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Q: General Powell, you hear senior administration officials grouse that world affairs are not a popularity contest. To what extent does it even matter if polls around the world show that so many people don’t like us anymore?

Gen. Colin Powell: Well, polls do show that we have fallen in our favorability ratings over the years. But at the same time, people still respect America and they still do trust America. They still come to Washington to find solutions to problems. America is still looked to as a nation that will provide leadership, whether it’s going after the scourge of HIV/AIDS and poverty or solving the problems of the Middle East, or doing so many other things. So we still are trusted, we still are respected. As I go around the country I see the immigration population of America continue to increase as people around the world line up at our embassies and consular offices to get visas to come here; to work, to go to school, to get healthcare and to become Americans. And so there’s something that’s still very good and very right about America. I think the negative views that have been expressed in recent years are a function of the Iraq war, and what has happened in the aftermath of the fall of that terrible regime and, frankly, continuing anxiety about the situation between the Israelis and the Palestinians; “Why can’t more be done about that? Why can’t America do more?” I think if those two problems could be resolved, then I think we would start to see those numbers go back up in the other direction.

Q: When we read books and essays about leadership, as I’m sure you have as well, it’s often argued that leadership is about winning respect first and then people want to essentially follow you up the hill. I mean, do you agree with that idea and can we apply this better to our relationship with the rest of the world?

Powell: I think leadership is about trust and you garner trust by convincing people in the rightness of your cause, and also by sometimes taking chances. You can’t always wait until everybody agrees with the action you’re about to take. Sometimes you have to act and then hope that public opinion will follow that action. I’ve been in a number of situations, for example the invasion of Panama back in 1989 when I was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, roundly condemned by many people in the world. But we got rid of a terrible regime and Panama has now had four, I think it is, successful democratic elections since and there isn’t an American soldier in Panama. So things turn out well over time.

When we had trouble with the ABM [Anti-Ballistic Missile] Treaty at the beginning of this administration, everybody said if we ever withdrew from the ABM Treaty we would destroy the strategic framework that existed in the world with respect to nuclear weapons, and we couldn’t do it and we shouldn’t do it. But we did do it, and we did it after talking to our friends for nine months, after talking to the Russians for a nine-month period as well, and making them understand why we felt we had to do it. When we did it, it didn’t cause any of the kind of outrage that people suggested. Six months after we left the treaty, we signed a new agreement with the Russians that reduced nuclear weapons. So sometimes leadership is about consulting with others and talking to others, but doing what you think is right and hoping that because it was the right thing to do, opinion will eventually come around to your point of view. That is not to say you should go around poking your finger in the eyes of others or being inconsiderate to the views of others. I think it’s important for us to give reasons for our actions and to spend time listening to our friends.

But you know, there is a suggestion that America isn’t doing this, or hasn’t been doing this but let’s look at some of the facts. We have been engaged in multilateral negotiations and diplomacy with our European friends to do something about the Iranian nuclear program. We have been in multilateral discussions with our friends in Asia to do something about the North Korean program. We’re not invading North Korea or Iran; we’re working with our friends to try to find a diplomatic solution. When the Balkans still had a significant military presence, some thought the United States was going to leave when the Bush administration came in; we did not. We worked with our friends and allies and we said, “We went in together and we’ll come out together.” HIV/AIDS, solving the North/South crisis in Sudan, dealing with the problems of Liberia, of Haiti and so many other places, we have worked with our friends. The unilateral charge, or that we don’t listen or pay attention to anyone, really revolves around the situation in Iraq, the International Criminal Court and Kyoto. Those three.

Q: Those are big ones.

Powell: Those are big ones, and we probably could have taken more time to explain our position with respect to Kyoto and the ICC and maybe that would have made it less harsh on the ears of others or in the opinions of others. But we felt strongly about those issues, and I think we still feel strongly, that we have a reason for our decisions and those reasons continue to make sense.

Q: You pointed to examples where America is working with our coalition partners, talking, listening. But could we do an even better job? Do we have the ratio off slightly in terms of engaging versus essentially asserting our authority?

Powell: I think we could do a better job. I think we could take more time to listen and consider the views of others, and not just hear them, but actually listen to them and crank their positions into our own deliberations as we go forward. I’ve always a believer in diplomacy, a believer in dialogue, “Let’s do everything we can to avoid a crisis or to avoid a war.”

Q: Look, I know hope springs eternal. From the tsunami zone in Indonesia we get a story of American engagement that suggests we can still make friends if we put our minds to it. But there are some people who argue that we’re past the point of no return, that antipathy for what America is doing is so strong that it’s hard to make friends moving forward.

Powell: Well, you know, that’s nonsense. We have many friends in the world. We have great alliances. We have the NATO alliance. We have a good relationship with the European Union. We have a strategic relationship with India after forty years of India kind of being on the other side of the ledger with their connections to the Soviet Union way of doing business, and now we have a strategic partnership with India. With China, we ended the Asian Cold War, brought down the Bamboo Curtain and now we have an extremely strong open-trading relationship with China. We have alliances with South Korea, with Thailand, with the Philippines. We have strong relations with Australia, with New Zealand. It doesn’t mean that all these relations are perfect. There will always be disagreements; disagreements of a trade nature, or disagreements when somebody feels they have to act in a certain way for their own national interests and others might not agree.

But the presumption of your questions has been that everything has gone in the wrong direction, and I submit that is not the case. I submit that we succeeded in expanding NATO, we have watched as the European Union has expanded, and we have worked hard with our friends and allies around the world to increase trading relations, to open up trading opportunities, to conclude free trade agreements. We have been deeply engaged in providing assistance to the rest of the world. In the four years I was secretary, we doubled the amount of development assistance we give to the world. We quadrupled the amount of aid we were giving to Africa. We helped Secretary-General Kofi Annan set up the Global Health Fund for HIV/AIDS and other infectious diseases, and the President then launched a program separately from that to provide $15 billion for HIV/AIDS relief and the relief of other respiratory diseases.

When the Tsunami hit out in Asia I was there within a week or so, and we started sending money to the area the night it happened. When the United Nations put out a first call on the Sunday night of the Tsunami and said they needed $7 million in immediate assistance, the United States chipped in over fifty percent of that money immediately. By the end of the first week, we had upped the amount to some $300 million as the extent of the damage became known. Our military forces, those that are sometimes looked at with some disdain, were one of the first groups to arrive on the scene and begin providing aid, with helicopters coming off of our ships and carriers. So we’re still that nation, and I think the people of the world recognize it. But are we going through a bad spot right now with respect to how people generally in the world view the United States? Yes. Is it recoverable? Sure it’s recoverable.

Q: As we’ve gone around the world looking at innovative ways that the U.S. engages other countries, my colleagues and I do hear this disturbing refrain about your previous point, that people are not inclined to follow the lead or the wishes of our country too often because they’re just so angry about what happened in Iraq. General Powell, you helped make the public case for going to war in Iraq. Do you share blame for some of this?

Powell: I am glad that Saddam Hussein is gone. It’s a terrible regime. The intelligence information that I presented to the UN was the same intelligence information that was presented to the United States Congress four months before, the same intelligence information that was provided to the President, the same intelligence information that our allies were using when they decided to come along with us, in the case of the United Kingdom. Italy, Spain, and a number of other countries were not all of the offended governments that you’re referring to. They all felt that it was important to deal with this problem. The United States took this problem to the United Nations and sought a solution. We got a unanimous resolution after seven weeks of multilateral diplomacy, and that resolution could have avoided the war if Saddam Hussein had fully complied with its terms. He didn’t, and the President, believing that it was necessary to protect the nation and protect other nations, decided that military force was necessary.

Now it turned out there were no stockpiles, but let there be no doubt that the intentions were still there and the capability of creating stockpiles was still there. If Saddam Hussein had escaped the consequences this time, there may be some who feel he would have moved to create such weapons but the President was not one of them and neither was I.

Q: Well without inviting you to take potshots at present policy – that’s not my intention – are there lessons to be drawn from experience in Iraq when we think about America’s leadership role moving forward?

Powell: When you have to undertake an operation like this, make sure that you have planned well for all potential consequences. It wasn’t the first phase of this operation that gave us difficulty. The regime came down quickly. Nobody should miss the opportunity that was created with the elimination of one of the most despotic regimes that the world has ever seen, and I’m glad they’re all gone. We did not plan sufficiently for the aftermath, and did not understand the nature of the environment we were entering. Then when the insurgency broke out, we didn’t respond sufficiently to that.

Q: Leaving the subject of Iraq now, many Americans do seem to see the wider world through what’s really a prism of fear; a lot of international threats are all too real given what we’ve seen, and we have to fiercely guard against them. But to what extent do you worry that reacting to fear is almost the defining idea of our foreign policy?

Powell: It’s not good. You’re often saying, “Many Americans see,” or, “Everybody in the world sees.” I would submit to you that many Americans see an entirely different picture than the picture you just conveyed to me. I travel widely around America and I see people who are working hard, who are creating value or creating jobs, who are confident about the future, and they have put terrorism into its context; it is a danger to us. We have to guard against it. We have to go after the terrorists. But at the same time, we can’t let terrorists change the way we live. We can’t let them change our value system. My understanding of the American psyche right now is we are troubled by Iran and North Korea, we are deeply troubled by Iraq and we are concerned about terrorism, but the country continues to move on. Our economy is doing extremely well. We are creating huge amounts of wealth. Companies are investing not only here in the United States but they’re investing overseas. Huge equity funds are being raised in order to make these kinds of investments. The American people going about their business, concerned about the crises but also relieved that there’s no longer a cold war in Europe, there is no longer a cold war in Asia and that the nations that used to have the capacity to destroy us as a nation and a society – the Soviet Union and to some extent China – are now, for the most part, friends. So there are a lot of opportunities out there and I see many American companies and institutions taking advantage of those opportunities, and being worried about the crises you touch on but at the same time fairly confident of the future.

Q: There are a lot of problems though around the world that might be improved with some American attention and investment. What you tend to see though is the pitches for government money to fix problems overseas often appeal to the national security argument. Is that a problem at all, this notion that you can’t just say, “Poverty alleviation,” you have to say, “No, it’s all really about fighting terrorism”?

Powell: I was in charge of all of our development assistance for the four years that I was Secretary of State, and very seldom did I use in my conversations with Congress the national security argument. If you look at the way in which our funds are used now compared to the days of the Cold War, where the argument always was we’ve got to bolster those nations that are anti-Communist and not invest in those nations that are Communist, well that distinction is gone. What I was concerned about as Secretary is how do we relieve poverty, how do we help those nations who have foresworn corruption and have put themselves on the basis of the rule of law? How do we help people who are suffering with unclean water and who need food, basic necessities of life? I didn’t have to worry about who is an enemy and who isn’t an enemy and, “We’re only going to do this on a national security basis.” We did it on the basis of what America’s obligation is to our fellow human beings around the world.

The other point I would make is that government aid is not the answer. Ultimately we need nations that have moved away from authoritarian regimes, who have put in place the rule of law, who have ended corruption and have created conditions in their country that attract not just aid, but trade. They need investment, not just aid. Aid helps them get started but ultimately they need people who feel comfortable to invest in their country, and start to develop their economies and generate wealth.

Q: What is the right blend of military power versus other kinds of engagement if the goal is making the world a safer place?

Powell: You can’t compete them that way. There’s always a suggestion, you know, we should take more money from the Defense Department and give it to the State Department, or give it to Social Security or give it to the Agricultural Department. We’re a rich nation. We can afford whatever we need if we’re willing to pay for it. I always argued for additional assistance money for my accounts on the basis of need, not on the basis of, “You should take it away from the Defense Department.” The Defense Department has significant worldwide responsibilities. Right now, it’s involved in two active theaters in Afghanistan and Iraq and that takes a great deal of money. So the Defense Department defends what it needs, and hopefully the Congress will give them everything they need. The State Department, including the Agency for International Development, has to make the case for what it needs. Hopefully it is a persuasive case that the Congress will support.

(This text has been professionally transcribed. However, for timely distribution, it has not been edited or proofread against the tape.)