No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington

by Condoleezza Rice

  The first opportunity for the President to set a new direction for our national security policy was the 2002 State of the Union address, the first since the events of September 11. Clearly the President would address the war on terrorism, but what else would he say?

  At the time of the address to the nation on September 20, 2001, the NSC had considered the question of linking terrorism and weapons of mass destruction—that is, it had debated whether to raise the specter of a successor attack to 9/11, this one carried out with WMD. Sitting in the Situation Room reviewing the speech on September 19, though, the time simply didn’t seem right to go there. The nation had just been through a devastating event, and the American people did not need to be further unsettled by the specter of a nuclear attack on our soil.

  But now the President had to talk about that nexus. The proliferation of weapons of mass destruction had taken on new urgency after September 11. The world had to prevent the most dangerous weapons from ending up in the hands of the most dangerous people, be they terrorists or rogue regimes.

  We were veterans of the Cold War and completely conversant with the efforts of responsible powers to prevent biological, chemical, and nuclear war. But North Korea and Iran, opaque and tyrannical regimes with a deep animus toward the United States, appeared to be closing in on the development of weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear weapons. Saddam Hussein sat astride the Middle East, increasingly unconstrained in his ability to buy or produce weapons of mass destruction, which he had previously used against his own people and against his neighbors. His link to WMD was not a theoretical one. And once in office, we learned with great alarm that A. Q. Khan, the father of the Pakistani nuclear program, had a business on the side: selling the technology and the know-how to produce nuclear weapons to whoever could afford to buy it.

  The world had looked frightening enough on September 10, 2001, but after the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, the threat took on greater urgency. We faced the reality that terrorists had many potential sources from which to buy or develop what we knew they wanted most: a nuclear weapon capable of making the next 9/11 catastrophic on an unthinkable scale. In October 2001 we’d seen credible reporting that terrorists would again attack the United States, perhaps with a radiological or nuclear weapon.

  The President sought in the 2002 State of the Union to place all of this into context and to make clear that the United States could defend itself only by taking on the proliferation challenge. In that regard, he uttered one of the most often cited and, frankly, overdramatized phrases of his time in office. After describing the North Korean, Iranian, and Iraqi regimes and their links to terrorism and weapons of mass destruction, the President said, “States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world. By seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave and growing danger.… We will work closely with our coalition to deny terrorists and their state sponsors the materials, technology and expertise to make and deliver weapons of mass destruction.… America will do what is necessary to ensure our national security.”

  The substance of the sentence was unremarkable, but the phrase “axis of evil,” which was, in fact, inserted by a speechwriter, was only meant to vivify the point that certain kinds of regimes with WMD might transfer those weapons to terrorists. I don’t remember a great deal of focus on the phrase during the speechwriting process. Steve and I had talked about whether “evil” sounded too dire but didn’t think at all about “axis” and the fact that it might be over-interpreted to mean an alliance of rogue states. The speech was reviewed in the Pentagon and at the State Department, and no one raised even a yellow flag.

  When I briefed the press before the President’s speech, I focused on what we thought was the news in his message: “America will take the side of brave men and women who advocate these [democratic] values around the world, including the Islamic world.” The President was calling for freedom from tyranny in a region in which many of our friends were authoritarians. I even made sure to call Saudi Ambassador Prince Bandar so that our friends in Riyadh would not be surprised.

  So the next morning, when the media focused almost exclusively on the phrase “axis of evil,” I was stunned and so was the President. Since many people believed that we’d already decided to go to war against Iraq, sinister interpretations suggested that we were preparing to use military force against all three states. We had for all intents and purposes, some believed, declared war on North Korea, Iran, and Iraq.

  As luck would have it, I was scheduled to give a speech on proliferation the next day. Working with Steve Hadley and Robert Joseph, the senior director at the NSC who dealt with proliferation policy, I hastily revised the speech to clarify what the President had meant, and I continued to offer clarification in subsequent press interviews. The President was not saying that the three nations were in formal alliance. Rather, they were illustrative of a class of states that share certain characteristics, including the pursuit of WMD, and the axis was between them and their potential terrorist allies. No, we did not believe that military action was the appropriate course in all cases. The President wouldn’t take any options off the table, but he’d said we would work with our friends to deal with the problem; diplomacy was the first line of defense. But, admittedly, the harsh language suggested that negotiation was impossible. How could you negotiate with members of an “axis of evil”? The phrase helped brand the Bush administration as radical and bellicose, given to hot rhetoric and a preference for military force.

  That perception was reinforced when the President delivered the 2002 commencement address at West Point. We’d used the usual speechwriting process, which always started with a conversation with the President about what he wanted to say. The President had said that he needed to address the question of how to avoid a surprise attack the next time. That had led to a discussion of whether we, as a nation, had waited too long to act in Afghanistan. Nothing in international history or law suggested that a country had to wait until it was attacked and then respond. Why not argue for the legitimacy of preemption as a strategy, which says that one can act in self-defense in anticipation of an attack, rather than simply trying to deter or contain terrorists and rogues? After a rather academic discussion of preemption, prevention, and deterrence, the President sent us on our way to work on the speech.

  The follow-up session took place in my office with Steve Hadley, Mike Gerson, Andy Card, Karen Hughes, and Karl Rove. The group worked well together because we valued one another’s opinions. But when it came to the substance of the speech, people stayed in their lanes. Karl, for instance, struck just the right balance in discussing how a speech would play politically yet never tried to act as the foreign policy expert, though he is extremely well read. I loved working with Karl, who is brilliant and funny and was completely committed to the President’s success. When I said that something wouldn’t work in foreign policy terms, he took it on board. When he said that something wouldn’t work politically, I tried to accommodate his views. I know that Karl had developed a reputation as a “take-no-prisoners” political operative, a “zero-sum game” player. He did not, however, try to insert himself into the substance of foreign policy—a testament to both him and the President. Karl and I had an easy working relationship.

  The speech that emerged stated, “Our security will require all Americans to be forward-looking and resolute, to be ready for preemptive action when necessary to defend our liberty and to defend our lives.” But why should that have been controversial? The President was not saying that the United States would always act preemptively. He was simply stating what we thought to be obvious: it might not be possible to deter shadowy networks, and that containment might not be possible when unbalanced dictators can deliver weapons or secretly provide them to terrorists. The language was surrounded by talk of homeland defense, missile defense, and the need for good intelligence. Even reading the speech many years later, it does
not seem to me to have a “hair-trigger” feel. Yet that is how it was taken, and again it was linked to Iraq: the United States was declaring the right to attack at a time of its choosing, even if it had not yet been attacked itself.

  There would be one more opportunity to lay out a rationale for this policy as well as to broaden the discussion to other key elements of our strategy going forward. The administration was mandated by the National Security Act of 1947, as amended by the Goldwater-Nichols Department of Defense Reorganization Act of 1986, to deliver to Congress a national security strategy each year. The document had previously been a largely bottom-up bureaucratic exercise that had produced an unwieldy tome of several hundred pages. I myself had participated in the process when I was on Brent Scowcroft’s NSC. People both inside and outside the administration failed to take it seriously; it was just a task to be finished with as little effort as possible so that one could get on to more important things.

  But this time we decided that the national security strategy would be different and consequential. We took as the model the historic NSC-68, Paul Nitze’s seminal statement of U.S. objectives and strategy at the outset of the Cold War.

  We allowed the bureaucracy at State and Defense to beaver away in the traditional way while quietly drafting a short, clear document within the NSC staff. All of the key staff members were stretched thin, so I asked Philip Zelikow, with whom I’d worked previously and with whom I’d written a well-regarded book on German unification, to take the pen for the first draft. Over lunch with Mike Gerson, Steve Hadley, speechwriter Michael Anton, and several others, I asked Phil to hold nothing back in addressing the United States’ changed circumstances. Controversy was a good thing. I wanted people to debate this document and believe that it mattered. I specifically said that he should address the nexus between terrorism and nuclear weapons and the question of how we would avoid being surprised again as we had been on September 11, 2001. But we wanted to address not just the negative side but also the United States’ view of how the world ought to be. The document should express the country’s confidence in its ability to win this struggle based on its values, just as it had won the Cold War.

  Philip’s draft was just like its author, brilliant but baroque. I decided to take the draft and try my hand at a simpler, more direct version. The draft was short and clear—or at least I thought so. When I sent it to President Bush for an early look, he asked me to come down to the Oval. “I thought this document was supposed to be my strategy,” he said. I nodded. “The boys in Midland will never believe it. It doesn’t sound like me.”

  I took up my pen again and, after several iterations, produced the document that largely survived an abbreviated interagency process piloted by Steve Biegun, the executive secretary of the NSC, who was also expert in matters of defense and foreign policy. The national security strategy began with a strong commitment on the part of the United States to “create a balance of power that favors human freedom.” It cast our struggle against terrorism in stark ideological terms: much like the great struggles of the twentieth century between liberty and totalitarianism, the United States now confronted a world in which “[f]reedom and fear are at war.” In this new age, the document stated, we must never forget “that we are ultimately fighting for our democratic values and way of life.”

  The strategy made clear that we would not shy away from using our “unparalleled military strength and great economic and political influence” to achieve those ends. The emphasis we placed on preserving our military dominance sparked some comment, especially when paired with our commitment to defend our interests “by identifying and destroying the threat before it reaches our borders.” Our allies were particularly concerned with the statement that followed: “While the United States will constantly strive to enlist the support of the international community, we will not hesitate to act alone, if necessary, to exercise our right of self-defense by acting preemptively against such terrorists, to prevent them from doing harm against our people and our country.”

  As we noted later in the strategy, the United States has long maintained the option of preemptive action to counter threats to our national security, and international law has for centuries recognized that nations need not suffer an attack before they can take actions against an imminent threat. Contrary to popular view, the only novel aspect of our articulation of the preemption strategy was the way in which we had to adapt the concept of “imminent threat” to contemporary realities. As the strategy states, “The United States will not use force in all cases to preempt emerging threats, nor should nations use preemption as a pretext for aggression. Yet in an age where the enemies of civilization openly and actively seek the world’s most destructive technologies, the United States cannot remain idle while dangers gather.”

  We needed to drive home the point that the “enemies of civilization” were of a different character than before. In the past, when the threats had come largely from states, there was some reasonable expectation that military preparations for attack would be visible. But terrorists operated in the shadows and could attack without warning—as they had on September 11. In light of this threat, limiting preemption to the occasions when we are sure an enemy is about to attack makes little sense.

  Finally, the strategy committed the United States to “make use of every tool in our arsenal”—not exclusively military force—in countering the threat that terrorists and rogue regimes pose to our nation and our ideals. The strategy emphasized working with our allies to share intelligence and disrupt terrorist finances. It spoke of the importance of opening societies to free commerce and access to markets. Perhaps most innovatively, it recognized the importance of linking development assistance with good-governance reforms and shifts toward democratic governance. For too long, foreign aid had failed to spur economic development in the world’s poorest countries. Success was measured in dollars spent rather than growth rates and the poverty reduction achieved by recipients.

  Our strategy recognized that economic development would require greater transparency and respect for the rule of law and basic human rights, and it created various metrics by which we could assess success. All of the measures used came from third parties to make it clear that the United States was going to be objective and transparent itself in conducting the program. Through funding from a new Millennium Challenge Account, we would “reward countries that have demonstrated real policy change and challenge those that have not, to implement reforms.” Ultimately, we would work to protect basic human rights and political and economic freedom so that these countries could “unleash the potential of their people and assure their future prosperity.”

  The reaction was just as the President, Steve Hadley, and I had hoped. The Financial Times, the Washington Post, and the New York Times all printed full-page articles debating the strategy. John Lewis Gaddis, the eminent Yale historian, called it the most important foreign policy document since NSC-68 of Harry Truman’s administration. I have to admit that the academic in me was absolutely thrilled to have produced within the confines of government something viewed as so consequential. The principles in the national security strategy would be reinforced in the 2003 National Strategy for Combating Terrorism, drafted in part by William McRaven, a U.S. Navy officer who worked for me at the NSC and would later lead the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command. The world had been waiting to hear how the United States would react to the devastating events of 9/11. The President’s speeches and the national security strategy left no doubt: we would be aggressive in confronting threats and assertive in pursuing the United States’ national goals and values. This stance was meant to unsettle our foes. Apparently, it succeeded in unsettling many of our friends as well.

  Taking on the Proliferation Challenge

  THOUGH THE national security strategy addressed a broad range of issues, it was the issue of the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction that attracted most of the attention of the international press and ours as well. W
e approached the problem on three fronts. First, we needed a way to stop and, where possible, roll back the weapons programs of rogue states. Second, we needed to secure existing weapons as well as nuclear materials in places as diverse as Pakistan and Russia so they would not fall into the hands of terrorists or rogue states. Finally, we needed to defend the United States and our allies should the unthinkable happen.

  The effort to secure existing stockpiles was largely without controversy. President Bush was committed to funding the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction (CTR) Program, which had worked for the last two decades to safeguard and dismantle the large stockpiles of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons in former Soviet states. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, and Russia inherited a vast number of weapons stored in facilities that were insecure at best, with some sites protected with little more than a chain-link fence.

  Recognizing the threat that those weapons could fall into the hands of terrorists or other hostile actors, Senators Sam Nunn and Richard Lugar led the effort in Congress to establish a program in 1991 that would help successor Soviet states dismantle their stockpiles, develop secure processes for the storage and transfer of the materials, and reduce the threat of proliferation not only of the weapons themselves but also of the scientific knowledge necessary to develop them. President Bush invested heavily in the non-proliferation aspects of Nunn-Lugar, requesting more than $3.2 billion in funding for the CTR Program and other initiatives such as enhanced export and border control programs, recovery of radiological materials, and construction of secure chemical weapons destruction facilities. The administration also oversaw the first expansion of the CTR Program beyond the former Soviet Union by providing assistance to Albania to eliminate its chemical weapons. The United States assisted Pakistan to secure its nuclear arsenal by providing assistance in the early days after 9/11 and by helping share best practices in securing nuclear material.