Which Way, America? Condoleezza Rice on America’s Foreign Policy Challenges | Uncommon Knowledge

the current period I'm quoting here from the current issue of Foreign Affairs the current period is not a cold war Redux it is more dangerous former Secretary of State cond Lisa Rice on uncommon knowledge [Music] now welcome to uncommon knowledge I'm Peter Robinson the daughter of a pastor and a teacher condalisa rice grew up in segregated Alabama then went on to become the secretary of state she now serves as director of the Hoover institution here at Stanford and is a member of the ownership group of the Denver Broncos before we get to pesky little matters

like the state of the world 33 season you is it time for Broncos fans to abandon hope oh I just want to be four and three four and let's take them one one came at a time okay all right good luck with the Saints first question from your article in the current issue of for Affairs the current period is not a cold war Redux it is more dangerous during the Cold War we had an opponent in the Soviet Union with massive conventional forces arrayed against Western Europe with a navy that matched ours at least in

numbers of surface vessels and with 5,000 nuclear weapons pointed us how could the current period possibly be more dangerous Peter we did not have real territorial conflict between us after the Berlin crisis and certainly after the Cuban Missile Crisis so for roughly almost 30 years uh with the Soviet Union we lived in this kind of cold peace as it's been called right we could finish each other's sentences about uh nuclear deterrence we had created a whole way of thinking about accidental nuclear war but the more important point is that the Soviet Union was a milit

Ary giant but was an economic and technological China is technologically economically and militarily increasingly the equal of the United States and so the adversary is different uh this time around uh we also have a China that's completely integrated into the international economy so you have these aspects great power conflict a technological arms race and probably the most important thing questions about whether America really wants to lead that's why I think it's more dangerous okay so so if if we could during this conversation let's go through the nature of the threat China Russia Iran and then

I'll tell you why you're mistaken and we should all of this means that we should return home we should pull in our horns we should return to isolation I'll I'll I'll I'll fight with you on that that's the deal and then and then we can close with uh some thoughts because as you and I speak today there are a uh low double digit number of days between now and election day all right from your article in foreign affairs China now has the largest Navy in the world the growth in China's nuclear Arsenal is also alarming

this comes against the backdrop of an arms race in Technologies artificial intelligence Quantum Computing synthetic biology Robotics and others in the United States the supply chain for everything from pharmacological input to Rare Earth minerals runs through China and then there is Taiwan close quote here's the threshold question in a way it's the theme of our whole conversation today are we up for this we have to be up for it and first of all we have to recognize that it didn't happen by accident we actually had a narrative of a belief in integrating China fully into

the international economy when D Don chapen decided to take China out of isolation uh we faced a choice were we going to try to isolate 1.4 billion people with a growing economy or would it be better to have them fully integrated and that integration created exactly some of the points that you've just made the supply chains that ran through China because it was more efficient not worrying terribly much about whether or not you were going to get uh Rare Earth minerals from China uh China was the place to manufacture it was the place to assemble

there was was so much that was to be beneficial about China's integration into the International System beneficial for us beneficial for us well beneficial for the world economy uh and in fact China and China did did contribute to growth it was very important but something happened which is that uh I'm not much for the great man power uh great man theory of history but xishan Ping's regime has been different than the regimes before it know we always said uh you cannot have both economic liberalization and political control right and for a while right and for

a while China was moving to private Enterprise the big uh companies like Alibaba and tensent and and uh you were manufacturing there it was it seemed to be working and then xishan ping comes in and he says thank you very much I think I'll take political control and now it's a very different China and so the recognition that all of the investment that we were putting in through venture capital and through US investment into Chinese technology where we really doing that so that that technology in what China itself called civil military Fusion so that that

technology could be handed to the people's Liberation Army so that they could force us out of the Indo Pacific with claims in the South China Sea claims against our allies like Japan and the Philippines that was the realization that this has somehow how this bet that we made on integrating a country that had a fundamentally different social and political system but was prepared to play the capitalism game that maybe that bet hadn't play paid off just as it's it's comeer could I dwell on that bet for a moment because I think every time I ask

a question of course feel free to cor feel free to correct the question if you want to but it seems to me that understanding what went wrong is important in understanding what we face now okay so I mean I as way far back as the Reagan days I was in the rean white house we had great hopes that China would follow exactly as you said this basic pattern first you get economic growth and then as your people get richer they will begin to push for political Freedom here's and by the way it happened in South

Korea and it happened in Taiwan this was not a crazy idea our late Hoover colle Harry Rowan writing in 1996 quote when will China become a democracy the answer is around the year 2015 yeah and nobody laughed at that when Harry published it in 1996 okay it didn't happen is it the case that it didn't happen I'll put this crudely but is it the case that it didn't happen because they're communist the South Koreans aren't the Taiwan are not as you know our Hoover colleague Steven kotkin if you ask him what's the signal finding of

a lifetime that you stepen have spent in the Soviet archives if you could reduce it to a sentence but and he would he he always answers they were Communists they really believed it and that meant they had permanent aims against us is it because the Chinese are communist or because we got stuck with this unusual man Xi Jinping and if if the latter if the former is the case that's one kind of problem and if the latter is the case we can outweigh him maybe so you see you see the difference yes I do and

I want to come back to the point of can we outweight him because uh first of all that would be the easiest thing do I would be the first to say having studied some communist regimes myself yes it was in part because they were Communists okay right but it was also because this particular man had a view that communism couldn't evolve Communism had to remain the same you had to have absolute control of the Communist Party he even didn't allow it to evolve in ways that his predecessors had remember one of the problems for authoritarian

regimes is that they don't change power peacefully right they have too many presidents for Life the Chinese Communist Party had kind of fixed that problem they had term limits you got two terms they had age limits they had a kind of collective leadership where you had a Premiere who did things about the economy think xiran and then the president did uh everything else but the economy could could kind of on it own uh Dynamic on its own logic uh move toward more private Enterprise less state-owned Enterprises uh China was leading the world in online educational

startups leading the world they just shut them down because they couldn't control them so he was prepared to say it has to be absolute Communist party control and I do think that put us on a different pathway than had this Evolution uh taken place but I would be the first to say uh maybe he was right because once you start to get economic liberalization once people start to expect something different uh hentau told us once you know we need courts because people have to be able to go and make a claim for the land that

was expropriated by a party official and I thought you know that's called an independent Judiciary that's not going to work so well with total control so xishan ping maybe read it right communis is a very fragile system and he saying and Gorbachev read it wrong and gorbachov read it wrong he believed he was a kind of True Believer I knew gorbachov pretty well he really did believe that if you took away the lies if you took away the coercion uh people would kind of naturally become good Soviet citizens what he didn't realize is that communism

is in fact propped up by lies and by coercion and once you start to to pull those pillars it's going to fear is gone it's over once fear is gone it's it's over and so maybe xinping was right but that meant that our bet about uh a country that by the way the second largest Eon economy in the world is now not a democracy when when Ronald Reagan when you would have been in the White House when Ronald Reagan and George Schultz started the G7 right the largest economies in the world they were all democracies

and so this question of whether capitalism can really coexist with Communism I think uh the answer that we're getting is no that it can't it was probably from my point of view the right bet because what else were you going to do but there were elements you ask how did we get here there were elements that we didn't keep our eye on the ball so I'll uh how could it be Peter that semiconductors an industry created in the United States of America by people like Intel single digit miles from where we sit right how could

it be that the high end of that somehow ends up in Taiwan which is vulnerable to China how could it be that battery technology which we invented once dominated China now dominates and you see time and time again that maybe two great of integration right was the problem not some integration but recognizing that this was a very different entity with a Communist party at its uh at its head one more note about China and that of course is Taiwan again from your article in foreign affairs in Washington the discussion concerns how to deter a Chinese

invasion of Taiwan but Beijing could blockade the island or it could seize small uninhabited Taiwanese Islands or it could cut underwater cables or launch large-scale cyber attacks so we have again the Cold War versus the present moment and the difference in the nature of the threats during the Cold War we looked at Europe and the whole game for whatever it was four and a half decades was to prevent the Soviets from invading Western Europe through the Fula Gap right they weren't going to cut cables are that was it we put up tanks seal up the

okay this the defense of Taiwan will require just as much cunning and determination and ceaseless attention on our part as the Chinese are willing to devote to it and that seems to be essentially infinite attention and care and pains and Imagination again as currently configured are the Pentagon and the state department up for this just managing that one one one point of contact and and we'll come to the the problem of uh of overreach the fact that we have so many of these right but but but let me just say a word about Taiwan one

of the things that's been concerning to me uh and it's something we've been trying to do something about at the Hoover institution is that it's almost as if the thinking uh in the Pentagon and in Washington is just such blunt thinking it's going to be an amphibious landing on the military people will tell you that looks like D-Day times 100 right China has many many other options Visa Taiwan because they don't have to occupy Taiwan they just have to change the politics in Taiwan till it looks like Hong Kong and so that you know everybody

talked about one country two systems when uh Hong Kong was uh was given back to China by the British well it became one country one system and so what the Chinese would do I think for Taiwan is to try to put so much pressure that you have a very Pro Chinese government in Taiwan and then just slowly but surely it erodes Chinese Independence taiwan's Independence again correct me if I'm wrong about this but my observation my observation on Hong Kong a few hundred, people left when the Chinese got rough on Hong Kong but the business

establishment as far as I can count it I'm not an expert you are Jimmy lie is in prison and Martin Lee is under house arrest that is two members of the Hong Kong business establishment that stood up to Beijing and everybody else in effect cut a deal so for now for now well so so why couldn't why the Chinese say look we did it in Hong Kong these people in Taiwan are business people they'll come to an accommodation once we tighten up the situation isn't that a reasonable fear or is there a difference Som I

think there is a difference and and I think Hong Kong was always special in some way U and I don't know that there was a a Hong Kong identity in the way that there's a Taiwan identity now they did a a poll not too long ago and uh 70% of Taiwanese do not think of themselves as Chinese they think of themselves as Taiwanese that's a very basic and that's a very different uh way of relating to the mainland but the mainland May in May intend to to test that proposition and what I think we have

to do is to figure out how we how we deter the all-out military attack but how we also respond when you have something like the exercises that China has just been carrying out uh around Taiwan because they don't like what the president of Taiwan said uh we saw it when Nancy Pelosi made her visit there kind of denial exercises quarantine we just need to uh expand our thinking about what we might be facing because at some point if those kinds of tactics are employed where do we respond when do we respond it becomes kind of

salami tactics and that's what I worry about uh more with Taiwan we'll come to this but one answer is just forget about the whole problem I'll I'll we'll to we'll come to that I want to at least touch on Russia and Iran yeah February 2022 Russia invades Ukraine it fails to subdue the entire country but as of today Russia occupies about a fifth of Ukrainian territory and the conflict has settled into a war of attrition right I mean the fundamental Dynamics are not all that different from the first world war trench warfare effectively the Russians

since the War Began since the invasion in February 2022 the Russians have lost 120,000 dead yeah and half a million wounded according to a defense department spokesman quote Russian losses in just the first year of the war and now we're into the second of course in just the first year of War exceeded the total of all Soviet losses since World War II combined yeah Putin has just taken more losses than Stalin kushev bnv and drov chernenko and Gorbachev combined yeah what does he think he's doing what is in his head yeah what's in his head

is he cannot lose this war what's in his head is Russian the Russian Empire cannot uh tolerate an independent Ukraine and I he is doing it in a really quite gruesome way because uh actually the British numbers are higher than that they're closer to 600,000 wounded but whether it's 500 or 600,000 uh 600 5 or 600,000 casualties whatever it is they're not those blonde boys from St Petersburg and Moscow these are the poor kids from dagistan these are the prisoners they're throwing unarmed untrained young men just cannon fodder at the front and in doing so

they simply overwhelmed the numbers Russia is depending on something has always had Mass to just overwhelm a Ukrainian uh nation that just doesn't have that many people and that's what's in his head eventually the ukrainians will have to cry Uncle because I can just keep throwing people if the game is attrition he can win if the game is attrition he can win it and that's what he thinks I will say this it the eastern part of Ukraine it's it's a tough fight right now and uh the Russians are making slow gains uh they've made slow

gains toward even some uh relatively strategic places in the dbas region but let's not forget what the ukrainians have done not only have they have they frustrated the idea that they're you're just going to overthrow the Ukrainian government and install a pro Moscow government they they don't even have a Navy the ukrainians and they have pushed the Russian Navy back from um Sebastapol in the Black Sea uh because they've been able to use drones and Technology to to to threaten the Russian Navy as a result thanks to their work and some help from the Romanians

and others they've been able to uh to keep grain shipments going now through the Black Sea it's pretty remarkable and so the real question is let's say that it becomes uh something of a stalemate um there nobody's going to move too much in the next in a couple of months nobody will move because it's permafrost nobody will move we get to May or June and it looks pretty much like it does now uh that at that point Ukraine needs to make a decision about how much more it wants to throw uh treasure and blood at

the this particular region but it's actually not a decision for us to make it's a decision for the ukrainians to make because they have achieved an enormous amount and the question for me is is it is there a pathway to a prosperous Ukraine a free Ukraine a secure Ukraine even if there's a frozen conflict and one of the questions that will be asked of us is what will we do for the security of Ukraine going forward and that's going to be a hard discussion inside the United States but I think some combination of the ukrainians

holding uh holding hostage some of what Russia cares about for instance those Naval bases and the like so the parallel cold we keep going Cold War the present there are parallels they only go so far but the parallel there might be Korea or or Germany we lost North Korea yeah but the rise of South Korea still represents one of the stunning accomplishments of the 20th yes and and uh just one other thing uh people talk about a negotiated solution it's hard for me to see a negotiated solution to this war with Mr Putin there oh

is it all right yeah uh he's 6 hold on a moment he is 72 and the average life expectancy for Russian males is 67 we can wait this guy out we can wait him out although uh the average life expectancy is not the uh life expectancy of people who live in the Kremlin who live in dachas yes exactly he has pretty good medical help with being my guest Iran from your article in foreign affairs tron's proxies are a constant source of trouble the houthi in danger shipping in the Red Sea do they ever Hamas recklessly

launched a war with Israel Hezbollah and Lebanon threatens to widen that war into a regional configration add to this observation uh an an observation made this past summer by your successor as Secretary of State Anthony blinkin Iran's breakout time that is the time to needed to produce enough weapons grade material for nuclear weapons is now and here I'm quoting secretary blinkin quote is now probably one or two weeks yeah not years yes weeks is so again in our this part of our conversation I'm trying to gauge the size of the threat here or the magnitude

the danger is the regime in Iran a problem to be managed or a threat we must eliminate well this is written before the events that we've just seen in the Middle East uh and I have to say what the Israelis have achieved in um weakening Hamas I don't know how much they've weakened Hamas but quite a lot a lot it has to be a lot right and then there's hollah if you're a Hezbollah terrorist aren't you looking at the other Hezbollah terrorist and saying which one of you is an Israeli mole because to penetrate that

that uh organization to know where nasala was uh to then kill his second in command to be able to uh put a a a device inside of their their um walkie-talkies and this is revolutionary because Hezbollah George tenant the CIA director once told us Hezbollah is the A Team of terrorism he said and by the way they run drugs down into Latin America they own Beirut and Israel has really put them now on their back foot in a huge way now it doesn't mean there aren't risks they can still fire Rockets and the like but

they have got to be wondering what hit them and it exposes Iran because Iran has been a somewhat uh cowardly State they've worked through these Pro right well Hamas is in trouble hezus really in trouble um my view would be why not put the hooes on the list and uh take care of this problem while we're at it maybe that's something we should be considering and then you're the Iranian regime you're exposed uh oh by the way uh who wants to be in one of your guest houses when hania was blown up in a guest

house on an Iranian um government installation could I could I try a provocative yeah a provocative formulation just to see what you do with it all that you said add to that that the prime minister of Israel has had to manage relations with this country he's had to manage an extremely fractious difficult political domestic political environment his party has a very narrow majority in the knesset so he's clinging to and all of that said in the last month or so he's changed the dynamic throughout the middle least on as we speak today in this year

2024 I know you don't like the great man theory is BB Netanyahu the greatest man in the world well that system I would say I know Bib nanahu and um look he's uh he's something else he's not the easiest person to deal with but what he has done what that system has done give credit not just to BB give credit to mosad give credit to this is a professional question almost a technical question so when Hamas attacked a lot of people including the person you're talking to one of the reasons I felt so depressed of

course it was a horrible Massacre but also our own interest I had been thinking that mad is the best intelligence agency in the world they've got tyan Tyran may be two weeks away from a nuclear breakout but it's also a very unhealthy environment in which to be a nuclear physicist in Tron mad has this one and then we think oh no maybe mad was never what we thought they were so we have this failure intelligence failure at least in part an intelligence failure on October 7th and now we have they know where every big shot

is they can they can plant these pagers we're back to the mad is Invincible exactly so which which of these is true how do you weigh them they may both be true uh I don't know and and eventually there'll be a kind of Reckoning for what happened with the Strategic failure this the intelligence failure on October 7th some people say look they just didn't believe it possible you know the failure of imagination that we sometimes talk about but leaving that aside what they have done uh with the uh with hasbalah is remarkable and and it

will do two very important things one we talked about Iran has got to be wondering oh my goodness our our best uh best in brightest have just been taken down uh but secondly uh it really does put potentially free Lebanon Hezbollah has held Lebanon hostage for decades decades I was the secretary in 2006 I negotiated resolution 1701 now 1701 was supposed to have Hezbollah go back across Lani they were supposed to flow the Lebanese Army in uh everybody now thinks the un uh peacekeepers there have not been very good I would be the first to

agree with that we tried very hard to get un peacekeepers who would be under a un security uh blanket to be able to actually challenge Hezbollah we couldn't get it so um so now Israel has changed the nature of things maybe Lebanon would finally have a chance you know Hezbollah assassinated Rafi harriri in 2005 the then prime minister the then prime minister who really he was a a bright light for Lebanon uh they haven't allowed a presidential election in Lebanon for the last two years so when people think about the change in Balance think about

Hezbollah also not being able to dominate Lebanon in the way that they have but I want to come back to Iran I know that people talk about the um the progress of the Iranian nuclear program um I was never much for negotiating with the Iranians about this if they were going to be allowed to reprocess the fuel that they have now done that said they have we believe the components the fuel the bomb design the delivery vehicles we now know they have ballistic missiles because they've loosed them on Israel question is can they put it

all together and uh in nuclear weapons not so easy not so easy to deliver not so easy to get the right level of explosion and so I think one thing you could say to the Iranians is all right we know where you live and we know what you've got don't even think about trying to make it a usable nuclear weapon and that's a little bit different than saying oh they're so close to the fuel they're so close to the bomb design they're so close there's still a step that they have to take to be an

actual nuclear power and it may be given their weaknesses that you want to um do that and it says something too Peter because you know one of the lines that I use from the cold war is um and it it speaks to China Russia and um and to Iran George Kennan in his famous telegram said we have to deny them the easy course of expansion until the day of external expansion until the day that they have to turn to deal with their own internal contradictions February 1946 if I recall correctly and he's writing about the

Soviet Union and in I can tell you that being in that white house for George HW Bush in 1989 1990 1991 it was the Soviet Union having to turn to deal with its own internal contradictions having been held in check for all of those years by American power largely and uh maybe that's the lesson that if this isn't a cold war there is still one really important lesson which is that these regimes are ultimately fundamentally weak ultimately not today not tomorrow China is not the Soviet Union let's not scare ourselves to death let's not scare

let's make sure that they can't expand let's make sure that they can't push American power out let's make sure that they can't win the technological arms r and uh maybe the day will come when some young uh specialist for a future American president is talking about the day when they had to deal with their own internal contradictions okay lovely but now I'm going to tell you why that's just sentimentalism and you're all wrong and you're partly on to it yourself I'm quoting you from foreign affairs after World War II the United States was a confident

country with unbridled optimism about the future the United States is a different country now I'm quoting you to yourself the United States is a different country now exhausted exhausted by eight Decades of International Leadership some of it successful and appreciated and some dismissed as failure okay give me a moment or two to set this up this is at a minimum this is an Impulse that animates some very large portion of the country and some very large portion of both political parties now we're broke when Ronald Reagan took office during the cold War federal debt amounted

to 30% of GDP today that figure is 120% a four-time increase in debt as a proportion of GDP our military totally inadequate former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates writing just this uh last fall our army is shrinking our Navy is decommissioning warships faster than new ones can be built our Air Force has stagnated in size and our defense industrial base cannot produce major weapon systems in the number needed or as we have seen in Ukraine the vast amount of Munitions required close quote there are different ways of interpreting the slogan put America First yeah and

one way of interpreting the slogan is yes pursue our interests and pursuing our interests leads to pursuing our interests abroad but another way of putting it is we're broke we're exhausted our Southern border is a mess our politics are polarized we have no choice let the rest of the world take care of itself Madam Secretary yes I am the one who wrote exactly those words about this not very confident America right but it isn't beyond the uh possibility of humans to correct many of these problems and so when you talk about our our debt we

know that some answers to the debt are going to be very hard but we're also going to actually have to do it not just to be a a factor abroad but for our own health and wellbeing I mentioned the people who got left behind by globalization the the people that uh JD Vance wrote about in uh hillbill yes we have to do something about that we have to educate them we have to give them skills uh yes we do have to uh Revitalize our defense Industries but you know we don't have to we we have

a huge defense budget we don't have to just do it by buying all the same things we've been buying there are companies right here in the Silicon Valley that have important answers to some of our most dire military uh needs uh we've talked about drones uh we've talked about new technologies if we could just get the Pentagon to organize to spend the $800 billion do better that would be a a really important step forward and so it's not Beyond us to solve some of these problems and I think we better do it because the real

answer to you Peter is why not let the rest of the world do it I say this in great Powers don't mind their own business they don't they shape the world and the great Powers right now that are in line if we leave the playing field not Germany not France it's Russia and it's China and do you really want to live in a world shaped by Russia and China you know I look at this this Alliance of the the three plus one I call it because the North Koreans nobody really trusts very much China Russia

Iran and North Korea North Korea on a good day all right and I say to myself first of all uh they have a lot of Contra they can do a lot of damage right but they have a lot of contradictions among them too you really think those xenophobes and Russia are thrilled to see the Chinese dominating Central Asia which used to be a part of the Soviet Union you think they aren't a little unnerved by what's happening to Iran and its proxies in the Middle East uh today um I just uh saw Vladimir Putin uh

went to pongyang right uh that by the way turned the South Koreans on a dime they're Furious but it appears that little Olga and little alexe Russian children are going to go to summer camp in pongyang boy that'll be fun that'll be fun so let's uh let's recognize that we have some with some problems some weaknesses we also have some incredible strengths we have of course an economy that is still the Envy of the world we have technological and capability and Innovation that just keeps despite everything else and I just want to make one other

point we have an energy Bounty that if we don't mess it up we will be able to restructure the landscape for one of the most important elements of National growth and international growth which is the energy picture so we have our strengths we have our troubles but the thing that we cannot do is seed the ground uh to others because we're not going to like that ground if the others are the dominant power you addressing what I myself to take to be the Deep question in the current election we'll come to the candidates in a

moment yeah this is just me talking so I haven't I haven't written this one down I just like to see what you make of it we've been talking again about the Cold War and we have there a story of two decades and the 1970s in this country were a period of economic stagnation right a period of one small defeat after another as against the Soviets they expanded their Navy they took over countries in Russia and you add all these small defeats together and over the course of that decade they have the initiative and we're on

the defensive and then in the 1980s we get economic renewal we get uh restoration of national morale which requires leadership of course I'm not saying these things are easy but in one decade we go from the capture the Soviets invade Afghanistan in 1979 biggest land operation since the end of the second World War and the Iranians capture Americans in the American Embassy and hold them hostage for a year right and in 1989 just 10 years later which is not that long in the life of a human being let alone of a Nation the United States

has and our allies have undergone such a renewal that the Soviet Union folds up the Berlin Wall Falls exactly okay so the question is I really do take this as the Deep question in this election are we washed up are the Chinese right was that renewal the kind of last efflorescence of patriotism and American Energy and knowhow or is it possible again it is possible again and it was a recognition of our strengths and the needs to mobilize them and their weaknesses I've always still thought that it was hard analysis it wasn't it wasn't it

wasn't but but I I remember as a young international relations person Soviet specialist when Ron Ronald Reagan called it uh called the Soviet Union uh and communism a sad experiment uh on a hapless people and talked about uh you know the the fact that they they wouldn't survive in that famous British uh British Westminster uh Marxism leninism will end up on the ash as history and I remember thinking well that's a kind of undiplomatic thing for the president of the United States to say but you know what it was calling out the truth and we've

been calling out a lot of truths lately about our own challenges and every leader needs to do that because we need to address them but some leader also needs to call out our strengths the extraordinary resilience of American institutions throughout our now 240 plus year history the extraordinary notion that you can bring people from all over the world and they can some somehow find that they belong in a place where it doesn't matter where you came from it matters where you're going the extraordinary creativity and Innovation that we have and then to say um we

need allies right um I do believe uh NATO ought to pay that 2% and I we need all Li uh but democracy as for all of its challenges is not as fragile as autocracy could I I want somebody to say that could I one other this is a the only time you and I get a chance to have a real conversation is in front of cameras so I've got these other ideas I want to try out on you but I have been struck that in some strange way we always talk about what an example we

are to the rest of the world and and for decade after decade that turned out to be true and in all kinds of ways it's true today right and we hope it will become truer in the years to come but you know who's an example to us Ukraine yes you know who's an example to us be and the M that's right uh and and the Israeli people wait a minute if Ukraine those it's a bunch of technos Savvy kids in Ukraine who've saved their country by figuring out drones and this patching together new technologies we

have the best educated techno kids in the world what are we doing for goodness sake our ability for Innovation or BB I mean I I don't want I I'm I find him an impressive and innovation and toughness Innovation and toughness they they need to go and what VB tells the truth and he's tough what I loved about and love me go back to Ronald Reagan in this regard you can do that all day with me yeah I I suspect I can but what what Ronald Reagan understood was kind of the essence of America right and

how to appeal to that Essence but Ronald Reagan would never have said let's just mind our own business and leave the rest of the world to whatever happens to it that is true he just never have said it because he also understood that the essence of America is that we're an idea we're not just territory we're an idea and if we really believe in the universality of that idea then we have to give others access to that idea so that we are safer when there are more of us in the world who believe in democracy

you know Pol political scientists have actually shown democracies don't fight one another right and that really that old s really is true true they don't uh send child soldiers into uh War they don't terrorize other people they don't invade their neighbors you know there is an argument about just the security side of this the Practical side of it but it is also the American people even if a little tired of International Leadership I've always said Peter Americans carry two contradictory thoughts one is can't somebody else do this for goodness sakes we defeated the Soviet Union

we unified Germany we defeated Al-Qaeda can't somebody else step up but then Americans also carrying their heads you mean a larger country just wants to extinguish at smaller neighbors we can't let that we can't let that happen we can't let people be beheaded on television are you we can't do that so if nobody else will maybe we should and I've been saying this to some who uh want to talk about um America first as meaning mind our own business right I say I don't want to be the president of the United States on the day

when Xian ping and Vladimir Putin are on their Victory Tour having defeated the greatest collective security organization in human history of democracies NATO I don't want to be president because I really don't want to be the president who says you know I could have stopped that I didn't have to put an American Soldier In Harm's Way to do do it I just had to give them the means to do it themselves but I didn't do that and now Putin and xiin ping are the powers in the world the American people aren't going to like it

and any political leader who believes that they are going to skate by on that day needs to think again right okay last last questions so C I mean we you and I have now cheered each other up but of course we have to be very careful about saying oh this we we of course we'll Prevail of course we will we're Americans no no no hard work analysis okay so as we sit here talking we have only days remaining until the election let me set this up listen to this rapael Cohen of Rand writing last year

for years American defense strategy argued for a two War construct namely that the United States should have sufficient military capability to fight and win two simultaneous Wars in different theaters over the last decade as America's military shrank in size and its adversaries grew increasingly capable the United States backed off such aspirations so today we Face our military seems to believe that we're capable of fighting one major war and some kind of defensive action in A Minor Theater one and a half theaters okay listen to this count Ukraine in the Baltic Israel in the Eastern Med

Taiwan and the North Pacific that's three and all three are really dangerous okay let's go through it your advice your foreign policy advice for kamla Harris um if you really do want the most lethal military in the world are you g are you prepared to increase the defense budget okay your device your advice for former president Donald Trump if you really do want to um follow up on that 2% uh contribution in NATO I'm all for it but remember how important allies really are to the United States and uh to the Free World okay and

um here's the last question your advice for voters early uh mailin voting early balloting is down this year from four years ago there are ways of interpreting that but one possible reason for that may be that Americans are actually taking this one especially seriously taking time to think this over so when it comes to foreign policy what should the voters be weighing as between kamla Harris and the Democrats and Donald Trump and the Republicans I I don't want to personalize it to candidates because I think it's the same question for anybody who wants to be

president of the United States and uh that is um you see that there's a chaotic and difficult world out there you American voter you can you read the newspapers you see it on on television uh do you really believe that that chaos is going to subside or get better if America withdraws you really believe that and if you don't believe that ask hard questions of the people who want to lead you as president of the United States as to what they're going to do about it how are they going to bring all of these elements

of American power lies our still considerable military power our energy resources how are they going to bring them together our Innovation our creativity how are they going to bring them together in a way that serves Americans who felt they were left out and Amer so that the American dream still exists for everybody but also challenges all of us to go into that world and to try to make some sense out of this chaos cuz that's what we did after World War II we made sense out of the chaos now you talk about you know the

2 and a half it was 2 and a half Wars when I was in it was down to two and a half by then down to one and a half but it's it's really interesting that everybody talks about having to fight a war here or fighting a war there and I'm going to go back to um you know I worked for George HW Bush and I always felt that he was exactly the right person at the time to put the Germans in the lead on German unification he was a a hum humble person who put

himself in the background and never wanted to embarrass gorbachov and therefore I think really delivered at the end of the Cold War he'd been set up by Ronald Reagan who had a certain audaciousness about him to say that it is peace through strength right he didn't say War through strength he understood that if you were strong enough militarily if you could deter you might never have to fight any of those Wars and he understood too that if you could call out the weaknesses of a regime that is terrified of its own people which is what

authoritarians are then ultimately you could put that regime into a situation where it had to face its people I'll tell you one final story I we were in I was with President Bush in Romania which Bush are we George George W bush W bush right uh in 2005 Romania had become a member of NATO we were there uh to celebrate and there was a a square that they took us into and they said um this Square was filled with 250,000 people when chesu the the communist leader of Romania came into the square and he was

exhorting you know you'd had Revolutions in Czechoslovakia and Poland and Hungary and he was exhorting the people for what he'd done for them and all of a sudden one old lady yelled liar wow and then 10 people yelled liar and then 100 100 people and then a thousand people and now a 100,000 people are yelling liar and all of a sudden chesu knows that the fear that he has held over his people has reversed it's gone the fear is gone and now he's just face to face with the anger of his people authoritarians know that

what I've always called the chesu moment is ultimately there for them because that fear that they hold will one day break that's what Ronald Reagan understood and he understood that you just had to again to quote George Kennan deny them the course of internal of external expansion until that day comes was our job would you close by reading a passage from your article in foreign affairs thank you yes the future will be determined by the alliance of democratic free market States or it will be determined by the revisionist powers harking back to a day of

territorial Conquest abroad and authoritarian practices at home there is simply no other option cond Lisa Rice former secretary of state director of the Hoover institution thank you it's a pleasure for uncommon knowledge the Hoover institution and Fox Nation I'm Peter Robinson [Music]