 Good morning, and welcome to the LBJ Presidential Library. My name is Ryan Collier, and I serve on the board of the Future Forum. Now in our 15th year, the Future Forum was created to provide vibrant and energetic public policy discussions, and through our programming, inspire the doers of today and the builders of tomorrow. There are few in history who have done more, built more, and shattered more glass ceilings than our first woman Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright. And there are certainly even less who have given us permission to say it's okay to interrupt. I know that we are all appreciative of that advice, and we are honored to have you with us this morning, Dr. Albright. We are also pleased to have as our distinguished moderator, Chris Boyd, the host and managing editor of KERA FM's talk show, Think. And we're thrilled to know that this will later air on your show next week. We would also like to thank our generous sponsors, current events, for providing our wonderful breakfast, Hill and Nolten Strategies, Hill Co. Partners, and Norton Rose Fulbright's for supporting our programming. And now it is my privilege and honor to introduce you to our 64th Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, and Chris Boyd of KERA. Thank you. Secretary Albright, welcome. Delighted to be here, and everybody's been so kind while I've been in Texas. And I've got all my Texas pins on. Very glad to be here. Thank you so much. Thank you all for coming. I had to check in a couple of different places to make sure that this was true. You didn't have your first paying job in government until you were 39. Correct, yes. Your career trajectory is so interesting because there's no way you could have predicted when you were very young what you would do. Well, definitely. Everything about my life is an accident, which is that in fact, I shouldn't even exist. My parents, I was born in Czechoslovakia before World War II and spent the war in England. And I won't go through that whole story, but basically came to the United States when I was 11 years old. And my parents gave us an entirely new life. And so I'm very grateful and very grateful when I became an American. But my job trajectory is totally different than anybody might have suspected. I did go to a women's college, Wellesley College, and I wanted to be a journalist. And I was on my college paper. And then our commencement speaker was Neil McElroy, who was the secretary of defense at the time because his daughter was in our class. And we all kind of remember the commencement address slightly differently, but the gist of it was your responsibility is to get married and have children, preferably boys. And so, you know, the fact that we didn't all walk out. The bottom line is I took his advice and got married three days later. But I did have a job when my husband was in the army in Missouri. I worked on a small paper in Rolla, Missouri, doing what you're supposed to do, is work on a small paper. And then we went back to Chicago, where he already had a job and we're having dinner with his managing editor. And he looks at me and he says, so what are you gonna do, honey? I said, I'm gonna work on a newspaper. And he said, I don't think so. You can't work on the same paper as your husband because of labor regulations. And even though there were three other papers in Chicago at the time, he said, well, you wouldn't wanna compete with your husband. And I know what some of us might say at another phase, but I saluted and found another life. And I went to work for Encyclopedia Britannica, which did interesting things. Every year they had a series of articles that they would review. And that year they were doing geographical articles. And since I was a polysyn major, they thought that I at least was qualified to read the articles and find the art to go with them. And then newspapers, sometimes there was a little space at the bottom of columns that they needed to rectify. So I read Encyclopedia Britannica for factoids. And some I still remember, like, ostriches are voiceless according to Encyclopedia Britannica. So it never occurred to me that I would be doing something. I didn't know what I was gonna do. So I was not a journalist. You had three children to raise at home and you were getting your PhD at the same time. You say that was actually the hardest thing you've ever done by yourself. Well, it's interesting because literally what happened was I did, I, this is life before sonograms and I didn't, I kept getting fatter and fatter and the obstetrician was very unkind and kept saying you're getting so fat and do something. And so I barely ate and we were then living on Long Island and I walked all the time. And in the course of that, I saw that Hofstra University was offering Russian and for teachers for eight hours a day for eight weeks. And I had always wanted to learn Russian but because I was Czech and it's a Slavic language, it didn't make any sense to take first year Russian at Wellesley and I couldn't take second year Russian because I didn't know the alphabet. So I was able, my twins were very considerate and got born six weeks early. And so I took Russian while I had to leave them in the hospital and that made me decide that I really did want to go back to school. But it took me forever to get my PhD. I started when my twins were a year old and they were in junior high and they finally said, mom, if you can't finish your paper, then we're not going to finish ours. But it did take a long time because I was interspersing taking care of my children and also beginning to do politics. And so it really did take a while and I finally got my degree. And that's when I got a job, a paying job on the hill, working for Senator Ed Muskie of Maine. And instead of kind of saying this is my friend Madeline, you could say this is Dr. Albright. And so I really have been very lucky in terms of having my credentials together at the time that people did want the one woman on their staff, which is not a great commentary in terms of how people were hiring. But I really was there at a time that it was just perfect and Ed Muskie was wonderful to work for. You wrote recently after the vice president mentioned that he doesn't like to dine with women unless his wife is present, dine alone with them or attend events with alcohol. You think there should be more than one woman in the room? I definitely do. And I think part of it, I do think the relationship of women to each other and work and having a present somewhere. And so what really did happen, and I bet this has happened to every woman in the room at a certain point, you are the only woman in the room for a meeting. And you think, oh, I really would like to say something. And then you think now it'll really sound stupid. And then some man says it and everybody thinks it's brilliant. And you are so mad at yourself. And partially, not only does the man say it, but then the next man says, as Joe said, and they reinforce each other. And so I think by having more than one woman in the room, I could say, well, as Chris said, and I think that that's the kind of thing that's very important. So my advice on interrupting really comes from that experience, which is I have now said over and over again that if in a meeting you are going to interrupt, you decide you're going to interrupt actively, that I made up this term. You have to have kind of active listening. You have to really concentrate. You have to know what you're gonna say and you have to say it firmly. And you have to interrupt because if you raise your hand, nobody ever calls on you. So I do that in my class. They're a bit of a zoo, but I do think that in fact, it's an important lesson. And it gives you the confidence to be able to say something. When you were first offered a job with the National Security Council, your first instinct was to say, no, I'm happy here. No, I tell you the thing that happened because truly my life story is unbelievable. But what happened was that when I was a student at Columbia getting my PhD, Zbigniew Brzezinski was my professor. And he then, I'm working for Ed Muskie and he calls me up and he says, Madeline, perhaps you've heard, I've been named National Security Advisor. And I said, yes, I have. And he said, oh, well, terrific. Can you find me a place to live? And I said, jeez, big, I thought you were calling to offer me a job. And he said, no, I'm asking you to find me a place to live. So I did do that. And then I was working for Ed Muskie in terms of, I had a wonderful job with him being his chief legislative assistant. And he really was a powerhouse in the Senate having been made chairman of the budget committee and the environmental subcommittee and government operations. And it was just terrific. And what happened was, and I think some of you have seen the inside of Senate offices. They're all kind of like a rabbit war in a people. And so all of a sudden I get a phone call there and whoever answered the phone says, Dr. Brzezinski's calling you and everybody's listening. And he said to me, I think, would you like to come and work in the White House? And I was sure everybody heard that and I didn't want them to. And I said, no, I'm very happy here. And then I thought, I must be out of my mind. And I got up and I went, there were phone booths and there were phones in them. And I went out in the hall and I called back and I said, I don't know if I want to leave, but I would like to come and talk to you. And I did that. And it really was a totally intriguing job. And so that's what I decided to do. So you had a PhD, you had this legislative experience, you speak four languages, but you still write with great humility about the learning curve when you first arrived at the National Security Council. What you didn't do was say, I couldn't possibly be qualified for this, which is what women are socialized to say, even if they don't believe it's true. Well, the thing that was interesting was, I do think because I had worked on the Hill and I had been asked to do congressional relations. And by the way, just parenthetically, when I talked to Ed Muskie about going to the Hill, and this was a man that had been my mentor and a dear friend and he actually said to me, I don't think a woman can do congressional relations, which just kind of blew my mind if I may say so. And so I did go, but I understood what it was I was supposed to be doing is congressional relations because I understood the Hill. I did not know enough about how the system was set up and it was very interesting because Brzezinski had said, I want you to be on the National Security Council, which is not actually what I was being asked to do. The National Security Council is technically composed of the president, the vice president, secretary of state, the secretary of defense, and then as advisors, the chairman of the joint chiefs and the head of the intelligence. So I definitely was not on that. He was really asking me to be a part of the staff of the National Security Council. But I have to tell you something that did happen. My job was to do congressional relations and it was a time that President Carter was talking about doing an arms sale to the Middle East and he had a lot of members of Congress in to talk about it and I knew that my job was to listen to what questions the members of Congress were asking what President Carter was responding and I was sitting in the back and taking notes and then the meeting's over. I go back to my office and all of a sudden I'm sitting there, the phone rings and it's Brzezinski and he says, would you please come up and read your notes to Secretary Vance and Secretary Brown? And I go up there with some chicken scratches and they said, how did the president get from this point to that point? And I thought, you all were there and I said I'm sorry and I can answer the questions that the members asked and then I go back to my office and I thought I'm gonna get fired. And then I decided, I can't believe I decided this, that the best defense was a good offense. So I went up to Brzezinski's office and I said, excuse me but I didn't think I was hired as a secretary. And he said, you weren't. And I said, well why are you asking me about what notes I took? Don't you guys, somebody in there taking notes? And he said, no, you don't understand that the lowest member of the group, the lowest level job is the person responsible for taking notes and you must admit that you were the lowest ranked person in the room. So I didn't know how things worked frankly but I learned pretty quickly. I also learned that when President Carter said, I understand, it didn't mean I agree. And so I had to learn a lot of different kinds of things when I got there but it was a great time. I always wondered whether I was qualified. I still wonder if I'm qualified. Secretary Allred, are you saying that you have experienced imposter syndrome, you? Definitely, definitely. There's no question about that. You know that they'll find out that I really don't know anything. Or one of the things that did happen, I have to say, one of my jobs was to present, help present the budget of the administration to Congress. So I got my clearances pretty quickly and they rushed them through as fast as they could. And then all of a sudden I get this information and I didn't understand all the alphabet soup that went with it and the acronyms and things and I thought, oh my God, here they've spent all this money clearing me and now I don't know what I'm gonna be doing. So believe me, every day there was something that happened like that. When you accepted the position as Secretary of State, how did you quiet those voices that told you maybe you weren't ready? Well, first of all, I'm not sure I ever did, but the important part is that you do not do these jobs alone and that is the part in terms of the team that you have. The people at the State Department are stunning professionals and really you do develop a way of trusting them. The part that's really hard is you walk into a place with people that you don't know and they are the ones that are conveying information to you that is absolutely vital to being able to do the job. And so you quickly do learn who is somebody that briefs well, that can organize things, but the main thing is you don't do it alone. And I think that that's an important part is to recognize what a team effort it is, which is why I'm really sorry that Secretary Tillerson doesn't have a full team at the State Department. How much of diplomacy is about the ability to read the other side and what they need and want and how do you do that? That is key to diplomacy. What you have to do is put yourself into the other person's shoes on the other side of the table and decide that it cannot be a zero sum game. There has to be, they are there with their national interest and you are there with yours and it is very important to understand what they need. And you do get a lot of briefings ahead of time. I do think that what is important is you have to get intelligence on what is happening on the other side. One in terms of the issues that they're interested in and others in terms of who they are, what their personalities are. And one of the things I do teach and I make my, I always, they finally get tired of this, but I believe that every country makes decisions based on five factors and it's important to know what your five factors are and what theirs are. So very briefly, the five factors are, the first one, objective facts about the country. What is the geographical location? Most countries don't change their geographical location. Russia did and I think that plays a big part. Resource-based, we did. We now are oil independent. And demographics, which you just have to keep track of, but those are measurable things. The second factor is subjective. How do the people feel about what is going on? And that's obviously much harder to measure. In the United States, sick of war and fighting other people's wars, but I think it's important to try to assess that. The third factor is how the government is organized. And again, in our case, executive legislative relations. Or if you're looking at another country, are they a parliamentary system who are the parties that are in it? The fourth factor is bureaucratic politics, which is reflected in what the budget looks like. And the fifth factor are individuals. And I think that one of the things that's really important is to kind of do the five factors for the people sitting on the other side of the table. But it is absolutely essential to know what is their need. But you also need to know at what stage you make very clear what your national interest is and what are the issues on which you cannot compromise and which are the ones that you can. Compromise seems to have fallen out of favor as a tool for negotiation. In America these days, a lot of people equate compromise with capitulation. What do we do about that? Well, I think it's a very bad moment in that particular way because in a democracy, compromise is really the essential way of finding what I just said, something in the what the other person is saying or doing or needing that you can find some common ground. Compromise is not a four letter word. It is something that is essential. And part of our problem, frankly, is that not only do we not know how to do it at home, but we are really presenting a very bad image internationally. I'm chairman of the board of an organization called the National Democratic Institute that does democracy work abroad just in terms of not in terms of ideology, but in terms of nuts and bolts of democracy. And I was abroad somewhere doing some work and I said to these various factions in their parliament, you need to compromise. And they said, you mean like you guys? So we are not a very good example at the moment, but people say it's appeasement or capitulation. It is not, it is trying to find that area in which there is some common ground. And having respect, which is another word, for really listening to what those with whom you disagree in order to see if there's anything there. And we seem to be very low on that quotient at the moment. To date, you are the only US Secretary of State to have visited North Korea in person. Can you talk a little bit about that experience and your impressions of at the time it was Kim Jong-il? Well, part of it, again, goes a little bit back to what you were asking. We knew very little about North Korea because we don't have an embassy there and trying to really get good intelligence on it. And I tried to get as much intelligence as I could. And one of the people I talked to was Kim Dae-jung, the President of South Korea, who in fact had initiated something known, excuse me, as the sunshine policy and really trying to find areas where there was something one could do with the North Koreans. But very, very little information when I went. And Pyongyang was interesting about it. First of all, I watched a documentary flying in about how poor the North Korean people were and how people were eating bark off the trees. And you kind of thought, how can this possibly be a society that can continue to exist? And when we came into Pyongyang, they have big boulevards. And despite the fact that there was a motorcade, there were some people on bicycles. Nobody looked at the motorcade. And people were very isolated. And, excuse me, we didn't really know what we were gonna do. And so I sat in the guest house waiting for some kind of signal about what I was supposed to do. And they obviously had cameras and they were listening to us. What I didn't know was even if you type on a laptop, they can tell by the strokes what you're typing. So we just sat there. And finally we got a message that I had to go and see the embalmed body of Kim Jong-il's father. And so all those things in terms of protocol are somewhat more complicated because if you bow too low, then Americans will criticize you for paying respect to some dead body of a dictator. And if you don't bow low enough, then you haven't accomplished what you wanted. And so I did that, went back to the guest house, and I got a message about coming to see the dear leader. And so we had a press conference together. And it was really weird. It was kind of like out of the 50s with old cameras. And I'm standing next to the dear leader and we're the same height. And I had on high heels. And then I look over and he did too. And his hair was a lot poofier than mine. But what was interesting, we then had a meeting. And it was one of the more complex meetings in terms of talking about missile limits and a variety of issues to do with arms control. And he was totally versed in everything and very clear, all through an interpreter, but very clear in what he wanted to have done. And then he in fact agreed that we should be able to keep our forces in South Korea. And we're finished for the day. And he says, I have a surprise for you tonight. And I thought, what is it? So he said, what we want to do is redo for Europe in your honor, performance that they had for the 50th anniversary of the workers party. So in the middle of this place where you knew people were starving, all of a sudden they had, we went into a stadium. There must have been 100,000 people there, all clapping in unison, which I hate. And then a lot of incredible costumes and a lot of performance of gymnasts and things. But what was interesting is they had flip carts the way our people do at football games. And they definitely had some tableaus of the dear leader in the fields with tractors. But what was very interesting, what we were concerned about was something called the typodong missile that had a longer range than had been permitted previously. And so they were so good at the flip carts they could make the missile look like the missile goes up. And so Kim Chung Il turned to me through again through the interpreter saying, and that's the last one. And so they had clearly done all that on purpose. We then went to have a dinner, which again, all I could think about were the starving people. And one shouldn't make typologies like this, but Koreans are aggressive drinkers. And so they kind of, he took, I was taken around from table to table and the normal custom is you clink and drink. And Kim Chung Il said, don't do that to her. And we came back to the table, French wines, everything very fancy. And then all of a sudden he says, through his interpreter, how does my interpreter compare with Kim Da Jung's? And I thought, oh my God, I'm gonna have this person killed. So I was able to say Kim Da Jung has the best woman interpreter I have ever heard, but you have a terrific interpreter too. And by the way, that woman interpreter is now the first woman South Korean foreign minister. We just chatted again. But what it was interesting at the time because Kim Chung Il had asked about, he said, what do you think about the Swedish model? Which I didn't know model, model, but it was the economic model. And then he said, I would like to have Korean Americans come and teach our people English. The whole thing was very different. By the way, there was, I do take complete responsibility for Dennis Rodman because what happened, the one thing we did know was that Kim Chung Il liked basketball. So I took over a basketball autographed by Michael Jordan, which is in their holy of holies. So they seem to think that basketball players can be diplomats. But the bottom line is I left and what happened there was the election of November 2000. And Americans were confused about that election, but certainly the North Koreans were and I hold no brief for the North Koreans, but we were in the middle of negotiations. I had gone on another trip right after to South Africa and Wendy Sherman was with me who was my counselor. She was set to go to meet them all at the negotiations. And what happened was it was the transition period. I briefed Colin Powell on everything that we were doing. He agreed that they should continue. There was a headline in the Washington Post that said Powell to continue Clinton policies on North Korea. He was hauled into the White House and told no way. So we, that broke down and I think that it is an incredibly complex situation that has gone up and down ever since the end of the Korean War. There's no peace treaty. There's just an armistice. And we are now seeing another level of it and it's very dangerous. What is that brandishment of very dangerous weapons about? Is it about looking for some kind of compensation? Is it really about a sense of North Korea's own agency and the confidence that no one will invade their borders? I think it's a series of different things. First of all, there is something about this kind of holy family. They do believe that they have the mandate of heaven and that there was the grandfather and the father and now the son and they see themselves as the embodiment of their people and of the whole system. They also are very concerned because they are nervous about South Korea and also they have developed, they have been developing a variety of weapons for some time. And they are recipients of technology and salesmen of technologies. And what they did was they signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Agreement and then in early 90s, they wanted to pull out of it and we made an agreement with them. They are energy hungry. There's no question about that. And they try to figure out whether you can have peaceful uses of nuclear energy, but at the same time, they are bound and determined to develop a nuclear system. And I always sound as if I'm defending them. I'm definitely not, but they want respect and they wanna have a relationship with the United States and we are incapable of kind of connecting those things. And I do think there is the issue about, there is a linkage between the way we have treated Iran and North Korea. And by the way, one of the things I always like to talk about are the unintended consequences of foreign policy decision. So for instance, we dropped the bomb in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And I don't know whether physicists felt guilty or what, but they go to President Eisenhower and they say there can be peaceful uses of nuclear energy. And he gives a speech called Adams for Peace and that is the basis of the Non-Proliferation Treaty and the International Atomic Energy Agency. And the Iranians are signatories of it and we're the ones that sold them the technology. The North Koreans are also signatories of it. And under that, you have the right to have peaceful uses, but the issue is how do you monitor that they're not doing something militarily? And so the North Koreans, the Iranians began to develop things, we have the agreement with them and very tight verification. And when President Trump decides that we're not gonna certify the Iranians who are obeying the law, then it makes there's some doubt as to why the North Koreans would in fact want to do something similar. So there is a linkage about that. A lot of people know that your father was also a college professor and also a diplomat. You've talked about him being one of your most important teachers. He was also Condoleezza Rice's favorite professor and I'm curious about what kind of teacher could produce two women with so much influence. Well, let me tell the story about him. He really was a remarkable person in terms of being a diplomat and understanding history. And during World War II, when he was with the Czech government in exile in London, he broadcast over BBC into Czechoslovakia. Then he became, after the war, we went back and my father became the Czechoslovakia Ambassador to Yugoslavia. So the little girl in the national costume that gave flowers at the airport, that's what I did for a living. And he also, then we came to the United States and I won't go through that whole story, he kept saying that nothing was better than to be a professor in a free country. And what happened was, he defected, asked for political asylum and at that stage, the Rockefeller Foundation was finding jobs for Central European intellectuals and so they found him a job at the University of Denver and we had no idea where Denver was. And my parents started driving across America and my mother said, they said Denver was the mile high city but we're not going up so maybe we're going the wrong direction. Anyway, he did start teaching there and ultimately he became a pretty big deal in Denver and he died in 1977 and there were lots of flowers and tributes and things and among them was a ceramic pot in the shape of a piano with leaves in it. So I said to my mother, where did this come from? And she said, it's from your father's favorite student, Condoleezza Rice. And she had been a music major, hence the piano and she took an international relations course from my father and he persuaded her to be an international relations major. And she then did her master's at Notre Dame and was back working on her dissertation with my father when he died. And so this African American music major from Alabama wrote her dissertation on the Czechoslovak military. And so in 1987, and I didn't know her, when I was working for my long list of losing Democratic presidential candidates, I was working for Michael Dukakis and my job was to find foreign policy advisors. So I call her up and I explain what I'm doing and she says, Madeleine, I don't know how to tell you this but I'm a Republican. And I said, Condi, how could you be? We had the same father. But we have talked about the fact that, and I just did a panel with Condi. Actually it was the one, it was the George W. Bush Security Forum last week where President Bush gave that remarkable speech. And I mean, Condi always is very kind about the role that my father played but we did learn different things from him. But I do think that he loved teaching and I think that he understood the importance of having an academic basis to practical politics. And so he was a great teacher. People hoping to be president need to learn a lot of foreign policy very quickly. Governors in particular have not really focused on things outside the borders of their own states. Talk a little bit about the crash course that you would give to Michael Dukakis or Walter Mondale or Bill Clinton to ensure that they know enough to start making decisions about the policies that they will propose for their campaigns. Well, first of all, the people you named actually knew an awful lot. Bill Clinton went to Georgetown as a young student in the School of Foreign Service and Walter Mondale had been in the Senate and understood an incredible amount of things and Michael Dukakis had done a lot of traveling and as a governor and interestingly enough, a lot of governors know a lot about foreign policy in terms of because they trade or do any number of things. And so I think they actually were prepared in terms of things they were doing and also having been in their campaigns, I can tell you they spent an awful lot of time looking at foreign policy issues ahead of time. The other part, and I think this is a really important point, is one of the most interesting parts about our government and the changing of presidents and usually parties at the same time is the transition period. And there's some people who think it's too long from November to January and some people who think it's too short because there's so many issues to cover, but it is a remarkable transfer, peaceful transfer of power and transferring the crown jewels. And I have been transitioned into and I've done the transitioning, the latter is more fun, but the bottom line is the new people, you go and you sit in the offices, you are there. I did the transition for President Clinton for the National Security Council itself and I sat in the old executive office building and I met with the people that, to have them really tell me what were the issues they'd been working on, how were they organized. It was really like going to graduate school again and really going through everything. Or for instance, when Colin Powell became Secretary of State and I was Secretary, he had an office in the State Department. We made sure that all the Assistant Secretaries briefed him, I spent a lot of time with him. What had not happened this time, there was no transition. Very little in terms of people really knowing what all the issues are. And so there's that combination of people that come with some governance experience. I do think that it's useful, all the people you mentioned actually had worked in a government of some kind and also had prepared during their campaigns and then that transition period was not just icing on the cake but it was really a way to get their heads around the issues that they were ready to deal with. You mentioned earlier that Secretary Tillerson doesn't have even now a full staff. The President has spoken about him wasting his time with certain diplomatic efforts. Is this unprecedented? Well as far as I know it's unprecedented and I'm trying to find some rationale for it and I think one could say perhaps maybe this is part of some plan. That they're kind of doing good cop, bad cop and that there's really something going on underneath. I have no idea, all I know is what I read or listen to but I think that what must be very difficult even if it is planned, which is 50-50 chance is that it undercuts the Secretary of State and one of the things I do an awful lot of traveling and I do know that as a former diplomat it's not appropriate to criticize your own country when you're abroad but I listen a lot and I am asked by whomever I'm speaking with to explain what's going on. I can't and part of what is happening is it undercuts Secretary Tillerson's role if the people in X country actually think that it's a waste of time. Why would they sit there and talk to him? And so I think it is very damaging and what is equally damaging is that the way the administration has just generally looked at when it go back through my five factors, the budget. And what has happened is our budget is obviously very complicated and often doesn't get passed and they do continuing resolutions but they do send messages and so this particular budget that the administration set up has, the first function of the budget is the military, a function 0.50 which is somewhere over $600 billion and the next function is international relations which is 1.50 and it had under it under the Obama administration kind of around 50 billion and then the Trump administration proposed a 30% cut. Now it is being debated on the Hill and it is not as bad as it sounded at the beginning but it's bad and it is a signal that diplomats are not important, that diplomacy is not important, that the Secretary of State does not have the kind of power. The part that I find very surprising is that Secretary Tillerson has accepted it and he has gone to the Hill and the total opposite of what happened to the rest of us was members of Congress would say you need more money and he would say I don't want it and so he is not helping his own department and what I have to just tell you because I am teaching at Georgetown and the School of Foreign Service, a lot of people that in the past have thought they would go into the diplomatic service. My students are saying, do you think I really should take a foreign service exam, there's really been a freeze going on and some of the lower level jobs they're not interested in and what is, it's bad for right now but it's also cutting off our pipeline of people that are needed for diplomacy and my course that I teach, I say foreign policy is just trying to get some country what you want, that's all it is. So what tools are there? And my course is called the National Security Toolbox and you need all the tools, there are not a lot of them but it's diplomacy, it's the economic tools of aid and trade and sanctions and the use of force, intelligence, law enforcement, that's it and if all of a sudden we're cutting off our diplomacy then we're undermining our own foreign policy. How important is the way that diplomacy is portrayed in the media either in the United States or in the country that you're dealing with? I think that it is often portrayed as a bunch of people that go to receptions and don't really do much and are happy to live abroad because they have a lot of servants. It is definitely not that. It is one of the more important and sadly dangerous professions that exist now. When I was Secretary of State we had, there's a wall in the State Department of People that died while in office. There were more diplomats that died than flag officers. Obviously that changed with Iraq and Afghanistan but it is a very dangerous job and the people there work very, whichever country work very hard in those jobs and represent the United States as best they can. So it's vital and diplomacy is the way that history and over time countries communicate with each other. It is the standard way that diplomats there's a whole process by which they present their credentials and spend time but they are the eyes and ears of the present United States and another country. Technology has changed things a little bit because there's so much information out there but basically they are the ones that understand the history and the culture and religion of a particular country and can report on what is going on. People make an awful lot of fun of diplomats at the UN. You know that they really don't do anything and they just kind of develop a lot of parking tickets that they don't pay. But the bottom line is I found when I went up there that the representatives of their countries there are either people that have already been their foreign ministers or will be their foreign ministers and are very strong in terms of being able to again report on what is going on multilaterally and bring the voice of their governments to the multilateral setting. By the way, the thing that this panel that Kondi and I did with Nikki Haley up there also goes back to the issue. If we don't pay, the UN is a club. You have to pay your dues and if you don't pay them then you lose your vote or you're hurt in some way or if you don't pay your bills on peacekeeping it's very hard to get reform. And so we are undercutting our own power at the UN and by the way, because even when we were around it was difficult to get Congress to pay the money and so it led our best friends, the British to deliver a line they had waited more than 200 years to say representation without taxation. But I do think there is a genuine problem with the UN in this country is there are people that are terrified of the UN. They think that it will, that it has black Hawk helicopters that swoop down and steal your lawn furniture. And then there are people that don't like the UN because it's full of foreigners, which can't be helped. You have often called the United States the indispensable nation. Will that always be true? It's not true at the moment, frankly. And I have to say, and let me just give you a little bit of history of that. One of the things that really had happened when the Clinton administration came in, it had been a time where I think people felt that an awful lot of attention had been spent on foreign policy and not enough on domestic policy. And President Clinton said it's the economy stupid and people were focusing on a peace dividend. And so it became very evident that we had to deliver a message to the American people that the US had to be engaged internationally or that it would hurt American national interest. And so President Clinton was the first one to say that we were an indispensable nation. It's just that I said it so often that became identified with me. But it was in order to tell the American people that we had to be involved, but there's nothing about the word indispensable that says alone. It just means that we need to be engaged and it's another word for partnership. And so I do think it's very important. I am very concerned now given our behavior is that we are about to be the dispensable nation. And that whenever there is a vacuum in the international system, somebody steps in and that's what the Chinese are doing. And it's very interesting. They've just had their party Congress. Xi Jinping has stepped into kind of a role right after Mao Zedong in terms of glorification of the one leader and they are moving out in terms of justifying the fact that they had not been treated with respect over the years and they are doing whatever they're doing in the South China Sea. They're not interested in the rocks. They are interested in the oil that's under them. They are energy hungry and they are creating all kinds of networks of infiltration in a number of ways through what they're calling the Chinese dream and looking at what they call one belt, one road and they are developing relations in Central Asia and also in the Middle East and then some even in Latin America. So they are all over the place and in Africa and so they are stepping in where we had been seen as being the global power and I think it's very dangerous for the United States. I believe that we need to be involved internationally for our own national security reasons with our partners in order to make sure that we are safe. So if we lost global primacy, we wouldn't be the same United States that we in this room have all known. I think we wouldn't be because we are very, first of all, we are dependent on how what happens in other countries and there are all kinds of different and new threats, cyber threats or terrorism where you need nuclear proliferation, where you need partners to work with. And I do believe it's the job of the president of the United States to protect our territory, our people and our way of life. And so we all thought we were perfectly safe territorially because being protected by two oceans and two friendly neighbors but 9-11 was really kind of a watershed event in terms of showing that even our oceans do not protect us and that we need to know what's going on somewhere through intelligence cooperation. And then I think our people, our people actually don't, they wanna travel and do business abroad. There's no question about that and we benefit by a lot of those relationships. Trade agreements actually are important. We sell a lot of things to other countries. It isn't just that they're all robbing us. The bottom line is they are, when they're well done, they are bilateral or multilateral. And then our way of life. Our way of life depends on our safety but also we know that we feel threatened if other countries are a mess and people wanna leave them or they are petri dishes for terrorists. So I can argue that the US needs to have an international role, not alone. I mean, we used to say multilaterally if you can, unilaterally if you must. The bottom line is we need to be able to protect our people and you can't do it by closing any contact with the outside world and thinking that America's first because then America will be alone and it is much more, I think, under threat in that kind of way. I'd like to take some questions from our audience. Since we're capturing this conversation for a broadcast on the Think Program, if you can go to one of the microphones that we have set up on the side of the room or raise your hand and they'll go to you but we'd like to get your voice on the microphone, please. Good morning, Madam Secretary. There you are. My name is Skip Davis and I attended the University of Denver at the same time Condi was there and had the privilege of meeting your father as well. Wow. But there was another woman there who upon your father's passing influenced me and Condi in a very strong way. I would be the underachiever and her name was Catherine Kellerhur. Yes. And I was curious how she and her experiences helped you or inspired you as you made your way up the ladder. That's interesting. Well, first of all, I didn't know Condi at the time either and I was not living in Denver. But Catherine is somebody that I spent some time with when she was in Washington and kind of talking about arms control issues and what was going on in Europe and somebody that I respected a great deal in terms of her understanding of issues and that we did a lot of things together. I have to admit I kind of lost track of her but she really was somebody that I spent time with and admired. And I'm very glad to hear that you went to the school. It is now called the Corbelle School in honor of my father, which pleases me a lot. One of the people that went there, believe it or not is now the current foreign minister of Iran, which Zareef, which kind of surprised me as we've been talking about why he went to the University of Denver but it is a good school and clearly has had a lot of influence on people. Thank you for saying that. Matt McOviac, thank you for being here. It's been very interesting. You mentioned Foreign Minister Zareef. I was curious what you think the US should do now that the President's decertified the JCPOA, the Iran deal given that there's a 60 day clock for Congress to decide if they're gonna put sanctions back on. What are the realistic options and what should the US do at this point given the challenges within that deal? Thank you. Well, I think we have put ourselves unfortunately into a very dangerous situation. First of all, I do think one thing that needs to be made clear is it is impossible to deal with every problem one has with ex-country all at the same time. And there are always discussions as to whether there should be comprehensive agreements on anything or whether you should take it up piece by piece. And on Iran, we clearly have problems with Iran in terms of their behavior on ballistic missiles and some of the ways that they are influencing others in the region. But what made everybody particularly nervous was their development of nuclear capability. And so I think the administration, the Obama administration decided to look at that and make an agreement not alone but multilaterally with the P5 plus one in order to broaden the time, the window in which they could produce nuclear weapons and then develop one of the most stringent verification processes through the IAEA inspections in order to make sure that they didn't break the rules and they have given up a lot of their centrifuges and a lot of their heavy, their enriched uranium. They have been following the rules. What is interesting is that the sanctions actually, I think, brought them to the table but the misinterpretation of whether they would put more sanctions on might drive them away again. The other part, again, to go back to my five factors, we need to know, and it's important to understand what's going on in Iran. And Zarif and Rouhani, the leaders there now, are having their own problems with their hard line and so who are saying this wasn't a fair agreement. If the Americans are not gonna keep to it, why should we? And therefore we have yet, again, unleashed some of the horrors of what Iran could be doing even more in the whole region. So I hope that the agreement doesn't disappear and the other members of the P5 are saying that they're gonna stick with it and I hope that our Congress is careful in terms of whether adding more sanctions or what they're doing. What the President has done is kind of dumped it in their lap. What is interesting is I created a group of former foreign ministers. We just met two weeks ago and 25 of us signed a letter to members of Congress saying, do not let this agreement go away and it is a multilateral, it's a real view from a very international group saying the United States is gonna screw up if we really drop that agreement and I think that what the President did was really irresponsible and it doesn't mean that we shouldn't be looking at other ways that the Iranians are not meeting their obligations but why would we set loose this real problem again with the nuclear issue? By the way, can I just add one of the things, in 1998 when Khatami had first been elected, also a reformist, in the Clinton administration we're trying to figure out how to have some kind of to work off of that to see if we could change our relationship with the Iranians. So there were a bunch of meetings in New York and one of the things that happened was Kofi Annan, the Secretary General of the UN called a meeting of something called the Six Plus Two which were countries that dealt with Afghanistan and the person that had been the permanent representative to the UN also all of a sudden became the Iranian Foreign Minister and I'd met him so we were sitting in a room across the table and I look at him and I thought, he doesn't really look the way he did before and I thought, well neither do I so but I said, isn't it interesting if the person that's been the ambassador all of a sudden comes back to the UN as foreign minister, nothing and then I said, isn't it great when you've been here and you know where you are, nothing so I look at my bench of all America's Iran experts and I said to them, is this Karazi and they said, we don't know and that is what happens if you never talk to anybody and it wasn't until the Secretary General came in and said, I'm very glad the deputy foreign minister could come that I figured out who I was talking to and it goes back to the diplomacy question generally diplomacy is not a gift to the other side of who you're trying to arrange something with it is the method by which you find out what has to be done and try to figure out what is a win-win situation. Hi, thank you for being here, you're such an inspiration my question is related to what we can do as individuals on these issues of foreign policy because for me I run political groups and I'm very involved but I feel tiny in like this conversation so what can we do as individuals being both pragmatists and idealists what can we do to sort of make sure that we're keeping a check on what's going on in the current administration and also affecting our local communities to pay attention to this when there's so much I mean there's so much going on it's like a barrage every day what are your suggestions for individuals on the local level to contribute to this conversation? Well I'm very glad you asked that I do think that part of the problem these days is keeping up with the news especially when we don't know what the news is I mean and trying to figure out where to get your information in the first place and it requires really I think kind of comparative research of trying to figure out what is going on where I do think unless you happen to totally just love foreign policy or all issues there's no way to keep up with everything and I do think that it's important to kind of choose an area of things that you think you can make a difference in and I think that expanding the group of people that one works with and then going through a variety of civic organizations or I believe in people working together that one voice is great but a multitude is better and then going to elected officials and saying this is very important and then I do think also just to widen the issue I think younger people in high schools and things need to be educated about what democracy is about and to have civics courses again and for people to understand history and I think that pressure from really engage citizens to make sure that our education system lives up to what it's supposed to in this country so that you're developing a pipeline of people that understand that as citizens we have a responsibility. I think one of the things that's happened everywhere in the world is kind of the social contract is broken when people decide at a certain point to give up some individual rights to the state so that the state can do some things for them but it is a responsibility where citizens have to be knowledgeable and active and the government then when we go speak to them react to what we're doing and all of a sudden that kind of link is a little weak at this point because some people have kind of said I don't care I can't affect them anyway and then the government doesn't take anybody seriously so thanks for asking that and I'm sure you will I mean I think it's important to get a group with you it's very hard to be alone on this. Hi my name is Rainu Reissam and 17 years ago you were actually my commencement speaker at the University of California Berkeley and I never made the connection but I did go on to become a journalist so maybe there's a connection there but my question is about transatlantic relations and the rise of right-wing populism in Europe we're seeing that with Brexit in Austria even in Germany with the AFD getting an increasing share of votes how does the US fit into that and what does it mean if the transatlantic relationship breaks down right now? Well I have always kind of considered myself the embodiment of the transatlantic relationship having been born in Europe and being raised in America and the European situation has been complicated really from the very beginning I mean what happened after World War II was that countries got together initially through the Colin Steele community to work together and thanks we're celebrating the 70th anniversary of the Marshall Plan of kind of trying to rid themselves of hyper nationalism which had created World War II and create organizations that in fact represented Europe as a whole and it's interesting to kind of study the evolution of Europe I think unfortunately in looking back the European Union was created by people in fancy rooms with apostrophes in their name you know Giscard Destinang and didn't really present it to the people very well so there was a disconnect between this brand new organization and the population of Europe and then there were a bunch of bureaucrats in Brussels that made a lot of rules and kind of affected all of Europe and I think that there's kind of the trend to globalization but the problem with it is it has a downside which is it's faceless so all of a sudden the people in Europe in these countries kind of began to reacquire some kind of a national identity now it is very nice we all want to have an identity whether religious, ethnic, linguistic but if my identity hates your identity it turns into hyper nationalism which is very dangerous and that is kind of what has happened in Europe and then you've got the whole migration issue of people coming in from the Middle East and other places and there's the question about what happened during the financial crisis the bottom line is the Northern Europeans were horrible snobs about Southern Europeans saying that they were lazy and why should they pay off their debts so there were any number of kind of things that were going on that then lent to the kinds of populist parties and the things that are going on at the same time the Russians are taking advantage of all of it they are using disinformation to desegregate voices in Central and Eastern Europe so that and I happen to believe that the transatlantic relationship has been incredibly important it was the basis of how we all operated together during the Cold War the thing that happened that I find interesting is that there were a lot of people who thought in Europe who thought we didn't want a strong European Union in the US we did and we also hoped that the Europeans would be our partners as we dealt with other problems in the world and what happened when President Obama decided to rebalance to Asia a lot of Europeans felt abandoned and a lot of them called me and said you don't care anymore and I said yes we do you are no longer the problem you are part of the solution but they wouldn't buy that and so then they kind of feel that we have let down the transatlantic community and then when President Trump didn't seem to care about Article 5 and NATO and Europe it has been exacerbated so there are domestic issues in those countries that are creating right wing parties and Brexit and all that and immigration and at the same time kind of questioning as to what our relationship is with them right now and it's ongoing and that's one of the things as I said I travel a lot that they are asking about do you care are we supposed to do stuff together why are American corporations taking advantage of us and a lot of different things that need to be dealt with and whatever trade agreements are out there like TTIP we are not interested in it so there's kind of this you don't love us anymore maybe one more question thank you Dr. Albright my name is Jennifer and I'm a graduate of the EMPL program here at the LBJ School and I want to ask you do you mention that governors often have credibility with foreign policy and I'm speaking specifically of Secretary Haley who obviously received some criticism despite her role in bringing both Boeing and BMW to South Carolina how do we hope for and achieve the leadership of women which we lag behind our national our counterparts in the fact that we have never attained a female leader in our executive office either party well I thought you were going a different direction but let me just say this what I find interesting is Americans do always like to be number one in things there are so many other countries that have women leaders and we do not and trying to figure out why I think is an interesting question because there clearly are and have been very qualified women and and I think that it is one thing we need to ask ourselves about is whether we are subjecting women to a level of criticism that doesn't happen to men or whether it's our party system or whatever I do think that and it's interesting because I have met a lot of women leaders in other countries and even people always think that Latin Americans are chauvinists but they've had women presidents and prime ministers and so I do think we need to ask ourselves what this is about I also do think that we need to help each other more now I do believe that there's a special place in hell for women who don't help each other but I would not vote for a woman I disagree with I mean I think this doesn't have to do with voting but I do think it has to do with understanding how we help each other to get the proper training and support and an understanding that we can do things pretty well and but I don't know the answer frankly I think something and this is just my own experience with this is that we don't help each other and I went out I was Geraldine Ferraro's foreign policy advisor and once she was named we traveled around the United States together and what happened was we were somewhere somewhere in the Middle West and this housewife came up to me and said how can she deal with Russians I can't deal with a Russian well nobody was asking this housewife to deal with a Russian and what we do is kind of project our own sense of inadequacy on another woman another woman men don't do that to each other and I think we do have to understand that in fact there are highly qualified women and that there needs to be more support but it also begins in graduate school and every place and so it goes back to the initial thing we were talking about how women support each other and reinforce to say you know I agree with that and not think that the queen bee syndrome is going to get us somewhere if there's only one job at the top I'm going to have it and you're not because actually we're stronger when we work together Secretary Albright it has been a great pleasure thank you so much for your time thank you all thank you very much yeah thank you