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Condoleezza Rice: America Is Not in Decline
The United States isn't in decline, no matter what you may hear about a rising China eclipsing the West, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Thursday.
America at the start of the 21st century bears similarities to America at the start of the 20th - facing changing geopolitical threats and economic challenges overseas and a wave of immigration at home, Rice said. Now as then there is uncertainty and a discomfiting sense "that our common identity is shifting somehow, that change abroad may be hurting us, not helping us," Rice said in remarks to the Economic Club of New York.
As in 1907, the year the club was founded, there is scholarly debate about whether a successful century is giving way to an era of American decline, Rice said.
"This mood of decline hangs over so many of those articles and news reports that we see these days about the rise of China and India, and perhaps the coming of somebody else's century,'" Rice said. "We are to believe that America has had a good run, but it has to be all downhill from here."
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Rice said she rejects that notion both because of her personal optimism, and the optimism that her own success should inspire, and because she trusts American grit and competitiveness to adjust to whatever is next.
"I am optimistic because, in America, it does not matter where you came from. It only has to matter where you want to go," Rice said. "Our national disposition is to always look upon the future with hope, not with fear - as something we will shape, not something to which we will submit."
The group asked Rice to speak for its centennial, choosing her as an emblem of what club members had identified as the signal changes of the last century - the women's movement and the civil rights movement. Rice is the first black woman secretary of state.
"I stand before you tonight as a woman born in Birmingham, Alabama - the Birmingham of Bull Connor and the Ku Klux Klan, the Birmingham of church burnings, and police dogs, and water cannons, the Birmingham where my little classmate, Denise McNair, died in the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church," Rice told the mostly white crowd.
"Yet, despite these challenges, I stand before you as America's 66th secretary of state. And if I serve out my term ... there will not have been a white male secretary of state for 12 years," Rice said to applause.
In a legacy-minded, scholarly address, Rice outlined a pragmatic foreign policy perspective she called "American realism."
The doctrine mixes bedrock ideals of human freedom and human rights with the will to use moral and military force, Rice said.
"We believe that our principles are the greatest source of our power, and we are led into the world as much by our moral ideas as by our material interests."
Rice said relatively little about the main foreign policy challenges facing the United States now, including the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
"I know the American people are weary of the violence and the sacrifice" in Iraq, Rice said. "So are ordinary Iraqis."
© 2007 Associated Press.
Editor's note:
Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics: Inside Cover Stories
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