Condoleezza Rice on Russia, China, and Great Power Conflict

what I'm going to do is to talk a little bit about the International System about what we've called Global hot spots and then I really do hope as I said last night that you've got questions because I will call on somebody but I have a feeling you'll have plenty of questions so let me start my discussion of this this way I was the Soviet specialist in the white house for George H.W bush in 1989 to 1991 the wall fell during that time we unified Germany Eastern Europe was liberated history was going our way it was an extraordinary time but it was a transformative time I was then the National Security advisor 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 unmoored the Verity seem to all be up for grabs 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 re-emergence of great power conflict and great powers are different it's one thing to talk about non-state actors as we did after 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 after all the the so-called Washington consensus about uh capitalism Democratic capitalism to seem to be on the rise uh Eastern Europe had just been liberated the Chinese were if not Democratic capitalists they were certainly capitalists it seemed that many of the rules of the role for the International System were now written and everybody understood that and most importantly the great Powers had all bought into 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 the successive 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 is a royalist he's a nationalist 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 Candy 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 Catherine the Great she was a woman I guess she didn't count even though she was a brilliant Czar but of course he didn't say Stalin or linen he said Alexander Great the great and Peter the Great the czars at sort of the greatest expanse of the Russian Empire there's a line for which he's famous which is that 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 brother Russia so it gives you a sense that for him this was about Empire and the problem with an independent Ukraine as big neph Brzezinski 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 gets itself into this war that we are now experiencing and I think got itself into that war because there are three important miscalculations on Putin's part 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 made-up 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 Tchaikovsky 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 impulse that of course the ukrainians would welcome their great Russian brother well that means that you go into the war with five days Provisions for your armed forces and their dress uniforms for the parade in Keith 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 Putin 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 um the sanctions were 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 the Russian armed forces are not built for the offense one way that you can tell if an Army's built for the offense is that they tend to move as ours does and Europeans do in trucks the Russians removed 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 and so now having been frustrated in all three of those miscalculations he's turned to something else which is to just throw unarmed uh poorly trained Russian young men mostly from places like Dagestan because you don't want those blonde boys from um from Moscow and St Petersburg to revolt and so you just throw untrained young Russian men at the front by the way the Russians have no non-commissioned officer rank I remember when um Sergey even off who was the defense minister at the time asked Don Rumsfeld 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 Ukrainian 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 at the at the end okay a second great power of course China uh expectations uh when dang Xiaoping brought China out of isolation that 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 where you're really going to try to leave them outside the system so China's invited into the international economy in particular it exceeds to the World Trade Organization before Chinese uh before Chinese practices are aligned so you have continual problems with intellectual property protection the Chinese cut off large parts of their markets to foreign competition they clearly privilege 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 there on Parallel tracks and they don't really cross CEOs would tell you 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 that market in China is too important National Security people would start to see the emergence of a China even before Xi Jinping that seemed to be building its armed forces in significant ways that look like they might actually threaten American Supremacy in the indo-pacific in 2007 when I was Secretary of the Chinese actually had an anti-satellite test that was tremendously sophisticated and surprised everybody in terms of the level of sophistication but the the presidents of China Jean simen and hujin Tao engaged in something that 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 I was getting the Chinese to be in the chair for the six party talks on North Korea 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 did 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 Xi Jinping 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 Xi Jinping 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 the Chinese under Xi Jinping to go out and say we will surpass the United States in Frontier Technologies like Quantum and like 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 great power rivalry isn't but probably most importantly the Soviet Union was a military giant but it was a technological and economic that is not through of true of China for the first time the United States actually has a rival that has economic economic technological and military power to bring to bear on the International System and Xi Jinping 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 or decision to re to reverse the 1997 uh understands 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 province of China at this point and the Chinese engage in something called wolf Warrior diplomacy now there's a tendency with authoritarians to engage in what I call authoritarian Envy oh they build great airports oh they're so smart oh the Chinese are so strategic Sun Tzu et cetera 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 bats and so before long you start to get a reaction to the wolf Warrior diplomacy not to mention to Belton Road which it turns out it turns out the terms aren't so great if you're a recipient of Belton Road money and all of a sudden all these countries find themselves indebted 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 Xi Jinping 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 the indo-pacific in particular and perhaps globally continues to dominate uh Chinese foreign policy so you have 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 a 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 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 between uh between uh Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin the Bromance between these two authoritarians oh um start with the fundamentals this is an anti-American anti-western axis is what it is um 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 piece Russia the restoration of the Russian Empires that's kind of the 19th century in both cases but nothing that binds them culturally in fact there are no more xenophobic people in the world about Asians than the Russians and so the underlying of this 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 problem if you're Xi Jinping 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 because you've got Taiwan fine just don't do it until the Olympics are over okay I think that's that was the conversation between them and now Xi Jinping finds himself wedded to a homicidal maniac who's who's lodged 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 I've never met pagosian 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 Patra Chev 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 shoigu who is just an idiot all right I've spent a lot of time with him he's really an idiot and then you have garasimov who apparently 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 Byrne said it's something I recently 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 Fusion ping 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 follow a fall on the wrong side of sanctions and 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 Xi Jinping in 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 the roots of the um the state stability of prosperity is up for grabs you've read about the youth unemployment problems you've read about the bubble in real estate and again going back to authoritarians and authoritarian Envy when authoritarians make mistakes they make really big ones uh because nobody tells Xi Jinping he can't do it so zero covet 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 you can't have economic liberalization and political control our thinking was well obviously you would give up political control for economic liberalization and Xi Jinping has said thank you very much I'll take political control and that means you cannot have the alibabas and the 10 cents of you really think Jack Ma just wanted to spend more time with his family in Tokyo I 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 and International System and that's beginning to decline and so these two great Powers have disrupted the system in major ways and they are disrupting a system and this is my second Point they've displayed disrupting the system that was already weak uh globalization as we knew it had begun to become unstuck and I'll just give you two data points about this um so on 9 11 when the 9 11 attacks had happened within days we had um a U.N 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 Dubai in San Francisco in Paris it will look pretty much the same you won't take more than three ounces 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 covet 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 globalization and you got the rise of populace the rise of populism then uh Deb when was the last time that you heard a leader defend free trade for instance 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 Hillary Clinton because these sort of nativists and 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 is globalization done for you and politicians respond to that the system gets weaker and weaker the state becomes more the dominant 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 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 new and somewhat frightening we went through the issues of cyber that domain the first time really that the domain of warfare if you will 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 in 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 are even more challenging whether it is a synthetic biology so one of the reasons that and by by the way synthetic biology the ability to engineer um what would have been naturally occurring cells and so when you think about the reasons that biological warfare really never took off it was messy uh you couldn't control it a micro wouldn't know the difference between a Ukrainian and a Russian an American and um and you know an Iranian but with the potential to do this in a more targeted way you have to worry about whether or not these elements can be used for ill now we had our brushes with biological agents when I was in the white house and I'll tell you one of these stories so after 9 11 we had Anthrax you 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 we had 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 going to try to to vaccinate the whole country he was told five percent of the population would have an adverse effect what is an adverse effect they would die so you probably don't want to try to do that but then we had on one day a really interesting one which 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 invaded Afghanistan on October 3rd so every morning we would have a video conference with the president Colin Powell me and Andy Hardin was Chief of Staff in China kind of going like this in the 10th 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 it was you know exactly 12 hours so it's eight o'clock in in Shanghai eight o'clock at night in Washington so 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 the president says dick what's wrong and he says Mr President botulinum toxin has been detected in the White House detectors and there is no no known antidote we're all going to die because I said what was that dick he said uh well if anybody who's exposed is going to die and so Colin Powell 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 called Steve Hadley Steve had a kind of uh has a kind of Midwestern sense of humor so he said we've sent the sample to the CDC maybe a false alarm let me put it this way if the mice are feet up we're toast if the Bison feed down we're fine so uh 24 hours later we're at lunch with the Chinese and 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 who's stable who's seeing what's wrong Z men and I said Mr President good news thank God The Miser feed down and the President says thank God the Meister feed down at which point they translated 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 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 of AI algorithms to suddenly start hallucinating and making up stuff I mean it doesn't sound like a very good picture and I was asked it at AI Forum recently will it become a weapon of War every technology has 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 there so that's all the bad news about the International System [Music]

Channel: Hoover Institution

Views: 482,401

Keywords: Hoover institution, Condoleezza rice, international system, Russia, china, cyber security, biology, AI, artificial intelligence, globalization

Id: dF7uuxRliBU

Length: 32min 44sec (1964 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 20 2023