25 April 2025
It’s hard to describe the importance of the article linked below, but I’ll try. This is a classic example of Isaiah’s Job, both for Condoleezza Rice, who wanted to convey her concerns, and for me, wishing to promote the piece here.
She is uniquely qualified to speak to the complicated issues in her article. Besides her service as U.S. Secretary of State from 2005 to 2009 and as U.S. National Security Adviser from 2001 to 2005 and apart from her present position with the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, Dr. Rice is a Russian linguist, as I am also. I have traveled solo in post-Gorbachev Russia and Ukraine and have seen the shabby infrastructure and government neglect in Russia. I have met the disheartened, melancholy people there. I have seen the contrast with the buoyant people of Ukraine soon after it was free of its Russian oppressors (before 2014).
Having seen all that and having written my own novel set in Ukraine’s history (Fire, Wind & Yesterday), I take issue with President Trump’s abandonment of that nation, but that’s outside the scope of this matter. (See Ukraine and Your Future, also Ukraine: A Settlement.)
While Condoleezza Rice is too diplomatic to call out the evil dictators of Russia, China, North Korea, (and a few other regimes) as agents of Satan, she describes what it is that makes them so.
On my office wall I still have a bumper sticker, “Condoleezza 2008.” I was among the many sensible Americans who wished she would run for President that year. She declined to get into the race. Perhaps she was too sensible herself, and we endured the seemingly interminable reign of a spurious Nobel Peace Prize winner instead.
I lament with deep despair that the lessons Dr. Rice gives in this article are lost on our members of Congress, who are not interested in understanding what’s going on in the world, and lost as well on state legislators throughout the country, who focus on contrived social issues, ceremonial posturing, and how many hens are permitted to roost in a chicken coop. I am also deeply saddened that what Dr. Rice has to say will never be heard where it most seriously needs to be heard, in our high schools and colleges. Among America’s greatest experts on government and international affairs throughout our history she stands above most. If we were truly trying to teach students how to think, we would make certain that they listen not just to canned “issues” but listen to her as well and understand what she is saying here.
Oh, well. Our nation will suffer the invincible ignorance of those who rule us, thanks to those who continually elect and re-elect the least-qualified among us to rule.
Here is the link to Condoleezza Rice’s article:
If you are prevented from reading it there because of a subscribers-only wall at Foreign Affairs, a PDF copy of the article is available for download here.
Albert Jay Nock 