Center for Strategic and International Studies TRANSCRIPT CSIS- The Future of Statecraft “Keynote Discussion with Ambassador Susan Rice” EVENT DATE Tuesday, April 2, 2019 TIME 3:30 p.m. EDT LOCATION CSIS Headquarters, Washington, D.C. KEYNOTE Ambassador Susan Rice, Former National Security Adviser and U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations MODERATOR Kathleen H. Hicks, Senior Vice President; Henry A. Kissinger Chair; Director, International Security Program, CSIS Transcript By Superior Transcriptions LLC www.superiortranscriptions.com (Applause.) Kathleen H. Hicks: Well, good afternoon. Thank you to everyone for your continuing participation today. Kathleen H. Hicks: And I’m especially delighted to welcome our keynote speaker, Dr. Susan Rice. Ambassador Rice has served as national security adviser, the U.S. permanent representative to the – of the United States to the United Nations, and assistant secretary of state for African affairs. It’s fair to say you know statecraft, the topic of today’s conference, backwards and forwards, and you’ve served in every possible role to view it. You’re also a distinguished vising research fellow now at the School of International Service at American, and you are working on a book, you’re mentoring students. And we’re so thrilled to have you here to talk to us a little bit about your experiences, your thoughts on the state of U.S. statecraft, and some of the major issues that we’ve been tackling here in this conference. So thank you so much for your time. Susan Rice: Thanks for having me, Kath. Susan Rice: It’s good to see you all. Thank you for being here. Kathleen H. Hicks: So I think it might be most interesting for folks to get a little more knowledge of your background and what brought you first into this realm of national security and international affairs and foreign policy that you’ve dedicated your life to. Can you talk a little bit about what drew you to the world? I mean, do you have an early memory of global issues grabbing you and becoming a passion for you? Susan Rice: Well, I grew up here in Washington, D.C. This is where I was born and raised, in 1964 I’m afraid to admit. (Laughter.) And I grew up in an environment and a family and a context where all of the events of the day were very much on my television screen, talked about at my dinner table, where they were talking about the Civil Rights Movement, Vietnam, Watergate, later issues like, you know, the Cold War and the competition with the Soviet Union, arms control, the Iran hostage crisis. All of these were things that were the stuff of my childhood and my upbringing. Susan Rice: My mother lived not far from here on Massachusetts Avenue, right across the street from the Egyptian embassy. And, you know, I was home on the day that Sadat walked out of the embassy just having signed Camp David, and there were snipers on our roof guarding him to protect him and to enable us to celebrate that extraordinary event. So I feel like I grew up steeped on policy issues. Susan Rice: But for the longest time I thought I’d find myself involved in domestic policy. I went to college at Stanford. I was a history major. You know, I was there at a time when, you know, Condi Rice was on the poli-sci faculty and Alexander Dallin and all these great international relations folks, and I took none of their classes. (Laughter.) Susan Rice: I went to do my graduate work in Oxford, and when I left Stanford my expectation was that I’d do two years in Oxford and I’d come back and I’d go to law school and I’d end up doing some kind of public interest law, whether civil rights law or, you know, public defense, or something. And but I also figured that for the two years that I was at Oxford, thinking that I might one day want to become an elected official – forgetting that I was born and raised in Washington, D.C., and we have no voting representation – (laughter) – I decided to study international relations for two years, and did my master’s degree in IR. Susan Rice: And when I was done with that, I sort of faced a decision point. Do I go to law school as planned, or do I stay on and do my doctorate in international relations? And I chose to stay on and do my doctorate, just because I loved what I was studying, and I was interested in my dissertation topic, and I was convinced by a wise person that at 25 when I finished my doctorate I wouldn’t be too old to go to law school if I still wanted to. I didn’t choose to go to law school. And there are some days when I think I missed my calling, because I think maybe perhaps I should have been a litigator because I like arguing. Kathleen H. Hicks: Well, being a national security adviser, maybe not too different from sort at least arbitration and negotiation, so. Susan Rice: Exactly, exactly. But that’s how I got into international relations. But even after getting my doctorate, it wasn’t clear to me that that’s where I was going to make my career. It went to McKinsey and Company for a couple of years, a management consulting firm. And then I had the opportunity at the very beginning of the Clinton administration to come to Washington and work in the White House. And I actually had two offers – one to work on the newly established National Economic Council and the other on the National Security Council. And I wrestled with that and sort of did an eenie, meenie, miney, moe and chose national security. And sort of one thing led to another. (Laughs.) Kathleen H. Hicks: Amazing. You – backing up slightly, because it’ll take us to that time in the Clinton administration – you had done your dissertation on Rhodesia. Had you developed a strong interest in Rhodesia in particular, or African affairs? What brought you to that issue set? Susan Rice: Well, interestingly it happened because at Stanford I got very involved in the campus anti-Apartheid movement. And that was a time – this is, you know, the mid-1980s – when it was before Mandela was released. The violence was quite substantial in South Africa. And I was just very drawn to that issue as one of – you know, of equity, social justice, equality. And I got interested in Rhodesia, because Rhodesia and its transition to Zimbabwe in 1980 had been at the time – unfortunately, no longer so – a successful example of a transition from white minority rule to black majority rule. And I was interested in what one might learn from the experience and the transition of Rhodesia-Zimbabwe for South Africa’s future. Susan Rice: So that’s how I got into it. But in a manner that I couldn’t have predicted when I started it, I got very deeply engrossed in it, because I was lucky to be studying Zimbabwe in England, where the critical players were present, where the resources and the archival material was rich. I got to go down to Zimbabwe and do extensive field research and meet many of the protagonists and interview them. So there’s just a lot of meat there that I found fascinating. So I wrote on the transition of Rhodesia to Zimbabwe. And in fact, the implications of that transition for international peacekeeping because as virtually nobody in the world knows that period of time when the transition occurred there was the only time the commonwealth – the British Commonwealth deployed a peacekeeping force to maintain security during the election period. A first and only attempt at peacekeeping, a successful case study, and one that also got me interested in issues related to the United Nations and peacekeeping, which subsequently became my focus. Kathleen H. Hicks: Well, so fast-forward then to the 1990s, the Clinton administration, and right where you left off. Obviously the genocide in Rwanda, but one of a series of peacekeeping operations that the United States was engaged in, in one form or another. Can you talk a little bit about your – you know, what you brought into that, as you were just commenting, from what you knew academically, and what the reality of the U.S. role during that period and the debates over is America’s the world’s policeman, and in specific how we can help, and where the limits are to our ability to help prevent things like genocide. Susan Rice: Well, over the course of the eight years of the Clinton administration, I had three different jobs. And so three different vantage points on this broad set of issues. My first job during the first two years of the Clinton administration was at the NSC. My first job in government. I was director for international organizations and peacekeeping. And this was in the window from 1994 to early 1996, when we were dealing with Somalia, Rwanda, Bosnia, Haiti, Cambodia – all of these complex operations – and then in February of 1996, I became the senior director for African affairs on the NSC staff. Susan Rice: So I ran the small Africa office at the NSC where my focus was, you know, on the continent, broadly, and not just, obviously, on peacekeeping or security issues. I did that through the end of President Clinton’s first term and about six months into the second term, and then I went over to the State Department and served the rest of the administration as assistant secretary of state for African affairs.