Better in their words…

Hmm. This is worth your time. It Ms. Rice did get me to think more seriously about ‘the other side’ of the situation. I don’t hear her admitting mistakes made by the US, or evidence where the US is acting opposite of our principles, but when she has an opinion, I am compelled to consider it. mrossol

I have included a portion of the interview, but not all of it. Click on the link for the full transcript- or video. Peter Robinson is good.

Source: Condoleezza Rice On Footballs: Domestic, International, College, And Professional | Hoover Institution Condoleezza Rice On Footballs: Domestic, International, College, And Professional

Peter Robinson: Could I just on that one for a moment, because what you’re saying is very striking. We hear as you of course noted over and over again these days attacks on the founding, in particular on the founding. I’m thinking of the 1619 project, and there is a point to be made. Slavery had existed on this continent for more than a century before the founding, and some large proportion of the founders were slave owners. So, we have the notion A, that this means the entire enterprise was misbegotten. Fruit of the poison tree would be the legal term. Was misbegotten from the very beginning. And then there is another way to look at it, which goes far back in American history. And that would be Frederick Douglass.

Condoleezza Rice: Yes.

Peter Robinson: Who said in particular the three fifths rule in the Constitution, that that slaves would be counted as three fifths of a person and that slavery was permitted, although the constitution named a date by which the importation, the slave trade could be ended. And they ended it on January 1st of that. All right. But Frederick Douglass referred to these measures as scaffolding to permit the construction of the edifice to be removed as soon as it was no longer needed. So, he distinguished from the get go between temporary accommodations and the underlying structure. And you’re with Frederick Douglass.

Condoleezza Rice: I’m with Frederick Douglass. I believe that America has what I’ve called, not the fruits of the poison tree, but a birth defect. We were born with a birth defect. Do I wish that the founders had all been John Adams, who not just refused to hold slaves but actually defended slaves in the Amistad incident? Yes. Do I think that Thomas Jefferson might have been accused of, let’s say, talking on both sides of the issue to talk about these great principles of all men being created equal and yet holding slaves? Of course. But human beings are imperfect. And somehow today we want to go back and insist on perfection for people who lived hundreds of years ago in a different climate and a different set of morals. And I sure hope that there’s nobody out there judging us a hundred years from now in terms of our morals, because human beings are imperfect that I’m very religious.

And my grandmother had a wonderful phrase. She say, “The only human being who was perfect was Jesus Christ. And that’s because he was God.” And I think we have to understand people in their context, the founders in their context. But to celebrate what they gave to us. This constitution that is so remarkable that it has slowly but surely made America a more inclusive place. It’s slowly but surely meant that we the people, which was not what was meant about me. Now I’m included in we the people, and we continue to make progress.

Now, it doesn’t mean that we can just rest on our laurels about it, right? Because I do think Franklin was right. It’s a republic if you can keep it. And our great patron, George Schultz, as you remember, used to wear that tie that said, democracy is not a spectator sport. So, can’t all just sit around and say the glorious institutions, we have to work at it. We have to work at it every day. And that requires a renewal of commitment, not just to our rights, which we’re very good at asserting, but also to our responsibilities.

Peter Robinson: So, your fundamental position is with regard to the constitution and the founding and the fundamental institutions of the country, renewal, reform where necessary, not overthrow.

Condoleezza Rice: Absolutely. Absolutely. And when I would go abroad as secretary and people would say, but how can you talk about democracy in X, Y country when your country was founded with slaveholders? And I would say, yes, but it’s that same constitution that I took an oath of office to as a descendant of, by the way, both slaves and slave owners. And it’s that constitution that was progressive enough that today I stand before you as the Secretary of State of the United States of America. And people didn’t say much after that.

Peter Robinson: Unanswerable. All right. So, I can only do this if we set up some lights and cameras, but I’ve done it. I have you to myself.

Condoleezza Rice: You do.

Peter Robinson: So, I’m going to ask you to give me a seminar in the way to think if you have policies prescriptions, if you know what we ought to do, say so. But what I’m interested in is the way you think, the way a professional thinks about the big issues, the foreign policy issues of the day. And then of course, we’ll save this little lovely piece of cake right here, which is football. We’ll get to that.

Condoleezza Rice: Yes. Yes.

Peter Robinson: Walter Russell Mead, Russia and Ukraine. Walter Russell Mead in the Wall Street Journal, just yesterday, as we tape this show, “Vladimir Putin has responded to the weakening of his military position by annexing four contested regions inside Ukraine, declaring that the conflict in Ukraine is a war for the survival of Russia and raising the spectrum of a nuclear strike.” These are words that appeared at the Wall Street Journal yesterday. Mead continues, “This represents the most dangerous international confrontation since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.” The most serious confrontation in the last six decades.

Condoleezza Rice: Oh, I don’t doubt that it’s an extremely serious confrontation. I don’t like to try to rank confrontations because they’re always different and the circumstances are different. The Russians were not a major nuclear power at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis. One reason that Khrushchev put those missiles in Cuba was he couldn’t reach the United States from the territory of the Soviet Union. So, it was a different time. But yes, it’s dangerous. But there are three things I’d like people to understand about this conflict. The first is Vladimir Putin is not trying to reconstruct the Soviet Union. He’s trying to reconstruct the Russian empire. He is a Russian nationalist for whom an independent Ukraine is an anathema. And he believes in the concept of the Kievan Rus’. They’re all one people. Well, the Ukrainians have a different view, and that’s the second point. The Ukrainians actually are a nation.

They speak a language that is distinct from Russian. I have pretty good Russian. Ukrainian, I’ll make mistakes if I try to understand it. And they believe that they are a distinct people. Now, it is true that they’ve only been independent a few decades in their history here and there. They’ve been part of somebody else’s empire. But what’s remarkable is that this Ukrainian nation has remained intact. And that’s one of the things that Vladimir Putin didn’t understand. And so he thought they would be welcomed by the Ukrainians, but actually they’re fighting for their nation, and they are becoming forged as a nation even more every day. So, that’s the second thing to recognize. Now, if you think and you take those together, you will understand why Putin now really has a problem. Because he essentially went to the Russian people and said, I’m doing this special military operation to put us back together with our brothers in Ukraine. And oh, it won’t really affect your lives because they’re going to rise up and support us, and this will all be over.

And by the way, I think he told Xi Jinping the same thing. This’ll be over in a few days. The Russian military went into that conflict with five days of provision and their dress uniforms for the parade. That just shows how off he was in his thinking. Oh, now all of a sudden this Ukrainian nation is not just fighting back. They’re pushing the Russians out of the territories that they’ve occupied. So, now he’s got a problem. And number one, he needs more people. So, he has to do what he avoided until this moment, mobilize young Russian men to go to the front. And they’re fleeing in numbers. As someone told me that one of the most heavily accessed articles on the internet in Russia’s, “How do I break my own arm?” Because people don’t want to go. So, suddenly Russians are in the fight and they don’t like it. Secondly, Putin is sitting there-

Peter Robinson: Whom you knew?

Condoleezza Rice: Whom I knew. And I knew he was a Russian nationalist. It didn’t really fully sink in until I really began to think about why he does this. Now so, he’s had to mobilize the Russian people, that’s bad. Another point to make is that he had to do something dramatic, because we tend to think of autocrats or dictators as not having a politics to which they have to respond.

Peter Robinson: They don’t have to answer to anyone.

Condoleezza Rice: They don’t have answer anyone. He has to answer to these Russian nationalists, his right wing, if you will, that he actually mobilized in support of the war. So, what he did was to cut off the liberals who might have been against the war. He had jailed Navalny. He shut down their websites. He made protesting the war a crime. But he actually embedded these Russian nationalist journalists in the military. They were supposed to talk about the glory of the war. Now they’re talking about the failures of the war. And so he has to respond. So, the mobilization and the annexation are the response. Final point, nuclear weapons. Yes, I would’ve told you, Peter, three months ago, oh, chances are zero. It’s not zero. Maybe it’s 10%, because I don’t think he wants to cross that line. Russia would then be a permanent pariah. He himself would be a permanent pariah if he isn’t already. But it’s not zero. And that makes me uncomfortable. I do hope somebody’s telling him, by the way, that prevailing winds go east. And so he would be polluting his own country.

Peter Robinson: One more question, and again, this may sound as though I’m being a devil’s advocate a little bit. But the question is how correctly to think about the problem? And the question is very simple. What have they got to do with us, Ukraine? So, the Russians invade on February 24th. We’ve sent vast amounts of weapon material.

Condoleezza Rice: Yes, yes.

Peter Robinson: We have, as I understand it, hundreds of members of our special forces in place on the ground in Ukraine, engaging in training. They’re not involved in combat, but there are a lot of Americans there.

Condoleezza Rice: And we’ve been training them since 2014, which is, by the way, why they’re good.

Peter Robinson: Why they’re good. All right. And we’re sharing detailed intelligence with Ukraine. We even know that the Russians had their dress uniforms in their backpacks when they invaded. And we’ve provided, I’ve put this number together the day before yesterday, in the last 18 months, our A to Ukraine, 17 billion. I think just yesterday, President Biden committed to some other untold.

Condoleezza Rice: 600 plus.

Peter Robinson: All right.

Condoleezza Rice: Yes.

Peter Robinson: And the question is why? Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union for seven decades. Our economy grew, we remained at peace. It’s demonstrable that we can get along without them. And now of course, I’ll just lay out the whole argument here instead of putting it out in bits and pieces. This is taking place in Europe. Germany is a rich country to name only one. For the last, I checked this, as you know, NATO countries commit to spending at least 2% of their GDP on defense.

We spend, I think the latest figures is close to 4%. I think it must have gotten, it touched 4% under during your administration. In the last 30 years, Germany has not once, not once fulfilled its requirement to spend 2% on GDP. So, it would strike me, I mean, the test here is, which is a test that you’ll appreciate because you have a very keen sense for practical politics, not just diplomacy up here on the seventh floor, the fancy floor of the State Department. But you go into a diner in Iowa, and you have to explain to the waitress and the farmers why we’re going to take their tax dollars. So, what is our interest in Ukraine? You see that the whole … Why don’t the European, maybe it’ll take them a while, maybe it’ll be sloppy. But for goodness sake, let Poland and Germany, and if Germany and France stood up as quickly and as vigorously as Britain has, they could handle it on their own. Goes the argument.

Condoleezza Rice: Yeah, goes the argument.

Peter Robinson: All right.

Condoleezza Rice: So, I’m going to start with a general point that starts with some dates. 1914, 1941, 2001, problems never stay confined. And you can act now or you can act later. And the idea that we can somehow, behind our great oceans on both sides and our peaceful neighbors to the north and south, just let the world take care of its own problems. It simply never worked out that way. So, you really want to take that risk now. Secondly, we’ve believed in a rules based order. We’ve always said that when a people rise up and they want to defend themselves, we should be there to help them. Particularly if they’re defending the values that are core to us. And this peaceful country sitting there, that by the way, we recognized, we recognized an independent Ukraine. We were part of the guarantor of their sovereignty and their security when we got them to give up their nuclear weapons at the end of the Soviet Union.

Peter Robinson: They’re in the fix, they are now.

Condoleezza Rice: You better believe it.

Peter Robinson: Because we promise-

Condoleezza Rice: We promise that we’re going to take care of them.

Peter Robinson: That we’ll take care of them.

Condoleezza Rice: And so do we believe in the rules based order? Do we want to live in a world where big countries simply annihilate and then absorb smaller countries? I think we’ve done that, seen that picture before around 1938, 1939 didn’t work out so well. And then the last point that I would make to my fellow Americans is that we as a people represent and are a part of a country that is actually not a territorial or an ethnic or it’s not an identity of that kind. It’s an idea.

The American ideal is one of universal values. And so we either have to defend them or we don’t. To your point about the Europeans, I went all over Brussels and every NATO meeting, just like every former secretary of State going back, every president, please pay your 2%. Please pay your 2%. Now, I have to say, President Trump, for my point of view, wasn’t the world’s greatest diplomat. But he did go to them and say, and I’ll pay your 2%, or I might not defend you. Now, I probably wouldn’t have put it that way, but it actually did start to get peoples attention.

Peter Robinson: He did their attention.

Condoleezza Rice: Did start to get people’s attention. And not only are they starting to pay up, but what has happened in Europe because of Putin’s invasion has changed the context in Europe in a fundamental way.

Peter Robinson: For the better.

Condoleezza Rice: For the better. The Germans now, a friend of mine said Putin has ended German pacifism and Swedish neutrality all in a few months. Can you imagine?

Peter Robinson: And invented real nationalist in the Ukraine.

Condoleezza Rice: And invented real nationalist in the Ukraine. And can you imagine Finland and Sweden as members of NATO now. By the way, strong countries with great capabilities, now this is a stronger, better NATO. Germany, I think will play more of a role. Now they’ve been slow in getting equipment to Ukraine. Sometimes it’s hard to remember with the German bureaucracy, the German defense ministry. For a long time we wanted a German army that would fight. And so the defense-

Peter Robinson: Happy in their equipment.

Condoleezza Rice: Yeah. So, the defense gene in Germany is not that deep. The military gene in Germany is not that deep because it was our intention to subsume it in NATO, to subsume it in the European Union. That it is beginning to reemerge as something that we should celebrate. And I think when you’ve got people in Ukraine willing to die for our values, Europeans who are finally stepping up and even joining NATO and a world that is saying, really, you’re going to just extinguish your neighbor. We can’t sit home from that fight. We will rue the day that we didn’t play our full role.

Peter Robinson: All right. Last question on Ukraine. How does it end? Couple of quotations. Here’s Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal, this is just last week. “I hope our leaders are going towards something, some averting process.” She had earlier in the same column said, We cannot dismiss the possibility, as you just said.

Condoleezza Rice: Right.

Peter Robinson: I was not looking forward to hearing that from you. You just said, we can’t dismiss the possibility of a nuclear strike. “I hope our leaders are working towards some averting process, maybe along the lines of French President Emmanuel Macron’s urging for a negotiated piece.” That’s the first quotation. Here’s the second quotation. You and I were both in an event here at the Hoover Institution about 10 days ago when Neil Ferguson, our colleague Neil, had just returned from Ukraine. And someone asked him about the possibility of a negotiated settlement. And Neil said, I made notes. “If you ask President Zelenskyy of Ukraine to negotiate a piece in which Russia kept the Donbas”, that is to say the eastern portion of Ukraine. “Zelenskyy would say no.” The Ukrainian people-

Condoleezza Rice: Would say no.

Peter Robinson: Would not accept it. So, how does this one, your professional diplomat-

Condoleezza Rice: Yeah, absolutely.

Peter Robinson: This is intractable plus.

Condoleezza Rice: Yes.

Peter Robinson: And dangerous.

Condoleezza Rice: Well, and Vladimir Putin has never given any indication that he wants a negotiated solution. And in fact, by now annexing Ukrainian territory to be part of Russia. Essentially, he would have to give back Russian territory now. So, where does that leave us? And with all due respect to those who talk about an off-ramp for Putin, he just keeps closing them off-

Peter Robinson: Himself.

Condoleezza Rice: Himself. Are you really going to tell the Butcher of Bucha that you can now sit down and negotiate over Ukrainian territory? I don’t see it. Now, we may get there if the Ukrainians continue successfully to push Russians out of the territories that they have seized. If they continue to give the lie to the idea that these are now Russian owned territories by raising the Ukrainian flag all through the Donbas, maybe there will come a time when either Vladimir Putin or somebody around him will say, this isn’t going so well, and maybe we’re going to mobilize 300,000 people, probably most of whom aren’t actually usable in a military sense for a long time. Maybe it’s time to think about … So, let the Russians decide that it’s time to negotiate. Let the Ukrainians be in the strongest possible position that they can, because people who believe that diplomacy can fix problems on the ground are simply wrong. Diplomacy is a reflection of the balance of power on the ground.

[continues]