On Nov. 2, U.S. diplomat and former Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice spoke at Pomona College’s Bridges Auditorium about foreign and domestic policy for the seventh annual Payton Distinguished Lectureship.
Rice has held various positions as a diplomat, including assistant secretary of state for African Affairs, national security advisor and head of the Domestic Policy Council. She is a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times and a member of the Aspen Strategy Group, the American Academy of Diplomacy and the Council of Foreign Relations. She recently published a memoir “Tough Love: A Story of the Things Worth Fighting For.”
Pomona College President G. Gabrielle Starr introduced Rice.
“[The memoir] beautifully sets up the philosophy by which she writes, ‘I still believe the arc of the moral universe bends towards justice, but no one’s going to do the hard bending, if not you,’” Starr said.
Rice, in conversation with associate professor of politics and international relations Mietek Boduszyński, first discussed her path to public service. After fighting for the Union in the Civil War, her great-grandfather Walter Rice was able to pursue higher education and went on to establish the Bordentown high school. The school educated generations of African Americans before the federal desegregation of public schools.
Despite facing racial discrimination in the job market, her father, Emmett Rice, became a professor at Cornell University and later the second black governor of the Federal Reserve. Her mother, Lois Dickson Rice, lobbied for the Pell Grant, supporting college access for low-income students.
“[My parents] showed us a path … one that didn’t prescribe how we were to serve, but that in one form or fashion, the expectation was that we would do something that would be a benefit to more than just ourselves,” Rice said.
Rice recounted her role in the Biden administration’s efforts to pass legislation regarding civil rights and policing. After the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act stalled in the Senate in March 2021, she helped craft a broad executive order which set new federal standards for the use of force and chokeholds, added restrictions on no-knock warrants and established a national registry for police misconduct.
“We did implement a sweeping change that mirrored the George Floyd legislation to a large extent for federal law enforcement … but we were lacking the legislation to make those same things mandatory at the state and local level,” Rice said.
Rice identified political polarization as the biggest threat to U.S. foreign policy. Regardless of the outcome of the 2024 election, she said, we must work towards a more unified democracy.
“[Political polarization] makes us very vulnerable to these [foreign] influence operations that we see every day in our social media,” Rice said. “We … have a fundamental problem within our body politic that we have to wrestle with, and … it’s taking on new and potentially more insidious forms.”
She argued that the United States currently lacks sufficient regulation to address the sweeping effects of artificial intelligence (AI) on both domestic and foreign policy.
“The national security challenges, not only in terms of competition with players like China, but also in terms of how [AI] impacts our competitive advantage, our military edge, our intelligence gathering and analysis,” Rice said. “It just permeates so many things, and I think it’s absolutely going to be one of the greatest challenges of the next two to three years.”
“[Political polarization] makes us very vulnerable to these [foreign] influence operations that we see every day in our social media.”
Rice took a strong stance on defending Taiwan, emphasizing its critical role in the production of semiconductors, which are used for everything from household products and large language models. While the One China policy, which recognizes one sovereign China, encompassing Taiwan, is officially upheld by the United States, Rice pointed out that the United States also maintains a strong unofficial relationship with Taiwan, which entails defense commitments. She cautioned, however, that maintaining strategic ambiguity may become infeasible.
“President Biden has been strategically unambiguous in ways that have caused some of his aides and advisors to try to rein him in,” Rice said. “He’s been clear that we would defend Taiwan against China. I don’t think [we’ve] ever had the luxury of caring less about Taiwan … So I think we are increasingly not going to be able to be ambiguous … Nobody wants a conflict over Taiwan.”
Attendee Mai Hoglund PO ’28 was surprised by Rice’s framing of AI as a global issue.
“I hadn’t thought of AI as a foreign policy issue before … especially the connections she drew between the issues AI causes and the way the Taiwan conflict impacts that,” Hoglund said.
The discussion shifted to contemporary global humanitarian conflicts. While there is bipartisan recognition of the essential role of U.S. assistance in bolstering Ukraine’s defense, some lawmakers, such as Vice President-elect and Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, argue that a negotiated settlement will eventually be necessary. Rice, however, emphasized that Ukraine must approach any negotiations from a position of strength — which demands continued support.
“You want to go to the negotiating table from a position of strength, and that’s not where Ukraine is,” Rice said.
Rice suggested that the outcome of the U.S. presidential election could significantly impact Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s approach to the ongoing conflict in Gaza and the broader region.
Rice’s discussion took place three days before the election, so she spoke about the presidential election in hypothetical terms. She explained that in the event of a second Trump presidential term, Netanyahu might feel emboldened to expand military actions in Gaza and elsewhere, given Trump’s prior support for aggressive measures such as strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities.
“If Trump were to win, I think, I fear that Prime Minister Netanyahu would assume that he can continue the war,” Rice said.
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