Condoleezza Rice on Russia, China, and Great Power Conflict

about uh what we've called Global hotspots um and then I really do hope as I said last night that you've got questions because uh I will call on somebody but I have a feeling you'll have plenty of questions so let me start my uh discussion of this this way I was the uh Soviet specialist in the white house for George HW Bush in 1989 to 1991 the wall fell during that time we unified German Eastern Europe was liberated uh history was going our way it was an extraordinary time but it was a transformative time I was then the National Security adviser on September 11th and for a country that had not been attacked on its territory since the War of 1812 this was a shock and again it was transformative even with those two experiences I don't think I've ever seen anything like the International chaos that we're seeing now uh when I'm feeling good about it I call it a system in transition uh when I'm feeling less good about it I just think it's chaotic and that none of the pieces are at all clear 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 uh chaotic unmowed uh the Vari seem to all be up for graps 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 uh 9/11 it's another thing to talk about Regional players but when you have great powers and they bring with them uh so many assets to the table they tend to bump around and really make things feel unstable so um I think when we left office uh in uh the first time that I left office in 1991 we really thought that great power conflict was never going to emerge again um after all the the so-called Washington consensus about uh capitalis uh Democratic capitalism just seem to be on the rise uh Eastern Europe had just been liberated the Chinese were if not Democratic capitalists they were certainly capitalists uh it seemed that uh many of the rules of the road for the International System were now written and everybody understood that and most importantly the great Powers had all bought into to 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 uh 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 uh Vladimir Putin um is a royalist he's ational you might notice that he uses all of the symbols of the Russian Empire in fact he once told me uh when we were in his office he said you know Kandi you know us Russia has only been great when it's been ruled by great men like Peter the Great and Alexander II now he didn't say Katherine the Great she was a woman I guess she didn't count even though she was a brilliant Zar uh but of course he didn't say Stalin or lenen he said Alexander Great the great and Peter the Great the Zars at sort of the greatest expanse of the Russian Empire uh there's a a line for which he's famous which is that uh he said that the greatest tragedy of the 20th century was the collapse of the Soviet Union and everybody took that to being 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 B binsky 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 uh Imperial power and uh gets itself into this war that we uh are now experiencing and I think got itself into that war because there are three important miscalculations on Putin's part uh 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 madeup country right now it is true that Ukraine has only been independent for relatively short periods in his 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 was always part of somebody's Empire but what Putin didn't understand was that there was a Ukrainian nationality underneath uh he didn't understand that the ukrainians don't consider themselves little Russians uh the there's a chaikovsky 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 uh impulse that of course the ukrainians would welcome their great Russian brother well that means that you go into the war with 5 days Provisions for your armed forces and their dress uniforms for the parade in Keef That's a serious miscalculation and I think they've been stunned by the fact that in if anything Ukrainian identity has gotten stronger as this war has gone along secondly um Putin uh 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 uh probably contributed to that miscalculation if we didn't defend a place that we've been fighting for 20 years where there had 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 the um the sanctions were uh 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 uh 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 ours does does and Europeans do in trucks the Russians moved by rail uh 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 um and so now having been frustrated in all three of those uh miscalculations he's turned to something else which is to just throw unarmed uh poorly trained Russian young men mostly from places like dagistan you don't want those blonde boys from um from Moscow and St Petersburg to revolt and so you just throw un uh untrained young Russian men at the front by the way the Russians have no non-commission officer rank um I remember when um Sergey ivanof who was the defense minister at the time asked Don Rell uh 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 then throw at the Ukranian people as much terrorism as you can in terms of missile attacks on on um civilian sites Etc so that's but this great power Russia of course has significantly disrupted uh the International System with this war and I'll come back to that um at the at the end okay second great power of course China uh expectations uh when D xaing brought China out of isolation uh that uh China's desire to be a part of the International System uh was really the best thing that we could possibly do you know 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 uh 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 uh economy in particular uh it exceeds to the World Trade Organization before Chinese uh before Chinese um practices are aligned so you have continual problems with uh intellectual property protection the Chinese cut off large parts of their uh markets to foreign competition they uh clearly privilege uh 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 um CEOs would tell you um 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 uh yes I know that my intellectual property is at risk but I can protect that uh that market in China is too important National Security people would start to see the emergence of a China uh even before shishin ping that uh seemed to be building its uh armed forces in significant ways that look like they might actually threaten American Supremacy in the Indo Pacific uh in 2007 um when I was secretary the Chinese actually had an anti-satellite test that was tremendously uh sophisticated and surprised everybody in terms of the level of sophistication but uh the the uh presidents of China Jang zimen and huena uh engaged in something that uh the Chinese apparently called hide and bide all right so you kind of bide your time you don't upset in the International System at one point uh I was getting the Chinese to be in the chair for the six-party talks on North Korea uh to try to deal with North Korean nuclear weapons South Korea Japan the United States Russia and uh and North Korea and China was in the chair and it was hard to get them to actually do anything right they they would say oh we're just a developing country and so forth and you think no come on act like a great power well we got our wish with Shian ping they're now acting like a great power and now you start to see these narratives the Chinese the CEO narrative and the National Security narrative starting to come together because what happens under xiin ping 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 uh the Chinese under xiin ping to go out and say we will surpass the United States in Frontier Technologies like Quantum and like um 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 uh you know people talk about a new Cold War but there's there are a couple of really big differences with the Cold War one was the Cold War was ideological in a way that the the uh great power rivalry isn't but probably most importantly the Soviet Union was a military giant but it was a technolog iCal and economic that is not through of true of China for the first time the United States actually has a rival that has economic Pol economic technological and military power to bring to bear on the International System and xiin ping has not been quiet about it and so you get declarations for instance from China that the Taiwan Straits are Chinese National Waters uh you get a complete reversion uh or uh decision to re to uh reverse the 1997 uh understandings about Hong Kong one country two systems doesn't work any longer Hong Kong is essentially because of the security laws and so forth is essentially a uh province of China at this point and the Chinese engage in something called wolf Warrior diplomacy now there's a tendency with authority Arians to engage in what I call authoritarian Envy right oh they build great airports oh they're so smart oh the Chinese are so strategic tunu 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 bets 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 turns turns out the terms aren't so great if you're a recipient of uh belt and Road money and all of a sudden all these countries find themselves inde debted and so uh it we used to think the Chinese would go for what was called loan to own right so if you can't pay back your loans well that kind of works in the 19th century 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 uh on it so all of a sudden now Jan pinging 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 you know we're we're making our peace we we keep talking to Putin about peace in Ukraine it's uh it's a charm offensive now uh it's a diplomatic charm offensive but the underlying circumstances of trying to supplant the United States in uh the indopacific in particular and per perhaps globally continues to dominate uh Chinese foreign policy so you have a 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 an 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 uh 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 Huen uh between uh uh J uh between uh xiin ping and Vladimir Putin the Bromance between these two authoritarians so um let's start with the fundamentals uh this is an anti-American anti-western axis is what it is uh it has very little in shared beliefs values except that the West is decadent uh and uh 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 peace Russia the restoration of the uh Russian Empire that's kind of 19th century in both cases but nothing that binds them culturally uh in fact uh there there are no more xenophobic people in the world about Asians than the Russians and so the underlying uh of this is is is somewhat weak so what you're talking about though is that there's some benefit to being able to jointly uh deal with with the United States but here's the problem if you're xiin ping and at the Olympics so let me tell you I think I know how that conversation went at the Olympics um you know I've got to do this thing in Ukraine uh it'll take five or six days you know what it's like cuz you've got Taiwan fine just don't do it until the Olympics are over I think that's that was the conversation between them and now xiin ping finds himself wedded to a homicidal maniac who's P 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 and the crazy people around him by the way I know those people around him so uh I never met prosan although I was at a number of dinners which he apparently catered um he's he's he's just evil right uh then there's patev um who's evil and kind of stupid and according to most uh people sort of tied to the Chinese because that's how he made his wealth and then there's the defense minister shyu who is just an idiot all right I I spent a lot of time with him he's really an idiot and then you have gasimov who apparent ently just drinks a lot so it's not a particularly um inspiring group around Vladimir Putin who is more and more isolated told the truth less and less and now um as Bill Burns said at something I Rec was recently at our CIA director uh 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 J beinging and this is your relationship Without Limits so um 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 uh fall um on the wrong side of sanctions and uh 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 would bring about secondary sanctions and one final point about this this comes at a particularly bad time for xiin Ping 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 uh the roots of the um the St stability of prosperity is up for grabs you've read about the youth unemployment problems you've read about the bubble in real estate um and again going back to authoritarians um and authoritarian Envy when authoritarians make mistakes they make really big ones uh because nobody tells jishin pingy can't do it so zero Co 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 uh you can't have economic liberalization and political control our thinking was well obviously you would give up political control for economic liberalization and Jan ping has said thank you very much I'll take political control and that means you cannot have the alibas and the 10 cense of you really think Jack Ma just wanted to spend more time with his family in Tokyo don't think so so uh you know you can't have uh a separate set of power centers like these golden uh tickets that they had uh you shut down uh your dominance in online education because who knows what they might be educating people to and uh 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 uh you have uh capricious and arbitrary decision-making uh 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 is um 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 uh and they are disrupting a system and this is my second Point they've dis disrupting A system that was already weak uh globalization as we knew it had begun to uh become un stuck and I'll just give you two data points about this um so on 9911 when uh the 9/11 attacks H happened within days we had um 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 initiative 90 countries agreeing to stop suspicious cargo if you go to an airport in Mexico City in in uh Dubai in San Francisco in Paris it will look pretty much the same you won't take more than 3 oz 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 co 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 systems 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 global ation and you got the rise of populace the rise of populism then uh when was the last time that you heard a leader defend free trade for instance um 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 Hill Hillary Clinton because the sort of nativist um and uh 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 um actor and you as 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 uh 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 uh seem uh new and somewhat frightening uh we went through uh the issues of cyber the that domain the first time really that the domain of War Warfare if you will uh 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 belonged was the private sector but but frankly if you were hacked you needed the government because um 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 um 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 uh are even more challenging whether it is uh synthetic biology so uh one of the reasons that and by syn by the way synthetic biology the ability to engineer um what would have been naturally occurring cells and so um when you uh think about the reasons that uh biological warfare really never took off it was messy uh you couldn't control it uh a micro uh wouldn't know the difference between a Ukrainian and a Russian uh and American Amer and um and you know in an Iranian but with the potential to do this in a more targeted way you have to worry about whether or not these elements uh can be used uh for ill now we had our brushes with biological agents uh when I was in the white house and I'll tell you one of these stories so after 9911 we had um Anthrax you uh you 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 um we had uh the president had a report that there would be a smallpox attack uh 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 uh to vaccinate the whole country he was told 5% of the population would have an adverse effect what is an adverse effect effect they would die so you probably don't want to try to do that um but then we had on one day uh a really interesting one which um 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 invad at Afghanistan on October 3rd so every morning we would have a uh video conference with the president colen Powell me and uh Andy C 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 part on the other side of the video would be the vice president vice president Cheney and my Deputy Steve Hadley so one morning um it was you know it was exactly 12 hours so it's 8:00 in uh in Shanghai 8 8:00 at night in Washington so uh they come on and you can just see that the vice president looks gray what's going on here and uh he says to the president uh the President says dick what's wrong and he says Mr President botulinum toxin has been uh detected in the White House detectors and uh there is no anti no own no known antidote we're all going to die president said what was that dick he said um well if anybody who is exposed is going to die and so colen pal said what's the exposure time like was I in the White House during that time and he was and uh so the President says to me go call Hadley and find out what's going on and so I call Steve Hadley Steve had a kind of has a kind of Midwestern sense of humor so he said we've sent the sample to the CDC may be 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 uh 24 hours later we're at lunch with the Chinese and um I get a note that Hadley's on the phone he says good news the mice are feet down it was a false alarm I go by the president to table who's sitting with jangi men 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 translate it for the Chinese now I'm sure the Chinese are thinking what the heck are these people talking about right but those kinds of concerns about bio weapons will only be multiplied uh with synthetic biology and then finally Ai and if anybody can tell me where that's going um what we do know is the ability to do deep fakes what we do know is the ability to uh of AI uh 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 uh will it become a weapon of War every technology 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