Condoleezza Rice at ULI: How to Reassert the US on the Global Stage

At ULI in San Fran yesterday, former US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice listed ways to re-establish the post–WWII order where peace, stability and free markets were valued and defended.

Aside from fully funding the DOD’s budget and our capacity to defend our values around the world, the US government should deploy forces in the Baltic region and Poland to deter Putin and Russia; create a safe protection zone for the stream of refugees leaving Syria and other fragile states in the Middle East; and, finally, recover a sense of our identity as a nation, she said. "Coming back to who we are; that is our first priority," she said.

The former Secretary of State went on to say after the US defeated totalitarian regimes in Europe and Japan in WWII, this order or value system should today be strengthened and deployed to defeat non-state actors like IS (Islamic State) and Al-Qaeda, which pose a global terror threat and continued instability in the Middle East and to contend with aggressive, neo-imperial states like Russia and China.

Rice is now a political science and business professor at Stanford University, where she served as provost from 1993 to 1999.

Citing "great powers behaving badly," Rice faulted the aggressive leadership of Vladimir Putin for Russian incursions into Crimea and eastern Ukraine as well as members of the Chinese leadership who are pushing for the expansion of Chinese military bases to the chagrin of China's neighbors. The US can't be lulled into a sense of complacency about the intentions of these leaders. "We have this tendency to believe that everyone defines success the way we define success," she said.