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

U.S. Department of State

Remarks From Daughters and Sons Meeting at the Council on Foreign Relations

Secretary Condoleezza Rice
Washington, DC
December 17, 2008

MS. MITCHELL: Welcome. This is so wonderful for me to see all of you, many of you friends, many of you sons and daughters of friends. I am Andrea Mitchell from NBC News, Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent, and you all know our very special guest, the Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice.

Welcome to the Council on Foreign Relations. And tonight is a very special evening for many reasons. We are hosting tonight at the Council two cabinet secretaries simultaneously. Bob Gates is in New York at a Sons and Daughters meeting, and concurrently, we have Secretary Rice here at a Daughters and Sons meeting. And it is also the last meeting to be held here because after this meeting, the Council is moving to our new building at 1777 F Street. So all this is very exciting. If anyone wants to help Kay and the great staff here packing and moving over the holidays? (Laughter.)

I should remind everyone to please turn off -- and I mean completely off -- all cell phones and Blackberries because they do interfere with the sound system. So if you don't mind doing all that. And as a reminder, this meeting is very much on the record, so I also want to get all of you daughters and sons to think about your questions, because we're going to have lots of time for you to ask questions of the Secretary. This is really your event and I am here really to just lay the groundwork, talk about some of your legacies and your thoughts after eight exciting years, and some years -- sometimes too exciting, I suppose. (Laughter.) But obviously, the Secretary is working up until the very last minute as we can see from some of her most recent travels. So think about your questions and I'll start off with a few of my own.

Let's talk about the most recent events because of Mumbai and all of the other things that happened and the reaction, of course, from India to Pakistan. You had to extend your travel and talk to people in the region in both capitals. And as I think back to the way this Administration started with really conflict brewing over Kashmir, and I was traveling with Secretary Powell at the time, do you think that you, in your conversations, have managed to prevent further conflict there? And how do you see it going forward?

SECRETARY RICE: Well, the first point that I would make is it was obviously a very serious situation, and the President wanted me to go and to express our solidarity with India and condolences there, and to deliver a very strong message that, of course, Americans had also died in that attack. And so this was also of concern to the United States.

I found the fact that since 2001, which is the crisis that I also was a part of the management of that crisis, the United States has developed a very strong relationship with India. It has broadened and deepened, and I do think it has helped us through this crisis, because there's a level of trust with India that I think was not there in 2001 when we had to get through the -- really, the military mobilization that attended the crisis in Kashmir.

On the other hand, with Pakistan, we have a good relationship with the new civilian government. But there, the message had to be: you need to deal with the terrorism problem. And it's not enough to say these are non-state actors. If they're operating from Pakistani territory, then they have to be dealt with.

The good news is that I found on both sides a desire to actually work through the conflict. I don't think anybody wanted to escalate it. No one was speaking in belligerent language. And if Pakistan continues to do -- work to really deal with the terrorism problem, and if India can do the hard work of both helping to bring the perpetrators to justice and trying to prevent the next attack, then I think we can get through this crisis.

MS. MITCHELL: Do you have a feeling that the civilian government in Pakistan has control over the military, over the security forces, over the ISI?

SECRETARY RICE: Well, I have to say that I didn't hear a different line from the military and from the civilians. In fact, I heard from the military that they want the civilian government to succeed. They recognize that the civilian government has to therefore be the responsible entity for Pakistan. And I'm certain that there are and will be civil-military tension. It's a new civilian government just finding its footing in Pakistan. But it seemed to me that the civilians were very much in charge and making decisions. And thus far, we've seen some positive steps, though they're not nearly enough to this point.

MS. MITCHELL: Now going around the world just quickly, and then we'll -- I'd love to talk to you a bit about some of your next adventures as you move towards -- back to Stanford and towards education and some of the things that might be very interesting to some of our younger guests today -- but Iran.

SECRETARY RICE: Yes.

MS. MITCHELL: There's talk now that Khatami might consider running again. We have elections there. There is a lot of concern about red lines being crossed as early as this summer and the possibility of military action. We'll have a new government in Israel as well. What are the possibilities of a new administration coming in dealing with Iran? Do you think that there are, you know, so-called moderates with whom one could even negotiate in Iran?

SECRETARY RICE: I've said a lot -- many, many times that most bad American foreign policy in the last 25 years has started with the words, let's find the moderates in Iran. I just -- I don't know that they're there. I do know that there are people who are more reasonable and people who are not. And clearly, the people who are more reasonable are challenging some of the policies of President Ahmadinejad. I think they're challenging them in the editorial pages of Iran's newspapers. You've had resignations in certain parts of the Iranian structure, particularly on the energy side.

And I think it's because the international community, in a unified way, has imposed costs on Iran for their defiance of the Security Council resolutions and the IAEA. The costs have not been so high as of yet to cause Iran to change its behavior, but when you look at the fact that there are really no Western oil companies dealing in Iran any longer -- Total was the last to leave several months ago -- Iran really can't take advantage of the international financial system. Their banks are, many of them, sanctioned and can't do business. They can't get levels of investment as they did. Investment credits are down from around the world. So costs are there, and it will be exacerbated by the lower oil price.

Now, that may give room to some of those reasonable people to say, is the policy that we are pursuing really worth the isolation that we are actually enduring. And it's my hope that perhaps even in the next couple of months, but certainly by the time of the election, that you'll have an Iranian leadership that's willing to make different choices.

MS. MITCHELL: And if not, is there a way in the short timeframe between the moment when at least -- many people, many countries are now warning Iran will have made enough progress on the nuclear front -- is there time to stop Iran from developing a weapon, short of military action, if the United Nations, you know, doesn't step up to the plate?

SECRETARY RICE: Well, I still think that there's time, and -- because remember, what we're really talking about here is three components. One is the material itself. That's the enrichment and reprocessing that gives you actual nuclear material for weapons. Right now, it's technology that they're pursuing, and the question is how far have they gotten to actually being able to make that material. Secondly, there's the question of bomb design, and there is pretty good evidence that they have at least experimented with or looked to try to design weapons. And then third, there's the question of delivery, and they are making progress on their delivery system.

So it's a dangerous course that they're on. But there is still time in at least a couple of those areas to push Iran back from the brink, and I think the diplomacy is set up to do that. Iran, though, is going to have to make a choice that what they're doing is simply not worth it.

If they want to have a civil nuclear program, they can have a civil nuclear program. The Russians have built a civil nuclear reactor there. They will provide the fuel and take it back. It's called a fuel takeback, meaning that they can't keep the spent fuel so that they can process that into weapons-grade materials. That's a perfect outcome for a state that only wants civil nuclear power.

So there are many options on the table for Iran that they're not yet taking. There's a package of incentives that the so-called P-5+1 -- that's the Germans -- and the permanent members of the Security Council have put on the table. The Iranian should take it. I think there's a reasonable chance that reasonable people would.

MS. MITCHELL: Do you have any second thoughts about our negotiations with North Korea now that that process seems to have ground to a halt, that they have not lived up to their agreement? And there's been a lot of criticism from some former Administration officials like John Bolton that we were too trusting.

SECRETARY RICE: Nobody was trusting of the North Koreans. I mean, who trusts the North Koreans? You'd have to be an idiot to trust the North Koreans. (Laughter.) That's why we have a verification protocol that we are negotiating.

MS. MITCHELL: Well, any thoughts that as you leave, that this is --

SECRETARY RICE: Yeah --

MS. MITCHELL: -- not just unfinished business, but that this is a missed opportunity?

SECRETARY RICE: No. I think that what we've done is that through the Six-Party framework, we have an agreement of September -- of 2005 in which North Korea pledges to get rid of its nuclear weapons, the first of its kind, full denuclearization. Then we've had a series of negotiations, one that led to the shutdown of a reactor. And in fact, North Korea has made no plutonium since the September agreement was signed in 2005. That's an important point, because they were making plutonium so that they could make more nuclear devices. Third, we have watched them begin to disable Yongbyon, the reactor and the associated facilities. Fourth, they have given us some documentation and some samples, frankly, which have led us to be more suspicious of some things that they might be doing. These are, by the way, things that we would not have had, had we not been in negotiations with them. And then finally, we negotiated a protocol. There is actually a protocol, but the document had some ambiguities in it. And what the North Koreans have refused to do is not to accept the protocol, but they have refused to write down their assurances about the ambiguities.

Now I think that that means that this is a process that still has a lot of life in it. But North Korea negotiates this way sometimes in ups and downs. It's like a stepwise function. Each time, we've achieved a little bit more and we've achieved it, most importantly, with China, Russia, Japan, and South Korea at the table, so that North Korea cannot get the benefits of good behavior if they're engaging in bad behavior. They won't get fuel oil shipments that they desperately need and want, until this process of disablement and verification is complete.

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QUESTION: Hi, thank you. I have been an international recruiter for about 15 years in a variety of countries. And not to beat a dead horse, but if you could say a little bit more about America's standing in the world in terms of -- what I've seen in the last handful of years, scrawled on the walls, scrawled on people's faces, and what you can say just from the heart. I know you've mentioned about waiting for the headlines to change down the road and putting more diplomats out in the field, but -- and what you can say from the heart about how to deal with the difficulty and even pain of seeing America's standing, in my impression, drop internationally? Thank you.

SECRETARY RICE: Well, I think I would -- you know, you have to have a little bit of -- maybe I'm just getting older. When you get older, you say you have to historical perspective on something. It means you're old enough to remember something that other people don't. And if you look back to 1979, 1980, 1981, when in fact, women were chaining themselves to Greenham Commons because we were going to deploy nuclear missiles in Germany and in Britain. If you look at the way Ronald Reagan was vilified for that, America's policies -- there have been many times when America's policies were not so popular and when, in fact, people protested. There were millions of people in the streets in Europe during the protests about the deployment of intermediate-range nuclear forces. But people tend to forget that.

I think I could also note that in some of the most populous countries in the world -- China, India, and Vietnam -- America's standing has never been higher. So where are we talking about, right? We're talking essentially about parts of Europe and the Middle East. And in the Middle East, I think the truth is we've had to do difficult things. And we've had to say hard things about terrorism, its sources, about how to deal with it. And frankly, sometimes our support for Israel is also just not very popular in the Middle East, despite the fact that the President is the first president to really call, as a matter of policy, for a Palestinian state and call it by its name Palestine.

And so I think we have to distinguish between America's standing in the world, which I think is really pretty high, and the views of our policies sometimes, which people then will say "We hate what Americans are doing." But I'll tell you something, you say you're a recruiter -- I don't know for what -- but students coming to the United States, foreign students coming to the United States, are at record levels. Why? Because they hate America? I don't think so. How many people in the world do you think would turn down the chance to come to a community college in the United States or to a state university in the United States or to Stanford? Not very many.

When I go around the world, what I get is "Can't you get our students more visas, can't you get our students more opportunities?" That to me speaks of the standing of America.

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