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The CJP Interview with Dr. Susan RiceBy CJP | December 26, 2007
She spoke with CJP to talk about the difference between judgment and experience, the message only a Barack Obama presidency would send the world and why having small children sent her from Team Clinton to Team Obama. As she herself says, these answers are “not in a nutshell,” but do we really want our foreign policy served in a nutshell? Nope. Happy reading, Janes….
CJP: I’d be interested to know why you chose to work for Barack Obama after so many years in the Clinton Administration.
SR: I did work for eight years in the Clinton Administration in the White House and at the State Department. It was a privilege and an honor to serve President Clinton and I have enormous respect for Senator Clinton.
But for me, there was an obvious choice once Barack Obama decided to run for 2008. I could not be more enthusiastic about his candidacy, for several reasons.
First of all, I think he represents the kind of freshness and change that we so desperately need. We need a leader who is focused on the challenges of the future, of the 21st century. Someone that is not burdened by or constrained by the experiences of the 60s or the 70s or indeed the 90s, that doesn’t have a legacy or a record that must be defended even as we look ahead to the challenges of tomorrow.
We need a leader who can unify our country after so much partisanship and division, and I think he is uniquely capable of doing that.
But beyond bringing unity from our immediate, divisive past, I think an America that is capable of electing Barack Obama, an African American of mixed racial background, who has lived everywhere from Hawaii to New York to the Southside of Chicago and Indonesia, who represents the many strains of our national history and heritage, would be an enormous leap forward for us, psychologically and practically as a nation. And that in and of itself would be healing, and I think that’s critically important.
I also think that Barack Obama will be able to enable our country to take maximum advantage of what will be a very, very brief window of opportunity, starting in January 2009, when a new president is inaugurated and the world will look at America one more time, perhaps for the last time, and ask if we are prepared to be the kind of country that they can trust again, that they can cooperate with again, and that they can look to with hope to provide constructive leadership for the rest of the world.
And Obama shows the world in a dramatic and incomparable way that our country is capable of change and growth and learning from our past mistakes, whether they are the mistakes of the recent past, like Iraq, or the mistakes of our centuries-long history. And I think that’s a very important message we need to send to the world at a critical time when our standing in the world is at an all-time low.
But it goes beyond that.
It’s not just who he is, it’s what he believes and what he will do as president of the United States.
He believes that America’s security and well being, with globalized transnational security threats like terrorism, disease, climate change, proliferation, are inextricably linked to the security and well being of people in virtually every other part of the world.
And we need to understand that we have not just a humanitarian stake, as important as that is, but a security and economic stake in what happens with and to people in other parts of the world. And an America that leads from that premise is very different from an us-against-them, you’re either with us or against us, or even we’re the big power, the indispensable power, come deal with us. It’s a very different mid-set from what we projected certainly under President Bush and even under President Clinton in the post-Cold War period. And I think it’s very much the mindset we need now if we’re going to build back the kind of cooperation and relationships that have been so badly damaged over the last seven years.
The last reason I’m committed to Barack Obama is that I’m a mother of young children, and I can’t think of any better America to leave my children than one that is capable of selecting Barack Obama, one that will be focused on the challenges of the next generation. He is the father of young children as well. And one that is really capable of renewal in a fashion that only his election would enable.
That’s, in not a nutshell, why I’m committed to Barack Obama at this moment in our history.
CJP: Obama has been criticized, especially recently, for his lack of foreign policy experience. What’s your response to that, for voters who may like him in every other way, but are concerned that he doesn’t have enough time on the world stage?
SR: Let me say several things in response to that. First of all, Barack Obama already has more conventional foreign policy experience, meaning time in service on the issues of the day as a senator, than did Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and obviously George W. Bush, when they were elected to the presidency. As governors, none of them had any foreign policy experience.
Already, Barack Obama has a great deal more experience than they did- having served three years on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, including recently as Chairman of the European Subcommittee, serving on the Veterans’ Affairs Committee and the Homeland Security Committee, where he’s been a legislative leader on issues ranging from providing support to wounded warriors returning home from Iraq to leading with Senator Lugar on securing loose nuclear materials to being the first person to put forward legislation to deal with a potential avian flu pandemic, to being the first senator, many months before it was in the press, to deal with the problem of dealing with unaccountable contractors like Blackwater in Iraq.
He was the senator who sponsored legislation back in January, the Iraq De-escalation Act, that became the Senate Democrats’ legislative vehicle, which the president vetoed and which the Democrats continue to push as being the plan for responsibly redeploying our forces from Iraq. These are all substantive, important legislative accomplishments that Senator Obama has racked up in his time already in the Senate.
It’s interesting to listen to President Clinton, for whom I have great respect, criticizing Senator Obama’s age and experience, when he had less and when, in fact, Senator Obama is a year older than Bill Clinton was when he was running for president. So there’s a little bit of revisionist history involved in those accusations of lack of experience.
But let me say a couple other things. First of all, what is experience? Experience boils down to at least three things. The first is judgment, which is what you would hope experience would give you. We’ve seen tragically that you can have years and years of Washington experience, as Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld have had, and it would lead you nonetheless to horrible judgment.
We’ve seen many senators who served many, many years, who made the wrong judgment on the war in Iraq, some of them without even bothering to read the National Intelligence Estimate that was the basis for going to war in Iraq. Then there were other senators, people like Senator Levin and Senator Kennedy and others, who had the long service and had the wisdom to see that the war in Iraq was a tragic mistake and to oppose it from the start.
So experience may or may not give you the judgment you need to make the right decisions. Senator Obama, without the years of conventional Washington experience, saw from the outset that the war in Iraq would be a horrible tragedy, and opposed it clearly, forcefully, when it was politically unpopular at the start of his long-shot election campaign. And that is precisely the kind of insight and judgment we need.
He similarly has been clear, again when it wasn’t popular or the flavor of the month in Washington, that we ought to not be beating the drums to war and giving President Bush the benefit of the doubt on going to war with Iran, which was the choice made by others in this race and by many in the Senate.
He also has had the wisdom and the judgment to say, as Ronald Reagan did and John Kennedy did, that we ought not to fear to negotiate directly with our adversaries. We don’t need to negotiate only with our friends, because obviously they are our friends and we work with them. We need to negotiate in order to have some options other than the rush to war, combining carrots and sticks, with adversaries, and he said he would do so directly and unconditionally.
And now we see others rushing to embrace that position after having criticized it. We have a National Intelligence Estimate that underscores that with respect to Iran, not only do we have the time for negotiation, but we have reason to believe that negotiations have the potential to yield the outcome we seek.
And so that’s the kind of wisdom and judgment that Barack Obama has shown and will continue to show, and I’ll take that any day over years and years of Bush-Cheney misjudgment borne of decades of experience in Washington.
So the first component of experience is judgment, whether or not you have it. The second component is professional experience, and as I said, Barack Obama has a great deal more than many of our most recent presidents. The notable exception was George H.W. Bush, who served as CIA director and UN Ambassador and the like.
Barack Obama has been a leader in the Senate. He has served on the most important and relevant of committees. He has served eight years in the Illinois State Legislature, which is not insignificant. That’s a place where one learns to get things done, to cooperate across the aisle and build bi-partisan agreement on complex issues, which he did on things like the death penalty. That has given him the skills that he’s carried on to the U.S. Senate that’s enabled him to sponsor and pass legislation from ethics reform and transparency with respect to budgeting, to proliferation with Republican counterparts in the Senate. And so I think his professional experience exceeds that, by some margin, of our most recent presidents.
And finally there’s personal experience– the insights that one gains from how one has lived his or her life. Most of our presidents have lived and grown up in nice suburbs and gone to Ivy League schools, and certainly Barack Obama has been a beneficiary of a great education.
But he’s also got the unusual experience of having spent several of his formative years in the developing world, and indeed in the world’s largest Muslim country, where he had exposure to, and therefore some understanding of, a very important religion and culture that is badly misunderstood in this country, and which we need for obvious reasons to understand better.
He has family that continues to live in Kenya, including his grandmother who lives in a hut without electricity or plumbing. And when you have people that you’re close to who have that sort of lifestyle, you are imbued with the kind of understanding of what it’s like to see the world and life and indeed America from the bottom of the heap as opposed to the top of the pile.
I think that’s a critically important insight and perspective that would be very valuable for our president to have at a time when our relationships with the world are at an all time low, when the nature of the threats we face are increasingly transnational and require the will and cooperation of people from all walks of life and all parts of the globe, and when we frankly need much more insightful and smart strategies to deal with the serious security challenges we face. They can’t be managed primarily, and certainly not solely, through the barrel of a gun.
CJP: You mentioned Iran. Were you disappointed that he missed the Iran vote? Can he still come from a position of criticizing people who voted for it when he wasn’t there to vote himself?
SR: I think absolutely. We are talking about what is the right decision and policy judgment. And he was very clear from the day of the vote that he would not have made the judgment that Senator Clinton and others made to support the Kyle-Lieberman Amendment. So what you say and what you think tells you how one would lead, and on that he’s been clear.
But secondly, he was campaigning, as they all were doing on a daily basis. He wasn’t able to adjust his schedule quickly enough to get back to Washington, which obviously would have been ideal and which he subsequently said that he regrets missing that vote, that it was a mistake. But it’s the kind of mistake that you’re vulnerable to when you’re on the road campaigning constantly.
But the important thing is being clear about what kind of decision you would make at the time on the day. And he was very clear, and remains very clear that it was a massively flawed decision to support the Kyle-Lieberman amendment.
CJP: My last question. At the Des Moines Register debate, Senator Obama never really had a chance to answer the question about how his foreign policy would be different from Senator Clinton’s when they both have so many former Clinton officials advising them. Quite a few voters are looking at Obama and Clinton side-by-side, and the foreign policy question is more important that it has been in a very long time. Can you help voters see the distinction between how Barack Obama’s plans would be different from Hillary Clinton’s, from your perspective?
SR: Yes, the distinctions are actually quite stark. I think first of all, that these are two well-informed, very intelligent people, making largely their own judgments and determinations about policy. We can spend time racking up the advisors and talking about who’s who, but I think in both cases, they know what they think and they have the judgment, each of them, to come to their own conclusions.
What’s interesting it terms of the differences is, first of all, Senator Obama has been very comprehensive and exhaustive over the course of the campaign in laying out his foreign policy vision. On issues from counterterrorism to proliferation to climate change to development and poverty to defense and military affairs to veterans’ issues, he has put out extremely detailed foreign policy programs in speeches and in papers. So people don’t have to guess what he thinks on these issues.
He was the first candidate to put out an Iraq plan, joined with legislation that he introduced, and then elaborated on in mid-September, in which he made it very clear that his approach would be to withdraw combat forces at the pace of one to two brigades a month, with the aim of having all of our combat brigades out within 16 months.
He was very specific about the political reconciliation, economic and humanitarian steps he would take to mitigate a worst-case scenario in Iraq and to build the kind of political consensus that’s essential to end the conflict.
He’s also been very clear in saying he would have no permanent bases in Iraq. To the extent that that there was and will be a need for a small residual presence for a period of time, that it would be focused on protecting our embassy and our civilian operations, and on targeting al Qaeda operatives inside Iraq.
Senator Clinton, until this past week, offered no sense of a timeline or a timetable for withdrawal. She finally said this week that she would embrace Obama’s timeline of one to two combat brigades a month. She has not ruled out permanent bases. She has said that she would leave behind a much larger residual that would have responsibilities, including, worryingly, going after other terrorist organizations elsewhere in the region. I don’t know if she meant Hezbollah or Hamas, but in her “Foreign Affairs†article left the door open, not just to go after al Qaeda in Iraq.
That’s one critical difference. Obviously they’ve taken very different positions on Iran, the importance of direct and unconditional negotiations, the Kyle-Lieberman amendment and the wisdom of that. They have differed on whether the president of the United States ought to be prepared, after due diligence and preparation, to negotiate with countries that we deem are adversaries.
So those are just some of the differences that have come to the fore in the context of the campaign. But I think much more interestingly, if you look at what they have said or not said on a wider range of foreign policy issues, you’ll see that, as I said earlier, Obama has been very specific and direct about what he would do.
We have never even heard from Senator Clinton a comprehensive counter-terrorism strategy. Obama has laid one out. He said he would engage and lead on reducing, with Russia and others through negotiations, our nuclear arsenals and reaffirm the goal laid out in the Non-Proliferation Treaty, of working toward a world free of nuclear weapons. Senator Clinton said no such thing. She doesn’t seem to have a position on it.
He’s talked at great length about how he would approach the challenges of development and democratization and in other parts of the world. Senator Clinton has said no such thing. Senator Obama has said he is committed to doubling our foreign assistance within the first four years within his time in office. No such comparable specifics from Senator Clinton.
In the broadest sense, they differ in that I think Senator Obama has articulated a view of America’s role in the world that is focused on the challenges of the 21st century, and indeed on the opportunities of the 21s century, recognizing that given the transnational nature of the threats we face- things like climate change, disease, terrorism, proliferation- that we can’t possibly begin to deal with these things in isolation, by ourselves. We need the willing and effective cooperation of institutions, people and states everywhere. To achieve that, we have to reorient our perception of and engagement with the rest of the world. And his fundamental approach to these challenges is to recognize the security and well being of the United States is inextricably linked to the security and well being of people elsewhere.
And if you proceed from that premise, it tells you a lot about how someone would deal with prevention and resolution of conflict in far flung places. It tells you we’ve got to take the challenge of poverty reduction and disease very seriously. We need to understand that that which kills and threatens other people will ultimately threaten us. If we want people to cooperate with us on things like terrorism and weapons of mass destruction, we’d better be prepared to be helpful and engaged on the things that threaten them, which may be malaria, or hunger, or flooding due to climate change. Those have to become our problems, if we expect people to be work with us on the things we most need cooperation on. That’s a very different mind-set and orientation than I’ve yet heard any of the other candidates articulate. Senator Clinton speaks in terms of the “restoration of American power,†which is a valid and traditional perspective. But it’s different from the kind of leadership Senator Obama is articulating that is leadership not only for our own sake and safety, but that of others as well.
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3 Responses to “The CJP Interview with Dr. Susan Rice”Comments |
December 27th, 2007 at 2:27 pm
Great interview. Looking forward to hearing your tales from the presidential primary trails.
February 8th, 2008 at 1:07 pm
They never print Obamas middle name like they do the other candidates. Spell check Obama on your computer and see what you come up with. By the way, this is America not Kenya.
July 22nd, 2008 at 6:44 am
‘News flash’ - your comment sounds racist. If you frame your objections to Obama based only on his name being non-European and the fact that his father was from Kenya, people are going to assume that you know nothing of his policies and that your dislike is based only on racism or xenophobia. Your objections will be dismissed as frivolous.
Citizen Jane - this is an incredible interview. I’m very excited about Obama’s candidacy, and about the great people, like Susan Rice, he’ll be bringing with him!