Condoleezza Rice plays Hardball

On North Korea
MATTHEWS:  Relative to a hard line.  If there is a hard line—I’m not sure what it is.  Do you think Kim Jong Il is a sane man?

RICE:  I don’t know.  I’ve never met the man.

MATTHEWS:  Is he a responsible leader?

RICE:  I have to say that anyone has to say that the people of North Korea have not prospered under this regime.  They’ve suffered under this regime.   We’re talking about malnutrition rates that have led to literal height and weight differentials that are dramatic between the South Korean population, which is well nourished, and the North Korean population that is not.

The sad thing is that while the North Korean regime seeks nuclear weapons, its population is still totally dependent on food aid to try and deal with its malnutrition.  The good thing is that if the North Koreans chose to come back the six-party talks, they could significantly improve the well-being of their people, because there are—all of the states of the six-party talks are willing and ready to help them on this score.  Even without that, the United States has been a huge provider of food assistance to North Korea.

So there are ways for North Korea to take advantage of what is being offered.  They just have to give up their nuclear-weapons program.

On Russia
MATTHEWS:  Last two questions, and they’re related.  Russia and the piano.  Okay?

RICE:  Russia and the piano.  Okay.

MATTHEWS:  First of all, you’re a Russian expert.  Somebody said to me recently that—I think it was my wife—that the word in the world is that if you are a desperate people, times are bad economically, just out of human nature, you go to the tyrants; you go to the strongman.   Is that the appeal of Putin?  That he will bring back that nostalgic sense of the greater Russia, the greater empire, and therefore—and that’s being driven by this terrible dichotomy between rich and poor in that country?

RICE:  Well, first of all, a lot has changed in the 15 years since (INAUDIBLE).   This is not the Soviet Union.  And so even when we talk about trends of consolidation of power in the Kremlin that we think are troubling, we’re not talking about anything remotely like what it was before (INAUDIBLE)...

MATTHEWS:  No Brezhnev.

RICE:  ... in the Soviet Union.  There’s no Brezhnev.  There’s no Krushchev, in that sense there is not even a Gorbachev.  There a much freer society for individual rights, and the like than there has ever been, I think, in Russian history.

But there is a trend toward the consolidation of power.  And I think  you have to understand it in terms of the Russian people’s views.  I think in the ‘90s, there was a sense that it became just chaotic.  And I think there was a sense that Russia sense of being a great power was diminished.

Now some of that has been rebuilt.  And some of that is good.  But what you don’t want to do is to have an overreaction to the point that the concentration of power in the Kremlin, at the expense of an independent press, at the expense of a strong and independent judiciary, because to swing completely the other way.

And I do think that the income-distribution differences in Russia need to be addressed.  They’ve got an opportunity to address them.  They’ve got extraordinarily high oil prices.  But they’re not going to do it on the basis of an energy-only economy.

MATTHEWS:  What’s wrong with Russia, because we’ve been pretty good in this country—obviously not great, but good creating a middle class.   Roosevelt had a lot to do with it, the G.I. Bill, things like that, Social Security.  The Russians went from the czarist period, where it was horrendously unfair, where there were just a few very rich people.  And now it seems like they’re going back to that horrendous dichotomy.  People tell me around Moscow that these people are all driving around in Mercedes with  incredible wealth and prostitution and huge money.  Five miles out of town, or less than that, everybody’s impoverished.

RICE:  Well, it’s—I do think it’s gotten better in the last several of years, that there is a middle class that’s developed in Russia.

MATTHEWS:  Really?

RICE:  It’s beginning to develop.  It’s developing in the cities.  When you go out to the countryside, it is quite a difference, quite a different matter.

And the Russians, even the Russian leadership, will be quite honest with you about that, that the villages and the smaller cities are still very impoverished.  If you go to St. Petersburg or even Moscow, you do have a growing middle class.

I’ll tell you, the longest lines, Chris, are at furniture stores.  And why is that?  It’s because people are actually buying apartments.  They’re buying places to live.  They’re fixing them up.   So there is a nascent middle class.

But what you need is entrepreneurship in Russia, because one of the great secrets of the United States, of course, is small business.  It’s not big business; it’s small business that employs tens of people or at most hundreds of people.  And until you have a firm foundation of rule of law and people believe they can recoup their investment, and there are going to be fair tax laws and all of these things, you’re not going to have that entrepreneurship.

So the kinds of issues that we talk with the Russians about, the need for rule of law, is not just to attract big Western investment but also so you can create a culture in which Russians themselves will found small businesses and take the country forward.

MATTHEWS:  Why are the—last question.  Why are the Russians so good at writing novels, at ballets, at chess, at the piano, anything that requires intense, almost lifelong dedication?  Even their national anthem was beautiful, the Soviet national anthem is beautiful.

RICE:  It is.

MATTHEWS:  The internationale (ph) is beautiful.  What they haven’t been good at is society-building.

RICE:  Well, the comes down, I think, to political structures.  I don’t—I fundamentally don’t believe that there are any people on the earth who don’t have the DNA somehow for democratic development.

MATTHEWS:  None?

RICE:  I just don’t believe it.  I just don’t believe it.

MATTHEWS:  Haiti?

RICE:  Everybody in the world is capable of democratic development.  Some people in the world are unlucky enough to get stuck with really bad political leadership and with really bad political institutions.

Now, the Russians are—as I said, a lots changed in 15 years.  That has improved.  And you notice, too, that this is the people that also have some of the best software engineers in the world because they’re brilliant at mathematics.  They have the knowledge base, the intellectual base, to be a quite remarkable society and to build entrepreneurship, but they need a legal structure and a political structure that will allow that to happen.  When I think about what we got so fortunate about in the United States, it was really that from our foundings—both political institutions and that sense of what values mattered, were there in the first founding documents. 

Now to be sure, you know, my predecessor on the wall here . . .

MATTHEWS:  Yes, I can see Jefferson flying around Moscow.

(CROSS TALK)

RICE:  And Thomas Jefferson, you know, my favorite quote from him, Chris, is, you know, “The God who gave us life gave us liberty at the same time.”  Well, he was a slave-owner.  But these institutions, while they weren’t perfect at the time, did allow people to prosper and to continue to struggle and build toward them.  That’s what you need, is good institutions and I think people will eventually live up to them.

"Hardball with Chris Matthews" airs every weeknight at 7 p.m. ET on MSNBC TV.

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