Which Way, America? Condoleezza Rice on America’s Foreign Policy Challenges

>> Peter Robinson: The current period, I'm quoting here from the current issue of Foreign Affairs, the current period is not a Cold War redux. It is more dangerous. Former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice on Uncommon Knowledge now.

>> Peter Robinson: Welcome to Uncommon Knowledge. I'm Peter Robinson. The daughter of a pastor and a teacher, Condoleezza Rice, grew up in segregated Alabama, then went on to become the secretary of state.

She now serves as director of the Hoover Institution here at Stanford, and is a member of the ownership group of the Denver Broncos. Before we get to pesky little matters like the state of the world, three, three season, is it time for broncos fans to abandon Hope?

>> Condoleezza Rice: I just wanna be four and three.

>> Peter Robinson: Four and three, okay.

>> Condoleezza Rice: Let's take them one game at a time.

>> Peter Robinson: Okay, all right, good luck with the Saints. First question from your article in the current issue of Foreign Affairs. The current period is not a Cold War redux. It is more dangerous. During the Cold War, we had an opponent in the Soviet Union with massive conventional forces arrayed against Western Europe.

With a navy that matched ours, at least in numbers of surface vessels, and with 5,000 nuclear weapons pointed us. How could the current period possibly be more dangerous?

>> Condoleezza Rice: Peter, we did not have real territorial conflict between us after the Berlin crisis and certainly after the Cuban missile crisis.

So for roughly almost 30 years with the Soviet Union, we lived in this kind of cold peace, as it's been called.

>> Peter Robinson: Right.

>> Condoleezza Rice: We could finish each other's sentences about nuclear deterrence. We had created a whole way of thinking about accidental nuclear war. But the more important point is that the Soviet Union was a military giant, but it was an economic and technological midget.

China is technologically, economically, and militarily increasingly the equal of the United States. And so the adversary is different this time around. We also have a China that's completely integrated into the international economy. So you have these aspects, great power conflict, a technological arms race, and probably the most important thing, questions about whether America really wants to lead.

That's why I think it's more dangerous.

>> Peter Robinson: Okay, so if we could, during this conversation, let's go through the nature of the threat, China, Russia, Iran, and then I'll tell you why you're mistaken. All of this means that we should return home. We should pull in our horns, we should return to isolation.

I'll fight with you on that.

>> Condoleezza Rice: That's a deal.

>> Peter Robinson: And then we can close with some thoughts, because as you and I speak today, there are a low double digit number of days between now and election day. All right, from your article in Foreign Affairs, China now has the largest navy in the world.

The growth in China's nuclear arsenal is also alarming. This comes against the backdrop of an 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 to rare-earth minerals runs through China. And then there is Taiwan, close quote.

Here's the threshold question, in a way, it's the theme of our whole conversation today. Are we up for this?

>> Condoleezza Rice: We have to be up for it. First of all, we have to recognize that it didn't happen by accident. We actually had a narrative, a belief in integrating China fully into the international economy.

When Deng Xiaoping decided to take China out of isolation, we faced a choice. Were we going to try to isolate 1.4 billion people with a growing economy, or would it be better to have them fully integrated? And that integration created exactly some of the points that you've just made.

The supply chains that ran through China because it was more efficient, not worrying terribly much about whether or not you were going to get rare earth minerals from China. China was the place to manufacture, it was the place to assemble. There was so much that was to be beneficial about China's integration into the international system.

>> Peter Robinson: Beneficial for us.

>> Condoleezza Rice: Beneficial for us, well, beneficial for the world economy, and in 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 different than the regime's before it.

We always said, Peter, you cannot have 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 and Tencent, and you were manufacturing there. It seemed to be working. And then Xi Jinping comes in and he says, thank you very much, I think I'll take political control.

And now it's a very different China. And so the recognition that all of the investment that we were putting in through venture capital and through US investment into Chinese technology. Were we really doing that so that that technology and what China itself called civil military fusion, so that that technology could be handed to the People's Liberation army?

So that they could force us out of the Indo Pacific with claims in the South China Sea, claims against our allies like Japan and the Philippines? That was the realization that this has somehow, this bet that we made on integrating a country that had a fundamentally different social and political system.

But was prepared to play the capitalism game, that maybe that bet hadn't paid off.

>> Peter Robinson: Just come a cropper.

>> Condoleezza Rice: It's come a cropper.

>> Peter Robinson: Could I dwell on that bet for a moment?

>> Condoleezza Rice: Yeah.

>> Peter Robinson: Because I think every time I ask a question, of course, feel free to correct the question if you want to.

But it seems to me that understanding what 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. We had great hopes that China would follow exactly as you said, this basic pattern.

First you get economic growth, and then as your people get richer, they will begin to push for political freedom. And by the way, it happened in South Korea, and it happened in Taiwan. This was not a crazy idea. Our late Hoover colleague Harry Rowan, writing in 1996, quote, when will China become a democracy?

The answer is around the year 2015. And nobody laughed at that when Harry 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't happen because they're communist? The South Koreans aren't, the Taiwanese are not.

As you know, our Hoover colleague Stephen Kotkin, 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 meant they had permanent aims against us.

Is it because the Chinese are communist or because we got stuck with this 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 difference in your.

>> Condoleezza Rice: Yes, I do, and I want to come back to the point of, can we outweigh him?

>> Peter Robinson: Yes.

>> Condoleezza Rice: Because first of all.

>> Peter Robinson: That would be the easiest thing to do.

>> Condoleezza Rice: I would be the first to say, having studied some communist regimes myself, yes, it was in part because they were communists.

>> Peter Robinson: Okay.

>> Condoleezza Rice: But it was also because this particular man had a view that communism couldn't evolve.

Communism had to remain the same, you had to have absolute control of the Communist Party. He even didn't allow it to evolve in ways that his predecessors had, remember, one of the problems for authoritarian regimes is that they don't change power peacefully.

>> Peter Robinson: Right.

>> Condoleezza Rice: They have too many presidents for life, the Chinese Communist Party had kind 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 a premier who did things about the economy, think Jurangie, and then the president did everything else. But the economy could kind of on its own own dynamic, on its own logic, move toward more private enterprise, less state owned enterprises.

China was leading the world in online educational startups, leading the world. They just shut them down because they couldn't control them. So he was prepared to say, it has to be absolute communist party control. And I do think that put us on a different pathway than had this evolution taken place.

But I would be the first to say he was right, because once you start to get economic liberalization, once people start to expect something different, Hu Jintao told us once. We need courts because people have to be able to go and make a claim for the land that was expropriated by a party official.

And I thought, that's called an independent judiciary, that's not gonna work so well with total control. So Xi Jinping maybe read it right, communism is a very fragile system.

>> Peter Robinson: And Gorbachev read it wrong.

>> Condoleezza Rice: 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 naturally become good soviet citizens. What he didn't realize is that communism is in fact propped up by lies and by coercion. And once you start to pull those pillars, it's going to.

>> Peter Robinson: Once fear is gone, it's over.

>> Condoleezza Rice: Once fear is gone, it's over, and so maybe Xi Jinping was right, but that meant that our bet about a country that, by the way, the second largest economy in the world is now not a democracy. When Ronald Reagan when you would have been in the White House when Ronald Reagan and George Shultz started the G seven, the largest economies in the world, they were all democracies.

And so this question of whether capitalism can really coexist with communism, I think the answer that we're getting 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? But there were elements, you ask, how did we get here?

There were elements that we didn't keep our eye on the ball. So how could it be, Peter, that semiconductors, an industry created in the United States of America by people like intel.

>> Peter Robinson: Single digit miles from where we sit.

>> Condoleezza Rice: 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 and time again that maybe too great of an integration was the problem, not some integration, but recognizing that this was a very different entity with a communist party at its head.

>> Peter Robinson: One more note about China, and that, of course, is Taiwan. Again, from your article in foreign affairs in Washington, the discussion concerns how to deter a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. But Beijing could blockade the island, or it could seize small, uninhabited Taiwanese islands, or it could cut underwater cables or launch large scale cyberattacks.

So we have again the cold war versus the present moment and the difference in the nature of the threats. During the cold war, we looked at Europe and the whole game for whatever it was, four and a half decades was to prevent the Soviets from invading Western Europe through the Fulda gap.

They weren't gonna cut cables, that was it, We'd put up tanks, seal up the okay. The defense of Taiwan will require just as much cunning and determination and ceaseless attention on our part as the Chinese are willing to devote to it. And that seems to be essentially infinite attention and care and pains and imagination.

Again, as currently configured, are the Pentagon and the State Department up for this? Just managing that one point of contact-

>> Condoleezza Rice: Just managing that one point of contact, and we'll come to the problem of overreach, the fact that we have so many of these, right? But let me just say a word about Taiwan, one of the things that's been concerning to me, and it's something we've been trying to do something about at the Hoover Institution.

Is that it's almost as if the thinking in the Pentagon and in Washington is just such blunt thinking, it's gonna be an amphibious landing on Taiwan. The military people will tell you that looks like D-day times 100, Right? China has many, many other options vis a vis Taiwan because they don't have to occupy Taiwan.

They just have to change the politics in Taiwan till it looks like Hong Kong. And so that, you know, everybody talked about one country, two systems. When Hong Kong was given back to 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 pro Chinese government in Taiwan, and then just slowly but surely, it erodes Chinese independence, Taiwan's independence.

>> Peter Robinson: Again, correct me if I'm wrong about this, but my observation on Hong Kong. A few hundred thousand people left when the Chinese got rough on Hong Kong. But the business establishment, as far as I can count it, I'm not an expert, you are. Jimmy Lai is in prison and Martin Li is under house arrests, that is two members of the Hong Kong business establishment that stood up to Beijing and everybody else, in effect, cut a deal for now.

>> Condoleezza Rice: For now.

>> Peter Robinson: Well, so why couldn't the Chinese say, look, we did it in Hong Kong? These people in Taiwan are business people, they'll come to an accommodation once we tighten up the situation. Isn't that a reasonable fear, or is there a difference?

>> Condoleezza Rice: I think there is a difference, and I think Hong Kong was always special in some way, and I don't know that there was a Hong Kong identity in the way that there's a Taiwan identity.

They did a poll not too long ago, and 70% of Taiwanese do not think of themselves as Chinese. They think of themselves as Taiwanese.

>> Peter Robinson: That's a very basic fact.

>> Condoleezza Rice: And that's a very different way of relating to the mainland, but the mainland may intend to test that proposition.

And what I think we have to do is to figure out how we deter the all out military attack, but how we also respond when you have something like the exercises that China has just been carrying out around. Taiwan because they don't like what the president of Taiwan said.

We saw it when Nancy Pelosi made her visit there, kind of denial exercises, quarantine. We just need to expand our thinking about what we might be facing, because at some point, if those kinds of tactics are employed, where do we respond? When do we respond? It becomes kind of salami tactics, and that's what I worry about more with Taiwan.

>> Peter Robinson: We'll come to this, but one answer is just forget about the whole problem. We'll come to that.

>> Condoleezza Rice: We'll come to that.

>> Peter Robinson: 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 about a fifth of Ukrainian territory, and the conflict has settled into a war of attrition.

I mean, the fundamental dynamics are 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 and half a million wounded, according to a Defense department spokesman. Russian losses in just the first year of the war, and now we're into the second, of course.

In just the first year of war, exceeded the total of all soviet losses since World War II combined.

>> Condoleezza Rice: Yeah.

>> Peter Robinson: Putin has just taken more losses than Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernenko, and Gorbachev combined.

>> Condoleezza Rice: Yeah.

>> Peter Robinson: What does he think he's doing? What is in his head?

>> Condoleezza Rice: What's in his head is he cannot lose this war. What's in his head is Russian, the Russian empire cannot tolerate an independent Ukraine. And he is doing it in a really quite gruesome 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, whatever it is, they're not those blond boys from St. Petersburg and Moscow. These are the poor kids from Dagestan. These are the prisoners. They're throwing unarmed, untrained young men, just cannon fodder at the front. And in doing so, they simply overwhelm the numbers.

Russia is depending on something, he's always had mass to just overwhelm a Ukrainian nation that just doesn't have that many people. And that's what's in his head. Eventually, the Ukrainians will have to cry uncle, because I can just keep throwing people.

>> Peter Robinson: If the game is attrition, he can win.

>> Condoleezza Rice: If the game is attrition, he can win it. And that's what he thinks. I will say this, the eastern part of Ukraine, it's a tough fight right now. The Russians are making slow gains, they've made slow gains toward even some relatively strategic places in the Donbass region.

But let's not forget what the Ukrainians have done. Not only have they frustrated the idea that you're just gonna overthrow the Ukrainian government and install a pro-Moscow government, they don't even have a navy, the Ukrainians. And they have pushed the Russian Navy back from Sevastopol in the Black Sea.

Because they've been able to use drones and technology to threaten the Russian Navy. As a result, thanks to their work and some help from the Romanians and others, they've been able to keep grain shipments going now through the Black Sea. It's pretty remarkable. And so the real question is, let's say that it becomes something of a stalemate.

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, and it looks pretty much like it does now. At that point, Ukraine needs to make a decision about how much more it wants to throw treasure and blood at this particular region.

But it's actually not a decision for us to make. It's a decision for the Ukrainians to make because they have 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?

And one of the questions that will be asked of us is, what will we do for the security of Ukraine going forward? And that's gonna be a hard discussion inside the United States. But I think some combination of the Ukrainians holding hostage, some of what Russia cares about, for instance, those naval bases and the like.

>> Peter Robinson: 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: Or Germany.

>> Peter Robinson: We lost North Korea.

>> Condoleezza Rice: Yeah.

>> Peter Robinson: But the rise of South Korea still represents one of the stunning accomplices- stunning accomplices Of the 20th century.

>> Condoleezza Rice: Yes, and just one other thing. People talk about a negotiated solution. It's hard for me to see a negotiated solution to this war with Mr. Putin there.

>> Peter Robinson: Is it? All right. He's 60, hold on a moment. He is- 72. 72, and the average life expectancy for Russian males is 67.

We can wait this guy out.

>> Condoleezza Rice: We can wait him out, although the average life expectancy is not the life expectancy of people who live in the Kremlin.

>> Peter Robinson: Who live in dachas.

>> Condoleezza Rice: Yes, Exactly.

>> Peter Robinson: He has pretty good medical help.

>> Condoleezza Rice: Yes, you are right.

>> Peter Robinson: Iran, from your article in foreign affairs, Tehran's proxies are a constant source of trouble.

The Houthis in danger shipping in the Red Sea, do they ever, Hamas recklessly launched a war with Israel. Hezbollah in Lebanon threatens to widen that war into a regional conflagration. Add to this observation an observation made this past summer by your successor as secretary of state, Antony Blinken.

Iran's breakout time, that is, the time needed to produce enough weapons grade material for nuclear weapons, is now, and here, I'm quoting Secretary Blinken, quote, is now probably one or two weeks.

>> Condoleezza Rice: Yeah.

>> Peter Robinson: Not years.

>> Condoleezza Rice: Yes.

>> Peter Robinson: Weeks, is, so, again, in this part of our conversation, I'm trying to gauge the size of the threat here or the magnitude the danger.

Is the regime in Iran a problem to be managed or a threat we must eliminate?

>> Condoleezza Rice: Well, this is written before the events that we've just seen in the Middle East.

>> Peter Robinson: Yes.

>> Condoleezza Rice: And I have to say what the Israelis have achieved in weakening Hamas, I don't know how much they've weakened Hamas, but quite a lot.

>> Peter Robinson: It has to be a lot, right?

>> Condoleezza Rice: 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 that organization to know where Nasrallah was, to then kill his second in command.

To be able to put a device inside of their walkie talkies. And this is revolutionary, because Hezbollah, George Tenet, the CIA director, once told us Hezbollah is the A Team of terrorism, he said. And by the way, they run drugs down into Latin America, they own Beirut. And Israel has really put them now on their back foot in a huge way.

Now, it doesn't mean there aren't risks, they can still fire rockets and the like, but they have got to be wondering what hit them. And Exposes Iran, because Iran has been a somewhat cowardly state. They've worked through these proxies, right? Well, Hamas is in trouble, Hezbollah is really in trouble.

My view would be, why not put the Houthis on the list and take care of this problem while we're at it, maybe that's something we should be considering. And then you're the Iranian regime, you're exposed. By the way, who wants to be in one of your guest houses when Haniyeh was blown up in a guest house on an Iranian government installation?

>> Peter Robinson: Could I try a provocative formulation just to see what you do with it?

>> Condoleezza Rice: Yeah.

>> Peter Robinson: All that you said, add to that that the prime minister of Israel has had to manage relations with this country. He's had to manage an extremely fractious, difficult domestic, political environment.

His party has a very narrow majority in the Knesset. And all of that said in the last month or so, he's changed the dynamics of. Yeah, he changed it. As we speak today in this year, 2024, I know you don't like the great man theory, is Bibi Netanyahu the greatest man in the world?

>> Condoleezza Rice: Well, that system, I would say, I know Bibi Netanyahu, and look, he's something else. He's not the easiest person to 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.

>> Peter Robinson: 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 is the best intelligence agency in the world. They've got Tehran.

Tehran may be two weeks away from a nuclear breakup, but it's also a very unhealthy environment in which to be a nuclear physicist in Tehran. Mossad has this one, and then we think, no, maybe Mossad was never what 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 every big shot is, they can plant these pagers. We're back to the Mossad is invincible.

>> Condoleezza Rice: Exactly.

>> Peter Robinson: So which of these is true? How do you weigh them as a professional?

>> Condoleezza Rice: 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 imagination that we sometimes talk about. But leaving that aside, what they have done with Hezbollah is remarkable, and it will do two very important things. One, we talked about Iran has got to be 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 for decades.

>> Peter Robinson: Decades.

>> Condoleezza Rice: Decades, I was the secretary in 2006, I negotiated resolution 1701. Now, 1701 was supposed to have Hezbollah go back across the Latani. They were supposed to flow the Lebanese army in, everybody now thinks the UN peacekeepers there have not been very good.

I would be the first to agree with that. We tried very hard to get UN peacekeepers who would be under a UN security blanket to be able to actually challenge Hezbollah, we couldn't get it. So now Israel has changed the nature of things, maybe Lebanon would finally have a chance.

Hezbollah assassinated Rafiq Hariri in 2005.

>> Peter Robinson: The then prime minister.

>> Condoleezza Rice: The then prime minister who really, he was a bright light for Lebanon. They haven't allowed a presidential election in Lebanon for the last two years. So when people think about the change in balance, think about Hezbollah also not being able to dominate Lebanon in the way that they have.

But I wanna come back to Iran. I know that people talk about the progress of the Iranian nuclear program. I was never much for negotiating with the Iranians about this if they were going to be allowed to reprocess the 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.

>> Condoleezza Rice: The question is, can they put it all together? And in nuclear weapons, not so easy. Not so easy to deliver, not so easy to get the right level of explosion. And so I think one thing you could say to the Iranians is, all right, we know where you live and we know what you've got.

Don't even think about trying to make it a usable nuclear weapon. And that's a little bit different than saying, they're so close to the fuel, they're so close to the bomb design, they're so close. There's still a step that they have to take to be an actual nuclear power, and it may be given their weaknesses that you want to do that.

It says something, too, Peter, because, one of the lines that I use from the Cold War, and it speaks to China, Russia, and to Iran. George Kennan, in his famous telegram said, we have to deny them the easy course of external expansion, until the day that they have to turn to deal with their own internal contradictions.

>> Peter Robinson: February 1946, if I recall correctly, and he's writing about the Soviet Union.

>> Condoleezza Rice: 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 to deal with its own internal contradictions, having been held in check for all of those years by American power, largely.

And maybe that's the lesson, that if this isn't a Cold War, there is still one really important lesson, which is that these regimes are 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 sure that they can't expand, let's make sure that they can't push American power out, let's make sure that they can't win the technological arms race.

And maybe the day will come when some young specialist for a future American president is talking about the day when they had to deal with their own internal contradictions.

>> Peter Robinson: 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 country with unbridled optimism about the future. The United States is a different country now, I'm quoting you to yourself.

>> Condoleezza Rice: Yes.

>> Peter Robinson: The United States is a different country now, exhausted by eight decades of international leadership, some of it successful and appreciated and some dismissed as failure.

Okay, give me a moment or two to set this up. At a minimum, this is an impulse that animates some very large portion of the country and some very large portion of both political parties now. We're broke. When Ronald Reagan took office during the Cold War, federal debt amounted to 30% of GDP.

Today, that figure is 120%, a four-time increase in debt as a proportion of GDP. Our military, totally inadequate. Former secretary of defense, Robert Gates, writing just this last fall, our army is shrinking, our navy is decommissioning warships faster than new ones can be built. Our air force has stagnated in size, and our defense industrial base cannot produce major weapon systems.

In the number needed, or, as we have seen in Ukraine, the vast amount of munitions required, close quote. There are different ways of interpreting the slogan, put America first.

>> Condoleezza Rice: Yeah.

>> Peter Robinson: And one way of interpreting the slogan is, yes, pursue our interests. And pursuing our interests leads to pursuing our interests abroad.

But another way of putting it is we're broke, we're exhausted, our southern border is a mess, our politics are polarized. We have no choice. Let the rest of the world take care of itself. Madam Secretary?

>> Condoleezza Rice: Yes. I am the one who wrote exactly those words about this not very confident America.

>> Peter Robinson: Right.

>> Condoleezza Rice: But it isn't beyond the possibility of humans to correct many 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're also going to actually have to do it, not just to be a factor abroad, but for our own health and well being.

I mentioned the people who got left 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 revitalize our defense industries. But we don't have to.

We have a huge defense budget. We don't have to just do it by buying all the same things we've been buying. There are companies right here in the Silicon Valley that have important answers to some of our most dire military needs. We've talked about drones. We've talked about new technologies.

If we could just get the Pentagon to organize, to spend the $800 billion better, that would be a really important step forward. And so it's not beyond us to solve some of these problems and I think we better do it. Because the real answer to you, Peter, is why not let the rest of the world do it?

I say this in, great powers don't mind their own business. They don't. They shape the world and the great powers right now that 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 in a world shaped by Russia and China?

I look at this alliance of the three plus one, and I call it, cuz the North Koreans, nobody really trusts very much.

>> Peter Robinson: China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea.

>> Condoleezza Rice: And North Korea, right.

>> Peter Robinson: On a good day.

>> Condoleezza Rice: On a good day.

>> Peter Robinson: All right.

>> Condoleezza Rice: 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 of contradictions among them, too. You really think that hose xenophobes in Russia are thrilled to see the Chinese dominating Central Asia, which used to be a part of the Soviet Union? You think they aren't a little unnerved by what's happening to Iran and its proxies in the Middle East today?

I just saw Vladimir Putin went to Pyongyang, right? That, by the way, turned the South Koreans on a dime. They're furious. But it appears that little Olga and little Alexei, Russian children, are going to go to Summer camp in Pyongyang.

>> Peter Robinson: So it's real.

>> Condoleezza Rice: Boy, that'll be fun.

That'll be fun. So let's recognize that we have some problems, some weaknesses. We also have some incredible strengths. We have, of course, an economy that is still the envy of the world. We have technological and capability and innovation that just keeps, despite everything else. And I just wanna make one more point.

>> Peter Robinson: Of course, of course.

>> Condoleezza Rice: We have an energy bounty that if we don't mess it up, we will be able to restructure the landscape for one of the most important elements 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 do is cede the ground to others, because we're not gonna like that ground if the others are the dominant power.

>> Peter Robinson: 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: Yeah.

>> Peter Robinson: 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 again about the Cold War, and we have there a story of two decades. In the 1970s in this country where a period of economic stagnation.

>> Condoleezza Rice: Right.

>> Peter Robinson: A period of one small defeat after another, as against the Soviets, they expanded their navy, they took over countries in Russia, and you 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, we get restoration of national morale.

>> Condoleezza Rice: Yes.

>> Peter Robinson: Which requires 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 since the end of the Second World War. And the Iranians capture Americans in the American embassy and hold them hostage for a year. And in 1989, just ten years later, which is not that long in the life of a human being, let alone of a nation, the United States and our allies have undergone such a renewal that the Soviet Union folds up, the Berlin Wall falls.

>> Condoleezza Rice: Exactly.

>> Peter Robinson: Okay, so the question is, I really do take this as the deep question in this election. Are we washed up? Are the Chinese right? Was that renewal, a kind of last efflorescence of patriotism and american energy and know how? Or is it possible again?

>> Condoleezza Rice: It is possible again.

And it was a recognition of our strengths and the needs to mobilize them and their weaknesses. I've always still thought that.

>> Peter Robinson: It was hard analysis. It wasn't luck and it wasn't science.

>> Condoleezza Rice: It wasn't. But I remember as a young International Relations person, Soviet specialist, when Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union and communism a sad experiment on a hapless people and talked about the fact that they wouldn't survive in that famous British.

>> Peter Robinson: Yes, yes, yes.

>> Condoleezza Rice: Westminster.

>> Peter Robinson: Marxism and Leninism will end up on the ashy heap of history.

>> Condoleezza Rice: And I remember thinking, well, that's a kind of undiplomatic thing for the 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 truths lately about our own challenges and every leader needs to do that because we need to address them. But some leader also needs to call out our strengths. The extraordinary resilience of American institutions throughout our now 240 plus year history.

The extraordinary notion that you can bring people from all over the world and they can somehow find that they belong in a place where it doesn't matter where you came from, it matters where you're going. The extraordinary creativity and innovation that we have and then to say, we need allies, right.

I do believe NATO ought to pay that 2% and we need allies. But democracy, for all of its challenges, is not as fragile as autocracy. I want somebody to say that.

>> Peter Robinson: Could I? One other, this is. The only time you and I get a chance to have a real conversation is in front of cameras.

So I've got these other ideas I wanna try out on you. But I have been struck that in some strange way, we always talk about what an example we are to the rest of the world. And for decade after decade, that turned out to be true, and in all kinds of ways, it's true today.

And we hope it will become truer in the years to come. But you know who's an example to us? Ukraine.

>> Condoleezza Rice: Yes.

>> Peter Robinson: You know who's an example to us? Bibi and the Mossad and the Israeli people. Wait a minute, if Ukraine it's a bunch of techno savvy kids in Ukraine who've saved their country by figuring out drones and this patching together new technologies.

We have the best educated techno kids in the world. What are we doing for goodness sake? Our ability for innovation or Bibi, I mean, I find him an impressive figure.

>> Condoleezza Rice: Innovation and toughness.

>> Peter Robinson: Innovation and toughness, okay.

>> Condoleezza Rice: They need to go.

>> Peter Robinson: Bibi tells the truth, and he's tough.

>> Condoleezza Rice: And let me go back to Ronald Reagan in this regard.

>> Peter Robinson: You can do that all day with me.

>> Condoleezza Rice: Yeah, I suspect I can. But what Ronald Reagan understood was kind 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 world to whatever happens to it.

>> Peter Robinson: That is true.

>> Condoleezza Rice: He just never said it, because he also understood that the essence of America is that we're an idea, we're not just territory, we're an idea. And if we really believe in the universality of that idea, then we have to give others access to that idea, so that we are safer when there are more of us in the world who believe in democracy.

Now, political scientists have actually shown democracies don't fight one another, right?

>> Peter Robinson: And that also is really true.

>> Condoleezza Rice: 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 about just the security side of this, the practical side of it, but it is also the American people, even if a little tired of international leadership.

I've always said, Peter, Americans carry 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 also carry in their heads, you mean a larger country just wants to extinguish its smaller neighbors.

We can't let that happen, we can't let people be beheaded on television. We can't do that, so if nobody else will, maybe we should. And I've been saying this to some who want to talk about America first as meaning, mind our own business. I say, I don't wanna be the president of the United States on the day when Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin are on their victory tour.

Having defeated the greatest collective security organization in human history of democracies, NATO. I don't wanna be president cuz I really don't wanna be the president who says, I could have stopped that. I didn't have to put an American soldier in harm's way to do it, I just had to give them the means to do it themselves, but I didn't do that.

And now Putin and Xi Jinping are the powers in the world, the American people aren't gonna like it. And any political leader who believes that they are going to skate by on that day needs to think again.

>> Peter Robinson: Right, okay, last question. I mean, you and I have now cheered each 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. Raphael Cohen of RAND, writing last year, for years, American defense strategy argued for a two-war construct, namely that the United States should have sufficient military capability to fight and win two simultaneous wars in different theaters.

Over the last decade, as Americas military shrank in size and its adversaries grew increasingly capable, the United States backed off such aspirations. So today we face, our military seems to believe that were capable of fighting one major war and some kind of defensive action in a minor theater.

One and a half theaters, okay, listen to this count. 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, your foreign policy advice for Kamala Harris.

>> Condoleezza Rice: If you really do want the most lethal military in the world, are you prepared to increase the defense budget?

>> Peter Robinson: Okay, your advice for former President Donald Trump.

>> Condoleezza Rice: If you really do want to follow up on that 2% contribution in NATO, I'm all for it. But remember how important allies really are to the United States and to the free world.

>> Peter Robinson: Okay, and here's the last question.

Your advice for voters, early balloting is down this year from four years ago, there are ways of interpreting that. But one possible reason for that may be that Americans are actually taking this one especially seriously, taking time to think this over. So when it comes to foreign policy, what should the voters be weighing as between Kamala Harris and the Democrats and Donald Trump and the Republicans?

>> Condoleezza Rice: Look, I don't wanna personalize it to candidates because I think it's the same question for anybody who wants to be president of the United States. And, that is, you see that there's a chaotic and difficult world out there. You American voter, you read the newspapers, you see it on television.

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 hard questions of the people who want to lead you as president of the United States as to what they're gonna do about it.

How are they gonna bring all of these elements of American power, our allies, 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 serves Americans who felt they were left out, so that the American dream still exists for everybody.

But also challenges all of us to go into that world and to try to make some sense 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 and a half, it was two and a half wars when I was in, it was down to two and a half by then.

>> Peter Robinson: One and half now.

>> Condoleezza Rice: 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 was exactly the right person at the time to put the Germans in the lead on German unification.

He was a humble person who put himself in the background and never wanted to, To embarrass Gorbachev. And therefore, I think, really delivered at the end of the Cold War. He'd been set up by Ronald Reagan, who had a certain audaciousness about him to say that it is peace through strength.

He didn't say war through strength. He understood that if you were strong enough militarily, if you could deter, you might never have to fight any of those wars. And he understood, too, that if you could call out the weaknesses of a regime that is terrified of its own people, which is what authoritarians are, then ultimately you could put that regime into a situation where it had to face its people.

I'll tell you one final story. We were in, I was with President Bush in Romania.

>> Peter Robinson: Which Bush are we with?

>> Condoleezza Rice: George W Bush.

>> Peter Robinson: W Bush.

>> Condoleezza Rice: In 2005, Romania had become a member of NATO. We were there to celebrate, and there was a square that they took us into, and they said, this square was filled with 250,000 people.

When Ceausescu, the communist leader of Romania, came into the square and he was exhorting, you'd had revolutions in Czechoslovakia and Poland and Hungary, and he was exhorting the people for what 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, and then a thousand people, and now 100,000 people are yelling liar. And all of a sudden, Ceausescu knows that the fear that he has held over his people has reversed. The fear is gone, and now he's just face to face with the anger of his people.

Authoritarians know that what I've always called the Ceausescu moment is ultimately there for them, because that fear that they hold will one day break. 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 expansion until that day comes was our job.

>> Peter Robinson: Would you close by reading a passage from your article in foreign affairs?

>> Condoleezza Rice: Yes.

>> Peter Robinson: Thank you.

>> Condoleezza Rice: The future will be determined by the alliance of Democratic Free Market states, or it will be determined by the revisionist powers harking back to a day of territorial conquest abroad and authoritarian practices at home.

There is simply no other option.

>> Peter Robinson: Condoleezza Rice, former Secretary of State, Director of the Hoover Institution, thank you.

>> Condoleezza Rice: It's a pleasure.

>> Peter Robinson: For Uncommon Knowledge, the Hoover Institution and Fox Nation, I'm Peter Robinson.