Interview With Matthew Swibel of Forbes MagazineSecretary Condoleezza Rice
New York, New York
September 30, 2007Complete Interview Series with Forbes Magazine:
8.07.2008 - 3.11.2008 - 12.03.2007 - 10.15.2007 - 09.30.2007
QUESTION: I'd like to start out talking a little bit about your -- how you define diplomatic process, okay? So someone who worked on your team I spoke to recently said that, to him, it's like gardening, something you're tending to all the time, but you never leave it completely finished. I wanted to know whether you thought that that was an appropriate metaphor and if, as the manager of the State Department, you always have to make sure that your goals are a work in progress.
SECRETARY RICE: Yeah.
QUESTION: And then my follow-up to that would be, do you have a hard time communicating that as a leader? Because shifts in focus can tend to be interpreted as contradictions.
SECRETARY RICE: Right. That's right. Well, I've heard the gardening metaphor a number of times. George Shultz actually is probably the author of the gardening metaphor and he uses it in a way that I think is totally appropriate, which is that you are constantly tending to relationships, both personal relationships with your colleagues and to relationships with countries, and so it is important to develop those relationships and to keep them -- to call people when something happens in their lives. For instance, I've called people if I know that there's been the death of a parent or something like that.
QUESTION: Can you give an example?
SECRETARY RICE: Yeah, I'll get you an example.
QUESTION: Okay, sure.
SECRETARY RICE: But I try to just keep relationships personal relationships. You also have to tend to your relationships with countries, and so it's important to make certain that you are seeing your key allies on a regular basis, even if there is no particular crisis or work to be finished in that particular business. And so yes, I think that's extremely important. In fact, the worst thing that you can do is call somebody for the first time when you have to ask them to do something hard. You want to have developed that relationship before you have to call them to do something hard.
So in that sense, I think the gardening metaphor works. But I am -- I understand the notion that the diplomatic process is one that is continuous (inaudible) history, each building on each other. But I think it's important to have certain milestones that you're trying to achieve, to have certain work that you're trying to finish, even if you know that the conclusion of, for instance, the U.S.-India Civil Nuclear deal would not be the end of moving the U.S.-Indian relationship forward. We'll do more work on that, the next Secretary of State will, and so will the next Secretary of State. But if you can conclude something like that (inaudible) you've pushed it to the next level. And I'm always looking for the work that you can conclude to push something to the next level, push your relationship to the next level.
QUESTION: Can you draw an example, maybe, where you liked how that illustrated (inaudible)?
SECRETARY RICE: Yeah. Well, I think the relationship with India is one of those. We set out at the beginning to try and improve, extend, broaden and deepen the U.S.-India relationship because very early on the President and I both saw it as an emerging, big democracy and the relationship's never been very close. And you can do all of the kind of small things, you know -- not small things, but expected, new agricultural cooperation, new cooperation between businesses. But the 800-pound elephant in the room was could we overcome the nuclear cooperation barrier that has existed ever since the NPT -- India not signing the NPT and India being a nuclear weapons state.
And so setting out to do that then puts the relationship on a completely different level. And when people talk about landmark agreements, I think that's really what they're talking about.
QUESTION: And just so I don't infer anything inappropriately --
SECRETARY RICE: Yes, yes.
QUESTION: -- from the recent biographies, when you -- when you came into the India negotiations --
SECRETARY RICE: Right.
QUESTION: -- did you see that as a continuation of a stepwise function or -- to use your analogy, or were you in that case drafting things for the first time on paper?
SECRETARY RICE: Well, we didn't start right away. We really started pursuing the India Civil Nuclear deal in 2005, so there was a period of getting to know the relationship and building on what had been there before. But I think we knew from 2001, 2002 that eventually that was going to have to be an issue. But we built to it slowly. It didn't start with the big stepwise function.
QUESTION: And so what about -- this is a follow-up to my question. How do you, as a manger, articulate a shift in focus that comes about inevitably as something aside of a contradiction?
SECRETARY RICE: Well, it's a good question because I read all the time, you know, that we have changed course, shifted course or reversed course. And very often --
QUESTION: It's the media's fault, right?
SECRETARY RICE: Yeah, right. (Laughter.) Well, I think it's a tendency to look at things in snapshots on a kind of day-to-day basis rather than looking at the total picture. So let's take another current issue, the North Korea nuclear issue. The shift there in how to deal with North Korea and how to try to get to a non-nuclear North Korea came all the way back with the creation of the six-party mechanism which for a while, admittedly, didn't have much success. It didn't have much success because -- in the early stages because it was a new concept of not just a bilateral negotiation with the United States and North Korea, but rather a multilateral one where all the big neighbors were going to be a part of the denuclearization of North Korea.
QUESTION: Right.
SECRETARY RICE: So you have that context. Now, when we then have -- are able to move to a kind of tactical maneuver where the United States is able to have bilateral discussions increasingly, and increasingly more fruitful, increasingly more substantive bilateral discussions in the context of that six-party talks, it's not a reversal to decide that now you can have bilateral talks now that the context has been set as one that's multilateral. And I think it's because people look at a snapshot and say, oh, in 2006 or -- yeah, 2006, late 2005, it looks as if Chris Hill is beginning to have bilateral discussions with his North Korean counterpart; that must mean that they've reversed the notion of this not being a bilateral U.S.-North Korea problem. Well, no, in the context where you've said that it's going to be all six parties -- China's going to play a major role -- then those bilateral talks have a very different perspective.
QUESTION: Well, as a manager though, what have you learned about communicating -- how to effectively communicate --
SECRETARY RICE: I believe our diplomats understand that -- let me step back and say that you're right, the State Department is a very big place. It's 50-plus-thousand people who are spread over probably close to 200 different major posts around the world. I can't see every employee of the State Department. I can't see every Foreign Service officer. I can't see every Civil Service officer. And so the question of how one sets, first, expectations and, two, kind of -- first, mission and, secondly, expectations, is not unlike what you face if you've got a big multinational operation.
And when I became Secretary, I thought that the most important thing was to understand what would motivate and drive people to see the current circumstances, this rather complicated, sometimes chaotic, sometimes world in which it appears that things are not always going right, to see that as an opportunity rather than as just a challenge, really see the opportunity.
How could you get people excited about having to deal with all of the complicated and hard problems that we have around the world? And so for me, that became an issue of thinking first what would drive people to go into the Foreign Service, what would drive people to work for the State Department. And I knew a lot of them. I taught a lot of them. It's the people who wanted to change the world. That's why they go into this. They don't go into it because it's personally and financially beneficial to them. They can do a lot of things. They're very talented people. They could do a lot of things that would be a lot more financially beneficial. They do it despite the fact that people serve in hardship posts and serve away from family and move every three years. And so what motivates these people? Well, what motivates these people is they want to change the world. And so developing the narrative about where we are in this particular point in history and making everybody feel a part of the excitement of changing the world became one of the first and earliest messages that I wanted to (inaudible).
QUESTION: And yet there was still a lot of resistance from people within the State Department to at least not at the lower levels, but aside from that to go into hardship posts. At least that's what's been played out in the press.
SECRETARY RICE: Well, let me come back to that for a second because that's the sort of -- that was the strategic thinking.
QUESTION: Yeah, I don't know --
SECRETARY RICE: We're in an environment in which we're changing the world. And then you have to ask if we're in an environment (inaudible) are we structured properly to do that? Do we have the skills? Are we deployed in the right places? Do we have the right incentives for people to be able to be a part of that? And so I came up with this phrase, transformational diplomacy, which meant that we're not preserving the status quo, we're transforming the status quo. And in order to do that, it's not sitting in Europe and reporting on what the governments in Europe are doing as our primary goal. It's being out in the trenches in places like Kabul and Baghdad or in places like Haiti or in very far outposts in China, and being out helping other people in other countries deal with problems of pandemics or creating a new tax collection system or building a new police force. It's a much more kind of expeditionary, active notion of what the Foreign Service is about.
QUESTION: Well, since you took me there, can you be a little more specific and maybe draw on some examples of how the Department's deployed assets have affected outcomes, if at all, to your job? To give you the benefit of the doubt, it almost seems like anyone stepping into your shoes, if the resources were not matched to the objectives, it's almost like having one hand tied behind your back because you depend on information and relationships; if they don't exist in the places that, you know, your priorities and your disaster response (inaudible) are, then what do you have?
SECRETARY RICE: It's a very --
QUESTION: Can you tell me -- can you think back to a situation where it was, you know, frustratingly evident?
SECRETARY RICE: Yeah. Well, let me first say that I had -- I benefited from coming after Colin Powell, who cared about the management and the development of the Foreign Service and had already laid as a foundational principle that people had to be trained and managed in management, in leadership. When he got there at the State Department, most of the people were still using Wangs on their desks. He increased the size of the Foreign Service, which had basically stopped hiring in the '90s. And so I want to be very clear that he laid a good foundation.
But the next step was to, as you put it, deploy the assets properly. So I moved 300 Foreign Service officers out of Europe, not because Europe is unimportant but because with all the interactions that we have in Europe and with the ease of communication in Europe and --
QUESTION: There's other apparatus.
SECRETARY RICE: Yeah, there are lots of other ways to do what we needed to do in Europe. We didn't need all the layering in Europe.
So I'll give you a couple of examples. One that we're still struggling with, one that I think we are getting better, is Ryan Crocker, who is now Ambassador to Baghdad was Ambassador in Islamabad in Pakistan. And when the earthquake hit, he told me, he said, "You know, I just moved 12 officers out to the field." He said, "I didn't ask anybody in Washington." He moved them out of the Embassy out to do earthquake relief with USAID and the military and so forth, just pushing them out there. He said, "I didn't ask anybody because if I had asked Washington it would have taken days to get an answer out of there and I couldn't do that."
And that really started me thinking that there isn't a capability for that kind of response. Similarly, in every new post-conflict democratic society that we're building, helping to build, we had to create ad hoc the capability to help people build the institutions of statehood: police training, the treasury, people who can go out and help them with a tax system, the assistant attorneys who can go out and help them with a judicial system. And so you have to ask yourself, well, why does the United States not have that capability? And what we did was to, in Afghanistan when we went in a post-conflict situation there, we kind of divided it up among countries. You know, this country adopts the police system, that country adopts the judicial system. Let's just say it worked variably.
In Baghdad, in Iraq, the only institution big enough to take on something of that character was the Defense Department and the military, and so that's why the Defense Department was put in charge of post-war operations in Iraq, not because there was some contest between the State Department and the Department of Defense that the State Department lost. The only organization big enough in a post-war circumstance of that kind, and capable enough, was the Defense Department.
QUESTION: Logistically?
SECRETARY RICE: Logistically. In terms of being able to mobilize people from the Guard and Reserve who might have those skills. So now we've decided that we need a civilian capability of that kind, and that's the notion of the Civilian Response Corps, which we can get you a lot more information about.
QUESTION: Now, I know my editor is going to ask me, okay, wait a minute; Secretary Rice was the National Security Advisor whose policies helped support the notion of sprouting democracies in places around the world.
SECRETARY RICE: Right.
QUESTION: Isn't the need -- wasn't the need for the civilian nation-building or supportive roles that you're talking about, wouldn't the Secretary have known years in advance that this would be needed?
SECRETARY RICE: Well, I'll tell you where the concept of the Civilian Reserve Corps came from. It came from a guy named Clint Williamson who worked for me --
QUESTION: Kent?
SECRETARY RICE: Clint. Clint Williamson. Because we have -- we were struggling with this and he did the first concept paper on the creation of a Civilian Reserve Corps. We tried a couple of times to actually get a small capability, but it was -- it's kind of hard to get it through the Congressional Budget process, anyway.
But we knew there were people on the Hill who really supported the idea, people like (inaudible) and Joe Biden. And so finally put it into a big proposal in the President's State of the Union speech last year. But it's -- being a student of international history, I know that it isn't the first time that kind of a new institutional answer comes out of new necessities. It’s almost always the way it is. And if you think about -- I'll bet if you go to some of your Fortune 500 companies and ask them, they will tell you that that's how new capabilities come about as well. You see that there's a new problem (inaudible) capabilities (inaudible). So it started when I was National Security Advisor and now we've been able to push it forward.
QUESTION: But the execution of it maybe moved more rapidly once you got to State?
SECRETARY RICE: One thing that's not understood about the National Security Advisor is the National Security Advisor is not a line officer.
QUESTION: Right. I saw that in the book. You made sure -- a few months -- you were sure you got that quote in --
SECRETARY RICE: It's really true. You don't have troops. You don't have diplomats. You're a coordinating mechanism and a staff person.
QUESTION: Just to -- if I may move to another topic, I mean, is it fair for me to infer -- again, from what you're saying -- are you saying that your staff saw the need for the civilian -- people on the ground in the street doing work that -- without holding guns, basically.
SECRETARY RICE: Right, right.
QUESTION: And --
SECRETARY RICE: And the ability to mobilize civilians.
QUESTION: Right.
SECRETARY RICE: In the way that you can mobilize either the military or, say, the National Guard or Reserve.
QUESTION: What changed, though, in the willingness to adopt that strategy? Besides that you didn't have enough money, was there anything? Was there other factors?
SECRETARY RICE: No, it just -- it takes time to --
QUESTION: No philosophical misunderstandings?
SECRETARY RICE: No. In fact, it got the greatest support from the Defense Department, starting with Don Rumsfeld and now Bob Gates. It isn't that there's been great resistance to the idea of a civilian capability, but it has taken some time. It takes some time in government to get the response in place. We've done some things in the meantime, some what I would call more stopgap measures; for instance, giving the State Department the job of mobilizing other civilian agencies of the U.S. Government to be able to send people.
QUESTION: Right.
SECRETARY RICE: But in that case, we had to argue that we had to be able to reimburse, say, the Department of Agriculture if they were going to send people out to Kabul. We did some other things in -- I have a relatively small but in the hundreds now team of people who work in other -- who work in normal jobs in the State Department who are mobilizable to go out, and some of them are now in Haiti and Sudan and Liberia. So we've created kind of interim capabilities to do this until we can get the major capability. But we're still very heavily dependent right now on letting contracts to kind of mobilize civilians and get people that way.
QUESTION: Well, this is an area that I know even for you it's sometimes hard to think of things off the cuff (inaudible), so this is an area that I would like to revisit at some point to learn which specific negotiations along the way do you feel like you're -- did you feel like you were making some breakthrough on this front.
SECRETARY RICE: On?
QUESTION: On executing the civilian (inaudible).
SECRETARY RICE: Okay.
QUESTION: Whether it was conversations or a certain memo that, you know, convinced someone.
SECRETARY RICE: Yeah, we can put that together. We can put that together for you. Could I just -- I mean, I won't take you where you don't want to go, but you wanted to talk about why people -- still getting people (inaudible) posts?
QUESTION: Well, the notion that you need people doing things other than security on the ground promotes democracy, promotes stability, promotes security, is something that I think I view as a hallmark of maybe the last few years and through your efforts. So I need to explain to the reader, beyond how do you incentivize Foreign Services officers to relocate from Amsterdam to Afghanistan (inaudible). (Laughter.) What actually has taken place where, you know, after pounding your fist or after, you know, killing with kindness, how do you actually get the job done with the civilian -- and the behind-the-closed doors type of thing. Rather than speaking about it in a philosophical way, it's helpful, but the action is what I need for the story.
SECRETARY RICE: Yeah. This one will be easier because we had to take a whole bunch of steps in order to get it done.
QUESTION: And showing that, actually, I think will surprise the reader --
SECRETARY RICE: Yeah.
QUESTION: -- that you're the Secretary of State.
SECRETARY RICE: You know, just tell people --
QUESTION: At least why isn't it a three-step process?
SECRETARY RICE: Yeah.
QUESTION: Why is it a whatever sort of process?
SECRETARY RICE: Well, I think we actually -- this one I think we turned around relatively quickly. But look, one of the ways that I manage is that if something isn't getting done, I think to myself -- okay, what's the impediment here? When I was Provost of Stanford, you know, we sit on an earthquake fault, and so we used to do -- and we had a huge earthquake in the fall of '89, destroyed a large part of the campus.
And so I was in charge of earthquake preparations. And we had a briefing from the Army Corps of Engineers once. And they started out by saying, you know, when you have a major disaster the first thing you have to ask yourself is what is the enabling condition, right? And in an earthquake it might be actually clearing the roads so that rescue people can get through. And I thought, that's a kind of neat concept: What is the enabling condition?
So I ask myself all the time now: What is the enabling condition? What are the things I have to break through in order to make this happen? And I learned of this a bit the hard way because when I started out as Provost at Stanford I was 38 years old. I had never even been a department chair. And my way of managing was that if something wasn't getting done, I did it myself. And I learned pretty early on that I was either not going to have very good people working for me because they were going to get tired of my taking things over.
QUESTION: Micromanaging.
SECRETARY RICE: Micromanaging, or I was going to drive myself crazy and not be very effective. And this became a way of asking: Why isn't Joe getting that done? Maybe there's something that I need to have happen so that he can get that done.
In the case of people taking hardship posts, it turns out that there are all kinds of impediments that were relatively easy to (inaudible). For instance, some of this had to do with family, particularly for people who were kind of in their mid career. You would ask yourself, why are you getting all the really young officers and retired people?
QUESTION: Right.
SECRETARY RICE: Well, because if you've got two kids and you're in Kuwait and they're in school, and your government tells you that if you agree to go to Baghdad in January you've got to uproot your family and move them all the way back to the States, that's going to make it very hard. So one of the things we did was to arrange that people's families could stay where they were. Now the kids can continue in school and it makes it easier for mom or dad to pick up and go work in Baghdad or Kuwait.
Another one was that the posts that were having to give people up had the sense that, you know, they'd just gotten the outstanding political officer at post, and since Arabic speakers were a particularly limited -- in limited numbers, they'd just gotten a real good political officer. That person is going to go off to Baghdad for a year and then come back for a year and they've lost them. So we extended the tour so that when they go back they still have two years to serve in Kuwait or in Cairo or someplace like that. And so by regionalization of the positions --
QUESTION: So they go away to Iraq and then they come back for two years --
SECRETARY RICE: Right.
QUESTION: -- rather than --
SECRETARY RICE: If they'd like to.
QUESTION: Right.
SECRETARY RICE: So there were -- there are a whole list of things like that that we did.
QUESTION: What about money?
SECRETARY RICE: We did give people -- we already have a hardship pay increment, but yes, it's enhanced to serve in such places. And then, but when it finally comes (inaudible) you feel the people's patriotism, too, because they're going into dangerous and difficult positions. But yeah, there were -- and we can get you -- there were probably five or so personnel changes that we had to make, pretty blocking-and-tackling kinds of things, to make sure that people can serve.
QUESTION: I think this is a good (inaudible) for us to revisit. Let me shift gears for a minute and talk a little bit about negotiation outside of the Administration and the Department. Why do you view now as an opportunistic time to work things out between Israelis and Palestinians? Six months ago, a much different feeling.
SECRETARY RICE: Yeah. But that's a very good example. Six months ago, I was hammering that we could get this done and everybody thought I was -- had lost it somehow. You know, I really started in January --
QUESTION: Well, can you give us a sense of how this process was? How did it go down, sort of play by play?
SECRETARY RICE: All right. Well --
QUESTION: As best you can.
SECRETARY RICE: Yeah. It's kind of a long story and I'm trying to figure out how to start it little for you. Because --
QUESTION: Well, I guess a good place would be maybe the end of last summer.
SECRETARY RICE: Yeah, the end of the Lebanon war. Yes, at the end of the Lebanon war you either had to say, all right, after this war we're going to try to put in place some kind of foundational improvements, foundational stakes in the ground that are going to provide for a different kind of Middle East, that that's what we should do. And you know, we had --
QUESTION: I don't understand what you mean by that.
SECRETARY RICE: What I mean is that when you have a war like that, a lot of kind of old bargains have been broken, have broken down. There are a lot of bad things that happened. And the question is can you get something good out of it.
QUESTION: You're not beholden to the same virulence, in other words?
SECRETARY RICE: Right, right. But I saw it as all this change that has been going on in the Middle East, some of it violent, some of it very difficult, there's some pillars that we need to try to help leave in place so that when we're gone and the next president is there, they're dealing with one of those (inaudible) stepwise (inaudible) that I was talking about.
QUESTION: Right, yeah.
SECRETARY RICE: Obviously, leaving Iraq in a sustainable position is one of those. But progress on the Palestinian-Israeli issue is one of those as well that could be one of the pillars of a fundamentally different Middle East. And I also -- I'll tell you, I also just believe that in a -- in some way that it's time. The Palestinians have waited a long time for the dignity that's going to come with a state. The Israelis have waited a long time for the security that's going to come from having a democratic Palestinian state.
And the conditions in the Middle East are never good enough. If you're waiting for the perfect condition, it's not going to come. And so we really set out to try and make progress toward the Palestinian state, and I remember I had this discussion with the President that I thought this was something that they should really pursue. He was completely -- agreed completely because, of course, he had been the one who outlined the notion of a two-state solution. And we sort of started in the fall of last year and really kind of picking up steam in January, and then we got to February and we had the Mecca agreement. And that scrambled the eggs, so to speak --
QUESTION: How so?
SECRETARY RICE: Well, because the Israelis who had been dealing with Abu Mazen and with the Palestinian Authority were suddenly dealing with a government that was Hamas -- that no longer -- we had been able to isolate the Hamas government, but all of a sudden now the Palestinian Authority and the Hamas government were one. And now the question of what were you really dealing with, because nobody really believed that the Israelis were prepared to deal with a -- with Hamas.
So now we -- in February we go to Jerusalem for what was supposed to be a trilateral between Abu Mazen and Olmert and myself. Very difficult. Mecca had just happened. A lot of bad feeling, I think. And I remember people saying this is going to go nowhere, there is no way that we're going to make progress toward a Palestinian state. You can look; I did some interviews during the time where I told people, well, you know, I was determined that we were going to try to keep this on track. And I thought that all I could do at that point was to get them talking, just get them talking. Not get them talking even about anything specific, except that we needed to get them talking about the political future that they might have together.
And out of that trip, they agreed to meet every couple of weeks.
QUESTION: Okay, stop here.
SECRETARY RICE: Yes.
QUESTION: What I'm hearing you say is that one of the overarching themes or objectives of that period was to use what has happened electorally in the Palestinian territories as a way to communicate to both parties you're going to swallow this bitter pill, so you need to accept it in a way and move on?
SECRETARY RICE: Well, no, that you're going -- not that you need to deal with Hamas. That wasn't the point. But you're still going to have to have a political future together.
QUESTION: Well, right.
SECRETARY RICE: Moderate Palestinians like Abu Mazen and the Israelis were still going to have to have a political future together.
QUESTION: Can you recast for me, though, you know, how you negotiate with Israelis at that time for talks when you -- you're probably telling them it's time you lived in a secure neighborhood with democratic allies, when the democracy -- or democratic neighbors, when the democracy is what brought Hamas to power.
SECRETARY RICE: Yes, that's exactly right.
QUESTION: Right. So can you --
SECRETARY RICE: That's right.
QUESTION: That is what I'm sure people will really want to know --
SECRETARY RICE: It's trying to get people to see over this moment to how to get to the next moment; how to use this moment, which admittedly was not very good --
QUESTION: But do you act humble in a way in explaining, look, maybe there's steps that we've taken that helped advance the process?
SECRETARY RICE: You'd have to ask somebody else how -- you know, how I come across in the circumstances.
QUESTION: But you're not purposely trying to?
SECRETARY RICE: No, I'm just trying to make an argument, you know. But yeah, I recognized at that point that it's not a time to, you know, beat your chest and be -- to say to people, oh, can't you see that there's a -- no, that's not how to handle it.
QUESTION: So how do you do it?
SECRETARY RICE: Well, when I had the two of them together, I started out by saying almost nothing myself but listening to them. And listening to them talk and listening to them interact and listening to them getting a lot of the --
QUESTION: -- anger out?
SECRETARY RICE: Yeah. And then saying -- as a matter of fact, I'll give you the full picture. We were in the David Citadel Hotel and the only room we had been able to find was kind of like a ballroom.
QUESTION: It was part of the ballroom. It was like a big ballroom where they had sectioned off part of it, so you had like a room?
SECRETARY RICE: Yeah. And we're sitting there in this enormous ballroom, just the three of us, me in the middle and Olmert on this side and Abbas on this side. And Abbas looked at me and said, "I feel like I'm in a train station." And I thought, this isn't off to a very good start.
So after they had talked, and there was considerable unvented anger, we went on that way for a while. And the interpreter, Gamal Helal, because Abu Mazen was speaking a lot of the time in Arabic, I kept watching to get a sense from Gamal how angry are his words, how -- you know, how much is this, how deep is this? And it really wasn't going very well, and so after a while I said, all right, why don't we go up to my suite and just talk about the future. You know, we've talked about the past. Let's put that aside now and let's go up and talk about how you're going to build a future together.
So we went up to my suite and, you know, much more comfortable surroundings, with Jerusalem in the background, you know, the Holy City in the background. And that went a lot better. And then they did start talking about the future, and I thought after that that if they could keep talking -- so we have this phrase that we use that they needed to talk about the political horizon. And it was -- it wasn't a phrase that was by any means substanceless, but it was meant to be accordion-like and kind of big, and not too specific, not you need to talk about the peace process, not you need to talk about the core issues, not you need to talk about the establishment of the Palestinian state. You need to talk about the political horizon.
And I thought -- and it did give them space to start interacting. But diplomacy is an interaction between what you do in that kind of circumstances -- you know, how good a negotiator you are and can you get people to talk to each other, can you bring people together -- and bigger circumstances that are unfolding around you.
And so we got -- this was going along and it was -- their conversations were getting better and better and they were talking more and more. But then when Hamas decided to launch the coup in Gaza and you ended up with a Palestinian Government led by Abu Mazen and Salam Fayyad, now the ability to really push forward was much greater.
But I really think if we hadn't kept it alive in February, I think if you don't keep it alive, then you don't have what you have now. But understanding this interaction between what I call the kind of tactical work, you know, just talking, you do have to know what strategic circumstances you're in. I was around for the end of the Cold War when the Soviet Union was collapsing. And yeah, there was a lot of difficult negotiating to be done, but in a context where the Soviet Union is going like this, it's a lot different than a circumstance in which the Soviet Union is in the '60s going like this.
QUESTION: So can you elaborate a little bit about this contextual reason for movement right now?
SECRETARY RICE: Yeah.
QUESTION: To follow your thoughts.
SECRETARY RICE: Yeah. Some of it had -- I talked about earlier, which was the alignment of -- I think we called them "responsible Arab states" who want to end the conflict. One of the problems at Camp David was that you didn't have really Arab participation and backing for ending the conflict. And so you could see really with Lebanon being a little bit of a shock as to Iranian influence --
QUESTION: And do you -- at this point, do you seek to understand why the Arabs want to keep this going?
SECRETARY RICE: They probably don't want to keep it going, why they want to end the conflict.
QUESTION: Right. But I thought you said there wasn't a lot of Arab support to end the conflict.
SECRETARY RICE: Back in 2000.
QUESTION: Oh, okay.
SECRETARY RICE: Back in 2000. Part of it was just procedural. They weren't brought in in the same way. But the -- you know, the big strategic picture has changed a lot since 2000. And frankly, what has happened with Iran, and I think Lebanon was a real glimpse into the future of Iran making itself felt in the Arab world and Iran backing parts of Hamas. And it gave -- I think it's given the responsible Arabs more of a desire to end this conflict. So that's one kind of strategic shift.
The other strategic -- the other shift is the emergence of this now democratic Palestinian leadership that is clearly committed to a peaceful course. President Bush took a lot of grief in 2002 when he said that Arafat would never make peace and the Palestinians needed new leadership. Well, they've done it. And so over this period of time, a lot of pieces have been coming into place. And so you recognize strategically where you are. You work tactically with, you know, this the negotiating part and the getting them together part and all that.
QUESTION: So to oversimplify and summarize a little bit, you were playing therapist for -- in the beginning. And so at what point do you sense --
SECRETARY RICE: Facilitator.
QUESTION: Facilitator. Facilitator. Okay, so at what point would you say marks maybe a little bit more the verbal, more directive role for yourself?
SECRETARY RICE: Well, when I go out, you know, I'm very clear on what I think needs to be done. But this is still a process that is going to only work if Palestinians and Israelis are in the lead with the United States recognizing when they have become stuck or when they need -- when they need a way. Remember I said that people get here and they can't see there.
QUESTION: Yeah.
SECRETARY RICE: When they need a way to see there.
QUESTION: The reason I ask is just because there was a ticker today on the television on Fox News, I think already planting the seed of doubt that, you know, Palestinians want specifics, Israelis want broad agreements. And so --
SECRETARY RICE: And they're going to need something in between. (Laughter.)
QUESTION: So -- right. Okay. So it's at the point where your position is to bring them together.
It's also interesting how the dynamics with Iran have been changed. Clearly, Sarkozy is a factor in the changed calculus. Is that fair in that situation?
SECRETARY RICE: Well, what do you mean? (Inaudible). Oh, you mean in terms of European unity?
QUESTION: Yes. And the fact that you have the EU more strongly behind or in alignment maybe with mechanisms in place to deal with Iran.
SECRETARY RICE: Well, actually, I think we've been pretty lined up with the Europeans since May of 2005. We weren't lined up with them before, but we're much more lined up since 2005. But I think what you're seeing is that there is more recognition that there will have to be steps taken in parallel to the UN Security Council process. And that's where, you know, EU sanctions and that sort of thing -- and there again, I think that Sarkozy has been -- has been part of the change there. But it was sort of beginning to happen, but he's been more articulate about it.
QUESTION: Can you recall a few moments over the past few months where you have included that in your -- included that knowledge in your negotiations on Iran?
SECRETARY RICE: Well, I don't want to give the impression that -- you know, the French have been pretty onboard really since May 2005. The French have not been a problem.
QUESTION: Well, I think your word -- wording was -- is precise, is the articulation about --
SECRETARY RICE: Oh, yeah.
QUESTION: And so does it not present an opportunity to capitalize behind closed doors on a momentum or --
SECRETARY RICE: Well, the problem is that I think it has helped more externally during -- yeah, because during the negotiations, the French have been very solid for a long time. (Inaudible).
MR. MCCORMACK: Just so you can arrange your time, you have about five more minutes in this session.
QUESTION: Okay, okay. Let me jump to this then. We've talked a little bit about incentives or facilitating with your counterparts around the world. We've talked about managing an internal process. What about with cabinet-level and higher peers? What incentives or tactics have proven effective in advancing your opinions or arguments? For example, can you walk me through how you have made the case for a dialogue with Iran ultimately taking precedence over an argument for isolation?
SECRETARY RICE: See, that's the problem. They're not -- this isn't bipolar. They're not -- they're two halves of the same walnut. This is one of the most misunderstood elements -- notions about diplomacy. Diplomacy without both negative --
QUESTION: Carrots and sticks.
SECRETARY RICE: Carrots and sticks, or disincentives and incentives as I call them, is just talking. And the idea that you can talk your way into a change in policy for Iran is just wrong. And so when people say, oh, there must be one part of the Administration that believes in isolating Iran and one part of the Administration that believes in engaging Iran, it's just not the way that it is.
QUESTION: Okay. I think I meant more -- I think that it's -- the carrot and the stick approach, I think, is pretty well known. But the question I was drawing out is when to pull the trigger on which side?
SECRETARY RICE: Well, let me put it this way. I always prefer to have my disincentives lined up before I start trying to give people incentives. I'm -- I don't believe -- I think diplomacy without teeth is just -- is not very helpful and kind of talking and just talking and just talking.
The worst kind of negotiation you can go into is where the other guy has most of the leverage. And so from my point of view, it's always a question of how do you build leverage before you have to go in and negotiate something. And with Iran, therefore, some of the leverage has come from letting the Iranians know that the United States is not leaving the Gulf region. That's why moving carriers in is important. That's why building stronger military relationships with the Gulf states is important. That's why running down their operatives in Iraq and Ryan Crocker's line to them, "None of your people are safe in Iraq, as long as they're trying to kill our soldiers (inaudible)," now that's the part that people -- that if that isn't being done, I don't ever want to talk to the Iranians. Because they have got to know that there is a consequence to not having agreement. That's why it is really important that these financial measures get tougher and tougher and tougher.
So I'm a big believer when you're dealing with an adversarial state that you'd better have your disincentives lined up before you go and start trying to give people incentives. So I think if there's anything that I read in the papers and I think, what are they talking about, it's this notion that one part of the Administration is trying to build disincentives and one part of it wants to engage them. I'm perfectly happy to talk to them when I've got the consequences lined up.
QUESTION: Well, I think we're out of time. I think that you might be -- I think you might be misreading some of the coverage, if you look at it in that perspective. Just you know, I don't think it's news to anyone that it's got to be carrot and sticks.
SECRETARY RICE: It's not a question of carrots and sticks.
QUESTION: It's a question of when you pull the trigger and how do you balance the two and --
SECRETARY RICE: It's a question about -- it's not even a question of balancing the two.
QUESTION: What is it?
SECRETARY RICE: I'm telling you that unless you have leverage going in, that means you -- remember I was talking about strategic context? Unless you've created a strategic context in which you're not the supplicant, you're not the weaker one, you're not going to get anyplace in negotiating with an adversary. And so you keep -- you lay -- you make certain that you've got the sticks constantly in place. You know, with -- there is a notion about diplomacy that it is somehow -- and people talk about diplomacy almost in isolation from what the strategic context is.
I can really tell you, you know, I was part of the negotiations at the end of the Cold War. At some level, the Soviets couldn't give up fast enough because they were in rapid decline. And so now, we had done a lot of things to put them there, to be sure, particularly Ronald Reagan, who maybe understood this better than anybody else. By the time Ronald Reagan was negotiating with Gorbachev in '87 and '88, it's because he challenged the Soviet Union. He called them an evil empire. He said they were going to end up in the ash heap of history. He, you know, put American military spending through the roof to try to spend them into the ice age. And then was ready to negotiate and he had created leverage.
So when you're dealing with an adversary, not when you're negotiating with Germany or even Russia, which isn't an adversary now, or negotiating with India, even negotiating with China, but when you're dealing with a true adversarial state like Iran that is a security challenge for the United States and that is aggressively challenging American interests all over the world, you'd better do it from a position of strength. And they had -- you had better make certain that they understand that you're in a position of strength.
QUESTION: Thank you.
2008/672
Released on August 29, 2008
|
