No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington

EPILOGUE

AS THE WHITE HOUSE Soviet specialist at the end of the Cold War, I witnessed the liberation of Eastern Europe, the unification of Germany on Western terms, and the beginning of the peaceful collapse of the Soviet Union. It is difficult in retrospect to remember just how unlikely those events once seemed as the Soviet Union cast its shadow across Eastern Europe. Few people personally remember the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and fewer still the Berlin crisis of 1948. When I returned to Stanford in 2009, I was startled when I realized that some of my students had not even been born when the Berlin Wall fell, and many had never seen the hammer and sickle fly above the Kremlin.

As the Cold War’s darkest days fade from memory, what once seemed impossible now seems to have been inevitable. In reality, the peaceful resolution of the Cold War was the product of farsighted decisions made at a time of great uncertainty. After World War II, the United States and its allies set out a vision and built institutions to guide us through the “long-twilight struggle” to victory. The foundation of that strategy was an unyielding trust in the ability of free nations to outperform and then to outlast those that denied their people freedom.

In my last major television interview on Meet the Press, David Gregory thanked me for all the time I’d given to the program. He told me that it was my twentieth appearance on the show. Twenty times. My God, that’s a lot of Sunday mornings. David asked a version of a question that I’ve been asked repeatedly since: What will be the legacy of the Bush administration? Often accompanying such queries is the implication—well, more than an implication—that the turmoil of 9/11, Afghanistan, Iraq, and the Middle East would forever scar the eight years that we served. I’ve answered honestly that my own experiences affirm that “history has a long arc,” and I do believe that “it bends toward justice.”

The past decade has tested that proposition and those who have been responsible for leadership of the country through these turbulent times. There have been three great shocks to the international system since 2001. The first two, 9/11 and the global financial crisis, bookend the presidency of George W. Bush and strike at the heart of our nation’s most vital interests—our security and our prosperity. The third is the Arab Spring.

Since the beginning of this historic year, the people of the Arab world have challenged the autocratic order in at least a half dozen states. Some governments have fallen; others teeter; a few have regained their balance. Still others have not yet faced the unrest but brace for the day that will undoubtedly come. The desire for freedom will persist until it is secured.

As Americans, this should not surprise us. The United States has a view of how human history ought to unfold. In 1776 we claimed our inalienable rights and insisted on their universality. As the United States grew into a great power and then a superpower, it has not been neutral in the struggle between freedom and tyranny.

The events of the Arab Spring have vindicated the belief in the universality of our values. Those commentators who today reduce the demands of the people in the streets of Tunis and Cairo to only economic grievances do them a disservice. Certainly people want a better life, but they can only demand it and hold their government accountable if they have a right to change their leaders. If they can’t do that peacefully, they will turn to violence to achieve their goals.

The events of September 11 brought the practical implications of that dynamic into sharper focus. The terrorists responsible for those devastating attacks hailed from countries where oppressive governments had closed peaceful outlets for political reform, creating conditions ripe for violent extremism. These terrorists were able to operate in weak or failing states that allowed them to recruit, train, and plan their attacks with relative impunity. President Bush and his foreign policy team understood those implications and adjusted course after 9/11. We pursued the Freedom Agenda not only because it was right but also because it was necessary. There is both a moral case and a practical one for the proposition that no man, woman, or child should live in tyranny. Those who excoriated the approach as idealistic or unrealistic missed the point. In the long run, it is authoritarianism that is unstable and unrealistic. This is because every dictator fears the “Ceausescu moment,” described to us by the Romanians when President Bush visited Bucharest in 2002.

In 1989 Nicolae Ceausescu, then secretary general of the Romanian Communist Party and overseer of a repressive regime, went into a square in Bucharest thinking he had sufficiently quelled the growing discontent in his country. His speech began with a recitation of all he’d done for the Romanian people. At the time revolutions were spreading throughout Eastern Europe—in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, East Germany, and beyond.

As he was speaking, an old lady suddenly yelled, “Liar!” Then ten people joined her, then one hundred, then one thousand, and soon one hundred thousand. An unnerved Ceausescu turned to run but the military delivered him to the revolutionaries instead. The hated Romanian leader and his wife, Elena, were executed.

That is the Ceausescu moment, when the only thing standing between the dictator and his people—fear—breaks down, and there is nothing left but anger. An old lady yells “liar,” a policeman refuses to fire at the Berlin Wall, a soldier turns his tank turret away from the crowd in the square, and suddenly the tides have turned in favor of the oppressed. We had hoped that the authoritarians of the Middle East, particularly our friends, would change the basis of their relationship to their people before the Ceausescu moment came to them. But some of them did not. As I write, people across the region are clamoring for their liberty and demanding a voice in how they will be governed.

While freedom and democracy sustain each other, they are not the same thing. Democracy is both a process and a system of governance that protects freedom. The process is begun with elections—a first step toward stable democracy. The harder task is to construct institutional arrangements that define the relationship of the individual’s rights to the state’s authority and sustain that contract over time.

The United States, more than any other country, should understand that the journey from freedom to stable democracy is a long one and that its work is never done. After all, when the Founding Fathers said, “We the people,” they didn’t mean me. My ancestors were counted as three-fifths of a man in the deal that permitted the founding of this country. My father had trouble registering to vote in Alabama in 1952 due to poll tests and harassment of black voters. And I didn’t have a white classmate until I moved from Birmingham to Denver at age twelve.

Still, we are also an example of why institutions matter in moving toward justice. When Martin Luther King or Rosa Parks—one a recognized national leader, the other an ordinary citizen—wanted to challenge the status quo, they could appeal directly to America’s own principles. They didn’t have to ask the United States to be something else, only to be what it professed to be. That’s the value of democratic institutions, even if their promise is not completely fulfilled immediately. At first, constitutions or bills of rights may exist only on paper. But they exist. And as people begin to appeal to them, to use them, to insist on respect for them by those in positions of authority, these institutions gain legitimacy and power.

Yet political change is necessary but not sufficient in itself for the success of democracy. When people choose their leaders they tend to expect more of them in terms of economic prosperity and social justice. That is why support for democracy must be accompanied by support for development. The Millennium Challenge Corporation was created with this in mind. Those who are governing wisely and democratically can use foreign assistance to deliver for their people—better health care, education, and prospects for employment. Ultimately, good leaders will free their economies and their markets and attract private investment. But they need help at the start, and our investment in them will pay off many times over as the number of stable, responsible democracies grows.

It is why, having helped Afghans and Iraqis win their freedom, we have an ongoing stake in the maturation of their nascent institutions. If the governments are called to fulfill the contract their people have with them, the democracies will over time stabilize and mature. Citizens will use those institutions to address their grievances and to pursue remedies. Most important, they will know that the ultimate weapon is in their hands: they can change their leaders peacefully. And in time, terrorists and hostile neighbors will find it more difficult to shake the foundations of these governments.

Nowhere is this truer than in the Middle East where the Arab Spring has freed millions. Americans can help to channel the developments there in a positive direction. We have influence with the militaries in Egypt and Tunisia; with civil society and political activists, many of whom we’ve helped to train through America’s nongovernmental institutions; and with entrepreneurs and businesspeople who need a way to access the power of international markets to deliver jobs and prosperity.

In other places, our friends—particularly the monarchs of the region—still have a chance to reform now before it’s too late. The United States can coax these monarchies to adopt constitutions and reforms that give greater voice to their people. The changes will strengthen moderate voices across the region, including in the Palestinian territories. The Palestinians have made great strides toward building democratic and accountable governing structures—even in the absence of statehood. The United States and the international community—but most especially, Israelis and Arabs—have an interest in providing a framework toward peace in which those hard-won reforms can be sustained.

And to our enemies, the Syrian and Iranian regimes, we should say, “Your time has come. Whatever follows you is unlikely to be worse, for your people and for the world, than who you have been.”

To say that democracy is ultimately stabilizing is not to say that the pathway will be smooth and without setbacks, even violence. Because reform has come late in the Middle East, the most organized forces are the extremists who gathered in radical mosques and madrassas while authoritarians pushed decent political forces out of the public square. The radical Islamists will likely contest in elections. But perhaps it’s better that way. In the light of day, they will have to answer questions about individual rights and religious freedom and about the role of women. They will have to explain too how they intend to improve people’s lives. When the only vision they have to offer is one of oppression and destruction, they will surely fail, removing not only the threat they pose to the region but also across the globe.

It all sounds like very heavy lifting, and as I’ve traveled abroad since leaving office, people ask me if the United States is still prepared to be a catalyst for democratic change and a partner for those who seek it. The question is often sparked by the second of those great international shocks: the financial crisis and its aftermath. Is America out of steam, confidence, and optimism? I don’t believe that we are—and I don’t believe we have a choice to retire to the sidelines.

I told President Bush a few months before leaving office that people were tired of us. After 9/11 we dared to think in broad historical strokes, believing that many of the old assumptions about stability and security no longer held. I realize now that it may have seemed unsettling—and exhausting—at home and abroad. But the legacy of 9/11 is a reminder that indeed our interests and our values are linked. That lesson was never more evident than when the consequences of the freedom gap in the Middle East exploded here at home.

As secretary of state I was always aware of the constraints of the world as it is and resolved to practice the art of the possible. But I also tried not to lose sight of the world as it could be, and insisted on a path toward that end. This is the long-term work of diplomacy. History will judge how well we did. I can live with that, and I am grateful for the chance to have tried.