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Secretary Rice delivered remarks at The Southern Baptist Convention Annual Meeting.
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14 June 2006
Rice Pledges Commitment to Liberty and Democracy, June 14, 2006(Secretary of state says free peoples create a more stable world)
By Michael Jay Friedman
Washington File Staff Writer
Washington -- Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice pledges the United States will remain engaged in the world and would ground its foreign policy in the nation's founding ideals of liberty and democracy.
Speaking June 14 at the Southern Baptist Convention Annual Meeting in Greensboro, North Carolina, she said that by striving to offer other peoples a chance to flourish in freedom, America contributes to a safer, more stable world.
The secretary addressed a number of foreign policy themes, including the desirability of an active foreign policy and whether supporting freedom advances the "realist" objectives of regional and global stability.
The fundamental choice facing the United States is “Will we lead in the world or will we withdraw?” she said. Abandoning the defense of "liberty and democracy in our world" ultimately would risk the nation's safety, she said, adding, "[W]henever freedom and tolerance are on the march, we are secure. But when these ideals are in retreat we are vulnerable.
"If America does not … rally other nations to fight intolerance and to support peace and to defend freedom, and to help give all hope who suffer oppression, then our world will drift toward tragedy. The strong will do what they please. The weak will suffer most of all and inevitably, inevitably, sooner or later the threats of our world will strike once again at the very heart of our nation," Rice said.
The secretary offered several examples of U.S. leadership. "If not for America, who would rally other nations to conscience to the international defense of religious liberty?” The Bush administration has its closest ties with governments that respect their people's beliefs, she said. "Government simply has no right to stand between the individual and the Almighty."
She posed the same question about the “horrific international crime of human trafficking," where the United States “has launched a new abolitionist movement,” and the global fights against HIV/AIDS, which she called "one of the great moral causes of the 21st century." (See Human Trafficking and HIV/AIDS.)
In Sudan, U.S. diplomacy helped end the civil war between North and South and assumed a lead role in achieving the recent Darfur agreements. The United States is providing nearly all the food aid being sent to the people of Darfur, Rice said. (See Darfur Humanitarian Emergency.)
The secretary said individual Americans, organized through their religious and other philanthropic organizations, “multiply the compassion of our government.” She cited Southern Baptists who fed the hungry and sheltered the homeless after the Indonesian tsunami and after hurricanes Katrina and Rita and who help in poor nations to build critical infrastructure like dams and wells.
American leadership in cultivating freedom and democracy was also essential to combat terrorism, Rice said. "We're striking at the very source of terror itself by summoning a vision of hope that outshines any ideology of hatred. The United States is supporting the democratic aspirations of all people, regardless of their culture or their race or their religion.”
The secretary pledged to bring terrorists to justice. "The terrorist [Abu Musab al-] Zarqawi … will never harm, he will never murder, he will never terrorize innocent people again. That is what America stands for." (See related article.)
Rice distinguished between American leadership and American exceptionalism. Although the United States embodies the liberties of self-government, freedom of thought and freedom of worship, it neither owns those liberties nor defines the means of expressing them. Democratic nations build democratic institutions that reflect their own cultures and customs, she said.
Echoing a theme expressed by the influential Cold War-era Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, the secretary said, "America will lead the cause of freedom in our world, not because we think ourselves perfect. To the contrary, we cherish democracy and champion its ideals because we know ourselves to be imperfect."
The Southern Baptist Convention, with about 16 million adherents, is the largest Protestant denomination in the United States.
A transcript of the secretary's remarks is available on the State Department’s Web site.
