U.S. Relations With the People's Republic of China (2008)

U.S. Department of State

Interview with the CNN Editorial Board

Secretary Condoleezza Rice
New York, New York
June 19, 2008

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QUESTION: Thank you very much, indeed. Yesterday, you scooped everybody yourself by telling the Heritage Foundation about North Korea's nuclear declaration, which you described as coming soon. Can you give us any more specificity about when this is coming? Is it next week? When could we expect it to happen?

SECRETARY RICE: Well, it's the intention of the six parties to move this process along quickly. And the hope is that within -- let's say within the month that we might receive the declaration. I can't say for certain. North Korea is a difficult country to read, as you would know, having just been there. But that's the expectation. There's been a lot of work done, principally by the Chinese, to try to move this forward. So that's the hope, within the month.

QUESTION: It was just announced that you yourself are going to China, to the earthquake zone. It's also known that you would like to go to North Korea. Will you use that opportunity to be in China to hop across the border?

SECRETARY RICE: No, I won't. I think that if I go, it will be at another time. And it's certainly premature right now. We will at some point get the ministers together once that is well prepared. The thought has always been that after the second phase -- if you remember, we are now coming to the end of the second phase -- the declaration, the end of the -- the disabling and some steps on our part as well and the part of the other parties -- that once we got to the end of the second phase, we might look ahead to the third phase, and that might be an appropriate time for the ministers to get together.

QUESTION: I mean, it's great where you've got to. Certainly, those of us who have followed these negotiations. It's also taken eight years to do something that kind of existed before you came into office. Do you regret the time lost in throwing out the previous administration's agreement, basically trying to get a better agreement, and ending up -- I don't know where you think you've ended up -- better, worse?

SECRETARY RICE: Christiane, I think they're actually quite different -- their structures are quite different. The Agreed Framework was essentially a U.S.-North Korean framework. There were other elements, but I would contrast that with what is truly a six-party framework. Yes, there's a lot of talk about the fact that we talk directly to the North Koreans, but the North Koreans also talk directly to the Chinese, the Chinese directly to the Russians, the Japanese, the Koreans and the United States together. And so this is truly a six-party framework and commitments are within that six parties. That's enormously important because you bring China to the table, you bring South Korea to the table; they have leverage that the United States does not have.

It's also structurally different because it is back-loaded in terms of benefits for North Korea, not frontloaded. North Korea, if they finish this second phase, will be -- the President will notify Congress that he intends to take them off the terrorism list. They're still on any number of lists that will keep sanctions in place. And we have given 130,000 tons of fuel oil. The Agreed Framework alone, before -- just for freezing the reactor, not for shutting it down and then disabling it -- had a lot more benefits for the North up front.

And the final structural difference is that the Agreed Framework -- and look, I believe the Clinton Administration did the right thing in 1994, the best thing that they could do. But in effect, it never really went anywhere. When we got into office, what you had were endless debates about you're not building the light-water reactor fast enough and therefore we're not going to do this, the reactor was frozen, but that was all. We have at least already gotten to the place that we've set back their plutonium production and we've begun a verification regime that I think will allow us to really know how much plutonium they made and to begin to get a handle on it.

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QUESTION: Madame Secretary, when Harry Truman left office in 1953 he was personally unpopular. The country was involved in a war that many thought we shouldn't be in. Over the 50 years that have followed, history has taken a different view of Harry Truman and the Truman Administration, what America's role was then.

As I'm sure you'll help write the story of this Administration's history, but as historians take a look at this past eight years, 25 years and 50 years from now, what are they going to write about? What is going to be the legacy of this Administration?

SECRETARY RICE: Well, you start with the right story because I think what it demonstrates is that today's headlines are rarely the same as history's judgment. And I'll tell you that I keep four portraits of Secretaries of States near me. Everybody has to have Thomas Jefferson, first Secretary. Everybody has George Marshall -- probably the greatest Secretary. But I keep Dean Acheson who, at the time, was probably remembered most for who lost China and now probably is remembered most for NATO and the foundations for the end of the Cold War that I got to be a part of in '89, '90 and '91. And just outside in the hallway I keep Seward. We're glad he bought Alaska even if at the time it was called "Seward's Folly." So you just have to keep that in mind when you're doing this work. I don't know how to think about legacy or what historians will think.

I do believe that a couple of things are already obvious. I believe that the decision to liberate Afghans and Iraqis will matter to how the international system evolves. The decision to liberate Iraqis will matter because Iraq is a fundamental state in the Arab world. It's a founding member of the Arab League. It was -- it is a state that in some ways is a microcosm of the Middle East with Shia and Kurds and Sunnis and Christians all living in the same body. And it was a state that was held together by violence and tyranny.

And if it can make the transition, which I think it is now showing a track line toward, to be a state that actually holds those disparate peoples together through democratic processes and institutions, that will be fundamental to the way the Middle East evolves.

If you think about, for instance, the bargain about how Shia have been dealt with, it's either been through marginalization or repression. And their finding their voice in Iraq will matter to finding their voice elsewhere.

So I think Iraq will turn out to be pretty fundamental. I also think that we will have done some other important things. One will be a little bit boring; I'll put it at the end, but I think it's pretty important.

I believe that the work that we've done in transforming partnerships into true global partnerships will matter. NATO is not the institution that it was in 2001. It is, first of all, an institution which 12 of the 26 plus two, 28, are former captive nations. And they have a fundamentally different view of what NATO is. And they are -- because they were so close to tyranny in their time -- they are fundamental fighters about freedom, and they were the first on the lines in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. And NATO, where we used to have long -- people like Fareed and I used to have long debates about out-of-area operations for NATO -- NATO is now fighting in Afghanistan. These are global partnerships now with Japan and South Korea; all for an Iraq and Afghanistan. So I think these relationships have been fundamentally transformed.

The one that I said is boring but I shouldn't say that, it's not boring to me, has to do with how we think about what diplomacy really is, and I don't mean what you do in a room with another foreign minister or reporting on what another government does. But I called it transformational diplomacy. You can call it by whatever moniker you would like. But American diplomats are less and less reporting on other people's lives and more and more helping them transform their lives.

So whether it is the people who are working in AIDS relief or the people who are working on the front lines to build a justice system in Afghanistan or the people who are doing women's empowerment programs in Bolivia or programs for marginalized people in Guatemala, you see a different kind of diplomat. And it shows most dramatically in a place like Iraq or a place like Afghanistan where literally we are embedded with the military. Because the different kind of war that we're fighting now is that you don't have war and peace; you have a continuum. So you clear a village in Afghanistan or in Iraq, and immediately you have to bring in reconstruction efforts and governance efforts. And so you're seeing civilian institutions change quite dramatically.

I think that will be a lasting element. And I think we've been the pioneers in it but other people will perhaps perfect it. So those are a few of the things that I think will survive. And I hope that as much as Iraq is a major change, I hope the Palestinian state, that it's not just a Palestinian state but one that's democratic will also have a major impact.

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QUESTION: I'm not going to bring up Iran anymore. Madame Secretary, you're going to China to visit the aftermath of the disaster there. And another recent disaster there, of course, with the cyclone in Myanmar. It devastated the country. Over 100,000 dead. Probably over a million affected. Probably the secondary deaths are even going to be more and worse. Aid workers barely trickling in. We ourselves had to sneak into the country and with that it's quite a bit of reporting and we'll do so again soon.

The U.S. ships were off the shore for a few weeks, and just about a week ago they just pretty much waved off and said sorry, we can't deliver any aid and they sailed off. Why didn't the U.S. do more to get aid into the country for the people that really need it? The international community would have --

SECRETARY RICE: Well, the question is were you going to try to do this in a non-permissive environment?

QUESTION: That should have been one good reason to do it. Over a million people --

SECRETARY RICE: Well, you know, the question of international legitimacy has come up any number of times in many, many things that we've done. And I believe, and I will tell you I think the international community has not done a good job in this case because if the responsibility to protect is going to mean anything, it will have meant something in this case. But we couldn't even get Burma on the Security Council agenda because of China. We couldn't.

Now, you can say the United States should have done it unilaterally, but that has its costs. And in this case, when you have a strong friend of Burma -- and not just China, by the way, but ASEAN and others --

QUESTION: India.

SECRETARY RICE: -- India -- that resists, then it is very hard to do. And so we took a different course, which was to press the Chinese to try to get some aid in. And much of what you see and the ability to get some of the aid in is because a lot of representations and tough efforts were made with the Burmese by their neighbors to try to get aid in.

I'm going to the Asia Regional Forum, ASEAN's Forum this year, and I'm going to put it on the agenda again because it didn't have to happen to those people that they couldn't be aided in their time of need. Nobody was talking -- we took politics off the table. This wasn't about the nature of this regime. This was about helping people in need. And so when all of us talk about how important it is to have multilateral approaches, to have the international community, to have a Security Council and the Security Council can't act.

We have another case that's not as dramatic or as bad but Darfur. Try to get a decent resolution out of the Security Council in Darfur. So something is -- it is a problem. Something is broken when the Security Council can't act after -- at the General Assembly two years ago -- and by the way, the United States was one of the most skeptical about the G8 adopting this resolution about the responsibility to protect because we said it won't mean anything when it comes right down to it. When people's interests are involved, it won't mean anything. And sure enough it hasn't meant anything.

So yes, the United States turned its ships around. They couldn't just float and bob out there. So did the French. But we've done everything that we can short of going in under hostile circumstances to deliver what aid we can, to get it in through ASEAN, to get it in through NGOs. But that's probably what you're left with when you have to deal with the international system.

I was at the Security Council this morning. I led a session on Resolution 1325 and Women and Violence and War, and I said that, you know, we had to get this on the Security Council agenda. There had actually -- despite the resolution. Not for this meeting, but there had been in the past some notion that rape and the use of rape as a tool of war and the sexual violence against women in war was not a matter of threat to international peace and security. So the Security Council has got to function better.

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