There are no difficult questions for Colin Luther Powell, the former US four-star general and Secretary of State. He is a regular officer, who spent most of his life serving in the army, where he mastered not only military and diplomatic strategy but also the secrets of leadership and playing skills not just on the fields of battle or diplomacy. He proved this to more than 350 Ukrainian listeners while delivering a lecture entitled “Democracy and the Global Challenges of Mankind,” organized with the assistance of the Viktor Pinchuk Foundation.
There was no room to swing a cat in the Sophia Hall of the Premier Palace Hotel, the most prestigious hotel in Kyiv. Dozens of guests had to stand for one and a half hours listening to a lecture given by arguably the most popular and honored person in the US and his responses to questions from the floor. Few Americans can boast of a similarly impressive service record both in the military-diplomatic and business sphere. Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, George W. Bush, and Bill Clinton all listened to Powell’s advice. So it is no surprise that the former general and diplomat earns 100,000 dollars for one lecture in the US.
Powell was born on April 5, 1937, in New York City, and spent his whole childhood in the South Bronx. His parents, Luther and Maud Powell, immigrated to the US from Jamaica. After graduating from Morris High School and City College of New York (CCNY) he was given a commission as an Army Second Lieutenant.
Powell served in the US Army for 35 years and rose to the rank of general. At the age of 52 he became the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (1989-93). General Powell took part in resolving 28 war conflicts and received a large number of awards and decorations for his service in the US Armed Forces, as well as many civilian decorations. He has received awards from more than 12 countries, including the French Legion of Honor and honorary knighthood bestowed by Queen Elizabeth II. Colin Powell was appointed the 65th US Secretary of State on Jan. 20, 2001. Before that he served as Secretary of Defence and National Security Advisor under President Ronald Reagan.
Below are the most interesting parts of the lecture given by this American politician and statesman.
A LECTURE TO FORMER ENEMIES
“I’m a little bit at a disadvantage because this is a higher school of economics. I am not an economist. I am a soldier. And most of my life was not spent in politics or diplomacy, or economics, or finance. Most of my life was spent in service to my country as a soldier, and most of my career was spent with you as one of my enemies. I often tell people that they have to pinch me sometimes when I reflect on the changes that have happened in the world, and the transition that I have made in my 35-year-long military history from looking across the Iron Curtain at my enemies as a soldier, and my mission was to fight them and defeat them. And in the last few years of my career to see all those changes was fascinating. And I see that a different kind of world emerged that is not a world of the battlefield, the kind that I grew up in, but a different type of world all together.
“I have to tell you that it will be 50 years next summer that I started my military career as a 20-year-old Second Lieutenant of Infantry. When I arrived in Germany, I was shown the Iron Curtain and told: ‘This is where the Russians will come through and all the rest: the Czechs, Slovaks, Hungarians, Ukrainians...With your 40 soldiers you guard right here, between these two trees. And when the Russians come down, you stop them.’ ‘No problem. I can do that.’ That dominated part of my life. It dominated almost 30 years of my life. Studying, always studying, always preparing to contain or fight the empire that was east of the Iron Curtain, the Soviet Union, and its associated nations and allies, or to contain or fight the other extension of communism, the Bamboo Curtain represented by China and China’s ideological bands. So for all those years, even when I went to Asia to fight in Vietnam for two years and when I was stationed in Korea, where I commanded a battalion in one of the demilitarized zones, it was all part of a great contest to fight communist ideology and two great empires - the Soviet empire and the Chinese empire. And they believed they had an ideology, an economic system, and a value system that was superior to what existed in the West, and that it was certainly Western decadence and the Western value system which were in collapse. And the superiority of state domination and economic system, centrally controlled, were proving to be superior to capitalism. We all worried about World War III at that time. And for 28 years I was waiting for this battle, because I was a soldier, not a politician, not a diplomat. Twenty-eight years after I started, I was made general, lieutenant general, three stars. And I was given command of the American corps, now 75,000 soldiers. Where? Germany. Same place with the Russian army on the other side. Nothing had changed in all those years. I didn’t have to worry about the individual needs of Ukraine and the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Poland. I didn’t have to worry about the needs of Hungary and Romania. All I had to worry about was that empire which was hiding on the other side of the Iron Curtain on the red part of the map. And we were on the blue part of the map. And that dominated so much of my life.”
DIPLOMATIC EXPERIENCE
“I entered the last four years of my military career, which were so transformational for me because they made me rethink all that I knew as a soldier. It began in my career when I was suddenly brought back from Germany from commanding my corps and was made Ronald Reagan’s National Security Advisor. It is a little unusual to have an army officer as a president’s National Security Advisor, but that’s the position I found myself in. And suddenly the Russians were not following the script anymore. The script said that the Russian leader would always be short, fat, bald, wearing a bad suit, and once a year he would come to the United Nations and say something really dumb. And we only counted on that part of the strategy. And then suddenly Mikhail Gorbachev showed up, who is a great historic figure and a friend of mine. And he looked at the Soviet empire and realized that it was not working. How can you say that you are in ascendancy when your people are not doing better in life, when you’re not producing products that anyone wants, when you have this Iron Curtain not to keep enemies out, but to keep your people in. How can you possibly say that this is a successful strategy? And Gorbachev faced that, and he faced the reality that the Soviet Union had to change. On our side we were very careful. We listened to Mr. Gorbachev, we listened to his statements about glasnost and perestroika and information. I understood that the ideas and information had crossed the Iron Curtain; they are more powerful than any army I can send.
“Everything was different (after the Iron Curtain came down. — Ed.), and each nation in Europe was trying to find its own way forwards to learn how democracy works. And they understood that applications of the democratic systems were kinds of risks you have to take, and they understood that democracy is a very noisy system. It is not simple; it is not easy like the old days. People shout, people argue. It’s a cluster of ideas, a cluster of personalities, and a cluster of wills, and you try to achieve a compromise from this cluster of ideas and wills. And from compromise comes consensus. And this consensus reflects the democratic will of the people. And I watched as the world I knew in Europe went away. And we are no longer facing that kind of conflict. We had problems in the Balkans, but there was nothing like the war we had moved away from, nothing like the threat of destruction of the entire society.”
WE ARE NOW WORKING ON PLAYING FIELDS, NOT ON BATTLEFIELDS
“Mr. Putin is very popular. He is moving on to another phase of his career, and we may see him again in another form. But he is going to allow the presidential elections to take place. I don’t want to speculate on what he is doing. But he is very popular and the Russian economy is doing very well. I don’t think he has done enough to put institutions of democracy in place in Russia, a democracy that rule of law, a free press, etc. Nevertheless, there will never be a Soviet Union again and the Cold War is not coming back. We are working now in a new European environment. In China just a few years earlier the same thing was happening, when Deng Xiaoping came to power. He looked at one billion Chinese people who were going nowhere. And he decided to keep political control not to make any changes in the political system, but to make changes in the economic system, for the Chinese people to live better in the years to come. And China started to work with this aim and it opened up its economic system. Now China is a member of the World Trade Organization, and it will become a country with the largest economy in 10 or 15 years. China will not become our enemy. It can become our enemy only if something happens in Taiwan.
“What Russia needs to do, what China has to do, and what new democratic states need to do - whether they are in Eastern and Central Europe or even in Latin America, in my part of the world - what they all need to do is to take this political democracy and use it to improve the lives of their people in terms of economic democracy. What I have seen in my military career and then going into my business career, and then into my diplomatic career as the Secretary of State, is the world that used to be defined in terms of battlefields and curtains, either Iron or Bamboo, in terms of alliances that would have a security-militaristic nature competing against one another, preparing to fight one another, that world has been changed as a result of the end of the Cold War and the transformation that has taken place in China. And that is the world that I saw when I was the Secretary of State, and I also now see as a private citizen is a world of playing fields, not battlefields. We are having problems in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the Middle East and there are other challenges for us out there. And we have to figure out how to cope with Kosovo; these problems are still there. But at least we are not looking at a world of battlefields, but of playing fields. And the number-one game is economics.”
WEALTH AND RULE OF LAW
“What are the Chinese people trying to do? Create wealth. What is Russia trying to do? Create wealth. What are we trying to do in Ukraine? Create wealth. Creating wealth not just for those who are at the top of the ladder, but creating wealth for the society, so that this wealth can help people, the society, and particularly its less fortunate members, I should say. So that everybody can live without poverty. So that everybody can have enough food, so that everybody can have a decent job, and every time you come home and bring a paycheck, you would bring dignity to your home because you bring a paycheck from a good job. That shows that you are a worthy family member, worthy father, worthy mother, that you can take care of your family. Wealth that helps you create a healthcare system to take care of your people, wealth that will help you create an education system, that will provide housing for people, that would provide infrastructure. And everywhere we go around the world, more and more countries that have come out from behind systems of state-controlled economies, you realize that you have to liberalize, you have to open up your economy in order to generate a kind of wealth that you need. You have to have an economy that is not only open but fair. And I think Ukraine fits clearly in this category. You have to have an economy that rests on the basic foundations of rule of law and will attract foreign investors to make investments here, in this area, bring their capital here and be protected by the rule of law. It will be protected by the absence of corruption. It will be protected by a judiciary system that is honest. That is the basic thing for economic democracy in any country.
“These days no nation can stand alone behind an Iron Curtain because of the power of information revolution, the power of cellular telephony, the power of fax machines, the ability to move capital and knowledge around the world at the speed of light. Because we are shaping the world in ways we never dreamed of.
“This will be a world of free trade, a world where people exchange their knowledge and which will be shaped more by economic tendencies than by military forces, as it used to be in the past. And of course, students studying in the Kyiv School of Economics will keep Ukraine moving in the right direction and will play a role in moving the whole world forward.
“There is another thing that is significant. This is world wealth. By this I mean the wealth of nations. And you, young people, after taking your place in society, you should not forget that the resources we use, people’s talents that you are going to organize, working as leaders - all this depends on the nation, the people. And the nation should gain from this. And you, young people, should not turn your back on those who are less fortunate in their life. You have to devote part of your life to those people who probably worked worse than you in order for the American or Ukrainian dream to come true for them. I am sure that your nation can count on you and that you will meet the expectations they rest on you.”
GLOBAL WARMING, EDUCATION, AND COMPETITION
“We have to take global warming as the reality. And we should work at protecting the earth and be sure that we give to the next generation a healthy and safe environment and teach the coming generations how to use it. I treat seriously both these questions and education in the US. When new countries enter the world of globalization and when the possibilities become equal in the future, of course it is very important to develop education. Say, China is purchasing whole universities in the United Kingdom, for example, and replicating them right in the provinces in China. China plans to graduate 2,500 MBAs a year. More and more educated people will be required in the future. That is why the Kyiv School of Economics is so important because this is an opportunity to invest in future generations of economists, economics students in Ukraine, and to make sure that you get the skills that Ukraine needs not only now or tomorrow, but for months and years to come. In the United States we have some of the greatest universities and colleges in the world. The problem we have in the United States is younger students. Too many of them are dropping out, not finishing high school. This is not what we, Americans, can afford. We are now competing in a world where there are now 1.3 billion Chinese and 1.2 billion Indians, several hundred million or so Europeans, and million Latin Americans. We have to educate our children increasingly to deal with this world that is becoming more sophisticated, more information-driven.”
AMERICAN INVESTMENTS
“I’ve told the prime minister (of Ukraine - Ed.) that at the end of the day it is not the American government that makes the investments but American investors. Of course, the government should pay more attention to this issue, and Ukraine has to create such an environment that would serve as a magnet for foreign direct investments. There is still no such magnetizing so far. You have to work by means of convincing trade chambers, by sending trade delegations in order to persuade American investors that their money will be protected, that everything will be protected from corruption and that a good and stable political system exists.
“I am so excited by Ukrainian democracy, by the events that have taken place in recent years. But now it is time to stop, to stabilize, settle down, so that people can understand what the political situation is there and not what it sometimes seems to be - competing personalities. So, we want to see a flourishing economy, rule of law, and political stability too. It seems to me that America will pay more attention to Ukraine if it sees that Ukraine has become more attractive. We can compete with Cypriots, Germans, and Austrians (who are investing more money into the Ukrainian economy than the Americans - Ed.). But I think Ukraine should do its part for this.”
HOW CAN NATO BE LIQUIDATED
“After the Cold war ended, my Russian colleagues told me: ‘We have cancelled the Warsaw Pact, and NATO should go away. Why do you need it?’ But how can an organization go away if people want to join it? Countries think that it is in their interest to ally themselves with a Trans-Atlantic security alliance and be part of something larger that is democratically based. Each nation has to make its own choice with respect to their kind of security relationship, and I think that Ukraine will make its choice too. Those 10 nations that made their choice have benefited from the experience being taught by NATO. But it’s an individual choice, not to be imposed by anyone or prevented by anyone from having.
“Ukrainians have to discuss these questions and determine whether Ukrainian nation is interested in joining NATO or not. I consider that the US has to be more sensitive to the impact that NATO membership will have on the neighbors, particularly Russia. NATO has not been sensitive to the feelings of the Russian people with respect to how NATO has expanded in recent years.
“I would make two points; there are two sides here. NATO is an alliance of democratic nations that want to ally with each other on a mutual security pact and it is defensive. It is not in any way a threat to any nation. This is my message to the Ukrainian people, and Ukrainians should think it through. And 10 countries that have joined NATO since the end of the Cold War have had a positive experience. And those 10 nations have not found that their relations with the Russian Federation have deteriorated that much.
“I know that if we took a poll right now that most Ukrainians would be against NATO than for NATO. But I am convinced that this is a sovereign decision for Ukraine to make, and not for the US or West to dictate nor for Russia from the other direction. Let the Ukrainian people through their political leaders decide what would be best for Ukraine.”
ON LEADERSHIP TRAITS
“I had the privilege to lead many kinds of organizations. Leadership is first and foremost about followership. Leaders exist to inspire and motivate followers to achieve the goals of the organization. Leaders can put those goals, make PowerPoint presentations, they can deliver speeches about leadership, but at the end of the day it’s the followers they work for. The best leaders that I have known were those leaders who understood that they had to inspire people, not just motivate them, but inspire them with a leader’s passion. In fact, a whole organization and all the followers - it’s the passion of a leader. And the leader does this by putting clear goals for his followers, making sure that each follower understands the particular mission. It is so important for them to do well, so that the whole organization does well. And the best leaders I have known knew how to make all the members of the organization believe that they are as important as anyone else in the organization. So, if you want to be a leader, you should do the following yourself and realize that your job is to inspire your followers to do what you want them to do. Second, you should make sure that if you inspire followers, you have to be an example. A leader should have high standards. A leader should be ethical. A leader should have more physical courage that is always pushing him in the direction of doing the right thing. A leader should not just talk about what he wants to do; he has to empower his followers by giving them resources, giving them training, giving them skills. A leader should also reward the followers: you have to make sure your people are appreciated. Sometimes this is good money, sometimes this is a good promotion, all kinds of benefits, but more often than not it is saying to your follower: ‘I’m so proud of you,’ ‘I don’t know how I could have done my job if it weren’t for you,’ ‘Thank you and, by the way, I’ve just called your wife or husband to tell them how much I appreciate your family being a part of my team. Do you say ‘thank you’ to the person who is cleaning your office? Aren’t they an important part of your team? Yes, they are. Leadership is a human thing, you should have sympathy for people, and you have to believe in them and they have to believe in you. The other thing a leader should have to do is to make sure that you are tough. If a leader can look at people in the organization who are doing a bad job and not do anything, he will not be an effective leader because good followers in the organization know who bad followers are and they are waiting for leaders to do something. So leadership is always based on human relations. And what you young people should do to become a leader, if you have the talent to become a leader, is to develop this talent. You should look at the leaders that you meet in your life, find the successful ones, and study them in order to know why he is successful.”
FORECAST, POLARITY, STABILITY, AND TONE
“It is difficult for me to say what will happen in late 2008. But I am an optimist by nature. When I look at certain tendencies in the last hundred years, I see that within this period of time we have come a long way. And this way was very difficult. There were dictatorships, totalitarian regimes, and total destruction, and countries that were constantly fighting against each other. Actually in the last 300 years we were repeating history. And now, when all these things are in the past, I don’t want to say that this world has become perfect and the best one. A large number of problems exist at the moment. But we have left many problems behind. We are now living in a world where more people than ever in history live in democratic states. And this world is creating wealth. Of course, we need money in order to solve the problems of HIV-AIDS, to raise standards for people in order to build infrastructure in underdeveloped countries and also for investments.
“Now we have democratic countries, new democratic countries in Europe. And they are thinking more about ways of improving life than conquering foreign territory. I don’t see two political systems that could come to a war in their contest. That is why we have stability now. It is much more difficult to see this stability because many people are now acting in a free and chaotic way, and it seems to me that a new stability is rising in this chaos and this cooperation. And now the question can be asked in the following way: Will the superpowers start a war? Can we start a great war at the moment? Probably, the US, Russia and China have equal possibilities to set up such a war. But will they do this in reality? It seems to me that when we finally solve the problem in Iraq, cope with what is happening in the Middle East and North Korea, we will deal in a peaceful way with Iran. I think everything will be fine. And we have only to endure this.
“There are no tough questions, there are tough answers. I am discouraged that the US image does not look so good in Europe in the last seven years. Support for the US in the Middle East has also decreased. And all this has happened within the last seven years: from 60 to 10 percent. All this is because of Iraq, because of the lack of access to the Middle East, because the current administration of the US is often appealing to the world in a hostile voice. I think this causes many problems. Whoever will be the next president, it seems to me, there should be a change of tone. We should listen to our friends and allies, talk to our enemies, and not just deliver speeches.”
