Rice’s “Transformational Diplomacy”

… the greatest threats now emerge more within states than between them. The fundamental character of regimes now matters more than the international distribution of power.

… transformational diplomacy is rooted in partnership; not in paternalism. In doing things with people, not for them; ….

…We partnered with old adversaries [Nazis] in Germany and Japan and helped them to rebuild their countries.

… America must begin to reposition our diplomatic forces around the world, so over the next few years the United States will begin to shift several hundred of our diplomatic positions to new critical posts for the 21st century.

… In the Middle East … a vast majority of people get their news from a regional media network like Al Jazeera, not from a local newspaper. So our diplomats must tell America's story not just in translated op-eds, but live on TV in Arabic for a regional audience. To make this happen, we are creating a regional public diplomacy center. We are forward deploying our best Arabic-speaking diplomats and we are broadly coordinating our public diplomacy strategy both for the region and from the region.

…Should a state fail in the future, we want the men and the women of this [the Reconstruction and Stabilization Office] to be able to spring into action quickly. …we envision this office assembling and deploying the kinds of civilians who are essential in post-conflict operations: police officers and judges and electricians and engineers, bankers and economists and legal experts and election monitors. [It] must be able to help a failed state to exercise responsible sovereignty and to prevent its territory from becoming a source of global instability…

… We must train record numbers of people to master difficult languages like Arabic and Chinese and Farsi and Urdu.

… We on the right side of freedom's divide have a responsibility to help all people who find themselves on the wrong side of that divide.

… there's a portrait of Thomas Jefferson that looks direct at me when I am speaking to those foreign ministers, and I wonder sometimes, “What would Mr. Jefferson have thought?” What would he have thought about America's reach and influence in the world? What would he have thought about America's pursuit of the democratic enterprise on behalf of the peoples of the world? What would he have thought that an ancestor -- that my ancestors, who were three-fifths of a man in his constitution, would produce a Secretary of State who would carry out that mission?

… This Russian Government is not the Soviet Government and sometimes people overstate this to say things have gone all the way back. They have not gone all the way back.

… The Iranians want to make this [nuclear dispute] about their rights. This is not about their rights.

… It's really hard in Afghanistan where you still have terrorists who will blow up innocent children at a moment's notice. … It's hard to see the difficulties that the Palestinian people live with every day. It's really hard.

… And it's only when you lose will or you lose your sense of what is right, that you lose the capacity to have the kind of optimism in the face of the difficulties and the dangers that lead our forefathers to deliver Europe, Japan and places like that to a democratic future.

… I can assure you that we don't stand in the way of federal prosecutions of American entities.

… if you're going to have a sanctions regime of [the Iraqi type],… you really need not just controls on it, but oversight of it.

… when people say, … “Why do you put so much faith in democracy and so much hope in this particular outcome?” I really want to say to them, “Do you have a better idea? Do you have an alternative? Do you have an alternative to well-governed, democratic states that are responsible in the international system?”

… when I walk into my office, the other portraits that I look at in addition to Jefferson, the portraits of George Marshall, but especially Dean Acheson because how out of all of that chaos at the end of World War II did they think to construct a collective security organization called NATO, did they think to press for democracy in Germany and Japan, did they stay so true to their values that they understood that Europe had always had temporary solutions to its problems.

Condoleezza Rice, ““Transformational Diplomacy: Shaping U.S. Diplomatic Posture in the 21st Century,” remarks at Georgetown University, 1/18/06.