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

U.S. Department of State

Interview on CBS News Radio with Dan Raviv and Charles Wolfson

Secretary Condoleezza Rice
Washington, DC
December 9, 2008

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QUESTION: Now, that sounds like a part -- a big part of what President Bush has advocated, which is promoting democracy around the world, that that should help fight terrorism, that should help establish peace. But also, with that comes promoting America's image. How has that gone? Because there's a general perception that what some people, say Karen Hughes, who you know so well, an old friend of the President, tried to do didn't work.

SECRETARY RICE: Well, it's shortsighted to worry about changing some negative perceptions about the United States in a matter of a couple of years. It's just shortsighted. Sometimes people don't like our policies. In some places in the Middle East, our steadfast support for Israel is not popular. But if you marry that with the President's advocacy for a Palestinian state, people understand that the United States is really trying to bring peace. Sometimes, it's not popular to tell the truth about the roots of terrorism and what needs to be done to make certain that terrorists can't attack again.

But I'm always a little puzzled to find the two most populous countries in the world -- China and India -- even if you want to take the test of popularity, which by the way, I don't think is the issue, but even if you wanted to take the test of popularity, the United States is very well regarded. And so yes, there are some places where our policies are not popular, where the fact that we've had to do hard things and tell people that we're going to do hard things, that perhaps the United States is not popular.

But the United States should never seek popularity. It should seek respect. It should seek a reputation for standing for the right values. And sometimes -- and by the way, it's often been the case, not just with the Bush Administration -- that will lead people to criticize us.

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QUESTION: Madame Secretary, there's so much to get to. Iran and North Korea, two problems which have kept you quite busy over the years. Can you talk about how they went from being members of the "axis of evil" to negotiating with them in small ways or larger ways, depending on which case it is?

SECRETARY RICE: Well, they are still problem states, but what we have now in both cases are coalitions of states that represent an international consensus about how this problem ought to be solved; in the case of Iran, the European-3 plus Russia, China and the United States, four Security Council resolutions, increasing and deepening isolation for Iran. Iran hasn't made a strategic choice to change its policies yet and to abandon enrichment and reprocessing, but it's paying a very high cost for not having done so. And perhaps in the context of Iranian elections next year, they'll make a different choice.

North Korea -- all the regional states united in a course of action. The North Koreans are disabling their plutonium program. We are very -- at this very moment trying to negotiate a very tough verification protocol, and the other states are unified. I think that moving them from an American problem to something that the international community agrees on how to solve it is a very important step.

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