In Black America; Dr. Condoleeza Rice

... From the Longhorn Radio Network, the University of Texas at Austin, this is In Black America. I've been asked to talk a little bit about the changes in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union at the end of the Cold War and their implications for African-Americans. Now, when I was first asked to talk about this, I thought, well, I don't know exactly

what to say, and so I took this on with a little trepidation because for this African-American at least largely what the changes in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union have meant is that it's finally interesting to read Provda. It's fun to go to the Soviet Union. Yalena Kang and I've known each other now for several years and I know she would join me in saying what tremendous changes have come to her country. And I will admit to you that I've been absorbed mentally, physically, and indeed emotionally in the tremendous changes that are taking place in Europe and in my chosen field, the Soviet Union indeed. When I first started to study the Soviet Union in the 1970s in a period of what the Soviets themselves call now the era of stagnation, I never would have guessed that I would have been so lucky to end up in the White House as the Cold War ended. Dr. Kondo Lisa Rice, former Special Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs and Senior Director for Soviet Affairs for the National Security Council.

From 1989 through 1991, Dr. Rice was a White House Soviet Specialist during the Revolutionary years, including the War and the Persian Gulf. Dr. Rice has also played a major role in the formulation of U.S. policy toward the emerging democracies of Eastern Europe. Dr. Rice is also on the Faculty of the Department of Political Science at Stanford University and has seen regularly on ABC News programs, including World News Tonight and Nightline. I'm Johnny Johansson Jr. and welcome to another edition of In Black America. This week, Dr. Kondo Lisa Rice and keeping the promise the world summit for children part two in Black America. But now with some time to reflect on these momentous changes and the end of the Cold War, I am happy to try to address with you and to perhaps start a discussion among us about the implications of these changes for people of color and particularly for African Americans. We may not agree about the analysis that I give you or

about the agenda that I think we have to set, but I hope that at the end of these few remarks, I will have encouraged you to think about it and to raise the issues in your columns and on your broadcasts, because I do think that it would be folly to think that you could go through the kind of tremendous changes in the international system, indeed a complete revamping of the international order, and not have that revamping of the international order have tremendous impact on people of color and on African Americans. As a 30-something Sovietologist, Dr. Rice enjoys a unique vantage point as a major advisor to President Bush. Dr. Rice was there at the Brown Granking Meeting of the President and Mikhail Gorbachev there at the brainstorming session of the American Advisors when this nation approached some of the most delicate and important foreign policy questions of the last two years were hammered out and numerous international

flights as German unification and Soviet conversion to a free market economy were shaped. Born in Birmingham, Alabama, she was nurtured in the Presbyterian Church and in the college community of Tuscaloosa. Both for parents are teachers. Dr. Rice first thought was to study classical piano. For two years at the University of Denver, she did jazz that, but later began shopping around for another major and focused on political science because she could still finish on time. From the University of Denver, Dr. Rice went on to earn additional degrees from the University of Notre Dame and Denver's Graduate School of International Studies. Before she began her tenure at Stanford University. This past summer, Dr. Rice brought a broad base insight into international affairs to the 16th National Conference of the National Association of Black Journalists. Dr. Condola Lisa Rice. I think there are three major concerns, major issues that come out of the end of the Cold War. And as is often the case, they will affect African Americans much

as they affect other Americans, but perhaps with greater intensity, they will be amplified somehow by the status of African Americans in America. The first thing that the end of the Cold War means is that we have entered and will be for some time in a new phase, a new debate on the US role in the world. It was, after all, fairly easy for the United States to mobilize itself for the last 40 years against a clear and common enemy. It was easy when international politics was zero sum when what was good for the Soviet Union was bad for the United States and vice versa. When the Cold War meant black and white, a split down the middle of Europe and when everybody thought that they knew at least to their friends and their enemies were. That's not the world that we are entering today. Indeed, it is a world in which the term friend and a lie terms that

we've tended as Americans to use synonymously. When those terms really are being redefined, I would only draw your attention to the fact that the US cooperation with the Soviet Union was probably greater in the Persian Gulf than US cooperation with many of its European allies. Those lines are blurring. The question of who is the enemy is on the agenda again. And for many Americans, there's a sort of discomfort with a world that is gray rather than black and white. There's a discomfort that leads many Americans to say it's now time to come home and worry about our problems here. The world doesn't need us anymore. So the first point that I would make to you about the end of the Cold War is I think we're about to enter a very important

and crucial debate in this country about the role of the United States in the international system. Secondly, the end of the Cold War really means the defeat of the other great ideological paradigm. The paradigm that for the last 45 years has organized so much of our thinking about the international system in general. Questions of who would win the hearts and minds and souls of peoples, of places as far as the Philippines, or Nicaragua, or Angola, or Czechoslovakia? A great ideological contest between socialism and capitalism is I submit to you over. When Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev applies to join the International Monetary Fund, once called by the Soviet Union, a bastion of capitalist exploitation, folks, the ideological contest is over. From Czechoslovakia

to Mexico to Chile to the Soviet Union, there is now a great premium on the shift from state ownership of enterprises to privatization, the new phrase of the day. Free markets are all the talk of economists everywhere, and foreign investment once thought by many to be a tool of exploitation is sought widely invigorously by countries from all over the globe. On the political side, issues range from the rights of the individual and how they can be assured to how to express those rights and responsibilities individuals in free elections, and I can tell you that I myself am taken aback as I travel around the world with the efforts to copy, and I use the word

advisedly, copy, the US Constitution, the Bill of Rights, indeed one of the hottest sellers anywhere in this world these days is the Federalist Papers. The growth of US influence follows naturally from the defeat of the other great ideological paradigm. On many dimensions, the United States is the only superpower left. It is the only country left with all of the appropriate instruments for political and diplomatic influence, and you know there's a tendency to say well both superpowers have declined, but we should be careful. The United States analytically still has economic power, military power, diplomatic and now some moral swation wrapped up together in ways that used to be called in the international system state craft. It means that sometimes you need military power, sometimes you need economic power, sometimes you need diplomatic influence,

and you can watch it every day as it unfolds in places like the Middle East, in Africa, in Europe and in Latin America. US influence oddly enough is on the rise. Now I have long debates with my good friend Paul Kennedy, who is a historian at Yale, you may know responsible for and famous for the book about the decline of America, but I think that it is important not to deceive ourselves about the potential decline, the actual decline, and while trends on some of these indicators do not look very good, the United States is still a very powerful country. Now the third major outcome of the end of the Cold War will be an ending of the intense ideological and bipolar approach to an area that African-Americans care a great deal about, people of color care a great

deal about, and that's the third world. For the last at least 30 years since Nikita Hirschhoff really took on the challenge in trying to build Soviet influence in Egypt. We have experienced the third world and thought of the third world in American foreign policy through an ideological prism, through bipolar prism. It was the battleground, if you will, for the great struggle between capitalism and socialism. US interests followed almost exactly the interest and growth of influence of the Soviet Union in places like Ethiopia and Angola and Nicaragua, and that I think with the withdrawal and retrenchment of the Soviet Union is probably also a thing of the past. Now for African-Americans, these three implications of the end of the Cold War. Questions of the US role and the balance of domestic priorities with international concerns,

and equivalents perhaps about the changing US role and growth of US influence and ideas in the world, and interest in and concerns about the fate of the third world. Those three are felt perhaps more intensely in the African-American community than in the community as a whole. And I think that we are going to have to have a very tough debate with ourselves about our response to those new conditions. Let me just suggest to you the three might, the way that I think about a response from the African-American community to those three new conditions. First of all, I hope that on the question of the US role in the world, that we will not participate in what I consider to be essentially a false dichotomy between international concerns and

domestic concerns. It's very interesting that the same people who talk about the growing interdependence of the world are many of the same people who want to say, well, let's just concentrate on what's going on at home. Let's come home finally from the Cold War, having been released from its strain and from especially its strain on our resources and deal with the problems here. Now, it won't surprise you that I as an internationalist think that there's a real downside to this approach and it's the following. Economic affairs in particular, no boundaries between states. Economic well-being knows no boundaries between states. The international economic order is as interdependent and we as dependent on its well-being as we have ever been in the history of mankind. And to somehow therefore think of our social and economic well-being as something

that stops at the borders of the 50 states is old thinking in a very dangerous way. And we can't have it both ways, folks, because the US can't somehow engage in international affairs when it wants and disengage when it doesn't want to. You have to be there for the long term. You have to be there with your interests with your instruments of influence. You have to be there with instruments ranging from foreign assistance to forces on the ground to participation in international institutions and you have to do it on a full-time basis. The US economy and US well-being is an extricably linked with the well-being of the international order. It would be a shame at this particular point in time to say, well, let's just come on home and try to build our economic well-being from within.

A second response to the second problem and that is this question of the dominance of one paradigm, the dominance of Western values, the dominance of the rights of the individual, of free markets of private enterprise. It's an established fact. Now the question is how to deal with it. I would submit to you that the first thing is to deal with our own ambivalence about that because for a lot of reasons, a lot of very good reasons. We are ambivalent about those values and whether or not they have indeed been realized here in the United States and therefore perhaps a little concerned about the export of those values elsewhere. But we're not somehow passive observers in this game and it's time to fight even harder for the realization of the values and the traditions that are embodied in those great documents that are being copied everywhere.

It's time to fight even harder because America is increasingly a model. If we become self-self-absorbed in our own problems here as people of color, I would submit to you too that we're going to abandon a lot of other people of color worldwide to a very bad fate because whatever our problems here in America, we need to realize that this is the most successful, the best integrated, the most energetic and the most dynamic gathering of the African diaspora on the globe. And therefore, African Americans have got to be a beacon for those who are elsewhere. And I want to point to one thing in particular. I've been in Europe a lot recently. And let me tell you the tensions between Europeans and non-Europeans are growing. In Britain, in France, in Italy, in Germany, immigrants from the third world now find themselves

persecuted and pursued and indeed often as they've just been in France deported. And caring about their fate and finding a way to communicate a message about tolerance among minorities is very important. And the United States is actually pretty adaptable in that way. We've done better than anybody else. I would guarantee you this is the best place to be a minority, although it's not perfect place to be a minority. And so I would suggest that as the face of America goes outward as more and more of a model, the face of America has got to be multicolored. And I hope that that means that as Yelena so well put it, that there will be Black journalist covering the U.S. Soviet summit, the upcoming peace conference in the Middle East,

and that Black business people, African-American diplomats, educators, the full panoplay and range of people in America who are succeeding will be the face of America as it goes outward. Now if we're going to achieve that, we're going to have to become more tolerant ourselves to. Because there are different roles that people are going to have to play. And when I listened to some of the commentary about African-American soldiers in the Persian Gulf, my heart really ached because the notion that somehow these poor kids were just not quite bright enough to know what they were getting themselves into, I think was actually a quite pernicious message to send. Especially when the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is an African-American, and when the deputy commander of Desert Storm was an African-American. You see it should not be that Europe and Japan see African-Americans only in gangs in Los Angeles.

That will be bad for Europe, it will be bad for Asia, it will be bad for the United States. So we need to get out there, and we need to be more international than we've ever been, because America is more influential than it's been in a long, long time, and it needs to be a multicultural America that is influential. Finally, on the question of the Third World and how to maintain a policy toward it, I am concerned that as the bipolar glow of the Cold War fades and places like Angola and Ethiopia seem further and further away from the core of American interests, that we as African-Americans have a special responsibility to find a way to make those concerns a part of the American foreign policy, agenda and the American foreign policy energy that is there. The message about Africa may

have to change. You know, we spend a lot of time on South Africa, and heaven knows we need to spend time on South Africa. But the rest of the continent is languishing. There is no enterprise for Africa like there is an enterprise for the Americas. There is no group of 24 assistants for Africa like there is a group of 24 assistants for Eastern Europe. And it is partly because the messages in Africa about private investment and privatization and democracy, we've not taken on as important themes. The days have changed. It's not good enough to stand up and talk about capitalist exploitation in Africa. We've got to lead and we've got to help as African leaders themselves look for investments so that Africa as a continent doesn't fall further and further behind as the rest of the world, Latin America, Asia and Europe develop.

So in conclusion, let me say that I think this is a critical time and it is a time when the implications of the end of the Cold War for African Americans and other people of color, people who are at the leading edge, the engine and of dynamism in the African diaspora need very much to examine what our new agenda is going to be. When the Cold War broke out in 1947 and when the international system heartened around two poles symbolized by a divided Germany, we weren't in a position to do very much to help shape that international order. We were dwelling in segregated schools in Birmingham and in ghettos in Los Angeles and we were very very far away from having African American chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff or indeed special assistance to the

president for Soviet affairs. I would guarantee you that there were few black journalists and that this would have been a much much smaller gathering at that time. So this time we don't have an excuse. We've got to get involved in the emerging international order and we've got to get involved assured that we too have something to say about the great values that are now dominating the international agenda, democracy, the rights of the individual, the right to free enterprise, all of those things that deep down inside we all believe too. Let's say it and say it loud. Dr. Condolee Sirice, former special assistant to the president for National Security Affairs and senior director for Soviet affairs for the National Security Council and a faculty member in the Department of Political Science at Stanford University. In September of 1990 at the World Summit for Children, 71 world leaders including President Bush met at the United Nations

to discuss the fate of the world's children. Bold promises were made to drag to reduce the infant mortality rate, malnutrition, disease resulting from a lack of sanitation and other problems facing children by the year 2000. I spoke with Sam Harris, executive director of results, Mr. Harris is serving as the global keeping the promised coordinator and Sherry Dean with the National Black Child Development Institute. The World Summit for Children had seven overarching goals. Okay. And they were goals in terms of reducing child mortality by at least a third and and they were literacy goals having 80% completion of primary school because that's a big problem in the third world and had goals like access to clean water and sanitation. I wear myself another hat in that I had a grassroots advocacy group called results and we're lobbying our advocacy group results for a bill called the World Summit for Children Implementation Act and this bill is kind of bill that asks for increased funding for the thing that work in third world health like

basic immunization and in terms of preventive health here like things like the WIC program in third world literacy like primary education in third world and in head start for example the head start program in this country. In this legislation it actually calls for for monies for AIDS education but in this particular bill in this particular case it's in the third world. So the summit itself many of the goals that the summit address needs of children in the third world in other words completion of 100 million children of primary school age in the third world are not in school of primary school age. So it addresses those kinds of needs that's why with this keeping the promise campaign we're also focusing on the U.S. health services goals and the goal set by the president and the 50 governors and so that's what we're trying to do with

this keeping the promise campaign to give people the information and the tools so that they can begin to speak up. I just want to concur with that it is so important that we maintain our energies and the vigilant and always articulate sound and rational policies on behalf of children. We are responsible for our children and it is up to articulate these policies constantly and to monitor elected officials to monitor the legislation to ensure that the legislation and the money finally reach the children and the families for whom it was intended. Last year we issued a status report on African-American children and we found to out dismay that many things for African-American children had not changed over the course of 20 years. However we know that a people without a vision perished and we set forth 10 visions on behalf of children.

Those visions have been translated into an action agenda for children that will be the theme of our conference. I would urge your listening audience if they are interested to please contact the National Black Child Development Institute. Our fund number is 202-387-1281 in Washington, DC for further information. It is all groups, all people, all institutions working together that will ensure that the promise is made on behalf of children whether they be here in America, children is South Africa, children in Nicaragua, but the promise is on behalf of children be kept. Sherry Dean and Sam Harris with keeping the promise the world's summit for children part two. If you have a question or comment regarding this program, write us. Remember views and opinions expressed on this program are not necessarily those of this station or the University of Texas at Austin until we have the opportunity again for a production assistant Lisa Wish and IBA's

technical producer Dana White here. I'm Johnny O'Hanston Jr., please join us again next week. From the Center for Telecommunication Services, the University of Texas at Austin, this is the Longhorn Radio Network. I'm Johnny O'Hanston Jr., join me this week on in Black America.

In fact, when Brent Scowcroft first asked me to come to Washington to be a Soviet specialist, I just been back at Stanford about 18 months from the Stanton of Pentagon and I thought, well, maybe I should wait because I've just gotten tenure. Dr. Kendall Lisa Rice and keeping the promise part two this week on in Black America.