Condoleezza Rice on Russia, China, and Great Power Conflict (Transcript)

So what I want to do first is to talk to you about kind of the reasons, the kind of elements that are causing this system to feel chaotic, unmoored. The verities seem to all be up for grabs.

And so I would say that the first reason for that is that for the first time since the end of World War II, we have the reemergence of great power conflict, and great powers are different. It’s one thing to talk about non-state actors, as we did after 9-11. It’s another thing to talk about regional players.

But when you have great powers and they bring with them so many assets to the table, they tend to bump around and really make things feel unstable. So I think when we left office, the first time that I left office in 1991, we really thought that great power conflict was never going to emerge again. After all, the so-called Washington Consensus about democratic capitalism just seemed to be on the rise. Eastern Europe had just been liberated.

The Chinese were, if not democratic capitalists, they were certainly capitalists. It seemed that many of the rules of the role for the international system were now written, and everybody understood that. And most importantly, the great powers had all bought into it.

If you look today, of course, that’s not the circumstance that we face. We face a disruptive power in Russia, a declining power, really, but a power with still a lot that can disrupt the international system, and you see that in what has happened, of course, with the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Now, when you think about Russia as a great power, think about it not as the successor state to the Soviet Union or Vladimir Putin trying to reconstruct the Soviet Union. Think of it rather instead as something that’s quite 19th century, which is an empire trying to reassert itself.

Vladimir Putin is a royalist. He’s a nationalist. You might notice that he uses all of the symbols of the Russian Empire. In fact, he once told me when we were in his office, he said, you know, Condi, you know us. Russia has only been great when it’s been ruled by great men, like Peter the Great and Alexander the Second. Now, he didn’t say Catherine the Great. She was a woman. I guess she didn’t count, even though she was a brilliant czar.

But, of course, he didn’t say Stalin or Lenin. He said Alexander the Great and Peter the Great, the czars at sort of the greatest expanse of the Russian Empire. There’s a line for which he’s famous, which is that he said that the greatest tragedy of the 20th century was the collapse of the Soviet Union, and everybody took that to mean about communism.

But when you asked him, as President Bush did, why was it the greatest tragedy, he said because 25 million Russians were orphaned outside of Mother Russia. So it gives you a sense that, for him, this was about empire.

And the problem with an independent Ukraine, as Zbigniew Brzezinski once said, is you can have no Russian Empire if there is an independent Ukraine. So Russia, on the decline, still tries to assert itself in terms of its imperial power and gets itself into this war that we are now experiencing.

And I think got itself into that war because there were three important miscalculations on Putin’s part. The first miscalculation was that his belief, that many Russians actually share, that Ukraine isn’t really a country. He told us at one point, Ukraine is a made-up country.

Now, it is true that Ukraine has only been independent for relatively short periods in its history. As a matter of fact, this is one of the longest periods since the collapse of the Soviet Union that Ukraine has been independent. It was always part of somebody’s empire.

But what Putin didn’t understand was that there was a Ukrainian nationality underneath. He didn’t understand that the Ukrainians don’t consider themselves little Russians. There’s a Tchaikovsky suite called the Little Russia Suite. It’s actually about Ukraine.

And so Russians tend to misunderstand this. It’s a distinct language. I speak pretty good Russian. If I try to speak Ukrainian, I’ll make all kinds of mistakes. And so this impulse that, of course, the Ukrainians wouldn’t welcome their great Russian brother, well, that means that you go into the war with five days’ provisions for your armed forces and they’re dressed in uniforms for the parade in Kiev.

That’s a serious miscalculation. And I think they’ve been stunned by the fact that, if anything, Ukrainian identity has gotten stronger as this war has gone along.

Secondly, Putin miscalculated about the response of, let’s just call it the West, but also including Japan and Australia and others. And it’s quite possible that what happened in Afghanistan probably contributed to that miscalculation. If we didn’t defend a place that we’ve been fighting for 20 years, where there’d been an actual attack on the territory of the United States, why in the world would we actually defend Ukraine?

And probably surprised also at the degree to which the sanctions were able to come into place so quickly. So second miscalculation, a belief that they wouldn’t get much resistance from the West.

And then third miscalculation, a really big one, he thought his army was good. They’re not. They’re actually terrible. The Russian armed forces are not built for the offense. One way that you can tell if an army is built for the offense is that they tend to move, as Europeans do, in trucks. The Russians move by rail.

Do you remember the pictures of the convoys that got stuck? Well, they couldn’t move off-road. So he thought this army was good, and so now having been frustrated in all three of those miscalculations, he’s turned to something else, which is to just throw unarmed, poorly trained Russian young men, mostly from places like Dagestan, because you don’t want those blond boys from Moscow and St. Petersburg to revolt.

And so you just throw untrained young Russian men at the front. By the way, the Russians have no non-commissioned officer rank. I remember when Sergei Ivanov, who was the defense minister at the time, asked Don Rumsfeld, tell me about these sergeant majors in your armed forces. They seem to be important.

They have nothing, so they’ve got arrogant officers, arrogant, corrupt officers and conscripts, and that’s why they have a morale issue. So throw that at the front, and throw at the Ukrainian people as much terrorism as you can in terms of missile attacks on civilian sites, et cetera.

But this great power, Russia, of course, has significantly disrupted the international system with this war, and I’ll come back to that at the end.

Okay, a second great power, of course, China. Expectations when Deng Xiaoping brought China out of isolation, that China’s desire to be a part of the international system was really the best thing that we could possibly do.

There’s now a lot of criticism of globalization and did you trust the Chinese too much and didn’t you see this coming? Well, the real question is what else were you going to do with 1.4 billion people at this point? Were you really going to try to leave them outside the system?

So China’s invited into the international economy in particular. It accedes to the World Trade Organization before Chinese practices are aligned, so you have continual problems with intellectual property protection. The Chinese cut off large parts of their markets to foreign competition. They clearly privilege national champions over foreign competition.

And this goes on for a while with what I’ll say a division in what I’ll call the CEO idea about the rising China and the national security view of the rising China. So for a while they’re on parallel tracks and they don’t really cross.

CEOs would tell you in the early 2000s, really up until a few years ago, well, you know, you can make a lot of money in China. It’s a big market. You have to be there. And yes, I know that my intellectual property is at risk, but I can protect that. That market in China is too important.

National security people would start to see the emergence of a China even before Xi Jinping that seemed to be building its armed forces in significant ways that looked like they might actually threaten American supremacy in the Indo-Pacific.

In 2007, when I was secretary, the Chinese actually had an anti-satellite test that was tremendously sophisticated and surprised everybody in terms of the level of sophistication. But the presidents of China, Zhang Zemin and Hu Jintao, engaged in something that the Chinese apparently called hide and bide. So you kind of bide your time. You don’t upset in the international system.

At one point, I was getting the Chinese to be in the chair for the six-party talks on North Korea to try to deal with North Korean nuclear weapons, South Korea, Japan, the United States, Russia, and North Korea. And China was in the chair.

And it was hard to get them to actually do anything. They would say, oh, we’re just a developing country and so forth. And you’d say, no, come on, act like a great power. Well, we got our wish with Xi Jinping. They’re now acting like a great power.

And now you start to see these narratives, the CEO narrative and the national security narrative starting to come together. Because what happens under Xi Jinping is that now there is an assertion that China has arrived, and that China ought to be able to engage in its foreign and defense policy as a dominant power, if not the dominant power in the Indo-Pacific.

The other piece that starts to come together is that in terms of technology, for the Chinese under Xi Jinping to go out and say, we will surpass the United States in frontier technologies like quantum and like AI, what did they expect? You got a backlash in the United States.

You got a backlash because it appeared that this effort to surpass technologically wasn’t just because you wanted to build your economy. It was because you wanted to leverage that technological capability to supplant the United States in international power.

And people talk about a new Cold War, but there are a couple of really big differences with the Cold War. One was the Cold War was ideological in a way that the great power rivalry isn’t. But probably most importantly, the Soviet Union was a military giant, but it was a technological and economic midget. That is not true of China.

For the first time, the United States actually has a rival that has economic, technological, and military power to bring to bear on the international system. And Xi Jinping has not been quiet about it. And so you get declarations, for instance, from China that the Taiwan Straits are Chinese national waters. You get a complete reversion or decision to reverse.

The 1997 understanding is about Hong Kong. One country, two systems doesn’t work any longer. Hong Kong is essentially, because of security laws and so forth, is essentially a province of China at this point. And the Chinese engage in something called wolf warrior diplomacy.

Now, there’s a tendency with authoritarians to engage in what I call authoritarian envy. Oh, they build great airports. Oh, they’re so smart. Oh, the Chinese are so strategic, etc. You couldn’t have a dumber foreign policy over the last couple of three years than Chinese foreign policy.

Who calls the Australians gum under the shoe of China? Who goes to a border with India that’s been quiet for 40 years and beats up Indian soldiers with baseball bats? And so before long, you start to get a reaction to the wolf warrior diplomacy, not to mention to Belt and Road, which it turns out the terms aren’t so great if you’re a recipient of Belt and Road money.

And all of a sudden, all these countries find themselves indebted. And so we used to think the Chinese would go for what was called loan to own. So if you can’t pay back your loans, well, that kind of works in the 19th century. It doesn’t work so well in the 21st century.

And so China, in its great power dimensions, has begun to flip to a different, not set of principles about what they’re trying to achieve, but to the face on it. So all of a sudden now, Xi Jinping, it’s not wolf warrior diplomacy. It’s, oh, we can make peace in the Middle East. Look at what we did with Iran and Saudi Arabia.

Oh, we’re making our peace. We keep talking to Putin about peace in Ukraine. It’s a charm offensive now. It’s a diplomatic charm offensive. But the underlying circumstances of trying to supplant the United States in the Indo-Pacific in particular and perhaps globally continues to dominate Chinese foreign policy.

So you have a declining power in Russia that’s disrupted the system through a war in Europe that nobody ever thought we’d see another ground war in Europe. You have a rising power or a risen power in China that’s disrupting the system because it’s kind of not playing by the rules that we thought it would play by.

And so all of a sudden, the United States finds itself with rivals. Now, let me say just one word about the relationship between the two of them because the other piece of this has also been, of course, the relationship without limits between Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, the bromance between these two authoritarians.

So let’s start with the fundamentals. This is an anti-American, anti-Western axis is what it is. It has very little in shared beliefs, values, except that the West is decadent and civilization needs to be saved by China and Russia. It has very little in common except that it’s both a revanchist China, the restoration of China, of which Taiwan is, of course, the last piece, Russia, the restoration of the Russian Empire. So it’s kind of 19th century in both cases, but nothing that binds them culturally.

In fact, there are no more xenophobic people in the world about Asians than the Russians. And so the underlying of this is somewhat weak. So what you’re talking about, though, is that there’s some benefit to being able to jointly deal with the United States.

But here’s the problem. It’s you, Xi Jinping, and at the Olympics, so let me tell you, I think I know how that conversation went at the Olympics. You know, I’ve got to do this thing in Ukraine. It’ll take five or six days. You know what it’s like because you’ve got Taiwan. Fine, just don’t do it until the Olympics are over.

I think that was the conversation between them. And now Xi Jinping finds himself wedded to a homicidal maniac who’s launched a war in Europe, sanctions all over the place, and oh, by the way, who can’t even control his own government and the crazy people around him. By the way, I know those people around him.

So I never met Prigozhin, although I was at a number of dinners which he apparently catered. He’s just evil, right? Then there’s Patrushev, who’s evil and kind of stupid, and according to most people, sort of tied to the Chinese because that’s how he made his wealth. And then there’s the defense minister, Shoigu, who is just an idiot. I spent a lot of time with him. He’s really an idiot. And then you have Gerasimov, who apparently just drinks a lot.

So it’s not a particularly inspiring group around Vladimir Putin, who is more and more isolated, told the truth less and less, and now, as Bill Burns said, it’s something I was recently at, our CIA director, if the emperor has clothes, he better put them on pretty soon because everybody has seen what has happened with this mutiny.

So you’re Xi Jinping, this is your relationship without limits. So I was a figure skater. A figure skating blade is about a quarter of an inch. The Chinese are on a quarter of an inch blade when you deal with the Russians. They don’t want to fall this way because they don’t really want to criticize the Russians and break up the relationship without limits.

But on the other hand, they don’t want to fall this way and fall on the wrong side of sanctions and maybe launch secondary sanctions if they were to help the Russians too much. And so they try to walk this very, very narrow path. And so far, it looks as if they have not crossed over to help the Russians in ways that would bring about secondary sanctions.

And one final point about this, this comes at a particularly bad time for Xi Jinping and China. What is the source of legitimacy for the Chinese Communist Party? Prosperity. It sure as heck isn’t you get to vote for them. It’s prosperity. And all of a sudden, the roots of the stability of prosperity is up for grabs.

You’ve read about the youth unemployment problems. You’ve read about the bubble in real estate. And again, going back to authoritarians and authoritarian envy, when authoritarians make mistakes, they make really big ones because nobody tells Xi Jinping he can’t do it. So zero COVID, that was a great idea, right?

A few decades before the one-child policy and now 34 million Chinese men don’t have mates. And so the problem is that when we would say you can’t have economic liberalization and political control, our thinking was, well, obviously you would give up political control for economic liberalization. And Xi Jinping has said, thank you very much, I’ll take political control.

And that means you cannot have the Alibabas and the Tencents of, you really think Jack Ma just wanted to spend more time with his family in Tokyo? Don’t think so. So you can’t have a separate set of power centers like these golden tickets that they had.

You shut down your dominance in online education because who knows what they might be educating people to. And you freeze the private sector. And then when growth is a problem, you start going to the private sector and saying, no, we didn’t really mean it, come on back. Do you think anybody does?

You have a capricious and arbitrary decision-making. And so foreign investment starts to drop. And so the Chinese problem now is that they are carrying out this great power policy on an economic base that turns out to have been very dependent on integration in the international system. And that’s beginning to decline.

And so these two great powers have disrupted the system in major ways. And they are disrupting a system, and this is my second point, they’re disrupting a system that was already weak. Globalization as we knew it had begun to become unstuck. And I’ll just give you two data points about this.

So on 9-11, when the 9-11 attacks happened, within days we had a UN Security Council resolution that allowed us to track terrorist financing across borders. Within days. Within a couple of months, we had something called proliferation security initiatives, 90 countries agreeing to stop suspicious cargo.

If you go to an airport in Mexico City, in Dubai, in San Francisco, in Paris, it will look pretty much the same. You won’t take more than three ounces liquid. You’ll go through a metal detector. You will be asked some questions. We harmonized travel in a very short period of time.

But now fast forward to the other data point, which is COVID. That was, of course, the revenge of the sovereign state. My PPE, my population, my border controls, my travel restrictions, and eventually my vaccines. And so something happened in between that the international system’s response was no longer as an international system.

And what happened in between was that the benefits of globalization began to look less certain, particularly for populations that were left out of the benefits of globalization. And you got the rise of populists.

The rise of populism then, when was the last time that you heard a leader defend free trade, for instance? In the 2016 election, it wasn’t just Donald Trump that was against the Trans-Pacific Partnership. It was the Secretary of State who actually negotiated it, Hillary Clinton, because the sort of nativist and protectionist impulses are coming back. You saw it, of course, in Brexit.

But if you’re an unemployed coal miner in West Virginia or an unemployed steel worker in Great Britain, what has globalization done for you? And politicians respond to that. The system gets weaker and weaker. The state becomes more the dominant actor. And particularly when you get great power conflict, you’re going to see even more of this because the tendency is to defend what is yours.

So an already weakened system, these great powers that decide to challenge it, and then finally you have an overlay of the technology that is transformative and where the domains in which you are dealing seem new and somewhat frightening.

We went through the issues of cyber, that domain, the first time really that the domain of warfare, if you will, potential warfare, didn’t belong to the government, belonged instead to the private sector. And so how did you deal with the fact that the portal was the private sector?

But frankly, if you were hacked, you needed the government because attribution of how a hack takes place is actually not physical attribution very often. It’s very often an intelligence picture that can be built.

And so the government is a good partner to have, but Edward Snowden comes along at exactly the wrong time and you get less trust between the government and the private sector, and that trust is still trying to be rebuilt. So cyber was the first of those domains.

And now we’re talking about domains that are even more challenging, whether it is synthetic biology. So one of the reasons that, and by the way, synthetic biology, the ability to engineer what would have been naturally occurring cells. And so when you think about the reasons that biological warfare really never took off, it was messy. You couldn’t control it. A microbe wouldn’t know the difference between a Ukrainian and a Russian, an American and an Iranian.

But with the potential to do this in a more targeted way, you have to worry about whether or not these elements can be used for ill.

Now, we had our brushes with biological agents when I was in the White House, and I’ll tell you one of these stories. So after 9-11 we had anthrax. Those of you who are old enough to remember, I forget, maybe you don’t remember so well, but maybe somebody told you that we had these anthrax attacks.

And then the president had a report that there would be a smallpox attack. We had not vaccinated for smallpox since the 50s because we thought it had been eradicated. He had to face the question of was he going to try to vaccinate the whole country. He was told 5% of the population would have an adverse effect.

What is an adverse effect? In fact, they would die, so you probably don’t want to try to do that. But then we had on one day a really interesting one, which was that on September 11th we were supposed to go to Shanghai for the Asia-Pacific Economic Council on Friday the 15th. Obviously it got postponed, but the president didn’t want to seem as if we were just locked in the White House.

So we went to China on October 7th. We had invaded Afghanistan on October 3rd. So every morning we would have a video conference with the president, Colin Powell, me, and Andy Card who was chief of staff in China kind of going like this in a tent so hopefully they wouldn’t hear us.

And on the other side of the video would be the vice president, Vice President Cheney, and my deputy Steve Hadley. So one morning, it was exactly 12 hours, so it’s 8 o’clock in Shanghai, 8 o’clock at night in Washington. So they come on and you can just see that the vice president looks gray. What is going on here?

And the president says, Dick, what’s wrong? He says, Mr. President, botulinum toxin has been detected in the White House detectors and there is no known antidote. We’re all going to die.

The president said, what was that, Dick? He said, well, anybody who is exposed is going to die. And so Colin Powell said, what’s the exposure time like? Was I in the White House during that time? And he was. And so the president says to me, go call Hadley and find out what’s going on.

And so I call Steve Hadley. Steve has a kind of Midwestern sense of humor. He says, we have sent the sample to the CDC; maybe a false alarm. Let me put it this way: if the mice are feet up, we’re toast. If the mice are feet down, we’re fine.

So 24 hours later, we’re at lunch with the Chinese and I get a note that Hadley is on the phone. He says, good news, the mice are feet down. It was a false alarm. I go by the president’s table and I said, Mr. President, good news. Thank God the mice are feet down.

And the president says, thank God the mice are feet down. At which point they translated for the Chinese. Now, I’m sure the Chinese are thinking, what the heck are these people talking about? But those kinds of concerns about bio weapons will only be multiplied with synthetic biology.

And then finally, AI. And if anybody can tell me where that’s going. What we do know is the ability to do deep fakes. What we do know is the ability of AI algorithms to suddenly start hallucinating and making up stuff. I mean, it doesn’t sound like a very good picture.

And I was asked at an AI forum recently, will it become a weapon of war? Every technology has become a weapon of war. And so the international system, as weak as it is with great power rivalry, this is a hard time to have this technology, which really does require some beginnings to think about what norms we would like to put around it.

So, that’s all the bad news about the international system.

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