RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
As President Obama's national security adviser and U.N. ambassador before that, Susan Rice has been grappling with the biggest security crises of our time - Iraq, Afghanistan, ISIS, cyberattacks from China and Russia. Rice has said her biggest disappointment has been the failure of the international community to stop Syria's brutal civil war. I sat down with Ambassador Rice in the West Wing of the White House late last week, and our conversation began with Russia's role in Syria and why America did not intervene.
SUSAN RICE: The Russians have doubled down in backing Assad, along with Iran and Hezbollah. And the president made the fundamental choice not to intercede in the civil war between Assad and the opposition in a direct way.
MARTIN: Although his critics point to that often as a crucial mistake...
RICE: Yeah.
MARTIN: When President Obama articulated this red line that Bashar al-Assad could not cross or there would be military repercussions by the U.S., and then he used chemical weapons. And then the U.S. did not respond.
RICE: There's two different things here, and I want to separate them. One is the broader question, which we could have confronted at any point over the last five years, as to whether or not the United States ought to intervene in the civil conflict between Assad and the opposition. I think that was fundamentally the right choice for U.S. interests not to intervene.
On the so-called chemical weapons red line, indeed we had put in place the assets necessary to use force, to try to strike at those chemical facilities and command and control entities that we thought were relevant to our chemical weapons concerns. In the mean...
MARTIN: So why didn't it happen?
RICE: Because in the meantime, we were able to find a solution that actually removed the chemical weapons that were known from Syria in a way that the use of force would never have accomplished. But the fundamental problem of Syria persists, and that is that there's enormous human suffering. And we have not - we, the United States, the international community, the U.N., Russia, everybody else - has not managed to find a negotiated solution, which would, by necessity, mean dealing with the problem of Assad continuing to govern Syria in the most violent and repressive way.
MARTIN: President Obama is not a man who speaks off the cuff often. There's a lot of thought that's put into the language that he uses. Do you regret the articulation of a red line in Syria?
RICE: It's not for me to regret or otherwise. I think the president stated the U.S. view, which is the use of chemical weapons is not something we're prepared to allow to persist, and we didn't. We managed to accomplish that goal far more thoroughly than we could have by some limited strikes against chemical targets by getting the entirety of the declared stockpile removed.
MARTIN: Our conversation then moved to the allegations of Russian hacking during the U.S. presidential election and why, specifically, the administration didn't release more of what it knew about intelligence assessments of Russia's role before Americans went to the polls on Election Day.
RICE: We did what was the most important thing to do back in October, which was to inform the American people that, indeed, from the high confidence judgment of our intelligence community and 17 intelligence agencies, that the Russian government, at the highest levels, was involved in cyber activity designed to influence the outcome of our election. And it was quite clear that this was a problem.
MARTIN: Then why not take action then?
RICE: Because the fact of the matter is, we have discovered more as the time has evolved. But also, we did not want to do Russia's job for them and make the actions they were taking even more of a potential influence on our electoral process than would otherwise have been.
MARTIN: You said that passing sanctions or repercussions would have been more destabilizing to the election.
RICE: That - we had plenty of time to do that, and we knew it. And the fact that we were concerned about what more might come between October 7 and the election was another factor. And thankfully, the warnings that we issued we believe had some impact because there probably was more that Russia could have done that it didn't do.
MARTIN: I want to ask you about your successor, retired General Mike Flynn. The two of you have met, I understand, as part of the transition.
RICE: On multiple occasions.
MARTIN: This administration has made a point of using the term, countering violent extremism as a way to encompass all its efforts against terrorism. The next administration, and Mike Flynn in particular, likes to talk about radical Islam. He has also personally tweeted a lot about what he perceives to be a fundamental problem with Islam that's perpetuating terrorism. Do you have concerns about Mike Flynn and the guidance and direction that he might push the next administration in as the national security adviser?
RICE: Rachel, as - for reasons I think you and your listeners would understand, I'm not going to get into commenting on the views or the comments of my successor. My responsibility is to execute the most responsible, comprehensive, effective transition that we possibly can. We have prepared hundreds of briefing papers for General Flynn and his incoming team. Those conversations have been candid and constructive.
MARTIN: You know that this administration has made a priority of climate change, considering it a national security threat.
RICE: Yes, it is.
MARTIN: The incoming administration does not consider it to be such. Have you had conversations with Mike Flynn about that?
RICE: We've touched a bit on that but not in great depth. I think the incoming administration has said a number of different things on this topic, and I think we need to see where they land. It is manifestly in the interest of the United States to deal with the very real threat that climate change poses. And that's why President Obama has worked so hard to reduce our own emissions and to lead internationally in forging the Paris climate agreement.
And I hope very much that as the incoming administration reviews both the domestic and international steps we've taken, that they'll realize as well that it's in our interest to continue with the Paris Agreement and to deal with climate change as the real threat it actually is.
MARTIN: But as Susan Rice gets ready to leave government, it is Syria that looms large in this moment, perhaps, in part, because she has been at the White House before, decades ago, as another global humanitarian crisis was unfolding.
You worked here when you were younger. When you were in your late 20s, I believe, is when you started here at the National Security Council, when you were working in the Clinton administration.
RICE: Twenty-eight.
MARTIN: Twenty-eight.
RICE: Twenty-eight is when I started.
MARTIN: Yeah.
RICE: I'm now 52, so time flies.
MARTIN: (Laughter) You oversaw a lot of complicated security issues even then. In particular, you were here when the genocide was taking place in Rwanda. How did that experience, working here in this building during that time, how has that informed how you have thought about the Syrian conflict and the mass atrocities there?
RICE: Well, I think, as I've said in various different contexts, these are very different circumstances. The Rwandan genocide occurred over a period of 100 days, people going house to house with machetes killing at extraordinary pace and speed. That is a very different scenario than what we witnessed in Syria, which is a horrific tragedy. But it's a five-year-long civil war in which a government, backed by foreign powers, has engaged against its own people.
So one of the things I've learned is that there are no cookie-cutter solutions that you can apply from one circumstance to another. They're different. Our interests, as implicated, are different. The tools we have at our disposal are different.
MARTIN: Outgoing National Security Adviser Susan Rice, she spoke with us from the West Wing of the White House.