A Conversation With Colin Powell
Atlantic Unbound | August 2, 2004
Interviews
Colin Powell and P. J. O'Rourke discuss foreign policy, Volvos, Elvis, and more. The full transcript of his interview from the September 2004 Atlantic
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Ideas are important, and, of course, actions are. But interviews are rude. Any child will let you know this when pumped about what he did in school that day. And imagine interviewing your spouse at breakfast: "What's your opinion of passing the toast? How do you feel about the eggs you made? Will we stay married?" On the other hand, conversation is good, even if—or especially when—it's polite conversation.
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I talked to the Secretary of State in his office on June 21, 2004. In the January/February issue of Foreign Affairs he'd written, <font color=red>"The sources of national strength and security for one nation need no longer threaten the security of others. Politics need not always be a zero-sum competition." "Zero-sum,"<font color=black> a term from game theory, means any gain to you is a loss to me. <font size=3>
—P. J. O'Rourke
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P. J. O'ROURKE: Zero-sum thinking is an obsession of mine, but mostly in economics. I'd never heard the concept applied to foreign affairs. I got excited about that. I've got little kids. They regard everything as zero-sum.
SECRETARY POWELL: Yeah, most of my career was in a zero-sum world—us versus the Russians. Zero-sum kind of takes you to places like Vietnam. The domino theory is a form of zero-sum thinking. My whole life, especially as a senior officer, we were always focusing on having to have the better tank, and they would immediately start working on a better tank than our better tank, and of course then we'd have to have a better tank than their better tank, and everything was zero-sum.
Let me give you a perfect example. It's a nuclear example. When you looked at how you had to attack the Soviet Union with nuclear weapons, there was a certain way you went about it. We're a fairly contained country, between two oceans and three time zones. They're across about three continents and eleven time zones. And the industrial base is different. They knew what they had to do to our industrial base, and we knew what we had to do with their much smaller industrial base. So it was two absolutely asymmetric target problems. But we had almost exactly the same number of missiles. We all worked like the devil, not so much to deal with what we needed to do for targeting, but to make sure they didn't have more than we did ... It was that kind of zero-sum mentality.
My favorite story is, after we got rid of the Pershing IIs and they got rid of their SS-20s, my counterpart Mikhail Moiseyev, chief of the Soviet military general staff, visited Washington in 1991. We had brought one of each of the missiles to the Smithsonian. And he and I are down there with adoring fans watching this unfolding of their SS-20 model and our Pershing. Well, the SS-20 is a big thing. And the Pershing is small. It's much more efficient, a better missile. And so everybody is looking at this. And my wife, Alma, is with me. She pays no attention to any of this military stuff. She's only been a military wife for the past forty years. And she looks at it and says, <font color=red>"How come theirs is bigger?"
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You always want your adversary to walk away thinking he prevails—not to the point where he can boast about it or make you look bad, but if you prevail and he prevails it's a win. And that usually takes non-zero-sum thinking, especially in a no longer zero-sum world. There's no longer just the United States versus the Soviet Union, but the whole West and international community against [here the Secretary gave a diplomatic, and apt, name to what opposes the West] the whole whatever-you-want-to-call-it. And so in my job especially—and I'm considered the multilateralist—multilateralism means finding areas of compromise.
Our nation also rests on a non-zero-sum concept. It was intended that Congress work by finding compromise, and from compromise you achieve consensus. Without compromise, you never get to consensus. It's through consensus that laws are written. The ugliest form of compromise is you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours.
As we have discovered, you really need to have friends and partners as you try to deal with the world's problems, and friends and partners come with their own needs and their own desires, and you've got to scratch their needs and desires.
P. J. O'ROURKE: What you've told me comes out of your personal experience. Is there any philosophical background to your ideas about zero-sum thinking? I was wondering, especially since I write for The Atlantic, if there's any sort of bookish input.
SECRETARY POWELL: No, I don't think so. I'm different from most people in senior foreign policy circles, both in the United States and among my colleagues overseas, in that I'm not an academic and was not raised to be a foreign policy intellectual. I'm fairly well read, but at the same time I'm not an academic. I'm a practitioner, somebody who was raised to see a problem, analyze it, have views about it, and have passion for a solution. I tend to go with my experience. My experience is in the soldierly things. Also, you know, my educational background is a B.S. in Geology and a Masters in Business Administration—data processing. It's not as if I was at the John F. Kennedy School at Harvard. Most of my foreign policy senior level education came from the National War College. Till then, I was just another infantry officer.
P. J. O'ROURKE: In terms of non-zero-sum thinking, is our country in the unique historical position of wanting other nations to be as powerful as we are?
Powell looked at me over the top of his glasses.
SECRETARY POWELL: <font size=4>Wanting other nations to be as powerful? No, I wouldn't say that. I think our historical position is we are a superpower that cannot be touched in this generation by anyone in terms of military power, economic power, the strength of our political system and our values system. What we would like to see is a greater understanding of power, of the democratic system, the open market economic system, the rights of men and women to achieve their destiny as God has directed them to do if they are willing to work for it. And we really do not wish to go to war with people. But, by God, we will have the strongest military around. And that's not a bad thing to have. It encourages and champions our friends that are weak and it chills the ambitions of the evil.
A deputy secretary interrupted. <font color=red>"That's good,"<font color=black> she said. <font color=red>"Did you just make that up?" <font color=black>
SECRETARY POWELL: Yeah. Not bad, eh?
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I tried to scribble down the exact words. The deputy press secretary offered me a tape.
P. J. O'ROURKE: A humorist doesn't really do that much note-taking.
SECRETARY POWELL: He can make it up, too. The question you asked was: Do we want people to be as strong as we are? I would like to see the whole world have an economy as strong as ours. That would benefit us. But it isn't going to happen anytime soon.
The Secretary recounted a <font color=blue>"slip of the tongue"<font color=black> that reportedly had been made by one of the delegates to the European Council and the Intergovernmental Conference on a new EU constitution, which had been held the previous week.
SECRETARY POWELL: They were all in a room arguing, you know, saying things like, <font color=blue>"Our system is a multipolar world, and how do we deal with the United States?"<font color=black> And one of them said, <font color=blue>"The United States has had over three percent economic growth for nine of the past ten years. We have had over three percent economic growth for one of the past ten years. So we had better start looking at what the United States does right as well as criticizing and screaming at them all the time."<font color=black>
I had prepared a follow-up question on unilateralism, but only for a multilateralist answer.
P. J. O'ROURKE: You've kind of thrown me for a loop ...
SECRETARY POWELL: <font size=4>I would like to see the whole world have a strong political system resting on democracy and the rule of law, as we do. But I think the world is well served right now with the United States still having the edge on economic power and a heck of a margin with respect to military power. The reason for that is that no other nation, with a few exceptions, is yet as well grounded politically in the democratic system as we are, or to be trusted with the kind of military power that we have.
I asked the Secretary why the defense spending of our closest allies was, proportionately, so much less than our own.<font size=3>
P. J. O'ROURKE: The powers that are on our side, why aren't they pulling on their oars? I mean, the EU has as big an economy and as big a population as we do.
SECRETARY POWELL: <font size=4>First of all, I do think they're on our side. I think we had a big hiccup on Iraq, and we lost some of them. But that'll swing back. The pendulum will come back our way because we do have more common interests than disagreements: terrorism, the world trading system, so many other things. Now, the reason we have to spend so much more is that there is no German navy preserving peace in the Pacific, there are no British troops standing guard in Korea, there is no need for any of our European Union friends to have the ability to project an army in a week or two from wherever they are to a place like Afghanistan.
P. J. O'ROURKE: But, why not?
SECRETARY POWELL: Because they have never felt that that was their destiny or their obligation. The United States entered into partnerships and believes it has these worldwide obligations. Nobody can move things like we can. They have never invested in it. Now, with the EU up to twenty-five nations, they're looking at whether or not this is where they should be putting their investment. And I think they should. But their domestic constituencies will not permit the kind of spending on defense that our domestic constituency permits. The Germans are dropping their defense spending and reducing the size of their armed forces. Whereas we've held steady for some years, and now Congress is passing laws to increase the size of our army.
The American people have always been more willing to shoulder this burden than our European friends, particularly now when the Cold War is over. There is no Iron Curtain, there is no Soviet Union, and the average European citizen looking around sees some of these out-of-the-way places like Afghanistan and the Balkans and Iraq. They're willing to do a little there, but they're not willing to put up to three or four percent of their GDP into defense spending the way we are.
P. J. O'ROURKE: I was shocked when I was in the Balkans in the early '90s that this was going on so close to the EU, essentially the same distance as from here to Jersey City, and they were letting it. They had the power to stop it.
SECRETARY POWELL: They had the power, but they are a union that does not have a predominant leader. NATO had a predominant leader in the United States. The European Union has a lot of pretenders and contenders for that position, but they don't have it yet, as evidenced by the debates they had over the constitution last week.
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But our great strength is the image we still convey to the rest of the world. Notwithstanding all you read about anti-Americanism, people are still standing in line to come here, to get visas and come across our borders.
P. J. O'ROURKE: Voting with their feet?
SECRETARY POWELL: Voting with their feet. So there's something right there.
P. J. O'ROURKE: Back in Lebanon in 1984, I was held at gunpoint by this Hezbollah kid, just a maniac, you know, at one of those checkpoints, screaming at me about America, great Satan, et cetera.
SECRETARY POWELL: Then he wanted a green card?
P. J. O'ROURKE: At the end of this rant, that's exactly what he said: <font color=blue>"As soon as I get my green card, I am going to Dearborn, Michigan to study dental school."<font color=red> And he saw no disconnect.
SECRETARY POWELL: He's there now. He's not going back to Beirut.
P. J. O'ROURKE: He hated America so much and wanted nothing more than to be an American.
SECRETARY POWELL: They respect us and they resent us. But they want what we have.
A story I tell a lot—I think it's in my book—that same Russian counterpart was here—Moiseyev. I took him to the missile fields and he was not the least bit interested. <font color=blue>"We have those." "Well, look at my new tank." "We have those." "You want to see how we build a submarine?" "We have one of those."<font color=red> We ended up having a potato peeling contest on the submarine because he didn't want to see the nuclear reactor. There's pictures in the book. He beat me.
When it was all over and we were driving to Andrews Air Force Base after a long dinner at the Russian Embassy, we were all having some fun. He and I were in the front car and his wife and my wife were in the second car. And his wife was a good Russian wife—quietly watched the whole week go by. She had to go to all these military bases but she also went to a Cadillac plant, and to the 21 Club in New York. We did lots and got to know each other pretty well. And she turns to Alma in the dark of the car as they're heading to Andrews and she says, <font color=blue>"Well, I saw a lot this weekend."<font color=red> She says, <font color=blue>"And I'm not jealous. I'm not envious of what I have seen. I'm just mad. I'm mad that we could have done this but we didn't. We wasted seventy years and I will not see it in my lifetime." <font color=red>
She was resentful, but the resentment was ... how can these Americans do this? Why can't we do this? And so there's respect that we can do it, and people want to learn it from us, but there's also resentment that we can do it.
What I find is that people are mad about our policies. They're not necessarily mad at us. And therefore, as policies are successful, attitudes can be changed.
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P. J. O'ROURKE: Does any of this remind you of having a dad?
SECRETARY POWELL: Having a dad?
P. J. O'ROURKE: I mean all that stuff you said about resentment and being respected.
SECRETARY POWELL: <font size=4>Yeah, and being a teenager. And then at twenty-three, you suddenly discover the old geezer was pretty smart.
P. J. O'ROURKE: That attitude, that adolescent attitude toward parents, is something that I feel I have encountered over and over in the attitude toward America. Which brings me to a question about the Arab world. Why has the Arab world, with this amazing, ancient, sophisticated civilization, suffered such huge political and economic failures?
SECRETARY POWELL: They even know it now. No doubt have seen the UN reports. [The UN Arab Human Development Report 2002]. Written by Arabs. Wouldn't have worked if we had written it.
P. J. O'ROURKE: It was remarkably frank.
SECRETARY POWELL: It went right to the heart of it. They just haven't advanced. They've allowed themselves to be stuck. They haven't been educating their people. They have regimes that have essentially been status quo regimes. They think, <font color=blue>"Hey, we're doing okay, let's be friends with the Americans and the Europeans, but let's not emulate them."<font color=black> And so there's been too much political stagnation throughout the Arab world, and they don't have the kind of intellectual curiosity or entrepreneurial drive or spirit that we have, and they don't have the political system with which to do all that.
P. J. O'ROURKE: Well, they sure have the entrepreneurial drive once they get outside their countries.
SECRETARY POWELL: Yeah, it's there. <font color=red>Why can't they do it inside their countries? Because the political systems constrain them. You know, sometimes you can't own property. And half the population is frozen within some of the societies. Can you imagine us if fifty percent of our population was not in the workforce? Not in the schools? It's not sustainable.
P. J. O'ROURKE: It does have something to do with the role of women in those societies.
SECRETARY POWELL: I think it does. And the interesting part of it is that, sometimes, to keep the women occupied they do let them go to schools. They let them go to universities in the United States. And then they bring them back home and say <font color=blue>"Go back in your house and sit there."<font color=red> That doesn't work. Once you educate them, you open Pandora's Box, and they will demand more and more.<font color=black> You cannot afford to invest in this class of people and not use the investment. And you can't afford not to invest in them. You can't have fifty percent of your population just sitting around providing the services for the other fifty percent.
P. J. O'ROURKE: There's a certain kind of behavior in the Arab world that, to me, resembles the way young men behave when there is no significant influence from women in their lives. I won't say, Lord of the Flies or teenage gangs or even poker night at the deer hunting camp. But there is this absence of female influence in some of the behavior that I've seen in the Middle East.
SECRETARY POWELL: I see it in our urban areas. I don't want to lay it all off on women. Men have a role to play, too. The intention was for two people to have children and raise them.
P. J. O'ROURKE: Yes. But the Middle East does seem to be a world without the constraints that ... if I started acting like the Iraqis are acting, my wife would be after me: <font color=blue>"You get right in here, stop looting and blowing up the car. If you blow up the car, how can I get the kids to school?" <font color=black>
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SECRETARY POWELL: You've heard the wonderful story about the elephants? This was at a game reserve in Botswana or somewhere. They had found a dead rhinoceros, and they couldn't figure out who had killed it. The rhinoceros doesn't have any natural enemies. They looked and looked and found that there were these elephants, male elephants, that were killing rhinoceros. They were young elephants that had been brought from another reserve far away, but they had been brought just as two adolescent male elephants, and—
P. J. O'ROURKE: An elephant gang.
SECRETARY POWELL: An elephant gang. And so the game keepers didn't know what to do. They didn't want to kill them. And it occurred to some guy, very early one morning he said, <font color=red>"I've got it."<font color=black> They just went and got some older male elephants. They brought two male elephants, adult male elephants in with these teenagers, and within a few months, problem solved. The teenagers didn't know how to act. The male elephants made it clear to them: <font color=red>"Excuse me, boy. This is not what elephants do. We don't go around chomping on rhinoceri." <font color=black>
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I've seen this in schools in Washington, D.C., where there are young men, about age eight or nine, who do not know the taboos of family, the shibboleths of the society, the expectations of a family, the need for self-restraint. They don't get it. And so what happens, they go bopping out, and they're out of control.
And then the Army's the same way. That's what drill sergeants do. Young recruits hate their drill sergeants with a passion. It's unbelievable the first week. They want to kill him. By the second week, they're kind of relaxing a little bit. By the eighth week, there's one overpowering emotion in those recruits. Know what it is? They want to please him. They'll do anything to please him, and they will never forget his name.
I was having dinner with Ted Kennedy once. We were kidding around. He was talking about some fight he had in the Army or something. And I said, <font color=red>"Ted, what was the name of your drill sergeant?"<font color=black>
P. J. O'ROURKE: And he had it.
SECRETARY POWELL: Instantly.
END OF PART ONE |
