Editor’s note: This interview was edited for length.
Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright met with our editorial board last week to discuss the 600 or so foreign dignitaries she’ll be hosting at the Democratic National Convention in her role as chair of the National Democratic Institute. The idea, she said, is to give them an up-close look at democracy through various panel discussions and the convention itself. The Post asked her to fill us in on her efforts.
Madeleine Albright: Our conventions are always visited by foreign visitors. They are there to observe and to participate in the great democratic experiment. So what we thought we’d do is to help them understand better what it is they were seeing.
We are just . . . inundated [with] people who want to come to this convention. There is probably, at least where I traveled, as much excitement as there is in the U.S.
[The NDI] is in over 60 countries. We don’t go into countries where we’re not invited. [We] provide people the nuts and bolts of democracy. So we teach people about organizing, how campaigns generally work, how you deliver a message. What we don’t do is have any sort of ideological bent.One of the arguments in developing countries is what comes first — economic or political development — and I have argued that people want to vote and eat. So there has to be this parallel aspect.
It’s supporting democracy, not imposing democracy. Imposing democracy is an oxymoron.
The Post: What do you think about China hosting the Olympics and boycott of the opening ceremony by some world leaders?
Albright: I was in China a year to the day before the Olympics were going to start, and I already began to question what it was going to be like just because of the environment. I couldn’t breathe just walking out of the hotel. And so I really had questions about whether the Chinese are going to be glad that they are hosting the Olympics, because it’s a very complicated issue for them.
I think it’s appropriate to have asked to Bush to not be there for the opening ceremony. I personally — and this is my view — I was in the White House when the decision was made to boycott the Olympics in Moscow. It didn’t turn out to be useful, frankly, and it penalized the athletes. So I think there’s a difference between boycotting the Olympics and having the president of the United States be there to kind of bless . . . the opening ceremony. I’m hoping that the Chinese will understand that it’s important for them at least to talk to the Dalai Lama . . . and that the press be able to get into Tibet to see what the various issues are.
The Post: Is there a way to effectively pressure the Chinese?
Albright: I think it is difficult, because they are bound and determined to maintain control. I find the Chinese truly fascinating and I’ve done a number of meetings with them. Even the Chinese talk about themselves as having a dual identity. One, they like to see themselves and they portray themselvesas the world’s largest developing country. That helps them a lot in activities like investing in Africa and being more and more involved. But they are also taking increasing pride in being a part of the, they don’t use this term, but the global management system. Of being one of the major powers that is interested in being more than in their own lives.
I remember when I was ambassador at the U.N. they didn’t participate in discussions that much and they primarily voted or abstained or voted against things that had to do with human rights in other countries because they didn’t want to set a precedent. They more and more are involved in international activities.
So they are in a way, at the moment, looking at trying to figure out how they want to be major world players but they don’t want to be pressured.
The thing about them is that they need markets. It isn’t as if, the relationship between the US and China is an interesting one. They own a huge portion of our debt and yet they need us for markets and so this is what diplomacy is about. To try and figure out how both sides are trying to pressure each other on something.
The Post: What can the U.S. do to move the Middle East peace process forward?
Albright: I’m very glad the Bush Administration is paying some attention to it. My comment for a long time was that this famous road map was never taken out of the glove compartment. They now are working on it.
I was in the region in December and I met with the Prime Minister of Israel,and then I went to Ramallah and I met with Mahmoud Abbas who I worked with a lot … and with the Palestinian negotiators and what I found interesting with both sides was a real desire to solve this.
I think there is probably more going on than meets the eye. Some of the things that had held things up before is that they’d always say, well if there are terrorist incidents, we are not going to meet. But Prime Minister Rabin used to say we have to follow a peace process as if there were no terrorists, and fight terrorism as if we were not in the middle of a peace process. The translation of which is that you can’t allow some terrorist incident to have a veto over everything. Recently I read that both Olmert and Abbas had said that, and that they now needed to just keep going.
However, the continuing events between Gaza and what is going on in terms of rocket attacks is something that is very difficult and is creating animosity between the leaders that are trying to meet. I find it hard to believe that they can actually get to where they want to get. But the pressure is there to do something before President Bush leaves office, and I can just assure you, and I feel comfortable saying this on behalf of any democratic candidate they will be more than happy to implement something that came out of this kind of meeting.
Seeing how many people among the Palestinians live, most of them young, that it’s very important to make sure that they all don’t become completely marginalized. I am on the board of the Aspen Institute that is creating loans to small and medium-sized businesses in the West Bank in order to allow Palestinians to create these businesses so they can create jobs. And I think that there has to be a two-state solution. There has to be a way that the Palestinian people feel some benefit out of these things. I can understand how Hamas got elected, you know, they do constituency services, same way Hezebollah is doing well. This is why this business that we’re talking about is that people want to vote and eat.
The Post: Two years ago, you were invited to the White House to advise on Iraq. What’s your view of the situation there now?
Albright: I would say that the military [surge] has worked, but what has not worked is that it was supposed to have created the space for the political agreements to have been made and that does not seem to be moving very fast.
The thing that troubled me the most was a statement made by the Iraq defense minister about six weeks ago in which he said that he thought American troops would have to stay until 2018 because of the porousness of the borders to foreign fighters and foreign arms. And the trouble with that is that it shows that there needs to be a regional solution to this that, if it’s borders, you need to talk to the neighbors,which means Syria, Iran, etc. And I don’t think there has been enough of an effort to look at this from a regional perspective.
So there needs to be a surge in diplomacy. But I think it’s really hard to know exactly what’s going on. . . . I think some statements that Gen. Petraeus made sounded to me very honest and therefore troubling. He said that it was not irreversible. He also said that there were no lights at the end of the tunnel, that no corner had been turned. It is just very clear that President Bush is just going to turn this over to the next president.
I think that American people are over this war. And so there has to be a responsible way to get out. And the question is how to get others to help.
The Post: What is your advice for the next president?
Albright: The first thing the next president needs to do is close Guantanamo because I believe that we are an exceptional country but we can’t ask that exceptions be made for us. The rule of law is something that we benefit from, and so when we do something like have Guantanamo, it allows, for example, the Chinese to say there’s nothing wrong with us picking up people or torturing people.
I see five big issues:
First, how to fight terrorism without creating more terrorists. By calling it the “war on terror,” the people on the other side are warriors and that gives them kind of a larger mythical status within their own societies. So we need to attack al-Qaeda, not lump all terrorist groups together.
The second part is to deal with the whole non-nuclear proliferation. There’s a concern that the worst weapons will get into the hands of the worst people.
The third issue is restoring democracy, and the fourth is dealing with the negative aspects of globalization. I think the biggest one is the gap between the rich and the poor. While there’s no direct line between poverty and terrorism, people that are marginalized or alienated are more likely to be recruited to be on the side of people who don’t like us.
The fifth big issue is all the aspects of global warming, climate change, energy.
And then these two hot wars with their unintended consequences. In Afghanistan, it’s Pakistan. And in Iraq, the unintended consequence is Iran. You can’t do these alone.
So the next thing the U.S. has to do is to signal in a very strong way that we want to be part of the international system.
