Spring Break
Condoleezza Rice speaks to Rice
Cindy Dinh
Issue date: 11/21/08 Section: News
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Rice spoke at a gala last Thursday commemorating the 15th anniversary of the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy, a nonpartisan scholarly think tank focusing on research on domestic and foreign policy issues. The institute was ranked among the top 30 think tanks in the United States by the Think Tanks and Civil Societies Program at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in January.
Rice became the 66th Secretary of State in 2005 but just the second African American to hold that position, after Colin Powell. Before her work as National Security Advisor and Secretary of State in the administration of President George W. Bush, she served as a political science professor and provost at Stanford University.
In her speech given in honor of former Secretary of State James A. Baker, who was in attendance, and the Baker Institute, Rice maintained that the United States is still a land of opportunity, but it needs to reshape its immigration policy and reform public education.
Rice said this month's presidential election was significant because it sent a message to the world that differences can be overcome.
"That [a country with] a girl like me who grew up in Birmingham, Alabama can now elect an African- American president is an extraordinary matter," Rice said. "Change is a good thing. The time comes for new people, time for new ideas."
People have historically thought of change as impossible, especially during the Cold War, she said. Rice referred to her time serving as director of Soviet and eastern-European affairs at the National Security Council in 1989 when Baker was secretary of state.
"It was a time when skillful diplomacy and statecraft was demanded, and Americans were fortunate to have Jim Baker as chief diplomat in bringing [about] the peaceful collapse of the Soviet Union," Rice said.
She stressed the importance of having friends and allies and said that when America exists in a world with like-minded democratic states, the world is safer.
"Today in Afghanistan, NATO fights alongside us to try to bring freedom to Afghan people who [have known] nothing but war and deprivation for 30 years," Rice said. "Democracy is not a system only for those who speak the languages of the West and come from those cultures."
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