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10/17/2022 09:56 PM EDT
Antony J. Blinken, Secretary of State
Former Secretary of State, Dr. Condoleezza Rice
Former Secretary of Defense, Jim Mattis
Stanford University, Stanford, California
Hoover Institution
SECRETARY MATTIS: Well, good morning, everyone, and welcome to today’s event, a conversation between former Secretary of State Dr. Condoleezza Rice and our current Secretary of State Tony Blinken. At a time when America is navigating its role in a changing world, today’s talk in the finest tradition of the great university where we meet offers a unique opportunity to delve into important issues.
I’m Jim Mattis, a Fellow here at Hoover, where we seek to improve the human condition by advancing ideas that promote economic opportunity while safeguarding peace. Thanks to their record of devoted service to our nation, little introduction is needed for these two patriots. America is one great, big, promising, exasperating, inspiring, and vexing experiment with all the political volatility inherent to a free and open society.
Admired leadership in our republic calls for certain characteristics: first, a humble awareness of each generation’s responsibility to improve on this experiment in forming a more perfect union; and second, competence. The two citizens on this stage are exemplars of both characteristics. Dr. Rice’s contribution over many years of leadership cannot be summed up in a few words. Suffice that through merit, conviction, and a keen perceptiveness of the world we must live in, she rose to the apex of our government, ultimately splitting eight years of leadership between service as our National Security Advisor and as our 66th Secretary of State. We’re proud to call her boss and coach of the Hoover team.
Secretary Blinken has also accumulated a lengthy portfolio of foreign affairs experience before becoming our Secretary of State. It wasn’t long after graduation from Harvard and Columbia that he entered government service, ultimately serving as the Deputy National Security Advisor and Deputy Secretary of State following his time on Capitol Hill, where he served as the staff director for the Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee.
In a recent talk with graduates, he suggested that if they’re going to spend a lot of their lives at work, then they should work at something they love. Our nation is fortunate that both these leaders devote their best efforts to something they love, and that is America. In so doing, their leadership by example reminds each of us that government service in a democracy is both privilege and responsibility. As problem solvers during these tumultuous years, their leadership forged trust while navigating maddeningly complex issues. Holding our values foremost, they have dealt pragmatically with a swiftly changing world filled by the good, the bad, and the ugly.
They have done so while listening and maintaining respect for those who disagreed with them, strengthening a necessary attribute for leadership in a democracy. Today’s discussion will focus on the evolution and importance of technology, diplomacy, and national security – familiar topics here in Silicon Valley and highly relevant across our nation and round the world.
Hoover Institution was established to advance the principles of freedom. We ask bold questions and propose solutions to help guide American policy at home and abroad. In that spirit and consistent with Stanford’s role of promoting the free competition of ideas, let’s get started. First a conversation, then Q&A. Again, please give a hearty welcome to Secretaries Blinken and Rice. (Applause.)
SECRETARY RICE: Well, thank you very much. But before we get started, I just have to say that that gentleman, Secretary Mattis, served as our Secretary of Defense but also many years of service as a Marine, something also carried by a great patron of this place, George Shultz. And so I’d like you to give Secretary Mattis a hand, please. (Applause.)
Welcome. Welcome to Stanford. Welcome to Hoover. Welcome to the Silicon Valley.
SECRETARY BLINKEN: It’s wonderful to be back. Thank you.
SECRETARY RICE: And it’s probably nice to be here, right?
SECRETARY BLINKEN: There’s something about occasionally getting out of Washington that isn’t a bad thing. (Laughter.)
SECRETARY RICE: Yeah, it’s a good thing. A good thing, right. (Laughter.)
Well, we’re going to have a conversation and then we will open for a few questions and answers. I’m still a professor; I will call on somebody if nobody raises their hand – (laughter) – so get ready with your questions.
You’ve just had a pretty momentous week, and I don’t just mean what’s going on in the world, but I mean the release of the National Security Strategy. And for those who don’t fully follow these things, I think the National Security Strategy is an opportunity for the President to really ask his team: What should we be doing now to prepare for a better future? And the National Security Strategy has a number of elements that I’d like you to speak to, and I’m going to start with one that’s kind of near and dear to the heart of every secretary of state probably going back to our long-long-time predecessor Thomas Jefferson. In case you didn’t know it, he was the first secretary of state.
But you start with talking about American values but also the competition between autocracy and democracy. Can you expand a little bit on how you think about this moment? The United States has had many competitors across its history, but this particular moment, how do you think about this big issue?
SECRETARY BLINKEN: Well, first let me just say how wonderful it is to be back at Stanford, to be with my friend Dr. Rice. Jim, I’ve been an admirer of yours and your leadership for many, many years, and today you again reaffirmed why you have such a strong, powerful, eloquent voice. It’s great to be with you. Thank you.
And first of all, I’m wondering: Do you have classes? (Laughter.) What – are you getting credit? (Laughter.)
One of the things that I think is almost visceral to us right now is that we’re at an inflection point. And to put it in broad perspective, the post Cold War era is over and there is now an intense competition underway to shape what comes next. That’s the moment we think that we’re living in.
Part of this is the renewed but also new great power competition, and that’s very much at the heart of the strategy. Part of this is trying to figure out ways, and in ways that we haven ‘t before, how to solve some really big challenges that are actually having a direct impact on the lives of our people, whether it is global health – and we’ve been living through COVID – whether it’s the impact of climate change, whether it’s just the role of all of the emerging technologies, so many of them coming from here, that are shaping our lives. All of that is reflected in the strategy.
Now, this is – Dr. Rice and I both worked on a few of these in our time. Rarely have so many labored for so long —
SECRETARY RICE: And you can drop the Dr. Rice if you – right, right.
SECRETARY BLINKEN: Thank you. But rarely – I think we would both say rarely have so many in government worked for so long on something read by so few. (Laughter.) But having said that, it is an important document because it does try to give coherence to what we’re doing. And it’s important across the government so that all of the different agencies and departments are kind of working off of the same blueprint, and internationally so that both friend and foe alike have a good idea about what we’re all about, why we’re doing what we’re doing, why we’re saying what we’re saying.
SECRETARY RICE: You talked about the great power rivalry, and this is something that I don’t think we really ever thought we would see again after the collapse of the Soviet Union. But indeed it has come back and it’s come back with force, and I’d like you to address the two big rivals.
The National Security Strategy talks about restraining Russia and outcompeting China, and that’s two very different ways to think about the great powers. So – and perhaps you want to weave a little bit of Ukraine into the Russia story, but can you start with restraining Russia – some would say a declining power in the great power competition, but one that is on the front pages now every day?
SECRETARY BLINKEN: I think declining power is probably a fair assessment, but one that has an enormous capacity if it chooses to use it to do damage, to be a disrupter. And of course, we see that front and center on our front pages every day in Ukraine.
When we started out – and again, we’ve both been dealing with this for a long time, and Condi knows more – has in a sense forgotten more about Russia than I’ll know for many years of working these issues. I think many administrations have come in with the hope that we might have a more stable, predictable relationship with Russia precisely because we have so many big things that we want to be working on that go to the betterment of the lives of our people and people around the world.
However, Russia – especially under President Putin – is a major disrupter and one that can make tremendous trouble. We see that in Ukraine. But we see it in its basic opposition and Putin’s basic opposition to the order that emerged after two World Wars and then after the Cold War with a basic set of rules and principles that we thought were necessary to try to help keep international peace and security.
This is in direct opposition to what President Putin is trying to do in reconstituting – take your pick – a Russian empire or a Soviet one. And it’s manifesting itself in the actions he’s taken. We’ve seen this play out over the last almost decade now. But for us – and I’ll just say this very briefly – the reason there’s so much focus on Ukraine is twofold. One is Ukraine itself. I think it bothers all of us profoundly when one country tries to lord it over another, when it tries to assert a world in which might makes right, in which it changes borders by force, in which it tries to subjugate another country to its will. That’s what’s going on.
But what’s also going in this: It’s not only an aggression against Ukraine. It is an aggression against the basic principles that are embodied in the United Nations Charter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and a whole series of norms and rules that many generations labored to build. And are they perfect? Far from it. Have we made many mistakes both in designing them and in their application? Yes. But fundamentally they have helped make sure that we didn’t have another global conflict after two world wars. And what Russia is doing, what Putin is doing, is in direct opposition to those.
SECRETARY RICE: It’s not your job exclusively, but there are Americans who say: Why Ukraine? Why not Peoria or Des Moines? And you just talked about the rules-based order. Can you sharpen it for Americans as to why this conflict is so important? Because this may go on a while, and we may have to sustain American support and therefore democratic support for a long time.
SECRETARY BLINKEN: At least from my perspective, if we and others are not standing up for these basic understandings, these basic rules, the idea that countries’ independence should be respected, its territorial integrity should be respected, not changed by force; if we don’t stand up for that – and we can do that in a variety of ways, which we can come to – if we don’t stand up to that where it’s being challenged, then the risk you have is opening a Pandora’s box, where aggressors – not just in Europe, not just Russia – will take a lesson and say: I can act with impunity; I can do this. And that’s going to stir up conflicts in many parts of the world.
And the one thing we know from history is that inevitably, one way or another, this pulls us in. And if we can do whatever we can to prevent rather than having to respond and to make sure that some of these rules are upheld – even as we try to modernize them even as we try to make sure that they reflect the world that we’re living in, not just the world that they were written in, which in many cases was 70 years ago – I think it’s clearly in our interest to do that. And that’s what we’re trying to show in Ukraine.
SECRETARY RICE: Right. Let’s talk about the other great power. I’ll come to a regional power in a moment, but let’s talk about the great power, China. Big party congress going on. Lots at stake. Xi Jinping is likely to be coronated for his third term. And he’s been a little bit of a different Chinese leader. It used to be said of Chinese leaders, when I was there – Hu Jintao, Jiang Zemin before him – “hide and bide.” Just keep developing China – the Chinese would always say, “Oh, we’re just a developing country; we don’t really do foreign policy.”
Well, Xi Jinping has a quite different view of China’s role. And 30-plus years of kind of a integrationist narrative about China seems to be coming apart. You’ve called it “outcompeting” China, which I think is an interesting concept. So talk about China and the United States in this regard.
SECRETARY BLINKEN: Well, you’re exactly right. We’ve seen a very different China emerge in recent years under Xi Jinping’s leadership. It is more repressive at home, it’s more aggressive abroad, and in many instances that poses a challenge to our own interests, as well as to our own values. But I also think it’s important not to reduce this to a bumper sticker. This relationship is among the most consequential that we have. It’s among the most challenging we have. It’s among the most complicated that we have. And what we’ve seen in recent years is the emergence of – or clearly adversarial aspects to the relationship; for sure – and I’ll come back to it quickly – competitive aspects; but there also remain cooperative aspects. And we can’t lose sight of those, because some of the really big problems that we have to find ways to solve are a lot harder to solve if the United States and China are not actually engaged in trying to solve them: climate, global health, et cetera.
But the competitive aspect is front and center, because this is, as I suggested, at least from our perspective, a competition to shape what comes next after this post-Cold War period. What does it look like? Whose values are going to be reflected in what we do? And from our perspective at least, we have a basic choice, because we find – and I think this has been evident over the – especially over the period since the Second World War – the world doesn’t organize itself. And for the United States, the choice is this: If we’re not playing a part in the organizing, if we’re not taking a leadership role in that, then one of two things – either someone else is, and it may well be China, and there, again, probably not in a way that fully reflects our interests and values; or maybe just as bad, no one’s doing it, and then you tend to have vaccums that get filled with bad things before they get filled with good things.
So we have an interest in engaging, we have an interest in leading, and we have an interest in making sure that, to the extent we’re in competition over what this new thing looks like, we are bringing everything to the table. In my own judgment, China also wants an order, but it’s a profoundly illiberal order. The order that we seek – again, imperfectly – is a more liberal one, and that’s what that competition is about.
SECRETARY RICE: I’m going to come back to how we do this, because you talk a lot about investing in our own strengths —
SECRETARY BLINKEN: Yeah.
SECRETARY RICE: — but I want to stay for a moment on the relationship with China. You gave a very good speech a few months ago in which you talked about – I’d call it a rather nuanced approach to China. As you’ve said, that there’s some areas of conflict, some areas of competition, and some areas of cooperation. Pretty quickly, the Chinese came out and said: not gonna happen – let me put it that way – because we can’t delink these things. Do you have some hope that there might still be room? Maybe after the party congress is over, maybe after our own version of the party congress, the midterms, are over – then would there be room, and where would you see those potential areas of cooperation with China?
SECRETARY BLINKEN: The world fundamentally expects this of us, so whether China wants to find ways to cooperate or not on particularly climate, global health, maybe counternarcotics, even if they don’t want to, there’s a huge demand signal from the world. They expect us to try to find ways to advance these issues, and if we can, together, because it’s affecting them as well as us.
We know we’re not going to be able to deal with climate as we should if China is not part of the picture. It’s going to have to decide; we can’t decide for it. It has to decide whether it’s in its interests, but it’s also getting pressure from others around the world to be part of the solution, not part of the problem.
Same thing on global health. And this is not about pointing fingers for the pandemic – it’s about figuring out how do we build a more secure global health system so that this doesn’t happen again. China needs to be part of that answer. But it’s going to have to judge for itself whether, in its relationship with us, it finds ways to pursue cooperation, whether it just has to be responsive to demand signals that it’s getting from countries around the world to be a positive actor, not a negative actor, on issues that concern them – not just China, not just the United States.
SECRETARY RICE: We had reasonable cooperation at one time on another troublesome part of the world, North Korea. Obviously, it’s been in the news again recently. Any thoughts on whether or not that scenario – it’s really nonproliferation. Do you really want nuclear weapons in the hands of, shall we say, troublesome regimes like the North Koreans?
SECRETARY BLINKEN: This has been a challenge going back every administration I think we were each involved in, in one way or another, and one that has manifestly not gotten better over the years. I think from the leadership’s perspective in North Korea, part of what we’re seeing is it doesn’t like to be ignored.
SECRETARY RICE: Yeah.
SECRETARY BLINKEN: And so when the world is focused elsewhere, this is a reminder that: We’re still here. We’re still a problem. You have to deal with it.
But there’s something else going on as well. Over the last months, going back about a year, we have significantly increased our own work with our allies and partners in the region – South Korea, Japan – both on a bilateral basis where we’ve, for example, renewed exercises that we’d had for years that were put in abeyance a few years ago – we brought them back, military exercises, to make sure that we could defend and hopefully deter any kind of North Korean aggression – as well as work that’s being done now in ways that it hadn’t been in recent years among the United States, Japan, Korea together, which has lots of benefits, including bringing Korea and Japan closer together. I think that Kim Jong-un saw that and didn’t like it, and it’s a response to that.
We’ve taken a variety of actions, including at the United Nations, including strengthening even more our defense and deterrence, but it is an ongoing problem. And it does go, Condi, to exactly what you’re talking about, which are concerns about broader proliferation. At the end of the day, one of the most important and powerful things about trying to continue to advance nonproliferation, preventing the spread of weapons, as well as arms control ourselves and being responsible actors under the Non-Proliferation Treaty, is making sure that we don’t have a world where a whole variety of countries conclude that they’re going to be better off if they acquire nuclear weapons that they don’t have. And we know that that’s a world that’s going to be even more fraught. So we have to find ways to reinforce these norms, these rules, these standards that we’ve signed on to and that need our engagement.
SECRETARY RICE: I’m going to come to technology in just a moment, I promise you, but I will get lots of messages that say you didn’t ask him about Iran. Do you want to say just a word about that situation? It’s extraordinary moments these days.
SECRETARY BLINKEN: What we’re seeing is – really is remarkable. And it starts with the incredible courage of very young people, especially women and girls, who are standing up for their most basic rights, their most fundamental freedoms, at extraordinary personal risk. And of course, we saw the prominent deaths of young women that led to this.
But what’s powerful about it is that this is – this is grassroots, this is bottom up. This is a reflection of huge frustration and huge anger that so many in Iranian society have toward the direction of their country and toward their leadership, and they’re demanding change. This is not made in the U.S.A.; it’s not made anywhere else. To the extent that leaders in Iran try to point the fingers and somehow blame us, they are profoundly misreading and misunderstanding their own people and their own country, and that’s going to be to their detriment.
What can we do? First, we can stand and speak in solidarity with those who are simply trying to stand up for their own rights. Second, we can look at the different actors in Iran who are denying those rights and do what we can to penalize them for their actions. So we, for example, had sanctions that we put forward on the so-called morality police. And then maybe most important, and this goes directly in many ways to this community, we want to make sure that we are doing nothing that gets in the way of making sure that Iranians have the ability to the greatest extent possible of communicating with each other and connecting to the outside world, and that comes with technology. So we’ve issued some licenses to make sure that we’re not doing that, that people don’t feel that our sanctions prohibit them from getting the technology that Iranians need to communicate with each other and with the world to the Iranian people.
SECRETARY RICE: A little bit more activist this time than in 2012?
SECRETARY BLINKEN: Each period’s a little bit different.
SECRETARY RICE: A little different, yeah. Right?
SECRETARY BLINKEN: And I think – I think our voice has been very clear – not just our voice, our actions. And not just ours, countries around the world. But fundamentally, this is about the Iranian people. It’s about their country. It’s about their future. They will decide it. But we want to demonstrate in both practical as well as rhetorical ways our solidarity with them in this moment.
SECRETARY RICE: So you’re sitting at Stanford University in the middle of Silicon Valley. A long, long history between this place and the valley. And you are seeing and talking to the people who are really leading the technology revolutions. It goes back a long way here.
So in 2007 when I was secretary, I invited the then-Foreign Minister of Australia Alexander Downer here, and we have a little trip. And I got to – got to drive an experimental car called a Tesla. (Laughter.) Alexander wouldn’t get in it. He wasn’t sure that he wanted – well, I think it was probably the Australian secret service that didn’t want him in an experimental car. But in any case, that’s now a household name, maybe giving us answers to how to think about electric vehicles and climate change and the like.
But it says something very important about another part of the National Security Strategy, which it’s – which says investing in our strengths. Very often, we get into what I call authoritarian envy. They build great airports. Democracy is so messy. But we forget that innovation has been from a place, the United States of America, that is the freest and most open. And so talk about investing in those strengths, protecting those strengths, and how that plays into the diplomacy that we must do but also the national security that we must achieve.
SECRETARY BLINKEN: It’s quite simply foundational, and let me say a couple of things about this. First, we go back to this proposition that we’re in a moment of intense competition to shape what comes next. Technology, innovation, entrepreneurship – they are at the heart of that. This is how we are going to retool economies for the future. This is how we’re going to modernize militaries as necessary. This is, through technology, how we are quite literally reshaping people’s lives.
And so it goes fundamentally to our national strength, but it also goes to a positive vision for the future that can be incredibly attractive for the United States around the world. Because as the technologies that are developed here – and I was just at the SLAC this morning, which is extraordinary, even for someone who probably understood about 1 percent of what I was hearing – this really does go to America’s most positive role in the world.
As we’re inventing; as you’re inventing new technologies that are going to make sure that we can overcome disease and that we can actually strengthen global health and make sure that we don’t have a repeat of COVID-19; as you’re finding ways to make sure that we have sustainable, healthy food supplies for people around the world who so desperately need it and we’re living in a moment of intense food insecurity; as you’re looking at ways to make sure that we actually develop the technology to ensure an energy future that’s not dependent on fossil fuels; as you’re looking at ways to make sure we have secure supply chains for technology going forward and good jobs for the future; if we continue to get that right, if we continue to lead on that, if we continue to be seen as a beacon for the world, that goes directly to our standing around the world, our strength around the world in ways that I can’t even begin to adequately describe.
So for us it starts with investing in ourselves. If you look at the so-called American Century, the second part of the 20th century, we were making these investments in ourselves in the ‘50s, the ‘60s and ‘70s in education, in research and development, in basic science, in our infrastructure. And we moved away from that. And it is not to say at all that government should be the one making all of these investments. We’re never going to compete with, for example, a Chinese model that dedicates all of its state resources to a particular part of the economy, to a particular part of the world. But what we can do and do more effectively is making sure we’re making these basic investments and then help catalyze, help facilitate, and ultimately help get out of the way for the private sector to really carry things forward.
We’ve had two, at least from where I sit, enormous successes in the last few months, starting with the bipartisan CHIPS and Science Act, a product of extraordinary work over several years by Republicans and Democrats alike to make sure that we were renewing these investments in ourselves. A lot of the focus on chips has rightly gone to renewing our ability to manufacture chips, semiconductors here in the United States, having subcontracted that out many years ago. But there are huge investments in basic science, basic research and development that are contained in the CHIPS and Science Act and the so-called Inflation Reduction Act, which has the biggest commitment to dealing effectively with climate change in the history of our country, more than $350 billion. And again, a lot of that’s going to investments in our own innovative capacity.
So I think, Condi, that is at the foundation of our strength, and it shows why the connection between what happens here and what happens around the world is stronger than it’s ever been. Since we did CHIPS and since we did the IRA, I found the conversations that I’m having with counterparts around the world have changed. There’s now this view that, wait a minute, maybe America is getting its act together and this is something that we want to be part of.
SECRETARY RICE: That’s the positive side of it, of course, that we invest in ourselves. But there’s also a question that’s constantly on the table about how much we’ve let out of the barn, so to speak, vis-à-vis the Chinese. They started down this road of indigenous development – in some ways hasn’t gone all that well. We keep reading about problems in their own high-end chip development and the like.
So how do you see the balance between investing in what we do here and making sure that it doesn’t escape to there? And it’s particularly actually hard for a secretary of state, because one of the things that you don’t want to do is make people declare loyalties. That’s the quickest way to lose friends, to say you either choose China or us. That doesn’t work very well diplomatically.
SECRETARY BLINKEN: We both know that very well.
SECRETARY RICE: Yes, right.
SECRETARY BLINKEN: And what we’ve been saying is this: We’re not asking people to choose; we want to give you a choice. And that means we have to have something to put on the table. A big part of what we’re trying to do besides the investment in ourselves, the other – the flip side of that is trying to get greater alignment with allies, with partners, with a whole variety of countries who might not even neatly fit into the ally or partner category but who have an interest in making sure that there’s a basic understanding about the rules and that everyone plays by them. So we spent a lot of time trying to re-energize and revitalize – re-engage our alliances, our partnerships.
We’ve also been inventing or energizing some new ones – new collections of countries that may be fit for purpose on specific issues; for example, making sure we have resilient supply chains, making sure that we’re on semiconductors investing together because so much of this work has to be collaborative as well, but also protecting. And in the case of the highest end semiconductors – as you know very well, there’s only a small number of countries that either are manufacturing the highest end semiconductors or making the tools to manufacture the highest end semiconductors. We want to make sure that we keep those where they need to be. So this alignment with other countries trying to all move in the same direction, trying to work together on shaping some of the norms, the standards, the rules by which technology is used, that’s also profoundly part of our national interest and our strength around the world.
SECRETARY RICE: This is a question that could solicit a rather boring answer, but this is a university, so it’s all right. We’re accustomed to boring answers. (Laughter.) So you talked about standards. And maybe what’s not fully understood is there are international efforts, international organizations where the standards are actually written —
SECRETARY BLINKEN: That’s right.