickly and being more attentive to collateral damage and civilian casualties in Lebanon than the Israelis were perhaps inclined to be. Are there lessons in that history, if I’m describing that correctly?

CONDOLEEZZA RICE

You are describing it correctly. I think we had a very good relationship of trust with the Israelis so we could have those discussions. The piece that was probably most important was that we really did understand that they had to do significant damage to Hezbollah. We did understand that driving them back across the Litani was a big step. We worked very hard to get the Lebanese army into the south, which took some doing because the Lebanese army wasn’t very well-trained. We undertook to do that.

So we tried to create a more stable situation. It lasted for a period of time, although there were rocket exchanges between Hezbollah and Israel. It really started to fall apart over the last year or two years, as Hezbollah was re-armed by Iran to get to the place that they had 150,000 high performance rockets aimed at Israel.

That means that you also have to have an answer about Iran. And letting Iran continue, through its proxies, to cause trouble in the Middle East is also not acceptable. And I’m a big believer in putting as much pressure on the Iranian regime as you possibly can. I do believe that you should never give them a penny again back from frozen assets because that is a very unpopular regime.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

When you assess the strategic picture in the Middle East over the past year, do you see Iran’s position as having been strengthened by events? Do you think Israel is in fact putting itself in a better position? I mean there are obviously fervent arguments about this, but how do you assess the strategic balance after a year of war, after a year since October 7?

CONDOLEEZZA RICE

Well, I don’t think the Iranians are in a stronger position. I think they’re on a kind of very thin blade, actually. I say that as a former figure skater. On the one hand, they have these proxies out there, which they arm and equip. I’m not sure how well they control them, but they’re doing all kinds of things out there. They struck at Israel, fortunately ineffectively. The Israelis struck back, just very limited, and said, “We know where Natanz is.” And I think the Iranians are not in as strong a position as we sometimes assess them to be. And so this is a time for a lot of pressure on the Iranian regime.

I thought that what the Biden administration did in sending a show of force into the region, when there was some fear that the Iranians were going to strike back after the killing of [Ismail] Haniyeh—and if you’re Iran and you’re a terrorist, maybe you don’t want to live in Iranian guest houses anymore because they’re kind of vulnerable. So I think those are not bad messages, just like I thought that the killing of Qasem Soleimani was a good thing.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

When I look back at the Bush administration, it may be the last time when there was a real chance of getting a two-state solution, getting real peace between the Israelis and Palestinians. You wrote a piece in Foreign Affairs when you were Secretary of State in 2008, when you stressed that a Palestinian state would be essential to true security both for Israel and in the Middle East. Do you see any prospect of getting there in the years ahead and is there anything U.S. policy can do that it’s not currently doing to make what seems fairly far-fetched at this particular moment more plausible?

CONDOLEEZZA RICE

We have to get there eventually because I think ultimately Palestinians, as Ariel Sharon said, Palestinians need to govern themselves. Israel shouldn’t rule over Palestinians. And we know some of the elements of that and what it’s going to look like; but it does seem pretty far away right now. It seems pretty far away because, first and foremost, the Palestinians don’t have the leadership that they need. And the refurbishing of the Palestinian Authority is something I think we ought to be spending a lot of time thinking about and trying to get the Arabs to support that remaking of the Palestinian Authority.

We did a lot of work with Europe and Canada, and actually with a three-star general in charge, to create real Palestinian security forces, which the IDF, the Israeli Defense Forces, actually thought was pretty good. But it’s going back to first principles. It’s less launching negotiations now over something that I think is pretty far away. You’ve got to go back and put the pieces in place again.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

When you look at the Palestinian elections of 2005 or 2006 and the Hamas takeover of Gaza subsequently, is there anything about that period that you think we could have done differently to—obviously that’s a decade and a half before things really blew up. But—

CONDOLEEZZA RICE

Well, the Palestinian Authority said if Hamas did not participate in the elections, they wouldn’t be legitimate. Now, at the time, I remember asking whether or not we should tell them they had to disarm first—in other words, kind of Sinn Fein/IRA style, that you could be in the political process, but you couldn’t be in the political process as a militia. And again, Abbas and others were concerned that if you demanded that Hamas would not be in the elections, then they wouldn’t be legitimate. So we went through with it.

I think we actually achieved something when we got what was called the Quartet at the time—the European Union, the UN, Russia, and the United States—to agree on a statement that said we would only recognize Hamas as a legitimate authority if they recognized the right of Israel to exist, which Yasser Arafat had recognized, and if they renounced violence, which Yasser Arafat had done. When they wouldn’t do that, they became somewhat isolated, which is why, I think, they then basically took over Gaza.

Despite that, we did get the Annapolis process started in the end of 2007. By the end of 2008, when we were about to leave office, Ehud Olmert had put a good plan on the table, which was a comprehensive plan. I wish now that Abbas had been willing to come to Washington with Olmert, just deposit it with George W. Bush, he could have handed it to Barack Obama, and you could have been off and running from that purpose. But he felt he couldn’t do it. It speaks again to the weakness of the Palestinian leadership. But the fact is that I sometimes wonder, should we have just published it? And maybe that would have given the Obama administration a better starting point than they ultimately had.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

There’s also a reading of the, I don’t know, decade and a half, first decade and a half of this century as one of strategic distraction, with the United States focused on Iraq, the war on terror and responses to 9/11 as taking us away from focusing on the real competitive dimensions of foreign policy. Do you worry about distraction now or overreach in certain ways as you look at just the complicated global picture that any foreign policymaker confronts?

CONDOLEEZZA RICE

Yeah. I think the problem is that when you’re in those positions, you don’t get to choose your battles. It’s not as if after 9/11 we could say, “Oh, well, we’re just not going to worry about that terrorism problem.” And so we had to deal with the Taliban in Afghanistan. Had we known about the stated weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, would we have done that? Well, what you know today can affect what you do tomorrow, but not what you did yesterday.

But all of that said, I would argue that, especially on China, we weren’t on the wrong course on China. But China changed, and that meant that we had to have a new vision of what China could be. On Russia, people say, “Oh, well you expanded NATO, and that’s what caused Vladimir Putin to invade Ukraine.” No: that is Vladimir Putin’s narrative, and I wish Westerners would stop saying it because I was with Putin, and President Bush was, for eight years; I don’t think he ever mentioned NATO expansion. And so I guess it didn’t bother him enough to bring it up. So I am one who believes that the United States of America is capable of multitasking and has to multitask, but that goes back to, you have to have the assets from which to do it. And that’s where I worry.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Let me try to close on a potentially more hopeful note. When you look back at the Bush administration and even the Clinton, Obama administrations, early post–Cold War years, initiatives like PEPFAR, which you were a part of forging to address the global HIV/AIDS crisis, were such central parts of the agenda back then. And as you look at the ways that isolationism and nativism and your other four horsemen have reshaped this debate, there’s much less scope for that kind of initiative. Do you worry that we are not focused enough on those kinds of opportunities? Do you see places where, again, if you were back in those old jobs, you would be trying to rally support, rally political attention and money from the United States?

CONDOLEEZZA RICE

The United States has always been best when it led from principle and power, not to mention compassion. And I think PEPFAR is an example of that compassion, but it’s also an example of having used that program to empower African countries in the building of healthcare systems that actually serve them very well through COVID. And so we do ourselves a favor, not just them, when we outreach to the rest of the world to address poverty and disease and the like, and that’s who we are, and that’s what we need to do more of.

I think the modern day or the today version of that is the global South. We sometimes only seem to be interested in the global South if the Chinese seem to be interested in the global South. And there’s so much that we could be doing. And we haven’t talked much about the relationship with India, but I think the relationship with India is really an important pillar of a relationship with countries that will want to have strategic autonomy, but are basically going in our direction. We don’t have to have loyalty tests for every time you vote with us in the UN. We just have to have common enough interest moving forward.

And then when I look at an African continent that is going to be a huge dominant factor through demographics, when I look at a Latin America that we sometimes seem only to pay attention to when there’s trouble in a place like Venezuela, I would hope that we would find our voice in the great effort to improve the lives of people in those countries and to enlist them in some of the big debates that we’re having about technology or about climate change. We need that part of our foreign policy too, and that part seems to be sorely lacking.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

That’s a great note to end on. Secretary Rice, thank you for the essay in our September/October issue, and thank you so much for joining me today.

CONDOLEEZZA RICE

Thank you very much. It’s great to be with you.