No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington

3 POLICY BEGINS

EVERY PRESIDENT COMES to office determined to set a new course in foreign policy. This tends to be the case even when there is no change in party. When George H. W. Bush entered the White House in 1989, Brent Scowcroft instructed the NSC staff to initiate a series of policy reviews. The purpose was to give time to get new people into place and, in the case of European and Soviet policy, to slow down what was widely seen as Ronald Reagan’s too-close embrace of Mikhail Gorbachev in 1988. The reviews, two of which I personally managed, seethed with distrust of the changes taking place in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Yet the rapid collapse of communism got our attention in time to overcome our inherent caution. Fortunately, no one remembers that we wrote policy guidance questioning Gorbachev’s motives and setting up careful “tests” of Moscow’s intentions months before the collapse of Soviet power in Eastern Europe and the unification of Germany.

When there is a change of party on the heels of a hardfought campaign, the desire to seize the agenda is, of course, more pronounced. The Bush approach had been laid out in a series of speeches during the campaign, and we immediately set about executing the initiatives.

The most comprehensive of those speeches had been the governor’s appearance at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum in November 1999. The venue was as important as the speech, since the event represented a kind of laying on of hands by the Reagan establishment, in particular Nancy Reagan. She couldn’t have been more gracious and remained so throughout the administration.

At the time, though, one subtext in the campaign was whether the presidency of George W. Bush would be, in effect, a second term for George H. W. Bush. This had important ramifications not only in domestic policy concerning taxes (Bush 41’s nonfulfillment of his “no new taxes” pledge still rankled many Republicans, who were hoping for better from Bush 43) but also in foreign policy, where George H. W. Bush was viewed with suspicion in conservative circles. Until the end, the policies of the two men would be compared and contrasted: realism versus idealism; diplomacy versus confrontation; compromise versus absolutism; prudence versus plunging. In fact, I regarded—and still regard—the hyperbolic comparisons, drawn in stark shades of black and white, as unfair. Yes, there were differences in style and temperament, with George W. Bush quicker to anger and less given to shades of gray. But to the degree that the differences were sharp (and they sometimes were), it was in large part because 1989 and 2001 were worlds apart. George H. W. Bush is and always should be remembered for his tactful personal diplomacy that ended the Cold War. The successful—though inconclusive—Persian Gulf War is also part of his impressive legacy.

Yet the defining moments that laid the foundation for victory in the Cold War had come in the dark days of Josef Stalin and Nikita Khrushchev. Ronald Reagan had issued the final challenge to the Soviet Union at the dawn of the 1980s, calling it an evil empire and pushing through huge defense budgets that spent it into the Ice Age.

By the time George H. W. Bush came to power, the Soviet Union was a spent force. It was not easy to shepherd a dying but still dangerous superpower to collapse. Unifying Germany on Western terms and sustaining the forward momentum of freedom in Eastern Europe was difficult. But the Soviet Union was in its twilight, and enlightened leaders such as Mikhail Gorbachev and his foreign minister, Eduard Shevardnadze, knew it. In 2001 it fell to George W. Bush to confront a new and rising threat in al Qaeda and its extremist kin, full of bravado and revolutionary zeal, and to lead at the beginning of a new and dangerous historical epoch.

In 1999 the scope of that challenge was not yet evident. The Reagan Library speech laid out a broad, if somewhat conventional, foreign policy agenda, including a plan for dealing with great powers such as Russia and China. It also anticipated the arrival of India, the world’s largest democracy, as a power of global significance, and vowed to strengthen U.S. ties by increasing trade and investment. I later elaborated on those themes in a Foreign Affairs article that winter. But a centerpiece of the foreign policy agenda drew on the governor’s knowledge of and interest in Latin America and as such represented a departure. In a speech in Miami, Florida, in August 2000, the governor spoke about the centrality of the “neighborhood.” He vowed to make Latin America a fundamental concern of his foreign policy, emphasizing strong ties to Mexico, renewed promotion of hemispheric free trade, and sustained support for freedom and democracy across the Americas.

Our first opportunity to put this promise into practice came in February 2001 with the President’s first foreign trip. The President’s foreign itinerary is made up both of trips that he must take—for example, to NATO summits and G8 meetings—and trips that he makes to push an initiative. The decision to make the first trip a visit to President Vicente Fox at his ranch in San Cristóbal, Mexico, was meant to send a strong signal that Latin America would be first among equals in Bush foreign policy.

The trip was intended to showcase not just the pivotal importance of Latin America in general but that of Mexico in particular. Fox and Bush had met in Dallas shortly after they had been elected. They’d sketched out a broad agenda: strengthening trade, modernizing the border, reforming immigration, and pushing a free-market approach for the entire region. Years before as governors, they’d known each other and had great mutual respect.

Mexico was in the midst of a democratic transformation, marked by Fox’s election win, the first time the opposition party had triumphed in seventy-one years. Fox’s predecessor, Ernesto Zedillo, had ushered in a new brand of clean personal politics, telling people that he intended to leave office no richer than when he’d arrived. Fox stood for the next important step: Mexico’s institutional maturation as a democracy and the peaceful transfer of power from one party to another.

George W. Bush understood the significance of Vicente Fox, and he wanted to be his friend and supporter as he took on the entrenched interests and corruption that prevented Mexico from moving forward economically and socially. Mexico and the United States have a long, mostly unhappy history with each other. We fully intended to highlight Mexico’s importance and U.S. humility.

On the morning of February 16, 2001, we boarded Air Force One at 8:00 A.M. We landed in Guanajuato, Mexico, and were met by Fox and his soon-to-be wife, Marta Sahagún, who’d been his press secretary. Fox is a giant of a man, dark and handsome, and it struck me that he could easily have been cast in a movie as a Mexican hacienda owner of the late nineteenth century. In fact, he’s a former international businessman who was the chief executive for Coca-Cola de México and speaks perfect English. Nonetheless, he looks as though he’d be right at home on a great stallion, and in fact, riding is an activity that he loves. He was reportedly disappointed when the White House let it be known that there would be no horseback riding, something President Bush did not enjoy.

Before going to the ranch, we stopped to say hello to President Fox’s eighty-one-year-old mother. We all waited in the car while the two presidents went into a house that spoke volumes about Fox’s modest beginnings. The short ride to the ranch was pleasant, with Mexican citizens out in significant numbers to greet the President. They were waving U.S. flags. Well, in every country the people along the motorcade route wave U.S. flags, unless they are protesting something that the United States has done. This time the spectators were all friendly.

We arrived at the ranch, which didn’t look like a ranch at all—at least not my conception of one. It was a magnificent series of houses arrayed across a picturesque Mexican landscape. The discussions were held on the partially enclosed multicolored-tile-and-white-stucco patio of the largest house, overlooking the serene countryside. Sitting around the large wooden table, I thought, All is going exactly as it should. U.S.-Mexican relations were off to a terrific start.

About an hour into the discussion, I caught sight of Ari Fleischer, our peripatetic press secretary. Ari had sharp elbows and battled with the press on a daily basis, but our relationship was cordial and sound. We had talked early on about the need for the national security advisor and the press secretary to develop a relationship of trust. Ari would stop in every morning to get the latest updates and develop a line of attack—or defense—on the issues of the day. I told him that there would be times when I couldn’t talk about issues but that I would never deceive him.

I couldn’t imagine what Ari wanted, but he was clearly motioning, with increasing urgency, for me to leave the table and talk to him. I was reluctant since I was seated next to the President. But Ari was by now in some measure of distress. When I excused myself and reached him, he asked, “Why are we bombing Baghdad?”

“What?” I said.

“The press is telling me that we are bombing Baghdad,” Ari said. “Their cell phones are going crazy.”

I went back toward the table and motioned to Colin Powell, then Karen Hughes. Pretty soon it looked like one of those television shows where one participant after another leaves until there is only one. I can’t imagine what the Mexicans thought. Here we were, writing a new chapter in U.S.-Mexican relations amid some very obvious distractions. The President finally stopped in midsentence and asked rather agitatedly, “What’s going on?” I whispered to the President that something was happening in Iraq and I would get back to him. Needless to say, the moment was pretty much ruined.

I made a series of panicked phone calls to Washington and got Steve Hadley on the phone. He called the Pentagon and learned that during a “routine” overflight of Iraqi airspace we’d gotten, as he put it in his understated way, “a little close to the air defenses of Baghdad.” We had, it seemed, set off every air-raid siren within shouting distance of the city. There wasn’t much time for a full accounting of exactly how that had happened. We hurriedly wrote press guidance that explained that the United States, as a part of its obligations under the armistice terms that had ended the Persian Gulf War in 1991, was flying patrols to keep Saddam Hussein from using his aircraft against his own people or his neighbors. They were called “no-fly zones.”

The press conference was a disaster. The President gamely made his points about the importance of U.S.-Mexican relations, our respect for Mexican democracy, and his desire for partnership with Vicente Fox. No one was listening. “Why are you bombing Baghdad?” “Are you going to war?” “Did you tell President Fox that you were going to war?” I remember feeling sick from the afternoon heat, which was suddenly very pronounced. And I was so embarrassed by what was happening. The two presidents finished the press conference, and we said our good-byes.

The relationship between Fox and Bush never really reached its full potential. There were many reasons for that, including outsized Mexican expectations about immigration reform and our inability to deliver any change on this critical issue, despite the President’s deep desire to do so.

There were also disappointments on both sides after September 11, 2001, shifted our focus and required from Fox support of U.S. priorities that he could not give. Indeed, 9/11 occurred just days after the Mexican state visit later in the year, which had included an historic joint meeting between the two countries’ cabinets. The relationship with Mexico seemed destined to be overshadowed. Yet I have to think that that first encounter left its mark and contributed to the sense of lost opportunities that would follow.

That night we went to President Bush’s ranch in Crawford, Texas. We were all a little shell-shocked. The television stations were playing the “attack” over and over, and Saddam Hussein, who was a master of public relations, Middle East style, had trotted out as many bloody bodies and scenes from hospitals as he could muster. The strikes against the air defenses had taken place near Baghdad, but it was unlikely that they had resulted in the civilian casualties now chronicled on the news. The President said, “I’m going to call Dick,” perhaps seeking reassurance from an old foreign policy hand. The Vice President said that from his point of view it had been a good message, showing that we’d be tough on Saddam Hussein. I thought that it showed, once again, the United States’ arrogance toward our Mexican hosts.

The next morning I was astonished to see that the New York Times had taken the line that the Vice President had predicted. The air strikes had “sent a timely signal,” the paper said, that the new administration would “not shy away from using force to contain any new Iraqi military threat.” The Washington Post called the strikes “a welcome reinvigoration of an existing policy that had been allowed to slide.” I walked into breakfast with the President. “Mr. President,” I said, “I want you to know that I know the difference between lucky and good.”

We returned to Washington and conducted a postmortem on what had happened. A few days before departing for Mexico, the air force briefed Steve Hadley and me about an upcoming no-fly-zone mission. The general who briefed us did so in a very matter-of-fact way. Because it was our first experience with no-fly zones, we failed to ask a few key questions, such as “How routine is a mission of this type?” and “How close will it come to Baghdad?” The answers would have been “Not very routine” and “Very close.” Even so, I doubt that the general would have said that we were likely to get into a “hot” fire exchange with weapons being fired. I blamed myself for not asking those questions. I should have known, I thought. How many times in my previous White House role had I seen the impact of unforeseen events involving military force? How many times had I taught about unintended consequences? That episode was an invaluable lesson.

The incident in Mexico was a reminder of the festering problem of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and its threat to our interests. Almost from the very beginning Iraq was a preoccupation of the national security team. Our focus was not, as common wisdom now has it, on the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. Rather, the early efforts were aimed at trying to strengthen the containment regime that had been put into place after the Gulf War. That war had ended inconclusively with Iraqi forces expelled from Kuwait but the regime still in power. The assessment of the George H. W. Bush administration in 1991 that Saddam was so weakened that he would either fall from power or stay in his box turned out to be wrong.

The no-fly zones were just one part of a complex web of constraints that the international system relied upon to keep Saddam from attacking his neighbors and his people and prevent him from rebuilding his weapons of mass destruction (WMD). And those constraints were being undermined on multiple fronts. For example, the Chinese were building a fiber-optic system in and around the capital, making it harder to track Iraq’s military communications. Saddam was finding new ways to shield his forces.

At the end of the Gulf War in 1991, the international community had learned that Saddam’s WMD capabilities were far more advanced than expected. When inspectors had arrived after Saddam’s defeat, they had found that he was a little more than a year away from possessing a crude nuclear device. He had, of course, twice used chemical weapons, first against Iran and then against the Kurds, in both instances killing thousands of innocent civilians. The 1990s had been dominated by efforts to prevent him from restoring his capabilities. Resolution after resolution—sixteen in all—had demanded better access for weapons inspectors. But over the years, the inspection regime had been softened in myriad ways. Saddam wanted inspectors from the United States and Great Britain to be replaced by a mélange of nationals, some of whom had little experience in the WMD field. By the end of the 1990s, the Security Council would give in to his demands. The inspections themselves had at times lost the element of surprise when Saddam had insisted upon and gotten prior notification at designated sites. (Even when they could get in, inspectors often found themselves harassed by Saddam’s forces.) The international community was slowly slipping into a posture of “respect for Iraqi sovereignty.”

Over time, the Iraqis also became less and less compliant with even the scaled-back inspections, leading to multiplying questions about what was going on in Iraq. That ultimately led President Bill Clinton to order a military strike on suspected sites in December 1998. Just before the attack, inspectors left the country, not to return until 2002, and the Iraqi regime remained uncooperative.

Iraq had been, since 1991, under a comprehensive set of sanctions on prohibited items that could be used to rebuild military capabilities, including a prohibition against selling oil. That meant that there was no revenue to provide for basic goods such as food and medicine for the people. The effects on the population were growing increasingly harsh, with malnutrition rates exceeding 20 percent in the late 1990s. The Oil for Food program, which was created in 1996, permitted Iraq to sell a prescribed amount of oil. The money was then put into escrow, and food and medicines were purchased with that account. Compliance was the exception, however, not the rule. Saddam proved to be a master at developing front companies and shadow financing schemes to make illicit purchases. His bribery and cunning made the sanctions almost totally ineffective as he diverted funds to the priorities of the regime.

In an interview in early January, President Bush had talked about this situation and said that the sanctions against Saddam had become “Swiss cheese.” Thus our first NSC meeting reviewed the state of the sanctions regime and also examined the problem of how to make the no-fly zones more effective. I prepared a memorandum for the Principals Committee summarizing the situation in Iraq as unsustainable and proposing a plan of action. The approach was adopted that day.

The State Department was tasked with the first issue, developing a program of “smart sanctions” that would target fewer items but really deny those that might benefit the regime and its efforts to rebuild its military capabilities.

Unfortunately, that would lead to a totally unsatisfying result. The effort was launched by the United States and Great Britain but quickly deadlocked over disagreements, for example, about whether to allow Iraq to have hechts (trailers for trucks), which, we argued, could be retrofitted for tanks. In fact, the Russians and to a lesser extent the French opposed any significant tightening of the sanctions.

Indeed, French and Russian companies were benefiting from the status quo. The United Nations’ independent investigation into the corruption and mismanagement exposed this fact. The Oil for Food investigation found Iraq had subverted the program’s controls and reaped nearly $13 billion in illicit income from kickbacks, surcharges, and oil smuggling. The investigation described the regime’s “explicit policy” to sell oil to countries “friendly” to Iraq, particularly “if they were permanent members of the Security Council in a position potentially to ease the restrictions of sanctions.” According to the report, Russian and French companies were, respectively, the largest and second largest purchasers of oil from Iraq under Oil for Food.

Beyond the challenge of forging international consensus, strengthening the sanctions to prevent Saddam from rearming was made more difficult because chemical or biological weapons can be made from items that may also have legitimate industrial uses. Chlorine is used both to purify swimming water and to produce lethal nerve agents. Not surprisingly, the effort to make the sanctions smarter was maddeningly slow, and determining a single U.S. government position, let alone an international one, took the Deputies—and sometimes the NSC Principals—hours and hours.

This issue was so divisive that we once had a Sunday-afternoon NSC meeting with the President in the chair to decide whether or not to support a Security Council resolution that State had negotiated with the French, British, Russians, and Chinese. (Together with the United States, those countries are the permanent five Security Council members, who hold a veto on any action.) The resolution set the terms for “smart sanctions.” Don and the Vice President believed that the resolution was too weak. I wasn’t able to find consensus, so we met with the President.

Colin was instructed to do better, but the Russians had already made clear that they would veto the introduction of more robust sanctions. He could not overcome their resistance, and two days later we accepted essentially the same resolution that we’d rejected that Sunday.

While State labored at “smart sanctions,” the Defense Department was asked to examine ways to improve the no-fly zones. U.S. and British pilots, flying from Kuwait and Turkey (though Ankara had begun to severely limit the number of missions) patrolled several times a week to keep the Iraqi air force grounded. Even though Saddam’s air defenses were no match for high-performance aircraft, the Iraqis routinely fired on our planes, and there was a growing fear that they might bring a pilot down with a “lucky shot.” Don Rumsfeld was told to develop options should this occur, including what the response might be if a pilot were taken hostage.

We also decided to intensify U.S. efforts, principally through intelligence channels, to build the capabilities of the opposition figures in exile and to help them unite. Frustrated with Saddam’s constant flouting of his obligations under the armistice, Congress had passed and President Clinton had signed into law the Iraqi Liberation Act in 1998 that had put most of the machinery and funding into place. But the exiles were a mixed bag, ranging from the well-organized Kurds, who were already living and governing in the north of Iraq, to the Shia and Sunnis, who were scattered from Syria to Iran and from London to New York, with minimal indigenous support.

In truth, the patchwork of measures to enforce the armistice terms of 1991 had frayed badly. Although it is easy to forget now with the controversy surrounding the subsequent Iraq war, concerns had been growing for a decade, shared by the international community and both sides of the aisle in the United States that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was again emerging as a major threat to the Middle East. The air strike that President Clinton launched in December 1998 garnered a House vote of 417–5, resolving that the United States should “support efforts to remove the regime headed by Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq and to promote the emergence of a democratic government.” Democratic senators such as Robert Byrd, Joseph Biden, and Dianne Feinstein all voiced their support for the Clinton administration’s military action. Saddam held celebrations of his 1991 “victory” on the tenth anniversary of the Gulf War in 2001 and alarmingly continued to speak of Kuwait as a province of Iraq. That led Colin Powell to publicly reassure Kuwait that the United States and its friends would defend its freedom. Nonetheless, the use of U.S. military force to overthrow the regime was not, as I remember, even mentioned in our first NSC meeting or in subsequent ones in 2001.

The issue of North Korea, another rogue regime seeking weapons of mass destruction, came onto the agenda early as well. Days after the inauguration, South Korea requested a meeting for its president, Kim Dae-jung, with President Bush, forcing us to review where we stood on the North Korean issue.

During the campaign, we’d been critical of the Clinton administration’s Agreed Framework between the United States and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, the North’s official name. After North Korea turned away weapons inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog group, and threatened to withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1993, the Clinton administration began on-and-off diplomatic negotiations with North Korea that would eventually last a year and a half and result in the 1994 Agreed Framework. Signed on October 21, 1994, the Agreed Framework aimed to eliminate North Korea’s ability to make nuclear arms. It called on North Korea to suspend the construction and operation of nuclear reactors suspected of being part of a covert nuclear weapons program in exchange for U.S. fuel aid and assistance in building two reactors that would not further North Korea’s ability to produce weapons. The two sides would then move toward full normalization of political and economic relations.

We’d been aware that the Clinton administration had been working in the last months to get a breakthrough deal with North Korea. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s somewhat infamous visit to Pyongyang (complete with the stadium presentation of more than one hundred thousand North Koreans in a “cultural” performance) was intended to achieve enough to allow President Clinton to visit the “Hermit Kingdom.”

Shortly after the election was decided, Colin received a call from Madeleine asking if he and I would take a briefing on their effort. In early January I accompanied the President-elect to Washington from Texas to begin the transition. After landing at Dulles, I broke off from the entourage and went directly to Colin’s house. There, in Colin’s dining room, Wendy Sherman, the counselor to the secretary, and Jack Pritchard, the senior director for Asian affairs at the National Security Council, told us of their plans. We didn’t comment because President-elect Bush was adamant that there would be one President at a time. We did not communicate our skepticism either privately or publicly. In the end, the effort to get a common agenda for the meeting—including the North Koreans’ promises to cease missile tests and development in return for U.S. compensation—failed, and President Clinton did not go to Pyongyang.

That was by far the most detailed policy encounter between the foreign policy advisors during the transition. When later there were claims of extensive briefings concerning al Qaeda during the transition, I recalled that North Korea, not terrorism, had been the Clinton administration’s most pressing business with the incoming team.

The meeting with President Kim was set for March 7, 2001. Kim Dae-jung was a revered figure in many ways. He’d been a prisoner during the military regime of South Korean President Chun Doo-hwan in the 1980s. His life had quite literally been spared by U.S. entreaties to the authorities. A mild-mannered, aging statesman, Kim was also an idealist who believed that engagement with North Korea, through what he called the “Sunshine Policy,” might eventually change the nature of the regime. The policy was built on large-scale assistance to the North with little demanded in return. South Korean policy and U.S. efforts to impose stricter requirements under the Agreed Framework were often at odds. One sensed that Kim Dae-jung simply wanted to avoid conflict with Kim Jong-il at almost any cost.

The day before Kim’s arrival, we held a Principals meeting to go over the administration’s approach. We all agreed that we would not publicly criticize the “Sunshine Policy” but that we would make it clear to Kim that the United States was looking for a different approach to North Korea. No one wanted to embarrass the South Korean, but he had to understand that we would not pursue the Agreed Framework. I walked down to the Oval that afternoon and reported our deliberations to the President. He concurred.

The next morning at five the phone rang in my temporary apartment on 7th Street in downtown Washington. It was before I resumed the practice of daily morning exercise that I’d established in California, and I was sound asleep. The apartment was tiny, but I had to get out of bed and go into the living room to answer the phone. The President had called directly, as he often did throughout the years. I was flattered to be on his speed dial, but I was robbed of that moment with the operator—“The President is calling”—to get my thoughts together. “Have you seen the Washington Post?” he demanded.

“No, Mr. President, I haven’t,” I said.

“Go outside and get it.” He was speaking in short, declarative sentences—a sure sign that he was really upset.

I put on a robe and went to get the paper, thankful that for once it had been delivered a little early. “Go to page A20.” There in bold headlines was an interview in which Colin had said that we’d tell the South Koreans that we’d take up the Clinton administration’s approach to North Korea. “Do you want me to take care of this, or do you want to?”

“I’ll take care of it, Mr. President.” That, in a nutshell, is what the national security advisor does: takes care of it.

I called Colin and went through the same drill. “Get your newspaper.” He did. He immediately saw the problem. Colin had intended to communicate that we were reviewing the policy but would not necessarily throw out all aspects of the Clinton approach. Truthfully, the Post had “overwritten” the story. The tendency of journalists to take a kernel and turn it into a full-blown scoop is one that I came to know well—and suffer from—throughout my eight years in Washington.

Colin was calm and thoroughly professional and said that he would take care of it. I went to the Oval immediately upon arriving at the White House and told the President that Colin would retract his statement by the time he arrived for the meeting. He did, calling the press to say that he “had gotten out a little forward on his skis.” The damage had been done, though, and the public perception of Colin Powell being reined in by the White House lingered and festered.

The meeting with Kim Dae-jung was polite, but it was very clear that we were worlds apart on how to deal with the North. I do not doubt that Kim was a compassionate man and undoubtedly concerned about the human rights abuses and the misery of the North Korean people, whose malnutrition resulted in as much as a five-inch height differential with their South Korean brethren. Yet he gave every indication that he would never challenge the North in any way. We were convinced that the Agreed Framework was doing little to deal with Pyongyang’s arsenal and that South Korea’s largesse was helping to prop up the regime. George W. Bush was offended by the tyranny of Kim Jong-il and could not understand why South Korea’s government seemed unmoved.

One of the hardest things about diplomacy is to put yourself into someone else’s shoes without compromising your own principles. The United States, sitting on a protected continent away from the monstrous North Korean regime, could be more aggressive in confronting it. For South Korea, a relatively new and prosperous democracy, accommodating the regime was a price worth paying to maintain stability and peace. North Korea has thousands of missiles and artillery pieces that could reach Seoul, only thirty miles from the border. And too much focus on the plight of the North Korean people had another downside: what would happen at the time of unification of the North and South? Many years later a senior South Korean diplomat would tell me that his biggest worry about the North was that Seoul would be saddled with millions of “brain-damaged midgets.” He was not being cruel; he was articulating the special vulnerability that South Korea felt.

The United States had different interests. North Korea’s nuclear program was a global, not just a regional, issue. Its treatment of its own people offended not just the President personally but also our country’s commitment to human rights. Those dueling perspectives would divide us until the ascent in 2008 of Lee Myung-bak, who placed greater public emphasis on North Korean abuses. But for the moment, there was little common ground on which to move forward.

That was painfully obvious in the press availability after the meeting. President Bush always did his best to cover over differences with his guests. As was the usual practice, the two sides got together before the press conference and agreed how to handle difficult questions so that there was not an obvious break. But the press, armed with Colin’s comments of the day before, did not buy it. The visit ended sourly with a split between the United States and one of its closest Asian allies.

And the issue of how to deal with North Korea would soon cause some of the most divisive moments within the administration.

RELATIONS WITH OUR European allies started somewhat more smoothly. The President’s first meeting with a European leader, Prime Minister Tony Blair of Great Britain, scheduled for February 23, was greatly anticipated. The “special relationship,” as the friendship between Great Britain and the United States is known, is as solid as any in international politics. There is a kinship and a deep sense of shared values forged through years of shared sacrifice, particularly during World War II. The relationship is so comfortable that I once had to remind a presidential speechwriter that Great Britain was not America’s oldest ally; that would be France. It’s not that no differences exist, but there is a deep feeling that if you cannot count on the Brits, you are really alone.

The political relationship transcends changes in administrations in London and Washington. Nevertheless, the personal relationships between British prime ministers and U.S. presidents have differed in terms of warmth and depth. Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher were close because they were cut from the same ideological cloth and saw the world similarly. The relationship between Thatcher and George H. W. Bush was cooler and sometimes difficult, particularly during the period of German unification, about which Mrs. Thatcher harbored deep reservations.

Because Bill Clinton and Tony Blair shared, as Reagan and Thatcher had, an ideological kinship, their relationship came to symbolize the triumph of center-left politics, dubbed the “Third Way,” and its revitalization of Labour Party politics in Britain and the Democratic Party in America. They were personally close, as were their wives, Hillary Clinton and Cherie Blair, both lawyers with the instincts of social activists of the late 1960s. In fact, I chuckled to myself when a few months later, during our first visit to Chequers, the British prime minister’s equivalent of Camp David, I encountered a prominently displayed picture of the Blairs and the Clintons. I wondered if someone had forgotten to move it.

As Blair’s visit approached, Washington (and for that matter London) chatter was about whether George W. Bush, a conservative Texan and foreign policy neophyte, would have anything at all in common with the sophisticated, smooth, and somewhat left-leaning Tony Blair. Tony Blair was a leader who exuded vast confidence and competence, a “rock star” in international politics. The press was intentionally setting up a test for the new U.S. President. Could he hold his own with Blair?

Since Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s time in office, Camp David, nestled in Maryland’s Catoctin Mountains, has been the presidents’ weekend retreat from the pressures of Washington and the gilded cage of the White House. It is rustic in an elegant way, with individual cabins complete with fireplaces and large outdoor decks in a wooded setting. Over the years it has also become a place to take foreign leaders who merit the signal of importance and camaraderie that everyone reads into such an invite.

The Blairs arrived on Friday afternoon, February 23, 2001, becoming the Bushes’ first foreign visitors to Camp David. There was a low-key welcoming ceremony at the helipad in keeping with the bucolic setting of Camp David: no national anthems, just the marine and navy honor guard displaying the national flags. As would become standard practice, the guests were given a little time to freshen up before the first meeting in Laurel Lodge, the main meeting cabin at Camp David.

Meetings between heads of government, particularly first meetings, are somewhat scripted. Any event of the kind sends the White House into hyperdrive. Briefing books have to be prepared by the NSC staff, covering every imaginable issue that might arise. Someone has to worry about the social arrangements: Who goes to dinner with the principals, and who entertains the rest of the staff? What press interviews need to be held to set the stage and by whom? The two-day visit takes many weeks of preparation. And if you are a smart national security advisor, you read every word and go over every detail, no matter how small.

Then there is the work to be done with the staff of the visiting leader. David Manning, Prime Minister Blair’s exceptionally capable and trustworthy foreign policy advisor, and I had worked to put together a program. That was routine practice before the “bosses” met. But I knew that my relationship with David was not going to be routine. David was a career diplomat, elegant and urbane—and funny. He’d served as the counselor and head of the Political Section at the British embassy in Moscow, and we shared a fascination and frustration with Russia and Russians. We became very close, and I’m grateful to have found pals like David and Catherine Manning, a friendship that has outlasted our government service.

In the light of all that these men would do together after September 11, 2001, the agenda we put together for that first meeting at Camp David seems, in retrospect, very mundane. The two talked about the development of a European Security and Defense Policy (ESDP), which many American experts saw as a competitor of NATO. Blair wanted a nod from the President that the United States would support enhanced independent European forces. The President wanted to make sure that the Europeans, who were unwilling to spend more for defense, would not simply hollow out NATO by trying to make their already meager forces do double duty. And we wanted a reference to the importance of missile defense—or at least an acknowledgment of the importance of both offense and defense. They both got what they needed. There was a kind of review of the international landscape, including an agreement to work together to strengthen the sanctions on Saddam. They talked about Russian President Vladimir Putin and missile defense, the President telling Blair that he was determined to withdraw from the Anti–Ballistic Missile Treaty. Blair was calm, urging only that we try to work out a deal with the Russians rather than withdrawing unilaterally.

So the first encounter was pretty unremarkable, but I thought that the President was nervous, talking rapidly and in a staccato cadence that was a little hard to follow. When the discussion turned to a nettlesome trade dispute between the European Union and the United States concerning bananas, Blair did something that, either inadvertently or by design, broke the ice. It wasn’t hard to tell that the President’s knowledge of the issue was not, frankly, very deep. Blair made his two or three points in response and said, “And I have now just said everything that I know about this issue.” With an agreement to kick the issue over to the “experts,” everyone relaxed.

The two men continued their discussions over a walk around the grounds and then met the press. One of the final questions was “What do you two have in common?” The implication was, of course, that they had nothing in common. The President said, “We both use Colgate toothpaste.” Okay. There has long been speculation about how, exactly, he knew that, but it was an amiable end to a very good day.

That night after dinner, all of us went to the small movie theater and watched Meet the Parents. Well, I watched part of it. As the President tells it, I was laughing robustly through the first half of the movie and then fell silent. I awoke to the prime minister of the United Kingdom and the President of the United States standing over me, saying, “Wake up, Dr. Rice.” In my job, you slept when you could.

I believe that during those private talks, George W. Bush and Tony Blair began to see that they shared something more important than ideological kinship in the modern political sense. They shared values, and in time they would see that they shared a willingness to do difficult and controversial things. That was what they had in common, and it would soon make them undertake, together, actions to radically change the status quo in world politics.

IT WAS A good thing that the President had established a relationship with the British prime minister, because he would soon need friends in Europe. From the start George W. Bush was viewed with suspicion by the European powers, uncertain of how this brash Texan would exercise U.S. power. Ironically, it was not a matter of war and peace that led to the first confrontation with our European allies; it was climate change.

During the campaign the governor had been clearly opposed to the Kyoto Protocol, an agreement that would commit industrialized nations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 5.2 percent below their 1990s levels over the following decade. He opposed Kyoto because it exempted roughly 80 percent of the world, including major population centers such as China and India, from compliance. He also argued that it would have had an adverse effect on the U.S. economy. He was not alone. The U.S. Senate had, in a nonbinding resolution, rejected the accord 95 to 0, causing President Clinton to shelve the treaty.

Nonetheless, though skeptical of some of the more alarmist predictions about climate change, the governor had shown sensitivity to the issue of carbon emissions and had promised in the campaign to regulate power plants’ emissions of four pollutants, including the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide.

I was in my office on March 13, 2001, when I got a phone call asking me to “clear” (sign off on) a letter from the President to four Republican senators who had asked the administration to clarify its position on limiting pollutants to address the greenhouse gas effect.

I immediately saw a problem with the letter, and since I knew that there was some urgency, I went directly to the President to tell him that we needed to change one sentence. That sentence criticized the Kyoto Protocol in the harshest possible terms and suggested we would have nothing to do with it. I wanted to add mitigating language saying that even though we could not support the treaty because it was fatally flawed, we would work with our allies to address the problem of climate change. I thought that it was the kind of standard line diplomats used all the time and that the President would have no problem with it.

When I walked into the Oval and described the approach, the President looked surprised and said, “But the letter is already gone. The Vice President is taking it up to the Hill because he has a meeting up there. I thought you cleared the letter.” I was flabbergasted. I hurriedly called Colin and then Christine Todd Whitman, the EPA administrator, to tell them what had happened and to suggest that they call in immediately to protest. The President said, “It’s too late.”

Later, when it was clear that nothing could be done, I returned to the Oval to talk to the President. I said, “Mr. President, this is going to color your foreign policy from the outset, and that’s a problem.” I also said that I was appalled that the Vice President had been allowed to take a letter to Capitol Hill on a matter of international importance without my clearance or, more important, that of the secretary of state.

In fairness to the President, I think he had thought of the letter as addressing a domestic issue for our Congress. After all, we had been clear that we would not support Kyoto. What was the big fuss? But I knew better. As I predicted, we suffered through this issue over the years: drawing that early line in the sand helped to establish our reputation for “unilateralism.” We handled it badly.

My immediate reaction was not to admit the mistake. It was my bad luck to have a meeting with the European Union ambassadors at the Swedish envoy’s residence the very next day. I should have just said that the letter didn’t fully reflect our view and that we’d work with them. Instead, because they were so aggressive in their questioning, I became combative too. “Kyoto is dead on arrival,” I intoned. The meeting was “off the record” but obviously would be reported back to their capitals. In fact, it took a nanosecond for those words to ricochet around the European continent.

Unfortunately, the situation continued to get worse. The President was scheduled to visit Sweden for his first U.S.-EU summit. The European Union was at that time composed of fifteen countries and had several principal bodies, including the European Parliament, the European Commission, and the European Council, headed by a country presidency that rotated among the members every six months. At that point, Sweden held the presidency. The meeting with the commission president and the Swedes was deadly dull, with everyone reading their talking points and staff-produced “interventions” made on every conceivable issue. At one point we were discussing NATO’s expansion into Eastern Europe, and I told the President that I wanted to say something. Much to my astonishment, he announced to the group, “Condi, you got something to say real quick.” I was furious because his offhand tone seemed to belittle my participation.

In the early days, the President also had a tendency to finish my sentences for me. Finally one day, standing in the Oval, I said, “Mr. President, I know we’re close and that you think you know what I’m going to say. I know you don’t mean any harm, but I’m sure others see it as a sign of disrespect for my opinion.” He was crestfallen. I felt bad bringing it up, but I was walking a fine line. I was staff, not a Cabinet secretary. At home and abroad, leaders and colleagues had to know that the President listened to me. As time went on I became very aware that no one doubted our relationship. The President would tell people that we were like brother and sister. Yet it wasn’t always easy to get the balance right.

That evening in Sweden, the President went to dinner with the heads of government of the European Union. Colin was at a foreign ministers dinner. Karen Hughes and I were the “plus two,” meaning the two staff allowed in the room with the President. Seated around a long table in a rather unattractive and quite cold room, the President was treated to lecture after lecture about climate change. The script didn’t change; it was just delivered in different languages: “Climate change is a great international crisis, and the United States is turning its back on its responsibilities and its allies.” “Don’t you know that the whole planet is at stake and only Kyoto can save us?” It was as if no other subject existed. Though I’d predicted that this would happen, I too was appalled.

At one point the President took his translation earpiece out of his ear. Uh oh, I thought, he’s going to show them that he doesn’t care what they think. I was relieved when, moments later, he just shifted it to his other ear.

Fortunately, José María Aznar, the prime minister of Spain, who would become a close ally of the President, helped calm the atmosphere by lighting a cigar. A few others also helped. Prime Minister Blair made his points without the accusatory tone that dominated the evening. The Finnish participant made fun of the Danish intervention, which seemed to suggest that windmills were the answer to the world’s climate problem.

But the President was really angry, and he never fully forgot what he saw as the disrespectful tone taken at that dinner. In time we produced policies that gave us a real voice in the climate change debate. The President’s approach gained traction, with everyone realizing that the goal was to find sources of clean energy to protect the environment while still allowing for economic growth. Discussions of alternative fuel sources, from battery technology to cellulosic biomass, would animate the President as he poured over reports, listened to entrepreneurs, and engaged like-minded leaders such as Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Brazil. By the time we left office, the United States had spent more than $40 billion on programs related to climate change.

To be fair, the administration struggled to find a voice between the climate change alarmists who proposed draconian measures to confront the problem and those—even in the administration—who thought that any “concession” on the question was a slippery slope. I don’t think there were any “deniers” among the key members of the President’s team. But there was a wide divergence of opinion about how much the President should do.

In time, our willingness to engage the international community would lead to several breakthroughs: the Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate, which brought China and India into the conversation in 2005; convening the largest emitters of greenhouse gases to chart a common way forward; and, perhaps most important, a public statement from the President that finally acknowledged the human element in climate change in July 2005. Still, we were never going to be seen as true believers, and it was hard to get attention for the pathbreaking work, especially in the second term, that the Council on Environmental Quality at the White House did, particularly under James Connaughton’s leadership in partnership with State’s under secretary for global affairs, Paula Dobriansky.

Years later the President and I talked about why the reaction in 2001 had been so sharp. “Mr. President,” I said, “the Europeans had built this crystalline structure called Kyoto.”

“I see; we came along and knocked it over,” he said.

“No, it was worse than that,” I told him. “We knocked it over and said, ‘Did I hit something?’ And we just kept on walking.” That was a self-inflicted wound that could have been avoided.

ISSUES LIKE climate change were ever present, particularly at the time of an international conference or meeting with a head of state. They formed the backdrop of steady daily work, carried mostly by the agencies and experts in the field. But the national security advisor’s life is very different; there are spikes, brought on by crises that make you drop everything else until the danger passes. And they almost always begin with a phone call that seems like it came out of nowhere.

“Dr. Rice, the Situation Room is on the phone for you. You can take it in the commander’s office.” I always dreaded those words from the Camp David steward, particularly at 10 P.M. as we watched a Saturday-night movie in the Holly Cabin theater. Something had to be wrong.

I got up, went to the commander’s office, and called the Situation Room. The senior duty officer said that the Pentagon was reporting an incident off the coast of China. The details were sketchy, but a U.S. maritime patrol aircraft on a routine surveillance mission had collided with one of two Chinese fighter jets. Both aircraft had been damaged in the collision, and the U.S. plane had made an emergency landing at an airfield on China’s Hainan Island. Twenty-four crew members had been detained. I was told that the plane had been over international waters when the incident happened.

The crew was safe but in captivity, and they’d performed emergency security measures before going down. Those are steps to prevent the plane’s technology from being stolen if it falls into foreign hands. The crippled U.S. plane had issued an emergency “Mayday” alert as it descended toward the airfield. A phone call among all relevant agencies of the government (called a “noiwon,” for National Operations and Intelligence Watch Officer Network) had been convened and was in continuous session.

I started to go through my mental checklist as I sprinted back to Holly Cabin just as the President was coming out. I said that I would call Colin and Don and get back to him. I reached the two. Don had only the information that I’d been given but was following up urgently. Colin began trying to reach the Chinese foreign minister.

The eleven days from April 1 until the release of the crew on April 11 were completely dominated by the Hainan Island crisis. Needless to say, that was not the way we’d hoped to start off our relationship with Beijing. In the campaign, we had referred to China as a strategic competitor, making clear that our first priority in Asia was to strengthen relationships with our longtime democratic friends Japan, South Korea, and Australia. It was not meant to be a signal of hostility to the PRC but some commentators in Beijing—and in Washington—took it as such.

The President was preparing to authorize a large arms sales package for Taiwan and there was press coverage already. The package would be significant enough to obviate the need to deal with the issue annually. Beijing would be angry but at least we wouldn’t have to go through the upheaval every year. But the Hainan crisis came on the heels of the tensions over the arms sales and before we had established a productive basis for U.S.-China relations.

Still, neither China nor we wanted the crisis to escalate, but it was a very difficult one to defuse. First, the U.S. plane had been over international waters and it was important to defend freedom of navigation. The problem was exacerbated by the skewed information that the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) fed the Chinese leadership. The PLA had every reason to paint itself as the victim and the United States as the aggressor. The Chinese civilian leadership appears to have been totally dependent on the military for information, especially at the start. That led to misplaced feelings of righteousness.

Second, and more important, the Chinese pilot who’d rammed our plane had been killed in the incident, making him an instant hero in the Chinese press. The Chinese wanted us to apologize for his death, something that we were unwilling to do—particularly once we learned that his hot-dogging had been a prime cause of the accident. But it became a matter of national pride in China. Time and again we would see this. China would stir up nationalist sentiment in the population through the state-controlled media, diminishing its own room for maneuver as it reacted to the very passions it had created. This tendency of authoritarian regimes to use manufactured “public opinion” is one of the most dangerous aspects of such regimes. In a democracy you don’t have to create a public voice; citizens do that without prodding.

Finally, we were simply unable to establish proper communications with the Chinese leadership for several days. That first night, Colin couldn’t get the foreign minister to return his phone call. We tried multiple channels for the better part of two days. Yet we were still having trouble maintaining consistent contact with the Chinese. On the second Sunday afternoon, I enlisted the Argentine and Chilean governments (the Chinese leadership was traveling in South America) to put us in touch with the Chinese by cell phone. In one bizarre incident, the Argentine put my counterpart on a cell phone, having tracked him down at a barbecue!

The reasons for this behavior continue to be a matter of speculation among those of us who managed this crisis. One theory is that the Chinese leadership was not on top of the facts and was trying to buy time until it could gather itself. That would correspond with what Clinton administration officials encountered in 1999 when the United States accidently bombed the Chinese Embassy in Serbia. That time, too, days passed before proper lines of communication could be established. Whatever the explanation, this behavior made the first few days very tense.

Once we returned to Washington from Camp David, we established a pattern for crisis management. I would talk to Colin at about 5:00 A.M. each day. As Colin noted, the Chinese seemed to make decisions at 4:30 P.M. their time because they always called him at 4:30 A.M. our time. I would then go to the White House at 6:00 A.M. or so, and at 7:00 A.M. the President and I would meet with Karen Hughes and Andy Card. Colin would often join us. We needed to keep our message under tight control while Colin sought an acceptable solution.

One problem in managing a crisis in today’s media environment is that you are forced to say something each day. If you are not careful, your rhetoric escalates little by little and you create demands that must then be met by the other side. Since the other side is doing the same thing, it’s easy to have the crisis spin out of control pretty quickly. For example, Dennis Blair, the head of the United States Pacific Command, reprimanded the Chinese air force for failing to intercept aircraft in a professional manner and playing “bumper cars in the air.” We had to disavow that statement.

We were also concerned about the well-being of our people. We sent warnings privately to the Chinese not to do anything provocative, such as parading them in public to embarrass us. Our very able ambassador, the former Admiral Joseph Prueher, worked to get consular access to them so that we could reassure their families, and the nation, that they were safe.

The crux of the matter was to find a face-saving way out for the Chinese. We could not apologize for what was not our fault. But after several days, the Chinese sent a signal: if Colin would send a letter that said that we were sorry for the loss of their pilot’s life, we could end the crisis. Don quipped that perhaps if Colin would say “pretty please,” that would do it. The next days were consumed with efforts to find acceptable language. In the end we acknowledged the loss of life and the need to prevent further incidents without a hint of any wrongdoing on our part.

Word came that our people had been released early on the morning of April 11. I was with the President in Concord, North Carolina, later that day when he announced that he would shortly be visiting the family of one of the servicemen on board the plane. The nation’s attention had been riveted on the fate of the crew, and when the President made the announcement, the crowd broke out into a chant: “USA, USA!”

My eyes welled up with tears, and I was pretty emotional when we met the crew several weeks later in the Oval Office. It was a relief to have them home. Eventually, a U.S. Air Force crew deployed to China and dismantled the aircraft so its pieces could be flown back to the United States. That was after a lot of back-and-forth about whether Beijing would return the plane at all. Chinese military personnel “monitored operations closely,” according to the air force report, continuously photographing and videotaping the operation and reviewing photos and videos made by the Americans.

THE REMAINDER of the spring was, for the most part, relatively straightforward. Though the Balkans flared up, with violence in Macedonia that threatened stability in the region, it was not the kind of crisis that dominated the agenda of the White House every day. The State Department worked with the allies to defuse the crisis by the summer of that year.

And the Summit of the Americas in late April provided a much-needed second opportunity to highlight our agenda for Latin America. The meeting of the thirty-four countries of the Western Hemisphere (Cuba was excluded because it did not have a democratically elected president) took place in Quebec against a backdrop of anti-globalization demonstrations. As a result, security was tight as we drove along downtown streets that were eerily deserted, merchants largely having closed their doors for the day to avoid trouble.

However, inside the convention hall where we gathered, the meeting was surprisingly smooth. The summit declaration enshrined the support of the gathered for free enterprise and free trade, reaffirming the need to create a Free Trade Area of the Americas. The major governments of Latin America were center-right and like-minded. Hugo Chávez was a troubling but not yet central figure in the region. When we met him at a session for the Andean nations on the margins of the summit, he was all smiles and desperate to be seen in a photograph with the President. When George W. Bush entered the room, Chávez almost leapt across the table and offered a few words about their common interest in baseball. The President remarked afterward that Chávez was a “street thug,” insecure in the clothing of a national leader. I thought he might be worse than that because he was animated by a certain crude charisma. Ultimately, the “street thug” would become a ruthless and surprisingly effective dictator, and his “insecurity” would give way to a relentless campaign against democratic principles, free markets, and, most important, U.S. influence in the region.