R. Nicholas Burns Quotes

The people of China are not our enemy. We do want to live in peace with China. No person in their right mind should want this relationship to end up in conflict or in war.

My entire life I knew that the United States was not perfect because of the Vietnam War and Watergate during my teenage years, and I knew that race in particular was a curse on our history. We had never gotten race right since the first slave ship arrived in Virginia in 1619. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and others have said that this is our original sin, of America itself, of our Constitution, which did not give African Americans, as you well know, full citizenship rights; nothing even close to it. But I feel now that America cannot be successful in its foreign and defense policy if we don’t heal and repair America at home. I’ve never felt that more strongly than I do right now.

I often get asked about decoupling, but it’s not a word that we’ve used. I always say in my talks with the business community, we’re not actively seeking to decouple two economies that have come together over 45 years, a $718 billion two-way trade relationship annually, with thousands, tens of thousands of companies interacting with each other. If either side is beginning to decouple, it’s more China than the United States. They’ve talked about it more – they don’t use the word – but that’s certainly what they’re signaling in some respects, and they’ve been taking actions far longer than we have.

Any time you're talking about the proliferation of nuclear weapons, and of the ability to manufacture them, and you add to that unstable or aggressive states, and North Korea and Iran meet both of those definitions, then you've got a terrible problem on your hands. And so I can't think of any two bigger problems right now that the world is facing than those two.

My message to young people all over the world, and in the U.S., and Canada and China is engage with each other. If this is going to be the most important bilateral relationship in the world, and it is, if we are the two strongest powers, we’ve got to find a way to live together in peace. it would be insanity to think that we would allow this relationship to descend into conflict or war. We’re not going to do that. And so our people have to work together, study together, do business together. Learn Mandarin if you’re Canadian or Brit or German or American. If you’re Chinese, you study in the United States. Our door is open to Chinese students. We want Chinese students to walk through the door of our universities. I was a university professor, taught many, well over a hundred Chinese students in 12 years, and they’re great students.

To a certain extent, what we’ve learned from nearly three years now of the global pandemic is the over reliance that some of us have had on supply chains from China in critical materials, critical for the functioning of our economy or for the industrial enterprises of our most competitive industries. So I think there’s been a major movement to try to make sure that we control our own [supply chains] in certain industries, [so] we have greater access and more reliability about supply chains. This is not just a lesson that we’ve learned; the Europeans [and] Japanese have learned this. You’ve seen movement around the world to make sure that, in a crisis, you control your destiny, and you control your own fate, so your economy can continue to perform at a high level, and you’re not at the mercy of an autocratic power that might deny you critical materials. So, that’s a lesson we’ve learned, and you’ve heard our President, other senior members of our government and many members of the business community talk about that.

The Biden administration encourages all of the Embassies to take part in the international debate… We have an embassy Weibo account, we have WeChat accounts, we have a Twitter account of 1.2 million followers, I have my own separate Twitter account. What we’re trying to do here is speak to the Chinese people and give them accurate information about us. We try to give the Chinese people an accurate portrayal of who we are as a country, what we believe in, and correct basic misstatements by their own government about us. There’s a powerful censorship body here. When Secretary Blinken gave his big speech on the US-China relationship, the major speech of this administration, it was censored on WeChat and Weibo within two hours. We put it back up a couple of days later and it was censored within 20 minutes. But in that two-hour span, and in that 20-minute span, you can get a lot of people looking at it. We believe in freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and we think that people have a right to free and accurate information. That’s our goal, and to show respect to the people of China, respect for their culture, and their civilization, their history.There are times we use our social media presence to debate the government here, to correct misstatements by the government, to criticize. So, I think we’re never going to live in a world where social media is not a presence.

On 9/11, having friends and allies made all the difference in the world. As we look at the pandemic and a possible second wave, the global economic collapse, the challenge that China and other authoritarian countries are presenting to our democracies, do we really want to face all this alone? Having retreated, are we going to return to our senses and re-establish and strengthen these alliances? That is a rhetorical question, but it’s an important one for Americans.

Well, I wish we lived in a world where I could sit down in front of Chinese CCTV and say what I wanted to and not have that edited or distorted by the state-controlled press. I mean, the reality is when you deal with the state-controlled press here, they often will completely fail to report any kind of constructive criticism, and they’ll only report when you say something positive. That’s not true of Chinese diplomats in the United States. They can write op-eds in the Washington Post, which nobody edits. And that’s part of the problem we face here.

We certainly cannot trust the Chinese. Our responsibility is to make Taiwan a tough nut to crack.

I became interested in international politics from my experience living as an exchange student in Europe, both in high school and in college, and I wanted to contribute to a restoration of wise and effective American leadership in the world.

We need a president and secretary of state who will value diplomacy. Really. And we need a president and secretary of state and a Congress that will embrace the fact that most of the big challenges ahead of us are not going to lend themselves to the use of military power, but to the need to build coalitions and strengthen alliances to fight common global problems, such as future pandemics, climate change, or trafficking of women and children.

The United States is disappointed that China continues to provide political and diplomatic support to Moscow’s fundamental break with the United Nations Charter two years ago in its brutal, illegal invasion of Ukraine. We are disappointed the state-controlled press here blames NATO and the European Union for this war. The blame is squarely on the shoulders of one man in the Kremlin. We are very concerned by the actions of Chinese companies that fuel Russia’s defense industrial complex. We have raised those concerns quite recently in the last two to three weeks with our Chinese counterparts. China’s silence on the existential issue of Ukraine’s sovereignty and independence is deafening. And its support to Russia is very troubling indeed.

We think we have about 290,000 Chinese students in the United States. The United States remains the leading destination for Chinese students. We just had a major fair here two weeks ago at the Embassy on a Saturday for Chinese students and their parents to familiarize themselves with the visa process, and also, most importantly, educational opportunities in the United States. Our doors are open to Chinese students. We want Chinese students to study in our country.

We ought not to exaggerate their [ China ] strengths or underestimate the strengths of the United States. What we need is self confidence that the United States is a strong country.