No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington

38 AN EXPLOSION IN ASIA AND A CHALLENGE FOR U.S.-CHINA RELATIONS

THE LIFE-AND-DEATH DECISIONS concerning Iraq were building to a fever pitch. Yet the rest of the world didn’t stop so that we could deal exclusively with that overwhelming challenge. North Korea had continued its insolent behavior, and it now appeared ready to raise the stakes with its nuclear program. In early October we were receiving reports that Pyongyang might be planning an underground nuclear test. The July missile incident had been bad enough, but exploding a nuclear device would be of another order of magnitude.

On the morning of October 9 the North Koreans made good on their threat. The event had been preceded by a frantic phone call to President Bush from Hu Jintao. The Chinese had been given only a one-hour notice by Pyongyang. The President reminded Hu that North Korea’s action was a slap first and foremost at Beijing and asked what China was prepared to do given the embarrassment that the North Koreans had caused. Hu didn’t answer directly, but there was little doubt that, this time, Kim Jong-il had gone too far.

Mike Hayden, the CIA director, called me at about ten o’clock on the night of October 8—already the ninth on the Korean peninsula—to say that the expected test had taken place. I immediately arranged a conference call of the other five ministers in the Six-Party Talks, reaching them in the wee hours of the morning. The Chinese foreign minister, Li Zhaoxing, said very little, but it was clear that we were united in the need to go to the United Nations. Within six days, reflecting the international community’s outrage over the incident, the UN Security Council unanimously passed Resolution 1718, with Beijing casting a “yes” vote in a direct strike at its client in Pyongyang. Sanctions targeting military equipment and luxury goods (which the regime fancied) bolstered the resolution, this time under Chapter VII authority.

Given the anger at Kim Jong-il, the resolution was not unexpected. But the real tests of our relationship with China were still to come: How far would Beijing go in pressuring the North? Could we count on the Chinese to do the right thing? Beijing understood the dangers of a nuclear North Korea but feared an unstable one even more. That tradeoff limited China’s willingness to pressure Pyongyang to the point that might bring the regime down. And the Chinese were aware too that Kim Jong-il’s collapse might hasten unification on the peninsula—totally on South Korea’s terms.

The Bush administration’s relationship with China had begun in an inauspicious manner with the downing of the U.S. reconnaissance plane in April 2001. But over the next few years, the interaction had become more stable and productive. The task of managing China’s rise as an economic and political power was critical to the future of the international system. Shortly after arriving at State, I asked Bob Zoellick to take special responsibility for nurturing the U.S.-China interaction. On his first trip to Beijing, Bob gave an important speech, encouraging China to become a “responsible stakeholder” in international affairs. It took some time for the Chinese to find a translation for the phrase, but they liked what it meant when they finally figured it out: the United States would welcome, not fear, China’s rise and wanted Beijing to be an active partner, commensurate with its growing influence.

That was easier said than done. The problem wasn’t that Beijing was too active. Rather, the Chinese exhibited a studied passivity that was detached in an almost Socratic way: they commented on issues but rarely worked to resolve them. I got so tired of hearing their standard refrain—“China will always act in the interest of peace and prosperity”—that one day I finally stopped Li in mid-sentence. “No, you won’t,” I said. “You’ll act in your own interest.” He was a bit startled, but I felt better having said it even though the next time he returned to the same empty language. I once asked a Mandarin-speaking colleague if there was something about the language that made the Chinese always seem to be speaking in slogans. He assured me that there was not.

Slowly but surely, though, we made progress in getting the Chinese actually to act in a useful manner. China reacted quickly after September 11, 2001, sharing information more fully than we’d expected about terrorists’ activities in Central Asia and in the ethnically troubled regions abutting their territory. Cooperation was delicate because, as with Chechnya in Russia, the terrorism issue was tangled up in an ethnic conflict—in this case with the Uighurs. Though some Uighurs were indeed extremists—we found a number of them fighting in Afghanistan—they were largely acting in opposition to Beijing’s heavy-handed repression of minorities.

The Chinese also came to appreciate the President’s patient and even-handed treatment of issues concerning China’s economic growth and the escalating demands in Washington to “punish the Chinese” for trade protectionism and currency manipulation. The huge trade imbalances were always a source of significant tension with the Congress. Only months before the 2004 election, the President refused to accept a “dumping” petition (a claim that a foreign country is “dumping” goods into another country’s economy at a lower price than that charged at home to gain market share) for sanctions against Beijing. The Chinese could see that George Bush had gone the extra mile to protect the relationship and would not succumb to easy opportunities to blame China for the United States’ economic difficulties. Unfortunately, Beijing rarely reciprocated.

The management of the economic relationship benefited from the arrival of Hank Paulson as secretary of the Treasury. At Goldman Sachs, Hank had been deeply involved in myriad matters concerning the Chinese economy and U.S.-China relations. He had excellent contacts across the Chinese government and was well regarded.

Hank came to see me shortly after his appointment. As we lunched on the eighth floor of the State Department, he somewhat hesitantly floated an idea. He wanted to establish a U.S.-China Economic Dialogue that he would cochair with the Chinese vice premier. The dialogue would address issues of the environment and trade as well as general economic issues. I learned later that he’d proposed the notion to the President. “I’m not sure how Condi will react,” the President had told Hank. “She might think that you’re trying to be secretary of state for economics.” He shouldn’t have worried. I was confident that State would retain influence over any key decision, and I would ask the deputy secretary to accompany Hank whenever the Dialogue met. Anyway, it seemed to me that a separate channel for the thicket of economic issues was a good idea. I was never a fan of linkage politics and didn’t really believe that threatening the U.S-China economic relationship in retaliation for differences in the security field or on human rights would work. We needed to solve economic issues with China because of their centrality to the health of our own and the global economy. Still, when necessary I could reinforce Hank’s message, and he could reinforce mine that the totality of the relationship mattered even if there were no actual quid pro quos. That said, I was by no means off the hook for purely economic issues.

So prevalent were these problems in my meetings in Beijing that, after yet another desultory conversation about China’s horrendous record on intellectual property rights (IPR), Hu had a surprise for me one day. “You’re always talking about IPR,” he said. “Let me introduce you to the woman who is in charge of making sure that piracy is prosecuted.” In walked Madame Wu Yi, a stoutly built woman standing no more than five feet tall. I had, in fact, met her before in my office as national security advisor. Back then we had laughed at both of us being included in Forbes’s “Most Powerful Women in the World” list. She was indeed formidable, a former petrochemical plant manager who had become the government’s dependable troubleshooter. Wu had, for instance, overseen the successful effort to contain the SARS pandemic in 2003. But the challenge she faced this time was on full display when on my way back to the hotel—no more than two miles from the Great Hall of the People—I saw many a street vendor selling pirated goods.

My portfolio intersected a great deal, therefore, with the economic team. In addition to a seamless relationship with Hank, I enjoyed a close and easy interaction with the trade representatives, Robert Portman and later Susan Schwab, with Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez, and with Sam Bodman at the Energy Department. As national security advisor, I had worked on economic issues, mostly concerning Russia, with Commerce Secretary Don Evans and Energy Secretary Spence Abraham. But as secretary, economic issues were a more regular part of my day, particularly trade problems.

In this work, Susan and I became and remain great personal friends, sharing a love of shopping and performances at the Kennedy Center. We also enjoyed a laugh once in a while at how much we stood out in the red suits that we wore among the dark-suited men in the room. Susan had a tough job because trade policy is always as much about domestic politics as it is international relations. I tried to help as much as possible, carrying many a message about opening the beef market in Korea, the pork market in Russia, and the financial services sector in China. “What do you want me to say?” I’d ask her in a customary phone call or meeting before I traveled.

“You know the script,” she’d answer. “There is nothing wrong with our—fill in the blank. Open your market!” She would then send me backup materials that made me more conversant about Russian claims of trichinosis in American pork or Korean concerns about mad cow disease in beef. I became more knowledgeable about such issues than I had ever expected—or wanted—to be.

The truth is, I never felt any of the tension that is often reported between State’s “strategic” view of China and that of the President’s economic advisors. Perhaps there were strains at lower levels, but at the Cabinet level I don’t remember a single conflict concerning economic policy toward China—or, for that matter, Russia or Europe—that required the intervention of the President. My colleagues respected my overall leadership of key relationships, and I understood their special task in managing the challenges of an integrated global economy.

The ease in our relationships was especially important given the increasing overlap of security and economic matters. As national security advisor, I’d added the treasury secretary to the regularly attending members of the National Security Council. We became very dependent on the Treasury to help pressure bad actors—utilizing the power of executive orders, Section 311 of the USA PATRIOT Act, and other measures to blacklist individuals and financial institutions for supporting WMD proliferation, money laundering, and terrorism.

Sitting in my cabin on a return trip from the Middle East, Stuart Levey, under secretary of the treasury for terrorism and financial intelligence, spoke with my counselor, Phil Zelikow, and me about what more we could do with regard to Iran. He indicated we could take the use of these tools to a new level by pressing international financial institutions and corporations—even in the absence of formal sanctions—to limit their investments in and dealings with Iran.

I’d been impressed with our ability to mobilize international financial action against North Korea without having to go to the United Nations. A briefing early in my tenure as secretary of state by David Asher, a senior advisor on East Asian affairs and the coordinator of our North Korea policy, had outlined, persuasively, the strengths of this approach. The process worked liked this: The Treasury would designate entities—front companies, for instance—that it identified as supporting terrorism or weapons proliferation or, in the case of Section 311 sanctions, as being “of primary money laundering concern.” Once “listed” by the Treasury, an entity would often be denied access to the U.S. financial system, and any other institution—say a German bank—that conducted business with it would risk being similarly restricted from the U.S. market.

The early results of such efforts had been dramatic. After the United States had designated the Macau-based Banco Delta Asia as an entity “of primary money laundering concern” for facilitating suspicious transactions on behalf of the North Korean regime, many financial institutions had reportedly severed their ties with Pyongyang. Few foreign banks were willing to risk losing access to the U.S. financial system simply to do business with the “Hermit Kingdom.”

Iran had much deeper ties to foreign countries and companies and was better integrated into the international system. If we could keep international banks and corporations from doing business with Iranian entities, it would help shut them out of the international financial market. And since the euro, dollar, and yen were the currencies that mattered in the global economy, we could avoid having to get the Russians and Chinese on board.

Although these measures were on occasion better in theory than in practice, they would nevertheless become one of our most important levers. We had to be careful not to use this economic tool for blatantly political purposes. Treasury was a vigilant guardian, making certain that the evidence gathered supported the contention that a suspicious entity was indeed supporting proliferation or terrorism.

The sanctions and other financial measures codified in Treasury rules and executive orders didn’t immediately cripple the Iranians, but they made their financial transactions more expensive and far more difficult. We eventually succeeded in blacklisting some of Iran’s biggest banks, including Bank Saderat Iran and Bank Sepah, as well as companies and individuals affiliated with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), which supervises the regime’s unconventional weapons program and is suspected of maintaining extensive ties to terrorist organizations throughout the Middle East. Given how deeply entrenched this military apparatus had become in economic affairs of the state, our thinking was that legitimate entities would want to limit their interactions with Iranian businesses—even those that had not been specifically blacklisted—to avoid running afoul of the U.S. financial system.

The process of getting other countries to join us in this effort was slower than we expected. But forced to choose between their activities in Iran or access to the United States financial system, many Western institutions opted to scale back their operations in Tehran. Hank Paulson and Stuart Levey’s leadership was crucial in achieving that result, and I understood why it worked. I’d been a corporate director for two financial institutions. Reputation was their most important asset, and no CEO wanted to face the board of directors and say that a banking partner had been found to be supporting the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.

IRONICALLY, THE COOPERATION with Treasury on sanctions that began with North Korea would come full circle as we tried to find a way back to the Six-Party Talks. The North Korean issue was both a blessing and a curse in our relationship with China. I was reminded of the Chinese characters wei ji, which seemed to capture the situation. Wei means “danger” and ji, “opportunity.” Together they form the Chinese word for “crisis.” The challenge with the North Korean nuclear problem was to turn the crisis into an opportunity rather than a danger to the larger relationship with Beijing and the region more broadly.

Although it faced a number of regional security challenges, Asia lacked robust institutions to deal with them. Unlike in Europe, where NATO provided a multilateral alliance for the democracies on the continent and across the Atlantic, the United States maintained separate bilateral defense arrangements with South Korea, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Thailand, and the Philippines. The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) gave multilateral cover to efforts to defuse so-called frozen conflicts from the Cold War era in the Caucasus and Eastern Europe. Though the organization was not always successful in its pursuits, in large part due to Russian intransigence, the OSCE could be helpful in lending legitimacy and focusing the diplomacy of multiple parties. There was no such thing in Asia. Rather, the Pacific Rim was a web of bilateral—and mostly bad—relationships: Japan with South Korea; South Korea with China; Japan with Russia; Japan with China. All bore the unhealed wounds of World War II. The United States thus became the hub of a wheel with spokes radiating in several directions. We succeeded over the course of the administration to cultivate better relations with each of the parties than they had with each other. But the challenge posed by North Korea, given the many competing interests and priorities among the key regional players regarding the fate of Pyongyang, pushed the bilateral approach to its limits.

The original rationale for the Six-Party Talks had been to prevent North Korea from playing the parties off one another. But it occurred to us that it could do more: it could become a security forum where the parties of Northeast Asia dealt with nuclear proliferation, terrorism, and ultimately even security disputes among themselves. There was no intention to replace the strong bilateral ties that we enjoyed, only to augment them. In fact, we had significantly modernized our defense alliances with South Korea and Japan. The implementation of the Defense Policy Review Initiative, for example, was an ambitious effort aimed to adapt the Japan-U.S. alliance to twenty-first-century security threats. There were also the regular meetings of the 2+2, a joint summit between the U.S. secretaries of state and defense and their Japanese counterparts. I held trilateral meetings with Japan and South Korea, as well as with Australia and Japan. We engaged our allies in numerous fora. Nevertheless, the President had immediately seen the potential of a multilateral forum through the Six-Party Talks that would include China.

This led to language in the Joint Statement of September 2005 that anticipated the establishment of a “peace and security mechanism” once the nuclear issue was resolved satisfactorily. We deliberately left open the timing and definition of what would constitute “satisfactorily” so that we could preserve flexibility in discussing broader issues beyond North Korea’s nuclear program when we deemed it appropriate.

In our most ambitious designs for the forum, we thought that the Six-Party Talks might ultimately lead to a final resolution of the Korean War, even a peace treaty. This would have been a big leap from where we were presently, but it was worth contemplating. What if the North could be persuaded to give up its nuclear weapons—really give them up verifiably—in exchange for the recognition that would come from actually ending the Korean War legally? Would the tyrannical regime of Kim Jong-il be strengthened by such a step, or would the end of the conflict deprive the dictator of a raison d’être in the way that the end of the Cold War destroyed East Germany? Would Kim be willing to open North Korea to international institutions such as the World Bank in a bid to improve the lives of his people, only to find that his vampire-like regime couldn’t live in the bright sunlight? It was a bold idea and one that I wasn’t sure would sit well with the President, who’d let it be known that he loathed Kim Jong-il.

We first discussed the new approach in an NSC meeting in early 2005. I laid out the case, careful to say that the North would not receive any concessions without serious movement toward disarmament. Not surprisingly, the Vice President was not persuaded, but he didn’t dismiss the notion out of hand. Don, on the other hand, was remarkably supportive. “Sometimes when you’ve got an insoluble problem [North Korean nukes], it is best to enlarge it—make it bigger,” he said helpfully. He promised to have the Pentagon look into what post–Korean War security arrangements might look like, both bilaterally and multilaterally. Don’s interest was sparked too by his view that the South Koreans needed to take more responsibility for their own defense and free up our forces. That was certainly one way to bring about that redistribution of obligations.

The President didn’t say much at the first session; he simply took in the arguments. But one evening at dinner at the White House, he turned to the issue again. “Do you think Kim will give up his weapons if he thinks we’ll let him survive?” he asked. I replied honestly that there was no way to know the answer to that question without testing the authoritarian leader. “Let’s test him, then,” the President said.

“Are you going to be comfortable with what we’ll have to do?” Steve asked, suggesting that such overtures would mean that “regime change” was off the table.

“No,” the President said. “It’s just regime change by other means. He’ll never survive if that place is opened up.”

In April 2006 Hu Jintao came to Washington for an official visit—with nearly all the trappings of a state visit. The distinction is lost on most people who are not steeped in the finer points of diplomatic protocol. But I can assure you it was of great importance to our guests, who knew precisely what activities were included in each level of recognition. A state visit entailed a South Lawn welcoming ceremony, complete with the Colonial Fife and Drum Corps, which was led by a drum major in a large hat made of bear fur. Those visits culminated with an elaborate state dinner in the State Dining Room. An official visit, on the other hand, might simply be an Oval Office meeting with the President, followed by a working lunch with members of the Cabinet. It was possible to mix and match a little, but state visits were rare; there were only eight in the Bush years, and they were reserved for leaders with whom we wanted to highlight our extraordinarily close relationship.

The Chinese presented a problem in this regard. They wanted all the trappings, but in a Washington environment where Chinese currency issues and trade surpluses made management of the relationship hard enough, it was better not to appear too close. That was true too from the point of view of our significant differences on human rights and religious freedom.

We decided on a South Lawn ceremony but a fancy lunch instead of a dinner. The Chinese were satisfied—or at least they were until a Falun Gong protester shouted out from the press riser as Hu was delivering his remarks. It was a moment of deep embarrassment both for us and for them—but Hu soldiered on and managed to appear unfazed by the outburst. Hopefully, he didn’t notice that the White House announcer had introduced him as the president of the Republic of China. That, of course, would be Taiwan.

Despite those hiccups, the visit proceeded smoothly, but the President encountered the problem that I had had in Beijing during my earlier visit. Every meeting with Hu was too large to discuss really sensitive matters, and the President had a particularly sensitive one in mind. He wanted to tell Hu to communicate the grand bargain to Kim Jong-il: give up your nuclear weapons, and we’ll give you a peace treaty that ends the Korean War and recognizes your regime. That message couldn’t be delivered with too many people around.

By the time we reached lunch, there had still been no opportunity to raise the issue. So the President became his own social secretary, rearranging the seating so that I sat on one side of Hu and he on the other. Then he politely turned to the others at the table: William Daley, the former commerce secretary; Michelle Kwan, the Olympic figure skater; and Richard Levin, the president of Yale. “Condi and I have something to talk to President Hu about,” the President said. “Excuse us for a moment.” The translator, Hu, the President, and I then conducted our conversation. Hu nodded his understanding and said that he would deliver the message. We reinforced the message through Henry Kissinger, who used his long and deep contacts with the Chinese to add his own assessment that the President was serious. It was a real turning point in how we approached the North Korean issue and in our interaction with Beijing.

From that moment on we pursued the denuclearization of North Korea with three goals in mind: increasing the transparency of Kim Jong-il’s nuclear program by “getting our people on the ground”; reducing the ability of the North to make, sell, or use nuclear weapons by retarding Kim’s capacity to produce plutonium; and, if Kim was willing to give up his weapons, ending the Korean conflict. And perhaps through diplomacy—not just confrontation—we could end the loathsome regime itself.

The President had made a strategic leap in his thinking. That was what permitted us—through Chris Hill, the assistant secretary for East Asian and Pacific affairs—to pursue active negotiations with the North that we’d eschewed in the first term. It was not a softening of policy toward the North; the President was not abandoning regime change in favor of the State Department’s well-known desire to negotiate with rogue regimes. Rather, it was a kind of strategic gamble—a safe one from the United States’ perspective because the North would get no real benefit until it demonstrated its willingness to give up its nuclear arsenal. North Korea was one of the world’s most sanctioned regimes, and those instruments would be the stick in our hands. We would remove constraints selectively if we made progress. And we were confident that with this bold approach we could keep the five parties of the six united in pressuring Pyongyang.

Ironically, the nuclear test gave us an opening to launch this strategy. I set out for Northeast Asia with three goals: to reassure our allies; to get support for full implementation of UN Security Council Resolution 1718, which had imposed stiff sanctions on the transfer of large-scale weapons, nuclear technology, and luxury goods into the North Korean state; and to deescalate the crisis expeditiously and move back to the Six-Party Talks. I’ve always thought that the argument about whether to “talk” to bad guys was misleading. Sometimes in diplomacy you have to negotiate with rogue regimes. You can’t overthrow every one of them by force, and diplomatic isolation, though perhaps psychologically satisfying, is not always effective. But if I have to negotiate with an adversary, I want to do it from a position of strength. Suddenly, because of the North’s aggression, we had the upper hand. What better time to engage Pyongyang than when it had lost all international support, including that of Beijing?

After an NSC meeting at which we established the policy framework for dealing with the crisis, I headed to Northeast Asia on October 17 and began my trip in Japan. The Japanese were relatively calm, reassured by the strong statements that the President had already made reaffirming the United States’ security commitments to them. My meeting with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was productive but rather typical of my usual engagements with the Japanese. It was quite unlike meetings with Prime Minister Koizumi, who had always been an animated personality. When engaging foreigners, the Japanese are known for their reserve—hiding their emotions and obscuring messages in impenetrable formality. That was never the case when we dealt with Koizumi, who was as ebullient, open, and candid an interlocutor as any of the leaders with whom we dealt. I’d first met him when he visited Camp David early in the President’s first term. There he talked openly about Japan’s stagnation and what he wanted to do to reform the economy and society—and he largely delivered. He also sang Elvis Presley songs; quoted lines from his favorite movie, High Noon; and tossed around a baseball with the President in full view of the press. He was a fierce defender of the U.S.-Japan alliance and of the Freedom Agenda, committing Japanese forces to support missions in both Afghanistan and Iraq.

By contrast, Prime Minister Abe was a more traditional and reserved leader, but I found him quite forceful on that particular day. When we talked about what North Korea had done, he was very clear that he had no intention of raising the prospect of a Japanese nuclear option should the North go further. “But,” he cautioned, “there are many who want to do exactly that, and their voices are getting louder.” It was useful to have those noises from Japan, so that Beijing could see that an unchecked North Korean nuclear program had real consequences. Still, Japan was deeply distrusted in the region, not just by China but by our South Korean friends as well. A little bit of posturing about what Japan might do was helpful—but not too much.

Tokyo wanted North Korea’s program stopped but feared that we might make a deal with Pyongyang before the tragic Japanese abduction cases could be resolved. While Foreign Minister Taro Aso mentioned the issue of the abductions at our joint press conference, I focused on the nuclear issue at hand and the Security Council resolution. I didn’t want to get a deal to halt North Korea’s nuclear program only to have to resolve the abduction issue fully before it could go into effect. It would be a constant balancing act throughout the next two years.

I left Japan having affirmed, as expected, the government’s willingness to carry out the comprehensive sanctions of UNSCR 1718 faithfully and to take the toughest possible stance against North Korea. What, though, of Seoul? The South Korean president, Roh Moo-hyun, was hard to read. He would sometimes say things that suggested an anti-American streak, such as his lecture to me on an earlier visit suggesting that South Korea needed to act as a balancer between China and the United States.

Then there was the incident the following year that summed up his erratic nature. As their meeting was coming to a close, Roh asked the President to state his willingness before the press to move toward normal relations with the North if it gave up its nuclear weapons. There was nothing new in that; it had been a part of the September 19 framework agreement of 2005. The President dutifully restated the promise when the press entered the room. Suddenly Roh turned to the President and said, “I think I might be wrong—I think I did not hear President Bush mention the—a declaration to end the Korean War just now. Did you say so, President Bush?” The President, somewhat surprised by this intervention, repeated his statement. “If you could be a little bit clearer in your message, I think—” Roh insisted. Now everyone was embarrassed. The shocked interpreter stopped translating, but Roh looked at her and insisted that she continue. After that drill the President called a halt to the press availability. The two leaders shook hands, and Roh smiled and thanked the President—seemingly unaware of how bizarre the moment had been.

Aware of his unpredictable behavior, I frankly did not know what to expect in South Korea. Through my first couple of years as secretary, I’d relied on my foreign minister colleague, Ban Ki-moon, to “interpret” his president. But Ban had left the ministry to become secretary-general of the United Nations. His replacement, Song Min-soon, was also very capable and broad in his thinking. Yet I had the sense that he was more reluctant to challenge his president’s unorthodox thinking.

I needn’t have worried. The North Koreans had succeeded in toughening Seoul’s stance considerably. There was not an inch of daylight between the United States and South Korea on the sanctions or their implementation. Even the usual pro-North protesters had disappeared from the streets this time.

In Beijing, I found a Chinese leadership that was tougher in private on North Korea than I’d ever seen them, if still engaged in sloganeering in public. Hu had sent the third-ranking Chinese official, State Councillor Tang Jiaxuan, to North Korea after the nuclear test. Tang’s visit “had not been in vain,” I was told, but I was not given further details at the time. I learned through other channels that the Chinese had quietly cut off the supply of spare military parts to Pyongyang. That news made me take more seriously my Chinese interlocutors’ insistence that they’d not let Kim Jong-il off the hook for his ill-advised nuclear gambit. The Chinese appeared willing to discuss the future of the North.

Tang had another message, though. Pyongyang knew that it had made a mistake—despite the public blustering about sanctions being an act of war. Would the United States consider a resumption of the Six-Party Talks? I’d agreed to allow Hill to attend a quiet trilateral meeting in Beijing with the Chinese and the North Koreans. I was furious when I learned that the Chinese had showed up only long enough to get the meeting started and then departed, leaving Chris in a bilateral with his North Korean counterpart. That night at my hotel, Chris had called from the putative trilateral to explain what was happening. “End it as soon as possible,” I said. “I’ll raise it with the Chinese tomorrow.”

I asked to see Hu with only a couple of advisors present. This time, the Chinese acceded to my request. He made very short work of the formal session, ended it, and we went into a back room, three on three. Sandy Randt, our ambassador, and Chris Hill accompanied me. I told Hu and Tang that China had to stop acting like the meeting planner and take real responsibility for making the Six-Party Talks work. The North’s aggressive act in testing a nuclear device had changed the circumstances. I couldn’t hold President Bush behind the current strategy if Beijing didn’t play its role more actively. But I said I thought the President might be willing to restart the talks based on a clear understanding with China of how we would proceed. This tactic of holding the President’s agreement in reserve was very important in getting things done. The President and I would often choreograph moments like this. “You deliver the message of what we want. But tell them you’ll have to convince me,” he would say. It was always good for the secretary of state to be the negotiator but to make clear that there was a hard-to-convince President who would ultimately make the decision. Hu asked if Chris could stay a day longer: China would work with us to develop a proposal to move the process forward.

MY FINAL STOP in Northeast Asia was Russia. The Kremlin had been generally cooperative in the Six-Party Talks and particularly interested in the peace-and-security mechanism, which, I suspected, it saw as a way to bolster Moscow’s relatively weak influence in the region.

I didn’t expect any difficulty concerning what to do about North Korea and I found none. There were, however, many other sticky issues to address, including a number of economic problems that were holding up negotiations on Russia’s accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO). And there were real storm clouds concerning Georgia, where the tensions were increasing between Putin and Saakashvili.

I arrived in Moscow and went to my hotel to await the phone call that Putin was ready to see me. Usually the call came within a matter of minutes—sometimes I just went ahead to the Kremlin knowing that any delay would be a short one. This time, though, we were told that the President wanted me to meet him at Meiendorf Castle, a presidential retreat just outside Moscow in Barvikha. Fine, I thought, patiently watching tennis on a Russian sports channel and working a little bit on my language “ear.” After waiting around for two hours after the scheduled appointment, I was told that we should leave for the meeting.

“What is this about?” I asked Bill Burns, our ambassador in Moscow. He surmised that Putin was testy and trying to send a message that he was not to be taken for granted. And I am to be taken for granted? I put my ego aside and my smile on.

When we walked in the front door of the estate, I was stunned. There, around a huge rectangular table, sat the entire Russian National Security Council. I’d experienced this once before as national security advisor, when Putin had gleefully invited me to meet them at his dacha. “I’ll bet you’ve always wanted to see what this was like,” he said, vaguely referencing my academic background as a specialist on Russian security affairs. I didn’t know then whether it was meant to be a kind gesture or a manipulative one.

This time I had no doubt. “We’re having a birthday party for Dmitri and Igor,” he said, referring to the future Russian president and national security advisor. “We thought you might like to join us.” Bill and I then sat through a bizarre encounter with the Russians, drinking special reserve Georgian wine—the likes of which they’d just embargoed in an effort to cripple the Georgian economy—and listening to their crude jokes about the “Gruzini,” a Russian term for Georgians.

At one point the discussion turned to terrorism, Putin feigning concern for the inmates at Guantánamo. “You have to treat them humanely,” he said. I could barely keep down my dinner, thinking of what the KGB officer had undoubtedly done to people vastly more innocent than the residents of Guantánamo.

Finally, I said, “Mr. President, this has been fun but we have a number of things to talk about. Could I talk to you alone?” In this more private discussion, he wanted to include Lavrov, which was fine, and I brought along Bill Burns. We repaired to a room adjacent to the increasingly raucous party.

THE DISCUSSION STARTED OFF cordially enough. We quickly went through a list of Russian legislation on intellectual property and market access that needed to change, Putin explaining that it would be easier to change after the United States had signed the accession agreement admitting Russia into the WTO. “It will give us an argument with the Duma,” he said, empowering the puppet legislature with more authority than it had. Nonetheless, it did make sense that there were interest groups that needed to be appeased. I promised to take the idea back to the President and see if we could go ahead with the agreement before the Russian legislation to conform their laws to WTO standards passed.

I then changed the topic to Georgia and simply said that I had a message from the President. “We are concerned about the rhetoric toward Tbilisi and the embargo,” I said calmly. “Any move against Georgia will deeply affect U.S.-Russian relations.” In an instant Putin stood up, peering over me. “If Saakashvili wants war, he’ll get it,” he said. “And any support for him will destroy our relationship too.” It was a physical posture clearly meant to intimidate. So I stood up too and, in my heels, rose to five feet eleven over the five-foot-eight or so Putin. I repeated the President’s message. For a distended moment we stood there face to face—well, almost.

Lavrov decided to defuse the situation, and we soon returned to the agenda. I softened my posture and voice too, saying that we just didn’t want any misunderstandings between us about the importance of Georgia to the United States. I said that I would talk with Sergei about reenergizing the “friends of Georgia” to look for a solution. There the confrontation ended, and Bill and I left. “He can be scary,” I said to Bill, who kept his own counsel.

WITHIN TWO WEEKS North Korea had agreed to resume the Six-Party Talks, but we did not rush to arrange a first session. I needed time to strengthen the resolve of the other parties and test Beijing’s commitment.

That chance came in Hanoi three weeks later, on November 18. The Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit was my favorite multilateral event. The organization united the vibrant economies of the Pacific Rim, starting in Chile at South America’s tip and circling up, around, and all the way back down to New Zealand. It was always reassuring that the global economy could depend on these engines of growth and that the United States stood as the glue between the two continents. The talk of growth, trade, and private enterprise stood in stark contrast, for instance, to the Summit of the Americas, where the likes of Hugo Chávez and Néstor Kirchner spewed anti-capitalist, anti-American venom.

This particular summit carried even deeper messages about the power of markets given its location in Vietnam. I remember my first encounter with the Vietnamese, a meeting of the Southeast Asian states on the margins of our first UN General Assembly in 2001. “The most important thing for Vietnam is to join the World Trade Organization,” the prime minister had said. Ho Chi Minh must be spinning in his grave, I thought. Then, seeing Vietnam for the first time during the APEC meeting, I was sure that the immediate victor in the long and painful war that I knew as a child was indeed turning in his still carefully preserved mausoleum.

I don’t know what I expected but Vietnam was the greatest surprise of my entire time in government. The incredibly young population—there seemed to be no older people—was ambitious, entrepreneurial, and very pro-American. President Bush couldn’t go anywhere without a gaggle of young women defying the Secret Service and getting close enough to take a picture with their high-tech cameras. One of the best meals that we had anywhere in the world was in Ho Chi Minh City, where a young restaurateur had taken over a deep bunker, made it into a wine cellar, and brought in a great chef from Italy. The stock exchange that we visited was still small but thriving, with serious-looking traders fresh from business school. Only the names—Hue, Haiphong Harbor—reminded me of what had transpired there. Hearing them stirred unexpected emotions in me. Colin Powell once said that the United States needed to see Vietnam as a country, not a war. It wasn’t hard to make that transformation when standing on the streets of the vibrant young nation.

The political situation had not kept pace with the economic boom, however. Vietnam’s Communist Party, the VCP, was hanging on through the usual means: repression of opposition and punishment of those who crossed the line into political dissent. There had been a little—very little—progress on religious freedom, even for nonregistered churches. But there was a lot of work to do to push the VCP toward political change. Still, the Vietnamese version of repression was less visible than that of many other authoritarian states, and the people did seem to enjoy a modicum of personal freedom.

Even the leaders of Vietnam seemed to sense the irony of the Communist Party’s devotion to free markets. The foreign minister called me aside after the meeting with the prime minister. He had a favor to ask: “Would the President just go over and meet with the general secretary of the Communist Party? He can make a lot of trouble if he feels ignored.” I wondered why the request hadn’t been made earlier but raised it with the President and Steve. We decided there wasn’t much downside, forgetting about the “setting” for the meeting. I would shortly see why advance people are so important. We walked into the room where President Bush and the Vietnamese president were seated under a giant statue of Ho Chi Minh and the general secretary seated to their side. “The great leader foresaw the cooperation between the United States and Vietnam,” intoned the general secretary. When exactly did he foresee that? I wondered. The meeting was mercifully short. There were still some “contradictions,” as Karl Marx would have put it, to be sorted out in Vietnam.

The morning of the APEC summit two days later gave me the chance to lay the groundwork for the resumption of the Six-Party Talks on our terms. I asked the Vietnamese to host a breakfast for the Chinese, Russians, South Koreans, Japanese, and me. I asked that Australia, Indonesia, and the Philippines (as the head of ASEAN) be included. The idea was to talk about security in the region. Everyone showed up, and it couldn’t have gone better. The Chinese heard every foreign minister, including Russia’s, deliver a strong message in support of the Six-Party Talks but with the proviso that it had to achieve something. “North Korea has endangered the whole international system,” minister after minister said. The Chinese were stunned at the ferocity of the condemnation of Pyongyang. They had received the message, and as we ended the year I was confident that we would find a way back to the talks—and a chance to do something about one of the two big proliferators.

I felt good too about our prospects concerning the other one. On the heels of the change in U.S. policy in May, we’d finally united the P5+1 to seek and pass a resolution in the UN Security Council in July. The Chapter VII resolution for the first time demanded that Iran suspend all enrichment-related and reprocessing activities, and it gave Iran by the end of August to comply or face possible economic and diplomatic sanctions.

As is almost always the case in international politics, however, the deadline came and went. Still, we were making progress in pushing toward another resolution. In fact, in the fall we’d make yet another push to get the Iranians to the negotiating table—and we almost succeeded.

In advance of the UN General Assembly that September, and after talking to the NSC Principals, I went to the President with a plan to take another step with our allies in the P5+1. I wanted to use the meetings in September either to get the Iranians to the table or, failing that, to get a tougher resolution. I personally developed a calendar of events and moves that we would make from the summer until the meetings in New York: steps we took unilaterally were in one color; actions by our allies in another; UN Security Council moves in a third. I took the proposed schedule to a breakfast meeting with the President and Steve. It was so complicated and had so many colors and lines that Steve said what the President was thinking: “I can’t make heads or tails of this.” Okay, so maybe I’d gotten a little elaborate with my calendar.

The point was actually pretty simple. We’d turn up the heat on the Iranians by placing financial restrictions on a few more entities, hopefully in concert with the Europeans, then give them a face-saving way to change course. It would require a little Kabuki theater, though.

Tehran contended that it could not suspend without “negotiations” first. That was obviously unacceptable to us, since suspension was a precondition for our involvement in the talks. We decided to have Javier Solana, the EU foreign policy chief, negotiate a suspension with the Iranians, Europeans, Russians, and Chinese at the table. I would then join the talks immediately after the suspension was agreed. All this was to happen within a matter of a day or so at the UNGA in New York. Javier communicated the idea to his Iranian counterpart, Ali Larijani. Everything was set.

Two days before I left for New York, my consular affairs officer came in to say that the Iranians had suddenly requested extra visas and there wasn’t time to process them. This is a ruse, I thought. I told her to keep our consulate in Bern open throughout the night and get it done. When the Iranians were presented with all the visas they’d requested, Larijani suddenly needed another one for a second translator. “Get it done,” I told Consular Affairs.

Now out of excuses about visas, Larijani refused to come to New York anyway. We still don’t know what happened. Some reporting suggested that he didn’t want to negotiate while his radical new president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was in New York for the first time. The Russians said that there had been a last-minute refusal by Ayatollah Khamenei to go along with the gambit. Whatever the case, the Iranians managed to unite the P5+1 even further. It took several months of haggling, but the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 1737 two days before Christmas. It was the toughest yet.

Resolution 1737 condemned Iran for failing to stop its enrichment activities and imposed sanctions that would remain in effect until the regime fully complied. The resolution targeted Iran’s ability to import the materials it needed to advance its nuclear and ballistic missile programs, and it froze the assets of individuals and companies with ties to the programs. Importantly, it created a Security Council committee to manage the list of entities subject to financial restrictions, and it granted the committee flexibility to add to the list over time, thus enabling the sanctions to become progressively tougher without additional resolutions. It also laid down another deadline, sixty days this time, by which Iran would have to verifiably halt its nuclear program or be subject to “further appropriate measures” by the Security Council.

Both proliferators were under pressure by the end of 2006. I felt that our willingness to energize the diplomatic track and show flexibility was paying off. I was under no illusion that the unity of the international community would last indefinitely or that the Iranians and North Koreans were ready to make a deal. But we were in much better shape than we’d been in January. Even conservative lawmakers and commentators were prepared to give us a little space to make the new approaches work.

Shortly after my announcement that the United States would join the negotiations with Iran if it verifiably halted its nuclear activities, I held one of my periodic off-the-record sessions with the “Fox Tong,” a group of Fox News personalities. I often asked journalists to come for a session of this kind so that I could explain what we were doing without creating untimely news stories. David Ignatius, Tom Friedman, David Brooks, and others would join in from time to time because it also gave them a context for the policies that were emerging. The Fox group usually included William Kristol, Charles Krauthammer, Jim Angle, Mort Kondracke, Brit Hume, Fred Barnes, and Juan Williams. To my surprise there wasn’t much criticism of the shift—skepticism, certainly, but no accusations of having gone soft. The sessions allowed me to gauge the politics surrounding our decisions—but these were also quality thinkers who made me sharper in assessing and defending the policy. This was particularly true of my interactions with Krauthammer, who is simply one of the best minds in D.C. At the session concerning Iran the consensus view could be summed up as “Hope it works.” It was well understood that we didn’t have the bandwidth for unilateral confrontation with Iran and North Korea, given the situation in Iraq. The strategy had, at the very least, provided multilateral management tools to address the proliferation threat. In a year that was memorable for its troubles, that was a welcome achievement.