WSJ What’s News - Condoleezza Rice on Beating China in the Tech Race: 'Run Hard and Run Fast'

Episode Date: November 23, 2025

This week, we’re bringing you an episode of Bold Names, which presents conversations with the leaders of the bold-named companies featured in the pages of The Wall Street Journal. On this episode, hosts WSJ’s Tim Higgins and Christopher Mims speak with Condoleezza Rice, former secretary of state, the current leader of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and a founding partner at the strategic consulting firm Rice, Hadley, Gates & Manuel LLC. She explains why she says the U.S. needs to “run hard and run fast” and win the tech race with China. She also discusses why executives can no longer afford to think of foreign policy as separate from strategy. For additional information on the Bold Names podcast and more episodes click here.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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This is What's News Sunday. On the show this week, we're bringing you an episode of our sister podcast, Bold Names, hosted by WSJ columnist Christopher Mims and Tim Higgins. This episode features former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. I'm joined now by one of the hosts of Bold Names, Christopher Mims. for Condoleezza Rice. I think most people know her as the Secretary of State under George W. Bush. Now she leads the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and is a founding partner of strategic consulting firm, Rice, Hadley, Gates, and Manuel. What makes her well positioned to speak to this geopolitical moment that we're in? She talks to a wide variety of CEOs about what they're dealing with. And of course, because companies are more multinational than ever, and they're having to deal with things that affect their operations all over the globe, like tariffs.

She's really become that kind of CEO whisper, but also a CEO listener. Was there anything that she said during your conversation with her that surprised you? Yes. So we're always talking about this new Cold War between the U.S. and China. She doesn't like that comparison. And, you know, it's hard to think of somebody who's more qualified to disagree on that. than Condoleezza Rice. Thanks, Christopher. Now, let's hear what Rice had to say in your interview for bold names. We're at this critical inflection point, it seems, a dangerous era, potentially, for geopolitics.

The U.S., China, racing for AI. What is your nightmare scenario here? Yeah. Well, AGI, it's, you know, the general intelligence so that the model is able to think on its own. is maybe it's going to happen, maybe it isn't going to happen. Well, if it's going to happen, I sure want it to happen in the United States, not in China. I don't want to wake up one day and find out that they have a general intelligence robot. I'm a friend of Sarah Connor.

I was told that she's here. Could I see her, please? You don't want The Terminator, but Chinese. Exactly. I'd rather, if there's going to be a Terminator, let him be American. I'll be back. Today, I'm bold names, Condoleezza Rice, the former U.S. Secretary of State and current head of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. A big name in foreign affairs.

She also has a strategic consulting firm that she founded with some other big names in that world. Yeah, she is helping companies navigate what is our dangerous current world. And one of her big sort of hobby horses now is making sure that the future is not filled with termination. and especially that we don't end up in a situation where China is building Terminators and nobody else is. I don't know about you, Tim. I think about all of these things a lot. I have kids. I really do not want one of them to have to become John Connor and save us from that future. Yeah, absolutely. I want to avoid that. Terminator 1, Terminator 2, definitely not the future I want. Maybe Terminator 3 I could kind of live with, maybe.

But in the meantime, let's get to this interview with Condoleezza Rice. From the Wall Street Journal, I'm Christopher Mims. And I'm Tim Higgins. This is Bold Names, where you'll hear from the leaders of the bold name companies featured in the pages of the Wall Street Journal. Today we ask, how are companies navigating international uncertainty and geopolitical tensions without falling behind? Welcome. for making time today. Thanks. The pleasure to be with you. We want to talk a lot about business in the international world today, but first maybe let's set the scene what's going on out there.

It's a challenging international environment. Business leaders for a long time, I think, probably took for granted the idea that there was going to be some stability in the global order. And now maybe not so. It makes it challenging for making those business investments. What do you see out there, is it more competitive than ever? Is it a new era of competition? Well, certainly, I think it is a more uncertain international environment. The way that I put it is we'd become quite accustomed in the business community to, thanks to the kind of integration of the international economy, you could put your supply chains where it was most efficient, you could invest where the ROI was greatest, you could do your manufacturing and assembly where the labor

conditions were best. And I think businesses painted on a kind of broad canvas that was almost borderless in the way that people thought about it. And I think what's happened is in part because of the way that China has dealt with its integration into the international system, but also the kind of technological arms race that's come out of that. And then some disappointment in parts of these countries, and not just the United States, but several democracies, with the effects of globalization on some elements, some parts of the voting public. That is breaking down. We're getting more nationalistic policies. We're getting a sense that supply chains that are wholly dependent on China are not secure. And so yes, I do think that the system, as we've known it,

is more uncertain. But the one thing that I'd be very clear on is this is not because of a change in administration. This has been happening underneath for some time. and it's likely to survive into the next administration, whoever that is. And so I think it's important for businesses to recognize this as a fairly permanent set of secular changes. I think what you're trying to say there diplomatically is this is not a Trump administration issue. This says those trend lines had been building for several years now. I think some people would like to label it as a new Cold War, right? I think I've heard you talk about how that's perhaps an important.

perfect term for that. And I'm curious why you think that. Whenever you use a term that is analogous to some other period in history, you realize people like analogies. But is it getting in the way of our understanding of what's actually going on? With the Soviet Union, we had an adversary that was a military giant, but it was an economic and technological midget. At no time was more than 4% of Soviet GDP determined by international trade. It wasn't integrated into the international system. One of the difficulties in dealing with China is that after 20 plus years of integration, you're finding that it's actually pretty hard to do something about rare earth minerals because they own the supply chain and they can withhold very important magnets. So the Soviet Union

would never have been able to do that. So I don't like the analogy. because I think we like the analogy because we won the Cold War. But I don't like it because I think it really does obfuscate this very real difference in what the challenge from China looks like. There is a military element, but there's a huge economic and technological element as well. You've described China as a technological peer to the U.S. I'd love some specifics here. Obviously, AI leads to mind.

What are there areas of technology are you concerned about where, China can match or exceed the U.S. And then, of course, use that, not just economically, but militarily. Well, one advantage that I have is I am the director of the Hoover Institution, but I sit at Stanford University. And so I can walk 15 minutes from here and talk to the best computer scientist and the best bioengineers and the best roboticist. And they will tell you that not just in AI, but in robotics, particularly usable robots,

ask a lot of scientists where they're buying the robots, and they'll tell you China. We all know about the battery technology story for EVs, and synthetic biology, which is something I don't think people pay enough attention to, which is really... And synthetic biology, if you could briefly define that. Yeah, so you're really talking about using, engineering the cell as opposed to doing a kind of natural process for it. And I'll just give you a very, very vivid view when Deep Seek came out. Deep Seek, the Chinese AI models.

Chinese AI model. There was not a single national security person who wasn't stunned by that. There was not a single computer scientist who didn't see it coming. And so what is going on in the private sector, in the scientific and technological sector, that is sometimes almost invisible to people who study national security is something that we have to watch. Those worlds need to link up much more effectively. After the break, Secretary Rice tells us how she's advising businesses now and why she says it's important to separate what she calls the signal from noise. There's an awful lot of hopping up and down out there, and it's not going to settle down for a while.

If you want to try to have some sense of what is enduring in your company, what needs to change, what might be modified, rather than just every headline leads you to think that it's in crisis. Stay with us. At Desjardin, we speak business. We speak startup funding and comprehensive game plans. We've mastered made-to-measure growth and expansion. advice, and we can talk your ear off about transferring your business when the time comes. Because at Desjardin business, we speak the same language you do, business. So join the more than 400,000 Canadian entrepreneurs who already count on us, and contact

Desjardin today. We'd love to talk, business. Okay, so you wear quite a few hats. in your professional life these days. And one of the things that you do is you're the founding partner of an international strategic consulting firm. And let me get the name right.

Rice, Hadley, Gates, and Manuel. And you are consulting with businesses out there who are trying to get their minds around all of this international uncertainty. I'm curious, love to know the names, but more importantly, what industries are you helping out there? Yeah, we have industries really across.

We have tech companies. We have energy companies. We have companies that are in the financial sector. So we try to help companies to understand what's going on in the kind of ecosystem in the international system. And it goes back to the first comment that I made, you know, kind of accept that the days when supply chains were just kind of wherever you thought they were most efficient, those days are gone. So how do you begin to adjust without over-adjusting?

One of the hard things about right now is to tell signal from noise. There's an awful lot of hopping up and down out there, and it's not going to settle down for a while. So you don't want to be the children's soccer game where everybody's running to where the ball is. You want to try to have some sense of what is enduring in your company, what needs to change, what might be modified. do you have the right skill sets, rather than just every headline leads you to think that it's in crisis? I'd love a concrete example of where long-term thinking beats reacting to every headline because surely there's something around tariffs or tech transfer, I don't know.

But I just love, obviously not talking about specific companies, but if you can give us an example of a trend. Going back for a while on supply chains, for instance, we had talked to companies about diversifying supply chains because it was pretty clear that a combination of Chinese policy, which made some elements difficult, and the fact that you were starting to get backlash in the United States. And we used to always say, when you think about risk, don't leave it to the risk officer because it's not going to be the risk officer who's testifying before Congress. It's going to be your CEO. So bring this into your boardroom. Do some simulation.

with it. And think about contingency planning at this point. If this goes this way, what would we do? We encourage companies to have what we call indicators. We do this all the time in the national security world. What are the five things if they would begin to happen that you would be concerned about? One of the really interesting things that happened when the Russians invaded Ukraine was that that was a real kind of shock to the system because it was. even though there was some smoke around what the Russians were doing, that they would do it in a way that basically took them out of the international economy was not really on the table.

And so we did have to help companies with really pretty fast adjustments in that case for what happens to your workforce. What do you do about Russians who are working for you? So sometimes you do have to do crisis management, but if you can do it over, if you can have some sense of the things that might happen, and start to use simulation, actually exercise those, then you will be better prepared. I just want to make one other point. We always ask companies to do something that I did in a political risk book that I wrote

a while ago with my colleague Amy Siegert. There's industry risk, right? So industry risk means that if you are, let's say, an oil company, you are driven by geology. You can't just go wherever you'd like to be. So you're going to have to take some industry risk. But there's also the matter of enterprise risk. Within the industry, where does your enterprise set? If you are a wildcatter, you'll look at that world differently than if you are a super major.

And so we try to get companies to analyze the industry risk and then analyze the enterprise risk. And that begins to narrow the questions that you're asking. I remember very well when the NBA was kicked out of China because of something that the Houston Rockets General Manager said. Now the Rockets General Manager under fire after comments he made about the ongoing violence in Hong Kong. A tweet backing pro-democracy demonstrations right here in Hong Kong. You know, the tweet itself, you know, you never know the ramifications that can happen.

And I was talking to NBC. folks, and I said, look, they're not going to kick you out of China because those young princelings are not going to watch the Kazakh national team play the Chinese national team. That's exciting? Yeah, it's not much fun. They're going to want to see LeBron and they want to see Steph. So you have to know where on that continuum you are, but if you're in the technology space, then you are going to decouple from China.

I mean, just watching things right now to see some of the. these companies essentially become, I don't know, ponds in the global negotiations. I mean, you look at Nvidia these days, really having a tough time with China just recently, the government there seemingly blacklisting its newest AI chip among Chinese tech companies, which is a challenge for them. And if you were advising them right now, what do you even say to a company like that? Well, I know, as you might imagine, the NVIDIA pretty well, they're going to work their way through this. But the first thing is, you know, I'd ask the Chinese, what are you doing? You say you want foreign direct investment, and then you blacklist the biggest American company on which everybody knows you've been dependent on chips.

Are you trying to get some kind of bargain where you get the higher-end chips? What's the purpose here? What in the world are you doing if you want to keep something of an integrated economy? me. But NVIDIA is such a huge presence. And the one thing that they've really shown that I really admire is their ability to continually reinvent themselves. And I think that's what's going to serve them best. It's interesting. We talk to a lot of CEOs. I talk to a lot of CEOs, and they always seem to think that they are facing unprecedented challenges, and especially in this kind of global space. And I'm curious, your perspective on kind of the long arc of time, if you will.

clearly the situation is different than this perhaps last generation where free trade was kind of a given, if you will. Is there another period in history that you kind of see some similarities to and companies need to be thinking about it that way? Well, I like to quote my colleague, a historian Steve Kotkin, who says that everything's unprecedented if you don't know history. And we do jump to the idea of unprecedented pretty quickly. I suspect that some the issues that what passed for international business in the 30s was pretty tough. If you were a financier, how did you think about this world that was clearly falling apart, militarizing people moving to their corners?

How did you think about access to resources at a time when those issues were starting to fuel the possibility of war? This isn't the first time that we've had tariffs in major ways. But I do think there are a couple of things that are really very different. And one is that the industrial revolution, everybody says, you know, well, it changed everything. But the technology is moving so fast in so many different areas. And it has no, it's basically a private sector business. The U.S. government doesn't own any of the assets, really, of the innovation revolution that we're going through.

The other thing that is very different, as I've said, is that, you know, we're trying to delink, decouple, de-risk, whatever you want to call it from a country that is a dominant force in the international economy. You mean China? China. And it's suddenly become an adversary. That's pretty different. Is that so different, though? Sorry, I have to jump in because I'm reading a book on the naval history of World War I right now. Isn't there?

Another crazy Friday night for Mims. Yeah. But seriously, though, you're a Russianist, so I know you know this history, right? Great Britain and Germany allies, they were doing naval exercises together. They were peer countries. Germany was a little bit ahead technologically. They were entwined economically because that was the beginning of globalization. And nobody thought they would ever fight.

I mean, at that time, they didn't think that they would fight. Yeah. Franz Ferdin gets assassinated. And before you know it, Churchill is chasing down German armored cruisers in the Mediterranean. I mean, is there a parallel here where the world seems stable, but you have these peer economies that, you know, turning on seemingly small events could end up in a conflict pretty rapidly because they're set up for it, right? Yeah. Yeah. Now, you're absolutely right that even though history doesn't repeat itself, once it said that sometimes it rhymes, and there are little elements of that in here.

But I wouldn't confuse the integration that was going on in either the end of the end of the end of the. the 19th century, the kind of beginning of the 20th century. I mean, people talk about the integrated currency. They were all on the gold standard. Well, yeah, of course. But I think, you know, they were all intermarrying, yes. But I don't think that compares to what you're seeing now in terms of how far the integration went of China. And it's largely because this was not basically the work of government. This was basically the work of the private sector. It's Tim Cook and Foxcon and people like that. Everybody, everybody, because, you know, the CEO narrative is, yeah, we've got some IP problem, you know, intellectual property problems there.

Yes, there's some segments that are closed, but boy, that's a huge market. You've got to be there. And that was the government's view, too, which then kind of encouraged the business sector to go do it. I feel a little bad sometimes for elements of the business sector when they're told, how could you be doing that in China? Well, because you kind of said it was a good thing to do that in China at the beginning of the thousands. So I think the depth of integration, the impact of the private sector is just different than at other times. When we come back, we'll hear Secretary Rice's take on the case for funding universities and what she calls the infrastructure of innovation. You won't find anybody who's more believer in the capitalist system than I am. But I'd like

some of the innovation to come because what happens in universities is somebody gets up and says, I wonder why that does that. That's next. So a company can only do so much, right? Really, this is nation against nation. And in order for the U.S. to stay on top, especially in these fast-moving areas of AI and fusion and robotics and all these interesting kind of spaces that U.S. investors are excited about,

U.S. companies are excited about. So is China. What needs to happen in the U.S.? What conditions need to be created in the U.S. to protect the U.S.? Well, the first thing is run hard and run fast, right? Just try not to worry too much about downsides. I know everybody says, oh, there's all these downsides to these innovations. Somebody said the other day, you know, well, there was a downside.

to fire, too, as an invitation. So, you know, let's not get caught up in the downsides. I think the opportunity is way outweigh the downsides. The second is keep it so that you can innovate in a broad range of places and then find room in the U.S. government, particularly the U.S. military, for those small companies to find a place in procurement in the Pentagon where it's still a bit the Death Star, where it's a little hard to approach if you're a small company. So those are some of the elements that have made us strong, and I think we should continue to do. One of the reasons that I emphasize run hard and run fast is that I trust democratic institutions to make corrections if something starts to go really wrong. If you have something go wrong, let's say an AI,

which it will. You're going to have investigative reporting, probably by some people you work with. You're going to have the congressional hearings. This will not happen in China. We saw the way that they deal with this sort of thing with COVID. They'll lie about it. They'll cover it up. And so I want democratic states to stay ahead in this regard.

The other point, I'd like to see our allies more in the game in innovation. I was just in London and Berlin. And, you know, the British have a lot going on in AI where deep mind was created. But because of the limitations of financing for small companies and like and venture, people come to the United States, one British, very senior British person who's no longer in government. But he said, how in the world did we let

deep mine get sold to an American company. And I do think there's something that's going on in Europe that is lamentable, which is right now the United States is the innovation economy and the Europeans are the regulators. That's bound to bring real tensions in our relationships. I mean, you're really getting at these kind of landmark tech laws that the EU passed a few years ago and they've just started going into implementation. And some of these were really really kind of targeting concerns about the dangers of social media, right? Or that some of these U.S. companies had just become too powerful for digital markets, right? And they were concerned about protecting the innovation that could occur.

But you think it sounds like you're saying it's gone too far. So the first I fully understand. We all know the downsides of social media. And not only is it tough, I teach in a university, and I worry a lot about these kids. who've never known anything but. And it is contributing to our polarization because social media encourages you to go to your tribe. And then you never actually talk to anybody who thinks differently. So when you talk to somebody who thinks differently, you think they're stupid or venal.

Yeah, and it exposes you to the worst opinions from the other side rather than the things you have in common. Precisely. And to be disagreeable is to get more clicks, right? And the kind of extreme, extreme of that is you get political violence. So I worry about that. The other, I really think that the Europeans, if innovation is not flowing in Europe, it's more not because U.S. companies are so dominant. They are dominant, but that's because you don't have the innovation ecosystem in Europe to support innovation. There's a very good report that's come out in Europe.

Draghi did this report about how you can create a better innovation infrastructure. in Europe. And that seems to be a better answer than trying to halt the market for the U.S. companies. Mario Draghi, the former Italian prime minister. Yes. And roll a big report on how Europe could innovate. You're talking about the poll in terms of where capital is available for companies like this. But obviously, there's a push. There's a genesis. So much of that comes out of universities. We rely on universities in the U.S. for pioneering research, but also from the talent pipeline. I hear over and over again when I talk to companies. I mean, that is of course where their talent comes from. How are we going to maintain this technological lead, which you've

described as being so critical for us to run fast and run hard, if university funding and specifically research funding is under threat? Well, universities have a lot to atone for. I would be the first to say that the behavior after October 7th was irresponsible is a mild way of saying it. I had a colleague who asked his students, from what river to what sea in the, you know, Palestine will be free. And this is, of course, in international relations, and almost none of them knew. So we haven't done a very good job of education about some of these issues. It's also true that we were not places where civil dialogue. around difference was welcome.

There was an orthodoxy. And if you didn't speak to that orthodoxy, which was pretty left wing, then you were held up as an example of fill in the blank, you know, xenophobic or misogynists or whatever. And so universities have a lot to atone for. I think people are starting to get back

to the basics that universities should be neutral and not try to have political positions as institutions. But if the cause, for trying to rectify that is that we destroy what basically has been the infrastructure of innovation, which is the government funding universities to do the basic research, to train the PhDs, to bring people into the private sector, to be the basis on which companies are founded even in the United States. Then we've really created a great deficit for the things we need to do. And we don't have a we don't have a plan B. The biggest

problem is we don't have a plan B. And while I know that a lot of them, you know, if my friends down the road here in Silicon Valley are listening, you'll say, but a lot of innovations going on in companies, that is absolutely true. And it is also true that on things like AI, universities don't have the compute power that it takes to do some of the large language models that my friends that, you know, Google or meta or Microsoft are doing. But I would ask the following question, do you really want all of the innovation to be done in the private sector? I'm an incredible capitalist.

You won't find anybody who's more believer in the capitalist system than I am. But I'd like some of the innovation to come because what happens in universities is somebody gets up and says, I wonder why that does that. And they don't have to worry about how long it's going to be. before it proves to have commercial value. They can pursue it for a long period of time. One of the great examples of this is that a lot of the neural networks work that was done

that now supports AI or is now the reason for AI sat on shelves from the 60s when people began to understand this, but it was another 50 years before the compute power to create what we now see was possible. Would a company wait 50 years to see that? So you want to have a part of the innovation system that is just driven by curiosity. Yeah, it sounds like you don't want to throw out the innovation baby with the ideology bathwater, if I can murder a metaphor. Exactly, exactly.

Okay, so we started this conversation talking about your nightmare scenario in this global tech race. let's flip that. What's the best possible scenario here? What's the what's out there? What's the potential that you see? Yeah. Well, in fact, I spend a lot more time and am a lot more confident in the positive side than in the negative side. I do believe that the potential for these technologies to change the face of education, to change the face of health care, we're all looking for growth. Industrial productivity might give us the growth that we need to deal with the fact that we don't seem to be able to deal with fiscal responsibility any longer in our governments. And so we've got to grow and grow and grow. And I don't see any way to grow without this

technological revolution really having an impact pretty near term on the way that companies do their business. My optimistic case is that we really mobilize the technology in ways that gives us the productivity that we need, that gives our kids a better chance at a good education, and that begins to solve some of the worst disease problems that we have. Our aging population really needs breakthroughs in some of the long-term problems of dementia and the like, and people who work in those fields tell me that AI is giving them a new chance. So this is a real benefit. And I get up every morning, come to this place, and I'm excited that the United States is at the forefront. I just want us to make sure that we

completely take advantage of this moment. Well, that's a good spot. Secretary Rice, thank you so much. Thank you. It was a pleasure being with you. We reached out to the Chinese embassy in Washington, D.C. A spokesperson said that China's cybersecurity regulator summoned chipmaker and Vidia over alleged security risks to Chinese users and said that for all companies, quote, the first priority when operating in China is compliance with Chinese laws and regulations. The spokesperson also disagreed with how Secretary Rice characterized China's response to the COVID-19 pandemic, adding that China released information, quote, openly and transparently with the World Health Organization and

other countries, including the United States. And we also reached out to the UK Department for science, innovation, and technology, which did not respond to our request for comment. And that's bold names for this week. Our producer is Alexis Green. Our video producer is Kasha Bruslian, Michael Laval, and Jessica Fenton are our sound designers. Jessica also wrote our theme music. And our fact checker is a parna Nathan.

Our supervising producer is Catherine Millsup. Our development producer is Aisha al-Muslim. Chris Sinsley is the deputy editor. And Falana Patterson is the Wall Street Journal's head of news audio. For even more, check out our columns on WSJ.com. We've linked them in the show notes. I'm Tim Higgins. And I'm Christopher Mims.

Thanks for listening.