New National Security Adviser to President elect George W. Bush Jr. Stanford in the summer is a sun-drenched university campus with a fascinating mix of architectural styles. Condoleezza Rice, Professor of Political Science and foreign policy advisor to presidential hopeful George W. Bush Jr. greets me with a broad smile in her corner office of the Hoover Institution. The setting is certainly apt for a TIES interview. After all, even if Herbert Hoover is best known for his role as US President during the great depression, he first came to fame for coordinating US efforts to avert starvation in Europe after the Great War. As Professor Rice immediately points out "He did the same thing after World War II when he was again asked to head the relief effort". The symbolic and human links between Europe and the US are strongly imbedded in this site. Professor Rice is also eloquent on the information society. Perhaps to be expected given that we are located in the heartland of the Information economy, California's Silicon Valley. Nevertheless Professor Rice has clearly thought through her reasons why "the United States is particularly well positioned for this kind of new global economy". Indeed, she is proud of the fact that "Stanford is the source of both ideas and of people for the Valley", demonstrating how US research universities act in symbiosis with the private sector. She specifically notes the importance of "tolerance for risk taking" and "for failure", "a relatively low regulatory environment" and "relatively low taxation" and the existence of an important venture capital basis. And "because we are a federal state, most economic decisions are not taken at the federal level at all." Decentralisation is crucial. Nevertheless unity is also important for mobility and "these days the American population is just incredibly mobile." This is building the kind of personal contacts that make international civil society thrive. Hence when it comes to transatlantic relations, she is happy to affirm that "outside of security, for the most part I think you can step back and let things happen". That of course does not include support for moving towards a North Atlantic common market. She suggests that such an option "seems to me incredibly complex when you take the percentage of the world economy that would be represented by a North American - European free trading zone, and the fact that the EU is not complete". In any case companies are operating as if there were no borders, and so far takeovers and migration of skilled workers poses no problems, although "this is an issue that could have been more of a problem in the United States than it actually is." The fact that the European Union does not figure prominently in US foreign policy debate is therefore somewhat of a good thing as "relations between Europeans and Americans are so multi-faceted and in so many aspects of life that we have simply ceased to think about it any longer." But Ms Rice also recognises the risks of such an approach: "One of the problems is not to take your friends for granted." Otherwise, "just as in personal relationships, if I never call my friends until I need them, then the relationship is not going to be very strong when I get there." Indeed, "we do have a couple of challenges in the relationship", especially on the security side. As regards NATO, she notes that the "center of gravity has moved East" and hence Kosovo is "in Hungary's back yard". Hence the need to think again about strategic doctrine. And yes, "unless you expect a war in Bonn, you know, then of course the wars are going to be out of area for NATO." Regarding European defence, her "concern is more that Europe will not do enough, not that it will do too much." Hence no need to talk about a US veto on European capabilities. Certainly "what has worried some people is that the United States may somehow not be party to a decision to use force, and then somehow get dragged in as Europe could not extricate itself. If we ever face that problem, it would be so far down the road that I think it is not even wise to contemplate it." As to the rise of civil society and its impact on foreign policy, Ms Rice interestingly chooses to focus upon the domestic role of civil society, rather than its impact on previously cloistered international institutions. In this context it was easy to understand her reflection that "constituency based politics, interest based politics, is having quite an effect, and mostly a negative effect, on foreign policy." Hence when considering how to bring civil society on board "of course you can try, but I think you have to have a very strong sense of when that is possible and when it is not". Overall a fascinating hour and quarter of discussion with much food for thought, as you will find by clicking upon any of the above underlined passages: Hoover was played a key role in coordinating relief efforts of Europe after the Great War Europe and America But do not take allies for granted Harmony in defence? "Step aside..." A North Atlantic free trade zone? Any backlash to Europeans buying up American companies and Europeans working here? Why the US has been able to take advantage of the new economy The US has a decentralised and flexible form of government Mobile citizens The emergence of civil society as an influence on foreign policy Any other way of getting civil society on board? Hoover was played a key role in coordinating relief efforts of Europe after the Great War. "He did the same thing after World War II when he was again asked to head the relief effort. The President of Stanford is a man who was born in Hamburg, Germany, in 1937, and who was 8 years old at the time of the end of the war. He remembers having what they called 'Hoover packages'. And so he always ends graduation ceremonies with a little story. He says how remarkable it is that a man who grew up on Hoover packages and could, like many German children, have starved had it not been for the intercession of Herbert Hoover, now has the chance to be here be at Stanford, Hoover's home institution." Europe and America "I think that relations between Europeans and Americans are so multi-faceted and in so many aspects of life that we have simply ceased to think about it any longer. Some people read it as a decline in transatlantic contacts. But if you just look at the raw numbers of contacts, I doubt that there has been a decline, I think that there has been an acceleration. But it has become routine. In any class that I teach at Stanford now maybe probably some 10 or 15% comes from some place else, and a significant number from Europe. The tendency of youth to think of themselves as, yes holding a citizenship, but living here for five years, going and working there for three years, is probably the best thing we have going for us. So I don't despair about this at all, to say nothing of the business community where the ties and contacts are almost daily." But do not take allies for granted "One of the problems is not to take your friends for granted. George Schultz often says that alliances are like gardens, you have constantly to tend to them. You know you have to constantly tend to your friends. Just as in personal relationships, if I never call my friends until I need them, then the relationship is not going to be very strong when I get there." Harmony in defence? "I think we do have a couple of challenges in the relationship. (...) Clearly NATO post-Kosovo is going through some major changes. We have three new members of the Alliance. We have moved the center of gravity east with the reunification of Germany and the admittance of Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary. It should come as no surprise to anyone therefore that when Kosovo happened, it was a strategic concern for NATO, not just a humanitarian concern, because it was in Hungary's back yard. It was almost as if people did not focus on the fact that when you move the center of gravity east, you moved into an unstable neighborhood, so you had to do something about the Balkans. And I found odd the constant searching for an argument about why we were doing something about Kosovo, with people saying that the Balkans are out of area for NATO. Well unless you expect a war in Bonn, you know, then of course the wars are going to be out of area for NATO! So I do think that post-Kosovo there is a challenge in trying to see what it means about NATO's strategic concept, what it means about the identity of NATO. And, of course, Kosovo, rather than crossing international boundaries, raised the issue of actually influencing affairs in a constituted state, and what that means about NATO's role. We have some tough issues there. I think the questions about further expansion of NATO are difficult issues, and we are going to have to face up to them. We have a 2002 summit at which all kinds of expectations are there about what might happen. And then finally the incorporation of the European Security and Defense concept, or initiative or identity or whatever it is called. I think its also very important. So we do have security issues that largely come out of the Cold War that we need to start addressing. So we must talk to our allies and talk about these major issues. The aerospace merger really did get people's attention in a big way. Whatever Europe decides to do about defense, the question is raised: will it become a kind of closed cartel for weapons development? Clearly some people worry about this. But my concerns go the other way. I am more concerned that Europe will not fulfill its promise, than that it will. I am very worried that the United States cannot continue to do the amount of peace keeping that it is doing around the world. Its going to need regional powers to do a lot of that. The Balkans is not going to be solved for a long time. And if you look at the military capabilities right now, Europe does not have the capability to do it. If you look, there are declining defense budgets in every place but Britain. I am more concerned that Europe will do not enough rather than that Europe will do too much. And I think the United States sometimes sends kind of contradictory signals on this. We say what I have just said, we have to have Europe in more. The Europeans say well we are going to put Solana in charge of a common European foreign and defense policy, and we say, no, don't do that, as it might interfere with NATO. So there is a kind of ambivalence about Europe going this route. Regarding European defence, "Get on with it". My concern is more that Europe will not do enough, not that it will do too much. I actually thought the Helsinki agreement essentially trying to clarify this role between NATO and EU. Perhaps we should learn from the history of NATO here. There used to be a running joke that the optimist would say about NATO that 'it works very well in practice' and the pessimist would say 'but it is a terrible thing in theory'. If you think about it, it's true. And to a certain extent, if we get on with it, I think some of these issues will resolve themselves. It is hard for me to imagine the circumstances under which Europe becomes so independent militarily, given what it will take to do that: expenditures on air power in which Europe is deficient, not to mention command and control, and intelligence facilities; it is really hard for me to imagine Europe becoming so independent of the United States that it is going to get embroiled in something that the United States doesn't agree with. I think the political machinery of NATO might still be very useful, or some ad hoc arrangements within NATO may be helpful. I think what has worried some people is that the United States may somehow not be party to a decision to use force, and then somehow get dragged in as Europe could not extricate itself. If we ever face that problem, it would be so far down the road that I think it is not even wise to contemplate it. For now I would just hope that the initiative would do more on getting Europe focused for its defense. We cannot afford a 50 year commitment in the Balkans. We cannot afford a 20 year commitment in the Balkans. And so finding ways to deal with those issues. And it is not just West Europe, by the way, I mean the Australians stepped up to the plate in East Timor. But we had to give them a lot of help. "Step aside..." Outside of security, for the most part I think you can step back and let things happen. You know we are going through a period of time where there is Daimler Chrysler, and BP-Amoco, Vodaphone-Air Touch and just the sheer number of transatlantic mergers suggest that business is not having any difficulty, almost treating the boundaries as non-boundaries. I am a corporate director of the Chevron Corporation, so I have watched the BP-Amoco merger, and also I was a director of Trans-America Corporation which was bought by a Dutch insurer. And yes there were differences of culture, and there are differences that have to be ironed out. But it is not that much harder than merging two American companie, and that says to me that the business community is really out-running our borders. A North Atlantic free trade zone? It seems to me incredibly complex when you take the percentage of the world economy that would be represented by a North American - European free trading zone and given that Europe is incomplete. You have to ask, would that be useful, or should it not be broadened? I think that much power concentrated in a free trade zone has two potential downsides, even if in theory I like free trade zones and would have them wherever I could. The two real downsides are first of all the complications of getting there, with the EU trying to do what it is doing. If it were another time and place maybe 20 years down the road the EU were further along in its own development, maybe it makes more sense. I always say to my European friends, can you tell me when it is that we should go to Paris, Berlin or London, and when it is that we should go to Brussels to get an answer. And until there is a clearer answer to that question I wonder. The second thing is that it may be viewed by emerging economies, in particular by China, and potentially also by Russia, and certainly the developing world, as making certain that they will never enter the international economy. It would so dominate high-end economic development. I mean what would you do with Japan? Nevertheless I remain in favour of increased free trade through a multilateral route.". Any backlash to Europeans buying up American companies and Europeans working here? Actually this is an issue that could have been more of a problem in the United States than it actually is. By the way a lot of the knowledge-based immigration is not European. It is Indian, South Asian, Asian. If you go down to Intel and you stand in the elevator, the software engineers around you are likely to be Pakistani or Indian or Israeli or Russian, but I do not think that it is causing a backlash, maybe because the economy is so strong. There are people who want to make it a backlash, but it is not really resonating. I think that the long-term challenge of the United States is that as job creation is happening at the high end, the skill level of the population is not really picking up. So education has become a kind of surrogate hot-button issue for this divide between people who can work in the Silicon Valley and people who cannot. And because it is partly disproportionately minorities who are not making it into those jobs that is a real danger. I think that it is less focused on foreigners coming here to do that than it is the ill-preparedness of Americans. Why the US has been able to take advantage of the new economy I think actually that the United States is particularly well positioned for this kind of new global economy. There are several aspects that have to do with the American micro-culture and some deeper aspects of the American culture that are not always well understood. The micro-culture things that economists would cite are: tremendous labour mobility; also that we have tremendous tolerance for risk taking, for failure; a relatively low regulatory environment; relatively low taxation; and the existence of free capital market - through the venture capital system. They are just a different breed than banks, they just do not do what banks do. Everybody would cite those things. But there is more. I touched on it when I spoke of immigration. America has a pretty liberal immigration when it comes right down to it and people want to come here because you can ultimately be American if you can get here. I think this upward mobility is important. I was really struck by this story of this woman who could not get into Oxford but got into Harvard. Did you know that the Stanford population is poorer than the Berkeley population. And yet Berkeley is a pubic school and Stanford is private! That is because of very strong values about upward mobility. Stanford runs a "needs blind" admissions, meaning that you are admitted first and then they find a way to fund you through Stanford. So the population here is actually poorer than it is in public institutions. So it is just the opposite. Class means nothing in the American higher educational system, and so I think that all of those values have gone together to make the US. The way that our research universities work, by the way, is also important. Sitting here in Silicon Valley, Stanford is the source of both ideas and of people for the Valley. It is true of Route 128 in Massachusetts, it is true of Austin Texas and the University of Texas. Here there are very low boundaries between the theoretical and practical world. So I think the United States is going to for a long time dominate this new economy, because it has these perfectly positioned characteristics. The US has a decentralised and flexible form of government Now because we are a federal state, most economic decisions are not taken at the federal level at all. (...) Actually I think the US government has never played a centralized role in economic affair and is not very successful when it tries. We have never had an industrial policy. People will tell you that micro-processing came out of a government program. But the federal government just funded basic research. Every time government has tried to fund applied research, it has failed miserably. It has funded defense research, which is where the Internet came from, it has funded basic research at Universities, which have then spun that out into the commercial sector. That is really the only relationship between federal government and new technologies. Biotech is another example of where US government funding has been very large, but it has not been directed research at all. In terms of economic policy, the federal government has monetary policy, that is about all. (...) Let me just relate a story that illustrates that. I was born in Birmingham Alabama. In the 1950's and early 1960s, Birmingham was a steel center. It was the second largest producer of steel in the country. I thought that the sky was supposed to be orange because of the smelter it was perpetually orange. With competitive pressures from foreign steel, particularly from Brazil, in the 1970s, Birmingham's economy almost collapsed. In fact it did collapse. George Wallace was governor at the time. His wife had had breast cancer, and he had been in Houston, and had been tremendously impressed by the cancer research centers there. And so he came back and his idea was that the University of Alabama Birmingham, which was just a little commuter school, should become a medical technology center. What he did was to set up incredible tax incentives, all kind of incentives, for the University of Alabama to become a medical technology center. It is now so powerful that Stanford competes with it for faculty. It is better than Stanford or UCSF in a whole host of medical subjects. Central government never said a word about it. And this is the case in region after region after region. These are really local decisions not federal decisions. So I think we already have that flexibility built into the system. Mobile citizens These days the American population is just incredibly mobile. There are all sorts of problems that come with that. And because it has such great labour mobility if somebody living in Minnesota wants to move to Alabama, they simply buy a plane ticket and they move to Alabama. I think that is why the system is so flexible. You know, I have students, who when I ask them what they are going to do they say, 'well I am just going to move to England for a couple of years'. The emergence of civil society as an influence on foreign policy I think constituency-based politics, interest based politics, is having quite an effect, and mostly a negative effect, on foreign policy. Part of the problem here is that of having a clear view of the national interest. It was so clear that when issues 1 through 10 all began and ended with the Soviet Union, it was a lot easier for the President to dominate foreign policy. Without a strong sense of what the national interest is (...) what happens is that American foreign policy becomes a patchwork of interest group politics, it becomes like every other issue. It is one reason why every interest group is going to have its own sanction in American politics. The change was utterly predictable, the Soviet Union was such an organizing principle. I was special assistant for Soviet and East European affairs and we had a system in the NSC that if your country was mentioned in a memo, the special assistant for that area had to sign concurrence, just to keep the person in the picture. So let us say it was an issue with Norway about fisheries, well the Soviet Union was also an issue. With the Latin America special assistant was sending forward a memo on something in Nicaragua, the Soviet Union was an issue. I was on concurrence on every single memo, because the Soviet Union was always an issue. You know, Americans saw every issue through the prism of Soviet Union. Well today it is just not true. So now the centripetal forces are very powerful in the absence of that centralizing principle. Hence we need a much more powerful definition of national interest. Any other way of getting civil society on board? Of course you can try, but I think you have to have a very strong sense of when that is possible and when it is not. The notion that the people in Seattle were there because they wanted to protect the rights of developing countries' workers is purely ludicrous. Somebody should have said it is ludicrous. The only people who said it was ludicrous were the developing countries. They said these people in the streets are going to keep developing countries from developing. I think that the weakness was not in calling them to the table and acknowledging that they had purpose. Environmental groups are a little bit different in this regard I guess - although I believe that environmental standards get better when countries get richer. No the real problem is that when you are talking about trying to transport American labour standards to South Africa, what you are talking about is protecting American jobs, at the low end so that South Africa never finds its way into the international economy. So I am all for trying to bring groups in, but for understanding that there are some interests that are crucial to defend. -- June 2000 -- An interview conducted by Visiting Scholar in Atlanta, USA, Member of TIES 'Political Interviews' Rubric contact@tiesweb.org