No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington

by Condoleezza Rice

  We walked into the new building housing the offices of the chancellor. It’s been called the “washing machine” for its cylindrical central tower that mimics a perpetual swirl of motion. I love traditional German architecture but find German modernism unsettling and thought to myself that this building was an uneasy companion to the nineteenth-century Bundestag across the square, even though the stone dome of the Reichstag had been replaced with glass to emphasize the transparency of the Bundesrepublik. That I was so focused on the buildings is perhaps a bit strange, given the importance of the meetings I was about to have, but for whatever reason, the architecture was what caught my attention.

  We took the elevator to Chancellor Schroeder’s office, where he greeted me warmly. Then, after a cordial meeting, the two of us walked down a narrow pathway toward the press availability. As we entered the room, I was literally blinded by the camera flashes. There were hundreds of journalists crowded into a lobby intended for far fewer people. They were pushing and shoving one another to get a picture of the two of us. “Condi, over here!” “Look, Secretary Rice!” “Condi, look at me!” Cameras were flashing in every direction. I kept walking alongside Schroeder, but I was absolutely stunned by the commotion around us.

  When we reached the podium, the chancellor made warm remarks about the importance of U.S.-German relations and our shared values. He underscored the contribution that Germany was making to rebuilding Iraq, concentrating on the effort to train security forces. I then delivered remarks that also focused on the future, not the past. The question-and-answer period was much like that in London, probing on Iran, not Iraq, and edgy though not hostile.

  At one point I called on a German journalist when it was actually Schroeder’s turn to recognize a member of the press. “Woman power!” he yelled awkwardly in his thick German accent. Oh, well, it was meant to be funny—I think. At the end of the press conference, Schroeder leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. The next morning’s coverage of my trip to Berlin included a huge picture of the German chancellor and me in a friendly embrace. That photo said more about putting the past behind us than any words could have, and I was grateful for that. Later that afternoon, on the flight from Poland to Turkey, President Bush called and we chuckled about how close the chancellor and I now appeared to be. But on a more serious note the President said that I was setting exactly the tone that he’d hoped; it was time to move on from the wounds of the Iraq split and unite the alliance in the cause of promoting shared values.

  No place was more evocative of the potency of those democratic values than Poland, and my stop in Warsaw was intended to remind everyone to think of history’s long arc, not the day’s headlines. Not only had the Poles participated early and enthusiastically in the liberation of Iraq, they’d done so for the right reasons. They believed in the universality of liberty and were grateful that the free world hadn’t forgotten them during the long twilight of the Cold War. That had led the Poles to want to do the same for captive peoples everywhere.

  Four years earlier, when visiting Warsaw with the President, I’d become quite emotional at the arrival ceremony. Listening to the two national anthems under not just the U.S. and Polish flags but also the NATO banner, I reflected on how unlikely this scene would have seemed in the dark days of Soviet domination of Eastern Europe. I remembered, too, my trip to Poland in 1989 with George H. W. Bush, who’d helped set off the revolt against the communist regime with his visit to Gdańsk and unequivocal support for the opposition movement Solidarity. Poland was a vivid reminder that U.S. foreign policy, grounded in both power and principle, had helped change what seemed to be immutable circumstances.

  If only Europe “old” and “new,” together with the United States, could focus energy and attention on troubled regions, particularly the Middle East, we could build a balance of power that favored freedom. It wouldn’t be easy, of course. But who would have thought in 1945 that the U.S. President, sixty years later, would review a Polish contingent of NATO troops—still goose-stepping, Central European style—thanks to Poland’s recent membership in the Warsaw Pact? Who would have thought it in 1985?

  Yet we understood that the challenge was exacerbated by the United States’ uneasy relationship with the Muslim world. My next stop in Turkey would underscore that point.

  Turkey was a longtime ally and had been a member of NATO since 1952. But until recently it had been only quasi-democratic, with an assertive military and a political elite that enforced secularism—sometimes brutally—on the population. Kemalism, as the doctrine of secularism was called, had allowed Turkey to modernize but not to fully democratize. Religious expression was all but prohibited outside the mosque. Now, with the election of the AKP (Justice and Development Party), avowedly Islamic leaders had taken the reins. They insisted that they had no intention of turning Turkey into a theocracy but merely wanted to rebalance the society and give religious expression and religious people a place in the public square. Tensions were evident as the old elite (wedded to Kemalism) and the new leaders clashed about the future course of the country. Even the fact that the wives of AKP officials often “covered” with head scarves was a source of discomfort for many Turks, who were fearful of the Islamization of their country. I saw Turkey as the frontline state in the historic struggle to reconcile the principles of Islam and the demands of individual liberty.

  That struggle is still playing out in the Middle East today. If there is to be democracy in the region, it will likely evolve as it has in Turkey. As in that country, there will have to be a resolution of the tensions between individual rights, including the rights of women, and the tenets of Islam. The place of religion and religious people in politics, resolved in Europe hundreds of years ago, will have to be determined anew in the Muslim world.

  Thus the struggle in Istanbul and Ankara and throughout the vast country is of monumental historic significance. I went to Ankara aware of Turkey’s centrality to the Bush administration’s reorientation of U.S. foreign policy toward the Freedom Agenda.

  President Bush’s second inaugural address had put the pursuit of human freedom squarely in the middle of U.S. foreign policy. The President had had a direct hand in the address from the beginning of its development, and it had become a deep reflection of his personal convictions regarding human dignity and freedom. The President was following in a long line of American leaders who believed that U.S. interests, in the long run, are best secured by the advance of freedom. “The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands,” he said. Still, U.S. policy for sixty years had pursued something very different in the Middle East: stability at the expense of democracy. We had gotten neither. The decision to cast aside the “stability over democracy” mind-set toward the region became the last element of our foreign policy response to 9/11 and the final piece of the Bush Doctrine.

  The evolution of our thinking—from the tactical goal of pursuing al Qaeda to creating a strategic agenda for freedom in the Middle East—did not take place overnight. Of course, from the very beginning the President had a deep personal belief in the power of liberty and an instinct toward a U.S. foreign policy based on values; that was evident in the way he viewed the prospective Palestinian state and in his insistence that the United States would help to build a democratic, not just a liberated, Iraq.

  The second inaugural address made the choice of promoting freedom in the Middle East and elsewhere explicit and set off a debate among policy makers, analysts, and academics about the place of idealism and ideology in U.S. foreign policy. Realists ran to the barricades to sound the alarm that “interests,” not “idealism,” should guide the United States’ interactions with the world. What they failed to see was that the Freedom Agenda was not just a moral or idealistic cause; it was a redefinition of what constituted realism, a change in the way we viewed U.S. interests in the new circumstances forced on us by the attacks of that horrible day. We rather quickly arrived at the conclusion that U.S. in
terests and values could be linked together in a coherent way, forming what I came to call a distinctly American realism.

  Our overall response to 9/11 was in one sense similar to the U.S. response to Pearl Harbor and its experience after World War II. Roosevelt didn’t enter the war to democratize Germany and Japan. When the war was over, the Europeans, particularly Great Britain, cared less about the form of the new German government than about containing its power. Churchill is reported to have said that he liked Germany so much that he wanted there to be as many Germanys as possible. In other words, he wanted to dismember it and return it to its pre-1871 state; safety lay in getting the balance of power right, and that meant a weak Germany.

  The Americans, though, had a different view. There was indeed a moral dimension to their insistence on democratic processes and institutions. But there was a practical reason as well: Truman, Acheson, Marshall, and others began to equate a new and stable order with a permanent change in the nature of the defeated regimes, a change that could be secured only with democracy. They believed that the balance of power could be improved in our favor if democratic states emerged in Europe. This linking of our interests (the balance of power) and our values (democracy) was at the core of our strategic thinking. Later the United States and our allies would embed West Germany in a new kind of security alliance, one based on democratic values. NATO would both prevent the further advance of Josef Stalin’s Soviet Union and create a security umbrella under which old adversaries would become democratic partners in peace. In Japan this would take the form of a defense alliance with a new government and a Constitution that looked much like the American one. This was an early practical manifestation of a belief that would later emerge in an academic theory called the “democratic peace.” Historically, it can be demonstrated that democracies have not fought one another. Therefore democracy and stability—both within states and between them—can be mutually reinforcing.

  The belief in the power of democracy to overcome old rivalries and establish a basis for peace and prosperity did not transfer verbatim to the Middle East. Still, the echoes of it were unmistakable in the way that we came to view that troubled region after the horrors of 9/11. The immediate problem was to hunt down al Qaeda, defend our country, and deal with WMD proliferators who might pass the devastating weapons to terrorists. But surely there was some larger message lying in the ruins of the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. It was, we came to believe, the toxic effect of the “freedom gap” in the Middle East and the unforgivable association of the United States with the defense of the authoritarian status quo.

  The intellectual origins of the link between the freedom gap and terrorism are complex. The works of Bernard Lewis and Fouad Ajami were influential with all of us, but the single most impactful document for the President, and certainly for me, was the 2002 Arab Human Development Report, sponsored by the United Nations Development Programme. In the report, Arab intellectuals laid out the costs of authoritarianism in the Middle East over sixty years. “The Arab world is at a crossroads,” they said, and it risked being left behind. The authoritarian status quo had led to three deficits that stifled progress: in knowledge and education, women’s empowerment, and freedom. By identifying the primary sources of the problem, the report helped clarify the way forward.

  The absence of freedom in the Arab world had not meant the absence of politics. The comfort many people had in the essential stability of the region was a false comfort. Authoritarians, many of whom were our friends, had set up a false choice: stability or democracy. “Islamist extremists or me,” they would say. They then engaged in self-fulfilling policies that made the dichotomy true. Healthy political forces were repressed, and advocates for reform were jailed, beaten, and prevented from organizing. Meanwhile, the Islamists took refuge in the mosques and madrassas, emerging as political forces and in many places purveyors to the population of social services that the corrupt authoritarians did not provide. Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in the Palestinian territories, and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt became associated as much with their good works among the poor as with their radical views.

  In the most unvarnished case of a kind of Faustian bargain, the Saudi royal family, frightened by the attack on the Grand Mosque in Mecca after the Iranian Revolution in 1979, made a pact with the radical Wahhabi clerics. The attitude of the monarch could essentially be summed up as “The mosque is yours; the public square is ours.” Once on a visit to one of King Abdullah’s extraordinary residences, I was flabbergasted to find myself walking through an enormous aquarium—populated by tropical fish and sharks! I asked one of the princes how they kept the sharks from eating the fish. “Oh, if you feed the sharks enough, they have no interest in the fish,” he said. Steve Hadley later joked that it was exactly how the House of Saud had treated the extremists: feed them, and they won’t eat you. That bargain came crashing down with the attack on the World Trade Center and then, two years later, in the brutal attacks on the Saudi kingdom itself. The new virulent ideology had manifested into al Qaeda, which was determined to expel the United States from the Middle East, destroy the “puppet regimes” that we had supported, and clear the way for an Islamic caliphate. So in essence the absence of decent political forces had left a void, which had been filled by extremists who had become the outlet for “politics” in countries experiencing a “freedom gap.”

  Only the emergence of democratic institutions and practices could defeat terrorism and radical political Islam. We knew that the path would not be easy and there would undoubtedly be trade-offs in the short term. The United States could not radically reorient its foreign policy, refusing to deal with friendly authoritarian regimes such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt on matters of strategic importance.

  The Freedom Agenda was meant to be a long-term strategic shift in the way we defined our interests, not just a genuflection toward our values. We developed new international institutions through a series of programs called the Broader Middle East and North Africa Initiative. The Forum for the Future, created in 2004, brought representatives of civil society and governments from throughout the region together to discuss individual rights, women’s empowerment, and economic development. Officials from the United States and Europe joined ministers from monarchies such as Jordan and Saudi Arabia and dictatorships such as Syria in sessions devoted to human rights and democracy. The goal was to push on different dimensions, supporting civil society and pressuring governments. The presentations at those sessions were, not surprisingly, sterile and sometimes even a little hostile toward us. Still the participants—representatives of governments and members of civil society—attended, and political reform was on the agenda at every meeting.

  In this we attempted to replicate the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe (CSCE), which had been formed in 1975. At the time many American conservatives had worried that the CSCE would confirm the status quo, since the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe participated as equals with the countries of free Europe. But it did just the opposite. Its charter enshrined human rights as one of three “baskets” (the others were security and economics), and dissidents repeatedly used the language to embarrass their rulers, who had, after all, signed on to the document. And the many exchange programs and conferences of the CSCE provided an opportunity for Soviet and Eastern European citizens to meet one another and to engage activists from the West in a protected environment. When the Cold War ended, many former dissidents credited the work of the CSCE in hastening communism’s collapse in Europe.

  The Freedom Agenda, we knew, would be the work of generations. Nonetheless, in the short term it was important to have some concrete manifestation of the possibility of its success. Iraq’s future was too uncertain to provide that example. Turkey was a stable country that, in its transition, was providing evidence that democracy and Islam could exist side by side.

  Turkey was important for another reason: it was by geography and history an uneasy bridge between the Middle East and Europe. The
great political scientist Samuel Huntington had written an article in 1993 called “The Clash of Civilizations?” and later a bestselling book. In them he argued that there was no such thing as universal values and that the Muslim world, among others, was an entity unto itself. That fact would eventually produce a clash, most likely violent, in which the Western principles of religious tolerance and secular politics would run headlong into political Islam. After 9/11 Sam Huntington sounded like a prophet.

  I’d gotten to know Huntington while I was a visiting fellow at his research center at Harvard, the Center for International Affairs, in 1986. He’d been an important mentor to me, sharing my fascination with theories of civil-military relations. There were few minds as fertile as Sam Huntington’s. He thought in grand philosophical and historical terms. His book was like that, sweeping in its analysis and even more so in its implications.