|
Condoleezza Rice on Foreign Policy
Secretary of State
|
Cuba: don't trade one dictatorship for another
This is a transitional period for the Cuban people. We are going to stand with them for the proposition that there should not simply be the end of one dictatorship and the imposition of another dictatorship.
And we are working with partners in the international community to send that message very strongly. But our role will be to help the Cuban people when the time comes to have a peaceful and stable democratic transition.
Source: Free Cuba Foundation, on www.4condi.com, "Issues"
Aug 6, 2006
Routine transatlantic relations good for business & people
Relations between Europeans and Americans are so multi-faceted 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 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 citizenship [in one nation], 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.
Source: TIES-Webzine interview at Hoover Institution, Stanford Univ.
Jun 25, 2000
Redefine national interest, to avoid interest-based policy
Constituency-based politics, interest based politics, is having 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,
foreign policy becomes a patchwork of interest group politics, like every other issue. The change was utterly predictable [because] the Soviet Union was such an organizing principle. Americans saw every issue through the prism of Soviet Union.
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.
Source: TIES-Webzine interview at Hoover Institution, Stanford Univ.
Jun 25, 2000
Page last updated: Jul 15, 2008