JOHN SHATTUCK: Good evening and welcome to the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library. I must say, on days like this, I think our faithful forum audiences are like the old US Mail carrier whom neither snow nor sleet nor rain could keep from their appointed rounds. So I want to thank all of you for coming out on this blustery night to Columbia Point.
I’m John Shattuck, the CEO of the Kennedy Library Foundation. And on behalf of our Board of Directors and our Library Director, Tom Putnam, who’s here tonight, let me say how honored we are, Madame Secretary, to welcome back to the Kennedy Library the person who’s drawn you all here tonight, my friend, the former Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright. I cannot imagine a more exciting way to inaugurate our 2008 Kennedy Library Forum Series, just a year before the inauguration of our next president, than to have you here this evening Madame Secretary. Thank you so much for coming.
Before introducing tonight’s discussion and our two distinguished guests, I’d like to express appreciation to the people who make these forums possible, and the institutions. I want to first thank my friend, Jack Manning, who’s the President of Boston Capital, and the Chair of the Kennedy Library’s Distinguished Visitor Series, who’s here with his wife, Lyle. Jack, could you please stand so we could recognize you? Thank you. [applause]
I also want to acknowledge Bank of America, the lead sponsor of our Kennedy Library Forums. And we’re grateful to all of our generous forum sponsors. Boston Capital, the Lowell Institute, the Corcoran Jennison Companies, and the Boston Foundation, along with our media sponsors, The Boston Globe, NECN, and WBUR, which broadcasts these forums on Sunday evenings all across snowy New England.
Madeleine Albright’s personal story frankly brings to mind the stirring words of President Kennedy’s Inaugural Address at the very beginning when he said, “Let the word go forth from this time and place to friend and foe alike, that the torch is passed to a new generation of Americans-- born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage-- and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed at home and around the world.”
Madeleine Albright was born in Czechoslovakia, and twice, as a child, she fled from the horrors of the 20th century. First from Hitler’s fascism, and then from Soviet communism. During the years that I was priviledged to serve under her when she was Secretary of State, she dedicated herself to fighting for freedom and fighting against the enemies of freedom that she knew all too well: tyrants and those who would abuse human rights, and the principles of democracy. And today she continues this leadership as Chair of the National Democratic Institute. I’m not going to make any secret of it, Madame Secretary, but you are one of my heroes. I think that is well known.
[applause]
And this is particularly important because we live in an age when heroes and heroines are often in short supply. I was proud and honored to serve as your Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, and then as Ambassador to the country of your birth, the Czech Republic. And from those positions, I had a front row seat at events where your leadership and your bravery made a huge difference in the lives of people around the world. In Bosnia and Kosovo, where I also served, you were instrumental in stopping and punishing crimes of genocide. And throughout Eastern and Central Europe, your inspiration played a key role in helping people overcome the legacy of four decades of communism.
But I can tell you it wasn’t easy serving as your ambassador in the Czech Republic when the Secretary of State could always pick up the phone in Washington and talk to Czech officials in their own, impenetrable language, which she shared with them. So I thank you, Madame Secretary, for tolerating my linguistic challenges, shall we say.
Secretary Albright has written a marvelous new book, and she’s here today to talk about it. And in this season of intense presidential campaigning, she’s sharing in print her advice to the next president, whoever she or he may be. Her book is called Memo to the President Elect: How We Can Restore America’s Reputation and Leadership. It’s on sale in our bookstore, and I know she will be very pleased to sign copies immediately after the forum.
I want to engage in just a very small amount of shameless advertising on her behalf by sharing just a few nuggets of the wit and wisdom that I found when I read her advice to the next president. First, she warns about the danger of succumbing to the post-election euphoria that inevitably settles around the winning candidate. “It is in the nature of presidential candidates,” she writes, “to paint a rosy picture of what the world would be like in the event that they are elected, as if the skies might open so that justice and righteousness might flow down. But expect no such gift.” she warns. “You are about to inherit a peck of troubles with no power over the heavens and little enough here below.”
“Get a good speechwriter,” she advises, reminding us that when JFK found Ted Sorensen, the result was a combination of elegance and substance that lifted America in the eyes of the world. In a pointed comment aimed at any candidate who might follow the lead of our incumbent president, she puts in a plug for international law. “To argue that international law is useless because it is not always enforced is no different than suggesting that laws against murder are without value because murders are still committed.”
In one more example in this vein, she lands a well-placed blow against an idea that’s been in vogue in the White House for the last seven years. “The doctrine,” as she puts it, “that America will attack dangerous people in dangerous places without waiting until they actually threaten us [is] a straightforward vow that might have been a cure-all if we had the authority to make rules that apply only to ourselves. In reality, however,” she writes, “a principle that allows country A to attack country B simply because country B may one day attack country A invites anarchy.”
So I think you get the idea. Madeleine Albright does not mince words, and that’s why her Memo to the President Elect is so readable and so compelling and so much worth your reading.
To engage Secretary Albright in a conversation about her book and about the future of American foreign policy, we’re extremely fortunate to have here this evening another good friend of mine and one of our nation’s foremost experts on national security issues. Joe Nye is the University Distinguished Service Professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. His highly acclaimed book, Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics, which was published four years ago, is still reverberating in foreign policy circles and transforming the way we think about the exercise of American power today.
Joe is no ivory tower analyst, having served himself in key foreign policy positions in the Carter and in the Clinton administrations, most recently as Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs. And before that, as Chairman of the National Intelligence Council. After he returned from Washington in 1995, Joe served for eight years as Dean of the Kennedy School, and he’s a frequent speaker and visitor here at the Kennedy Library. So please join me in welcoming Madeleine Albright and Joe Nye to the stage of the Kennedy Library.
[applause]
JOSEPH NYE: Thank you very much, John. It is a rare treat to be able to talk to Madeleine about foreign policy at this time in the year when there’s so much riding on the answers. I would urge you, this is an unsolicited advertisement, I would urge you to read this book. There are lots of books by former officials which make you yawn. You won’t yawn over this one. There are lots of books by academics that will make you yawn for the opposite reasons. They’re deadly dull. This one is a great mixture of sophistication and accessibility. And that’s rare. So I think when you have a chance to-- if you want to think about foreign policy, if you have a chance to look at this book, you’ll find it well worth it.
With those good words about the book, Madeleine, let me be somewhat more-- I don’t want to be challenging, but let’s suppose that it’s January 21st of next year and the new president is faced with what? A legacy of Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, Palestine, and the list goes on. North Korea. And one of the things that is interesting is if you’re talking about how can we restore America’s reputation in leadership is, how does the new president escape the inherited legacy? If he or she ignores any of those problems I just described, she’s dead or he’s dead. And it’ll zap their energy, their presidency, and so forth.
On the other hand, if they’re mired down in those problems, they wind up continuing Bush’s foreign policy. Maybe not all the details, but the agenda is the same. And it’s interesting. A few years ago, Vice President Cheney said, “Someday, ten years from now, people will judge us as a success. And what’s more, in the next election, the next president, whoever it be, will have very little choice but to follow our agenda.” How does a new president escape? How do they solve or cope with these problems and not let them define them?
MADELEINE ALBRIGHT: Well, first of all, that is the key question because what I get at in the book is that this is going to be an incredibly difficult presidency. I think people are ready for a new president. Some people are ready for a new political party, but I think generally there is a sense that it’s hard to believe there’s another year of these people.
[applause]
But the bottom line is, and what the point that I make in the book is, so you’ve won. And now what? This is going to be very difficult.
I think one of the hardest points for me is exactly the one you asked, because we’ve both been in administrations, we have both been at the process where you come in new, and we have also been transitioned into. And foreign policy doesn’t come in four-year segments. The rest of the world doesn’t quite abide by our electoral season. And so there are certain issues left on the table, and you have to figure out how to deal with them.
I have been very critical of the Bush administration when they came in to decide that everything that we had done was wrong. And they themselves talk about it, having adopted a policy of ABC, Anything But Clinton, meaning that wherever we had left the talks in North Korea-- for instance, I’m still the highest level American official to have ever gone to Pyongyang-- but we were in the middle of negotiations, and because we had done them, Secretary Powell was not in a position to continue them.
And he talks about the fact that he was prepared to carry on the negotiations, and the Washington Post had a story that said, “Powell to Do Clinton Policy.” And he was called into the Oval Office and said, “No, that’s not going to happen.” So as a political scientist and foreign policy person, I think it would be a real mistake to just flat-out say everything that has been done in the Bush administration is wrong. I think that the next president is going to take inventory during the transition period, and decide what is workable and what isn’t.
So, for instance, if indeed, President Bush is right, and he can get a peace agreement on the Middle East, then there would be, I think, various aspects of that that should be picked up. Implementation in a variety of ways. And while I think, for instance, that the six party talks on North Korea lost a lot of time, if that is moving forward, then one would try to pick up. And I think it would be a real mistake for a Democratic president to say everything. I think there should be some inventories, I said.
But I do think, also, that the next president has to set some priorities. I am advocating in this book that we actually get rid of the 100-day gimmick. That it is something that worked for FDR, because he was working within a totally different context on a specific issue. And that there are just too many issues together.
We were in the Carter administration together. President Carter, after 12 years of Republicans, had basically set too many priorities. And he would go to Congress. I was working at that stage for Senator Muskie, asking too many things-- and so some priorities. So I would get rid of the 100 days. I would then try to list the inventory and pick these issues, and then pick some that had to be done. And obviously, from my perspective, ending the war in Iraq. And then now, added to that, Afghanistan, Pakistan is the real thing.
And just as an example of math. If you set three priorities and you accomplish two, you’ve done two thirds of what you wanted to. If you set ten priorities and accomplish four, while you’ve doubled the two, you still have accomplished much less in terms of the overall number. So I think setting the priorities and not thinking that you have to overthrow everything.
JOSEPH NYE: I think that’s wise counsel. But let’s stick with Iraq for a minute. About a year ago, the view was that Iraq was sucking all the energy out of everything else in Washington. And that that was indeed the dominant issue of the campaign. Now the hotbed pundits are writing things like, the surge is working, the Democrats are basically going to undercut the progress it’s made, the new Democratic president will essentially do what you just said. Stick with the old agenda, undercut the progress. And that is going to lead to a foreign policy disaster. What do you recommend on Iraq?
MADELEINE ALBRIGHT: Well, first of all, I think the next president has to tell the American people the truth about Iraq. Really explaining what it is that’s going on in a way that sets the story out. I have no doubt that the surge is working. Our military is brilliant. And they will do, in the best possible way, what they have to.
The problem is that, in fact, until this debathification law that was passed in the last couple of days, the reason for the surge was to create an environment for a political solution. And there’s not enough evidence of that. So I think it would be a very big mistake to continue the policy of the Bush administration on Iraq.
I have said, in my previous book-- when you write a book, we all know, you hope that what you write and predict will come true. I’m sorry, but this actually has. Because in that book, I said that I thought Iraq would go down in history as the greatest disaster in American foreign policy. And I believe that. Which means I think it’s worse than Vietnam, not in the number of Americans who’ve died or Vietnamese or Iraqis, but in terms of its unintended consequences. And those are not going away. In addition to not getting a political solution in Iraq, we have created mayhem in the region. And every day, there is some kind of proof that Iran, in fact, is the one country that has gained the most out of it.
So I do think that there has to be a change in policy. Where, I think, it might have changed some the kind of discussion in the campaign is that getting out of Iraq has to be done in a much more calibrated way. And trying to figure out how to withdraw the troops in a way that does not create more chaos. I think those of us that, well, you were at the Defense Department, in terms that I learned, a force needs a force to protect it. And so there has to be some maintenance of forces there as we get people out.
And then something I hadn’t focused on until I read an article about it is that the material that has to come out-- first of all, we can’t leave it there, because who knows whose hands it would get into. And it’s filthy. It’s full of all kinds of desert bugs and things. And given our environmental issues, we don’t want to bring the stuff back. On the other hand, there’s not enough water in the place to wash it down. So there are all kinds of issues that I think people need to think through.
I read an article today which indicates that we are finally learning about counterinsurgency. And General Petraeus is the expert on that with his manual. But I do think the next administration has to end the war, and then figure out how to move the troops out and deal with the problems in the region. So the agenda has to change.
JOSEPH NYE: You are a long time and well-known supporter of human rights, concerned about the humanitarian issues. Suppose we begin a gradual withdrawal as you describe, and it turns out that what’s happened is that we’ve armed the Sunnis. And Muqtada al-Sadr has basically had a unilateral cease fire with the Mahdi Army. And that as we draw down, they say, “Now’s our chance!” And we wind up watching a much larger civil war than we’ve got there now. Do we have to re-intervene for humanitarian reasons?
MADELEINE ALBRIGHT: Well I think it’s interesting, because actually it was at your Kennedy School last year when I was talking. Everybody is eager to get us out. And one of the students there asked me the question, “Do we have any moral responsibility to the people of Iraq?” or more specifically to the question you asked, and I think we do. The question is, what is the best way to deal with it? I think it would be a mistake for us to reintervene. But I do think that we have a responsibility to try to develop some kind of a peace keeping force.
One of the things that stunned me-- now let me just make quite clear, I’m not contacted very frequently by this administration. But one of the things that happened, just as they were starting the war, they called a bunch of us into the Pentagon, and were trying to persuade us that this was a truly great idea. This was not a consultation. This was a propaganda activity. And Doug Feith, who was one of the architects of this mess, put a PowerPoint up. You were part of the PowerPoint generation. The Defense Department is really good at PowerPoint.
JOSEPH NYE: It’s a way to obscure the issue.
MADELEINE ALBRIGHT: Absolutely. But all of the sudden he put up the fact that the American military would turn over everything to the Iraqis. And I said, “So how long do you think that will take?” And he said, “Well not very long.” And I said, “Well do you have a timeline?” “No.” “Have you thought about some kind of an international, interpositional force?”-- which is something that we’d done in the Balkans-- “No, we won’t need that,” he said. So there never was any thought about that. And I do think that, in order to avoid what you’re talking about, that we should begin to think about some kind of a peace keeping group.
And the other thing that I’ve said, and this is not very popular when I say it in Europe, but the United States did not start World War I or World War II. But when we saw that it affected our national interest, we went in there and turned it around. Europeans particularly disagreed with the way the war started. But I do think that their national interest is even more affected than ours in many ways. And they need to get in there and help. And I think that diplomatic push is something that needs to be-- we need a diplomatic surge in terms of trying to get ready for what you’re talking about.
JOSEPH NYE: Let’s move next door to Iran. I will not stay in the Middle East forever, but as long as we’re stuck there for a bit, like foreign policy. On Iran, you have a really very good chapter in the book, which I think you call “No More Iraqs,” about how to deal with Iran, which does a very clear-headed cost benefit analysis of the use of force against Iran, which says, “Boy, we will be the big losers from this.” And it’s extremely well argued, as one would expect. But what are the prospects that we can imagine that, in five to ten years, that Iran will be a non-nuclear country? And if not, at what point do we use force?
MADELEINE ALBRIGHT: Well, I have done something else in the book, which I think is important, is to give a little bit of context of why our relations with Iran are so difficult. And they go way back to ’53 with the overthrow of Mossadeq. And then our dependence on the Shah. And then the hostage crisis. And a variety of things that make life fairly difficult for us with Iran.
I think there are several issues here. Iran definitely has gained out of all of this. And it is Persia after all. And the interesting part is to visualize the Persians in the middle of all these Arabs. And while there is a connection among the Shia, it still is Persians and Arabs. And I had a very interesting discussion with King Abdullah of Jordan, who talks about what he foresees as a potential issue of Persians versus Arabs, which is a very difficult and serious issue to contemplate.
You are the expert on nuclear proliferation issues. And I think it’s clear that the nonproliferation regime is broken. There are loopholes in it. And what basically happened was that the Iranians, they have a right to a peaceful nuclear program. And the question is whether there can be any way that the international community, the IEA, can in fact inspect what they have and get them under control.
I was in Israel just before the holidays and it was fascinating. It was just when the NIE came out, in which all of the sudden, our government-- not our government, some portion of the bureaucracy had decided that there was a question about the intelligence as to whether they had a nuclear program or not. And Defense Minister Barak actually said, “How can some country all the way across the ocean have any understanding of what is really going on?” And I am sure that President Bush is having some pretty tough discussions with him about this.
I do think that it is very dangerous for Iran to become a nuclear weapons country. And the options are not great, frankly. But there is some hope, internal, that there are divisions within the Iranian society. There’s some interesting developments there where the Ayatollah all of the sudden is saying a few things that are different from Ahmadinejad, who is not doing too well. That the large portions of the populations are pro-American. That there are real divisions there. And I think those need to be looked at.
I think the military tool can never be taken off the table. But I think it would be a real problem to use it because Iran knows how to not only in fact have weapons, but to fund a variety of terrorist groups. They have with Hezbollah and Hamas, and they have funded terrorist groups in Latin America. And that would be lucent, I think, if we were to use the military force.
The question, and I actually would ask you, why, if deterrents worked so well for 50 years, and one assumes that they-- maybe not Ahmadinejad, but that the Ayatollah’s a rational player. That in fact, deterrents in some way might work. And to try to figure out how to work with different elements of the Iranian society, try to get the international system into place. And keep the force tool on the table, but do more with deterrents.
JOSEPH NYE: I think that’s right. I mean in the academic discussions about this, there are a number of people who have said it’s possible to deter Iran. That the idea that it’s hell-bent on suicide is simply not the way it is. And there is a view that, when we think about nuclear weapons, it depends on what kind of a country has them.
So if we have ten years, we ought to be working to have a different type in Iran that never gets nuclear weapons and not the kind we have today. And that a premature attack is guaranteed to produce the wrong kind of Iran. We don’t worry a lot about French nuclear weapons. And much less about Russian weapons than we used to.
MADELEINE ALBRIGHT: I think one of the things-- I point out that the next president is going to have five huge international trend issues to deal with. The first one is fighting terrorism in a way that doesn’t create more anti-Americanism. And the second is to deal with this broken nuclear proliferation regime. The third, just briefly, is to restore the good name of democracy. The fourth is to deal with the negative aspects of globalization. And the fifth, that whole bundle of issues to do with global warming and energy. And just by naming what those are, a different style of work, in terms of cooperation.
So if the Indian Nuclear Agreement goes through, and it’s now got a problem with the Indians, then I think some thought is to take that as the basis of some kind of new nonproliferation regime. Have the new president submit a CTBT to the Senate and work on a fissile material cut-off treaty, so that there’s a whole host of issues that come together.
And then work on a different Iran.
JOSEPH NYE: I think that makes sense. Let me pick up one of those other priorities to try to get us out of the Middle East for a minute. You do say that democracy, I think you call it democracy doubts, that what we’ve inherited or what the new president will inherit, whether it be he or she, or Republican or Democrat, is a great deal of reaction against the democracy agenda of the Bush administration. That people look at what’s called democracy in Iraq, and say, “No thanks. I don’t want that.”
You were deservedly praised for efforts of democracy promotion. What do we do now? In other words, when there’s a great deal of cynicism about democracy promotion as a result of the last seven years. What do we do now to get back on track with democracy?
MADELEINE ALBRIGHT: John mentioned this and that we had worked on it. Let me just say, there was a meeting, two meetings, at the White House where President Bush invited the former Secretaries of State and Defense. I have to say, I never felt so young. I thought half the people had already died. But the President had come in and said, “I need to have you all support democracy.” And it was not a particularly pleasant meeting.
But as we were leaving, and he said, “I want you to come into the Oval Office to see how Laura has redecorated it,” I felt that I should speak to him. And so I said, “Well, Mr. President, I truly do support you on democracy. I only have one problem, one bone to pick with you. And that is that you act as though you invented democracy, when actually I did.” He did at least laugh on that.
But I think that, and I have to be very frank about this… I am Chairman of the Board now of the National Democratic Institute. I was Vice Chair when it started. And it came out of an idea of Ronald Reagan’s. A speech that he gave in London at Westminster in 1983, when he talked about the necessity of democracies organizing their message better. He didn’t know about Soft Power yet. But basically how democracies explain themselves. And so he came back and suggested the creation of the National Endowment for Democracy that has under it a Democratic Institute and a Republican Institute, and a Business and Labor Institute, in order to help support democratic movements around the world. And I underline support.
And it was a very interesting evolution in the last years of how you support a variety of movements, what you do, not to undermine them. What has happened is that democracy’s gotten a bad name, because imposing democracy is an oxymoron. And I believe in democracy, and I believe that countries are actually better off if they are run democratically. And as an American decision-maker, I think America is better off if countries around us in the world are democratic.
But democracy really had a bad name at the moment. And I think that what we have to do is be a little bit more humble about it in terms of not saying “American model of democracy.” We’re not the only country. We have to work with forces within the countries and not tell them what to do. And this is a hard part. I have to say, I have discussions about this with my big-D Democratic friends in Washington, who are less inclined about democracy these days than they were before because it is viewed as Bush’s imperialist democracy.
And I think we have to figure out how to have this discussion among ourselves, and then try to figure out exactly how to promote it. John Kennedy had some very interesting ideas on the subject, and did a lot in terms of when he was talking about freedom in Africa for many countries. And I think we need to get back to that, rather than democracy coming in with the military. That in itself is the part that has undermined the reputation of democracy.
JOSEPH NYE: I agree with that. What do you do, though, when you hit the hard cases, like Saudi Arabia? There’s this considerable resistance, even to the modest democratic agenda you’re describing. Or take the case of Pakistan. We’re pressing President Musharraf to hold free and fair elections. It’s not clear that he’s going to. If he doesn’t, what do we do?
MADELEINE ALBRIGHT: Well, I think that, first of all, I do think that, generally, we need to press the democracy agenda. But as we all know, whenever there are complicated relations with some country, we call it multifaceted. That we have a multifaceted relationship. I do think that one needs to press the Saudis for their own good to open up. And King Abdullah, actually, in a strange way, has moved some of it.
What I find interesting is-- The question always is, what happens if the wrong people get elected? Well, that happens here. But I think there have to be a certain set of rules in order to get into a democratic election. And I find interesting, for instance, people say to me, so, what happened with Hamas? And I’ll get to Pakistan in a minute. But basically there should’ve been some kind of an entry fee for going into democratic elections. You have to give up force as a tool of your party if you are going to compete in an election.
In Pakistan, I think what is so interesting is that Musharraf has really had a coup against the rule of law. He ousted the Chief Justice. He then got rid of a bunch of judges. And so the rule of law was undermined by the leader. I think there should be free and fair elections. I think the question is how quick. I mean, they have now been set, but what has to happen, an NDI actually had a delegation there, is to make sure that the electoral roles are legitimate, that there are actually not kind of ghost polling places, and that there’ll be international observers there. And if they are not free and fair, then they should so be declared. But that is never an easy thing. That is what just happened in Kenya, and there are all kinds of upheavals. But there’s nothing about this that’s easy. But I do think it requires sustained support, because it’s much worse when there are coups against the rule of law and democratic elections are not held.
JOSEPH NYE: Let me take one of your other priorities that you outlined early in the book, which was the working on the reaction against globalization. One of the four key priorities at the beginning of the book that you mentioned is anti-globalization growing. And how do we do something about that?
MADELEINE ALBRIGHT: I’ll tell you what’s interesting. I do have a consulting firm now, and people have actually come to me and said, “How do we stop globalization?” Well you can’t stop globalization. The question is how to manage it. And I have been asked to be a part of something truly interesting recently. I think many people in the audience, and you certainly know, Hernando de Soto, the Peruvian economist, who has a very interesting theory about how the poor can be a part of society if they have legal rights.
And for me, the biggest problem about globalization at the moment is the gap between the rich and the poor. If we were all rich, it would be very nice. If we were all poor, it would be too bad. But the problem is that, now, the poor know what the rich have as a result of information. And while there is absolutely no direct line between terrorism and poverty, the more disenfranchised and disempowered people are, it creates an environment so that those who really hate us and hate everybody can find recruits there. So I think the rich-poor gap, for me, is the biggest problem.
Hernando asked me to co-chair an international commission with him on the legal empowerment of the poor and a combination of looking at our development assistance and entrepreneurial skills to try to do something to mitigate that worst part. There are fewer poor people in the world today, but the gap between the rich and the poor is growing. And that to some extent is true in the United States. Domestically, also. And therefore a combination of looking at business and entrepreneurial skills along with governmental action, so top to bottom, I think is one of the big agenda items.
In Kenya, for instance, taking it as an example, we went there to do a consultation to see what really goes on. Not talking to representatives of poor people but poor people themselves. The poor are not stupid. And this is quite a story. We went to a place in Nairobi ...(inaudible) slum. A place called the Toy Market, which has nothing to do with toys. It just was called that. And it was about hundreds of stalls where people were selling each other spark plugs and flip flops and t-shirts.
And those people, in that slum, had organized their own credit system. And they each put one Kenyan dollar a night into this, and they then lent money to each other. As a result of what’s gone on now in Kenya, that market has been destroyed. And if those people had any piece of paper in order to rebuild it… But to me it’s the tragedy of not having legal empowerment.
JOSEPH NYE: Right. One of the great beneficiaries of globalization is China. But there’s also something of a reaction against China in American domestic politics now. They’re being blamed for low wages, which steal American jobs and so forth. Do you expect the anti-globalization problem to lead to a more poisonous policy toward China?
MADELEINE ALBRIGHT: Well, one thing you know from all our experiences together, is that there is always a very different mood in campaigns. Every candidate of every party has always criticized any relationship with China during the campaign. And then right after, there’s a recognition that you actually have to deal with China. And while this is not at all an elegant way for a political scientist or even a former Secretary of State to describe it, our relationship with China could well be described as that between a drug addict and a pusher. It’s just that we don’t know which is which, because they are dependent on us for their market. They own large portions of our debt. And so we’re going to have to work out some kind of a notice of …(inaudible) with the Chinese.
What I find interesting is that when we were in office, and especially when I was at the UN, the Chinese were not that interested in a lot of issues, except as they specifically referred to them. So whenever there was any question about what was going on internally in somebody’s country, they didn’t want anything to do with that resolution because they said, “Now people are going to be looking at what we do.” What has developed more and more is they now do see some kind of a global role for themselves that they have, because of their energy needs, are all over Africa and various places.
And I think what needs to happen is, rather than seeing them as our chief adversary, we have to figure out how to bring them into some kind of global management system to deal with the five issues that I raised, in addition to others. We need their help on Iran, on North Korea, on Darfur, and in terms of how one runs this very complex world.
JOSEPH NYE: We’re going to turn to the audience questions in about five minutes. So if you haven’t written along on a little card and passed it along, do so now. But we’ve talked mostly about policy, which is the first two thirds of the book. But I found equally interesting the last part of the book, which is about leadership and how is a leader to implement foreign policy. I’m interested because I have a book on leadership coming out myself. But when I got to that section, I said, “Does she agree?” And we do agree.
But if I could push you a little bit on it, on page 281 to be exact, if you’re quoting Jean Aitchison and so forth. You say, “The most valuable traits to the job as Chief Executive include optimism, resilience, capacity to adjust to new information, a willingness to accept responsibility, wisdom in judging people, patience to listen, and ability to inspire cooperation among Americans and between our country and the world.” That seems like a great list.
The question I have is how do we know that in an election campaign? There is a famous quote from when Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes was introduced to Franklin Roosevelt. Somebody asked him afterwards, “What did you think of the President?” And Holmes’s comment was, “Second class intellect, first class temperament,” which he meant as praise. That it’s not the guy or the woman who gets the best marks on the exams, or is the biggest policy ...(inaudible), it’s the person who has temperament, which has that list of traits that you describe. But as we watch these debates and these ads and so forth, how do we really get to judge as citizens in a democracy the temperament of our leader?
MADELEINE ALBRIGHT: I think with difficulty, I have to tell you, because the campaigns are very long, but not necessarily illuminating in that particular way. And to go back to that list a little bit, I think that, I mean, we have both worked for two very intelligent presidents. And I think what is interesting, I have also said that I want to see a president that is confident but not necessarily certain in that area. Total certainty is impossible for a human being, because we are human. But confidence in one’s views, enough to have that temperament, to ask questions, to feel comfortable when somebody argues with you, to have also the patience to listen to new ideas, I think is a very important part. Certainty leads somebody to not even know what they don’t know. So the bottom line is, how do you find that?
I think one has to watch very carefully as issues kind of unveil themselves in a campaign. But also, what is the connection between having grand ideas, and then doing some of the things in terms of the patience, the capability of working through it? You and I have been involved in many campaigns together. I think that there are various times in campaigns where some of the temperament actually comes through. And it’s usually when something very difficult has happened. Or the way a candidate treats people around him or her. Or kind of immediate reactions to problems. But I think it’s the hardest part, Joe, because, just in your personal relationships with people, you don’t truly know all these aspects.
The other part is that I think presidents often evolve in office. They don’t just look older, but they also develop a capability of dealing. Some shut down, and some develop this capability. I think that the leadership question is the hardest, and I’m very glad that you’re writing a book on it.
But I think that, for me, the dealing with the unexpected. I think that is a very big deal. And one of the things I say in this book is the next president, no matter how many transition documents there are and everything, will have to deal with the unexpected.
JOSEPH NYE: There’s, to take the case of a particular leader, the Clinton administration. I think a lot of people argue that Bill Clinton became a better foreign policy leader in his second term than in his first term. That he did learn on the job. But I was struck by reading a book by your former boss and our mutual friend, Zbig Brzezinski, when it came out last year, in which he assigned George H. W. Bush a B on foreign policy. And he assigned Clinton a C on foreign policy. He also assigned George W. Bush an F. As a teacher, students always come in and say, “Why’d I get that grade?” What do you think about Spig’s grading on Clinton as a foreign policy leader?
MADELEINE ALBRIGHT: Well, first of all, I think that sometimes people give grades when they haven’t been consulted about what they thought. And Zbig Brzezinski was not consulted very often by the Clinton administration. But I also, I have to say, I don’t know whether this is true, you are teaching now, I’ve just said this to my class, “When you come in here, you don’t have an A and you’re working your way down from it. You actually come in with a C and you have to work your way up there.”
I don’t know why he gave that grade, frankly, without being overly snide. I think that, and I tried to read the book. I didn’t like it. I think basically because he felt that there was not a grand strategy. That it was something that was done a little bit more ad hawk, which I think is part of the problem in the 21st century, and the end of the 20th, is that the kind of paradigms that we all lived with didn’t exist particularly. But I wouldn’t give anybody an A. I think it is a very hard job. I actually probably would give Clinton the same grade that George Herbert Walker Bush had.
And believe it or not, I might give this Bush a slightly higher grade towards the end, because I do grade my students on improvement. And I think that he has all of a sudden. You know, the course I teach is the “National Security Toolbox.” He has discovered diplomacy. And his trip to the Middle East, while late, I think is useful. I think there was a very interesting op-ed in the Washington Post today about the fact that our relations with Turkey have improved a bit. So I think that there I might assess him a little bit differently towards the end. Even though Iraq is the greatest disaster in American foreign policy.
JOSEPH NYE: We have a number of very good questions from the audience. I don’t know how many we can get through, but let me start with this one. What does the assassination of Bhutto mean for democracy in that region, and for women in politics in Muslim nations?
MADELEINE ALBRIGHT: Well, first of all, I think it is a huge blow to democracy in Pakistan. In terms of who might be a new leader, Nawaz Sharif from the other party is not somebody that everybody likes. There is no natural leader of Bhutto’s party. And it left a huge void. I think it is important to know that she was not the only Muslim woman leader. Indonesia’s had a woman leader, Bangladesh has. It does happen in other countries. And she was not assassinated because she was a woman, at least as far as we know. But I think that it does leave a gaping void in the system.
JOSEPH NYE: Here’s another one. How do you recommend we fulfill our moral responsibility to the reported two million Iraqi refugees?
MADELEINE ALBRIGHT: Well, I think that we need to-- This is a whole issue, generally, how we deal with refugees. But I’m sure that there are various categories of refugees. There are those who have just been moved out of their countries and they are living abroad, and we have to figure out how to get them back into Iraq and how to make sure that they can live a normal, decent life. I think there’s a whole other group of people that are refugees that actually have helped Americans, who have helped in terms of being interpreters and helping the soldiers. And they are under very specific threat. And I think we should try to figure out a way to bring them to the United States. I think that they need protection. So reconstruction of Iraq in itself is one way, but I think there’s a very special group that needs our protection.
JOSEPH NYE: Here’s another one. How do you see poverty and disease in Africa as a threat to global security? In other words, how do situations like Darfur affect security? Not just humanitarian concerns?
MADELEINE ALBRIGHT: I think that they do create a sense of insecurity and discomfort, and provide, then, areas for recruitment of a variety of people who are anti the system, or frankly just flat out anti-American. First of all, let’s take HIV/AIDS in itself. The number of people who die of HIV/AIDS unsettle whole regions and countries, and make the governing of them more and more difficult.
Then there are the issues of additional cross-border conflicts or ethnic conflicts that often happen because there are the haves and the have-nots. And it creates a reason for people to argue over their fields or crops, or whatever businesses they have. So it provides reason for arguing, and then those might spread to larger and larger regions. You look at, for instance, the horror of Rwanda that has, in many ways, spread to the Congo. And so it just creates larger areas of conflict, which then have a tendency to spread to wider areas.
I also think that one of the discussions, and I believe that, well, John, you were a part of it, and you were, Joe, is the question, what is US national interest? Do we consider that humanitarian intervention and the protection of people that are being ethnically cleansed or tortured or something, or just killed, and refugee displacement, is something that Americans don’t want to deal with in terms of our own conscience. I think Americans are the most generous people in the world with the shortest attention span. And so we have this tendency to get all exercised for national interest reasons in something, and then we go onto the next thing. And I do think it’s in our national interest not to see people being ethnically cleansed wherever.
JOSEPH NYE: If the United Nations Peacekeeping Force-- which was just agreed upon to help the African Union try to create a peaceful situation in Darfur-- if this fails, and there’s some worry now that it might be in the process of failing, should the United States intervene itself?
MADELEINE ALBRIGHT: Well, this is the issue that one goes back and forth on all the time. There’s a whole new doctrine in international policy, and it’s the responsibility to protect. I found very interesting, when I was at the UN, and there we were. Fifteen countries sitting around the table talking about what was going on inside somebody’s country. And I thought, “Isn’t that remarkable? That in the end of the 20th century, we really care what’s going on inside.” And then on other days, we would be mostly arguing about commas and UN phrases like “inter alia,” to try to figure out what to do about what’s going on inside a country.
And now there is this whole issue that, as an international community, if the head of a country is not protecting his or her citizens, then the rest of the community has a responsibility to protect. It does get in the way of sovereignty. And it is one of the huge issues that are going to have to be talked about in the 21st century.
Our problem, at the moment, is that our troops are overstretched. And it makes it very difficult for us to, all of the sudden, be involved in other peacekeeping operations. And the question is how, having tried, believe me, although not successfully, to get some larger number of troops into Rwanda at the time, I can see the great difficulty in trying to get American forces to intervene in Darfur. What I would hope is that there would be much greater pressure to put the UN force-- The UN forces are coming together, but they can’t get in, and so I think that before, we couldn’t-- We’re not going to invade Sudan. And so the question is how to get the system to get the forces in there, and get the United States to provide the logistical support and whatever number of forces that we can.
JOSEPH NYE: That leads to the next to last question, which is, you were Ambassador to the United Nations. What should the next president do about the United Nations?
MADELEINE ALBRIGHT: Well, I happen to be an advocate of the United Nations. And I kidded about the fact that the reason that I got to be Ambassador to the UN was that I actually won the United Nations contest when I was a sophomore in high school for the Rocky Mountain Empire, which is Colorado. And the reason that I did was because, at that stage, there were 51 countries in the UN, and I could name them all in alphabetical order.
I loved being at the UN. And I found that what was so interesting, when I got there in the early 90s, was that all of the sudden, the UN that had been paralyzed all through the Cold War, could in fact begin to act. And the peacekeeping operations were very interesting and important. And the economic activities and the health activities. And then I used to go around and give a lot of speeches and say, “For the price of a movie ticket, people don’t even know that children get vaccines. And we get information about the next storm. And you can send a letter from one country to another. And airplanes can figure out, if they ever take off, their flight patterns.” And so a whole bunch of things that the UN does that most people don’t know.
The UN needs reforming. There’s no question about it. But it requires the US to support it in order to reform it. So our problem, when we were in office, was that there are two sets of aspects of money. One are the regular dues, because it’s a club, and the other are peacekeeping operations that cost a lot of money. And the US was way behind on the peacekeeping operations, and we paid our dues late, because our fiscal year begins in October. And so we always paid late and created artificial financial crises. And at the same time, my instructions were, “Make them change on everything.”
So our best friends, the British, arrived at one United Nations General Assembly, and delivered a line they had waited more than 200 years to say, which was “Representation without taxation.” And so it lowered the leverage. Now there are people in the United States who think that the UN is a very dangerous organization, that it has black helicopters that swoop down in the middle of the night and steal your lawn furniture. And then there are lots of Americans who don’t like the UN because it’s full of foreigners, which, frankly, can’t be helped. So the bottom line is it needs to be reformed, because it’s a very useful tool in terms of dealing with our national security issues.
JOSEPH NYE: That, and answers to many of the other questions that we’ve had this evening are all in this book. I recommend it. But Madeleine, I can’t let you off the hook without having the last question be put to you, which isn’t related to the book but which I think you will have to answer. Would you be willing to serve in Hillary Clinton’s administration?
MADELEINE ALBRIGHT: Thank you. Well, let me say this. I loved being Secretary of State. I think all of you that know me know how much I loved it. And I am a foreign policy wonk. And there is no better job. But you don’t get to be Secretary of State twice.
The only person who’s done it twice was Daniel Webster, and I’m not exactly Daniel Webster. So I’m happy to help. And I hope I have the opportunity to see a different president of the United States.
JOSEPH NYE: Well, thank you.
[applause]
MADELEINE ALBRIGHT: Thanks, Joe. That was so much fun!
JOSEPH NYE: I couldn’t resist.
MADELEINE ALBRIGHT: Thank you! Thanks a lot! Much fun. Thank you.
JOHN SHATTUCK: Well, I know you’ll agree that that was a tour-de-force, and coming here on this snowy evening was certainly worthwhile. I want to thank Madame Secretary, Madeleine Albright, Joe Nye, and thank all of you for coming. Thank you. [applause]
END