Since taking over as Secretary of State in 2005, Condoleezza Rice's efforts to revive the State Department after years of fecklessness under the leadership of an isolated Colin Powell have paralleled the conflicting diplomacy of the Bush administration's second term. In an apparent effort to distance itself from the neoconservative thrust of President George W. Bush's first four years-and in unspoken acknowledgement that the preemptive, go-it-alone posture crashed in the wake of the Iraq War-the administration has allowed Rice to attempt to repair relations with key allies in Europe and elsewhere, offer negotiations with "enemy" states like Iran, and pursue multilateral diplomatic efforts in the face of North Korea's provocative missile tests in July 2006.
Commenting on the administration's restrained response to those tests, Time magazine observed in mid-July: "Under the old Bush Doctrine, defiance by a dictator like Kim Jong Il would have merited threats of punitive U.S. action-or at least a tongue lashing. Instead, the administration has mainly been talking up multilateralism and downplaying Pyongyang's provocation. As much as anything, it's confirmation of what Princeton political scientist Gary J. Bass calls 'doctrinal flameout.' Put another way: cowboy diplomacy, RIP" (July 17, 2006).
This diplomatic shift has been applauded both at home and abroad, and been lambasted by erstwhile supporters outside government. Repeating worn out claims of "appeasement," neoconservative outfits like the Center for Security Policy (CSP) and the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) have excoriated what they see as the administration's failure of nerve in the face of "existential threats" from terrorists and their state backers. In a June 7, 2006 National Review article entitled "Is Bill Clinton Still President?" AEI scholar Michael Ledeen characterized the "appeasement of North Korea" thus: "We're offering light-water reactors, which aren't as dangerous as heavy-water reactors, we won't give them anything unless they agree to stop enrichment, blah, blah, blah. All of which is true, and totally insane, since a madman is, famously, a person who thinks that he will produce a different outcome by doing the same thing over and over again."
For these disgruntled hardliners, Rice and the State Department seem to be the real villains, as CSP suggested in a disparaging commentary posted on its website after Rice's offer of direct negotiations with Iran in May 2006: "In the face of intensifying Iranian intransigence and provocations, President Bush has decided to adopt the recommendations of appeasement-prone subordinates . The decision announced by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice today that the United States would be prepared to participate directly-as opposed to through European and United Nations proxies-in negotiations with the terrorist-sponsoring mullahocracy in Tehran, if only it will promise to suspend its nuclear weapons activities, will only reward and lead to more of such behavior."
With the outbreak of hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah in July 2006, however, Rice has revealed the persistence of the neoconservative mentality within the administration. Echoing Richard Perle's view that the Israeli strikes are "an entirely appropriate response to the existential struggle in which Israel is now engaged" (New York Times, July 22, 2006), Rice rejected calls for an early ceasefire, arguing that it "would be a false promise if it simply returns us to the status quo." As for the destruction wrought by the Israeli strikes, Rice commented that these were the "birth pangs of a new Middle East" (cited in "Rice's Fantasy Ride," TomPaine.com, July 24, 2006).
Contradictory postures have also been apparent in the State Department's efforts on the Iranian front. While offering direct negotiations with Iran if the country were to cease its uranium enrichment program, State has also been busy developing regime change strategies, budgeting some $85 million for this purpose and establishing a bevy of specialized outfits-including the Office of Iranian Affairs and the Iran Syria Operations Group-which seem aimed, at the very least, at sending a message that the administration's real goal is overturning the so-called mullahocracy in Tehran. As Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations and a State Department official under Colin Powell, told the Los Angeles Times (May 19, 2006): "We are telling Iran, 'We want regime change, but while you're still here, we'd like to negotiate with you to stop your nuclear program'."
The mixed signals sent by Rice's State Department are perhaps unsurprising; Rice's own positions have changed as she made her way to becoming the administration's top diplomat. Prior to Bush's election in 2000, she advocated a more restrained foreign policy, one that would be strictly tied to U.S. national interests. But Rice quickly expressed a new comfort level with the expansive ideological and global-cop agendas promoted by the likes of Paul Wolfowitz and Dick Cheney. In September 2002, for instance, she said: "There will always be some uncertainty about how quickly [Saddam Hussein] can acquire nuclear weapons. But we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud" (BBC, November 17, 2004).
Despite her association with the neoconservative agenda during Bush's first term, one would be hard-pressed to define Rice as a neoconservative. Still, her background reveals at least one similarity to that political faction-she moved from the left to the right. Regarding her decision to leave the Democratic Party for the Republicans, Rice said: "I found a party that sees me as an individual, not as part of a group . In America, with education and hard work, it really does not matter where you come from-it matters where you are going." And since joining the administration, Rice's rhetoric has often taken on a distinctly neocon-ish flavor, such as her February 2003 remark: "Power matters. But there can be no absence of moral content in American foreign policy, and furthermore, the American people wouldn't accept such an absence. Europeans giggle at this and say we're naive and so on, but we're not Europeans, we're Americans-and we have different principles" ("Rice in Her Own Words," BBC, November 17, 2004).
Her hawkish views notwithstanding, Rice has at times taken advantage of her privileged position in the administration to champion a more cooperative foreign policy. An early example of this was Rice's perceived rebuff of John Bolton, one of the administration's hardline ideologues: She failed to give him a new portfolio within State, which ultimately led to Bolton's nomination as UN ambassador. Also, Rice's willingness-after some significant horse-trading-to support José Miguel Insulza, a Chilean socialist, as secretary general of the Organization of American States and to abandon the U.S. push for a more right-wing candidate has been interpreted as an example of her pragmatism.
Commenting on these moves, the Washington Post's Jackson Diehl wrote: "The emerging picture is of a secretary of state focused on solving problems and cutting deals with key allies. That necessarily means toning down U.S. preeminence and occasionally compromising on the hot-button causes of U.S. conservatives, such as Cuba or the [International Criminal Court]. Colin Powell tried and failed to lead Bush's first-term foreign policy in that direction. If her first months are any indication, Condoleezza Rice will make pragmatism a stronger feature of the second term" (May 9, 2005).
Since the mid-1980s, Rice has moved briskly through the revolving door connecting government, corporate America, academia, and think tanks. Rice got her start in government in 1986, when she received a Council on Foreign Relations fellowship to serve on the strategic planning staff of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. During the administration of President George H.W. Bush, Rice was an assistant to the National Security Council (NSC), where she became a go-to person for Soviet affairs. Bush senior once told Gorbachev: "This is Condoleezza Rice. She tells me everything I know about the Soviet Union" (Salon.com, March 20, 2000).
Rice's ties with corporate America include her former membership on the boards of Transamerica Corporation, Hewlett Packard, and Chevron. Chevron named an oil tanker after her but later changed the name when she became national security adviser in 2001.
Rice has developed a close relationship with the Bush family, including with former first lady Barbara Bush. During the two years prior to the election of George W. Bush, Rice was one of the most frequent overnight guests at the governor's mansion in Austin. During the presidential campaign, Rice repeatedly demonstrated her loyalty to candidate Bush, once referring to him as "someone of tremendous intellect."
When George W. Bush began assembling advisers for his run at the White House, his foreign policy team, which included Rice, took on the name the "Vulcans," a reference to the Roman god of fire and metal, as well as to Rice's hometown of Birmingham, Alabama, which is known as the center of the Southern steel industry. Among the other Vulcans were Stephen Hadley, Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz. "The Vulcans," wrote James Mann in his 2004 history of the Bush war cabinet, "represented the generation that bridged what are commonly depicted as two separate and distinct periods of modern history: Cold War and post-Cold War. For the Vulcans, the disintegration of the Soviet Union represented only a middle chapter in the narrative, not the end or the beginning." Most of the Vulcans, it turned out, had a distinctly U.S. supremacist vision of how the ensuing chapters of this story should look. And Rice became an early articulator of this vision. (For more on the history of the Vulcans, see Mann's 2004 The Rise of the Vulcans.)
A year before Bush took office, Rice wrote a widely noted essay in Foreign Affairs entitled "Promoting the National Interest." Her prescription for a new U.S. foreign policy centered on a critique of Clinton policy, which she argued was disconnected from U.S. national interests and was tied too closely to global opinions and multilateralism. "Foreign policy in a Republican administration will proceed from the firm ground of the national interest, not from the interests of an illusory international community," she wrote. According to Rice, "multilateral agreements and institutions should not be ends in themselves" and measures such as the Kyoto Protocol and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty would constrain U.S. national interests. The United States, she argued, should return to the core principle that "power matters." Instead of relying on "Wilsonian thought" of "exercising power legitimately only when doing so on behalf of someone else," Rice recommended that if the United States would focus solely on pursuing its national interests, the rest of the world would benefit-what she described as a "second-order effect." Concerning Iraq, Rice wrote: "Nothing will change until Saddam is gone, so the United States must mobilize whatever resources it can, including support from the opposition, to remove him."
After Rice was nominated as Bush's secretary of state in late 2004, Hadley-who had been Rice's right-hand man at the NSC-was tagged to replace her as national security adviser, a sign that Rice had consolidated her grip over the administration's foreign policy decision making.
The emergence of Rice and Hadley as the key managers of the Bush administration's foreign policy bureaucracy came despite their close association with numerous controversies that erupted during Bush's first term. Hadley first gained widespread public attention during the Niger uranium scandal, becoming the scapegoat when allegations arose that information about Iraq's purported effort to buy uranium was mishandled. According to the Washington Post, CIA Director George Tenet told Hadley that the Niger allegations, which were repeated by Bush in various speeches (including the January 2003 State of the Union Address) and used as a justification for invading Iraq, were probably bogus and should not be used by the president.
Both Hadley and Rice were subjects of the 9/11 Commission's investigation of the intelligence failures that led to the attacks. Even though he and Rice were shown a counterterrorism report in August 2001 warning that al-Qaida was planning an attack on the U.S. homeland, Hadley told the commission that he and Rice did not feel they had the job of coordinating domestic agencies before the attacks. For her part, Rice told the commission, "There was no silver bullet that could have prevented the 9/11 attacks . There was nothing demonstrating or showing that something was coming in the United States. If there had been something, we would have acted on it" (CNN.com, Transcript of Rice's 9/11 commission statement).
During the debate over her nomination to secretary of state, Rice was accused of refusing to acknowledge errors in planning or judgment and of avoiding accountability for the absence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. "In the end, I could not excuse Dr. Rice's repeated misstatements," Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL), said of his vote against Rice. Massachusetts Senators Edward M. Kennedy and John Kerry were among the Democrats who also voted against her (CNN, January 27, 2005).
As the Washington Post reported in a front-page story on Rice, "She has ... become enmeshed in the controversy over the administration's use of intelligence about Iraq's weapons in the run-up to the war. She has been made to appear out of the loop by colleagues' claims that she did not read or recall vital pieces of intelligence. And she has made statements about U.S. intelligence on Iraq that have been contradicted by facts that later emerged . Either she missed or overlooked numerous warnings from intelligence agencies seeking to put caveats on claims about Iraq's nuclear weapons program, or she made public claims that she knew to be false" (July 27, 2003).
The statements characterized as misleading include her insistence that she never received reports from the CIA that cast doubt on whether Saddam Hussein sought uranium from Niger, even though her staff had received the CIA memos; and her claim that the Iraqi military was capable of launching on short notice attacks with weapons of mass destruction, a claim derided by observers as lacking an evidentiary base.
Chuck Spinney, a retired Pentagon insider who has made a career out of debunking misleading claims made by the Department of Defense, wrote on his website: "Today's Sydney Morning Herald contains an absolutely mind-blowing economic revelation. The mystery surrounding how Saddam successfully hid his Weapons of Mass Destruction has been resolved by America's National Security Adviser, Ms. Condoleezza Rice. Her revelation goes beyond the need for a preemptive war, however. It provides a vision that could have a profound impact on the evolution of our industrial culture and future prosperity . Ms. Rice revealed that Saddam's weapons programs are 'in bits and pieces' rather than assembled weapons" (www.d-n-i.net, May 1, 2003). Spinney continued: "In her words, 'You may find assembly lines, you may find pieces hidden here and there,' she said. According to the wording of this report, 'ingredients or precursors, many non-lethal by themselves, could be embedded in dual-use facilities.' But there is more! If the Herald's reportage is correct, Ms. Rice implied Saddam's distributed and seemingly inefficient production system represented a current threat serious enough to justify preemptive war. She implied Iraq could quickly assemble and launch these weapons. The key to her vision of this rapid reaction capability (a quick OODA loop) lies in Saddam's 'just-in-time assembly' and 'just-in-time' inventory systems. If her words are accurately portrayed by the Sydney Morning Herald, Ms. Rice is suggesting that Saddam Hussein may be an economic genius on a par with Henry Ford and Taichi Ohno."
Rice's is a published book author; her works include Germany Unified and Europe Transformed (1995) with Philip Zelikow; The Gorbachev Era (1986) with Alexander Dallin; and Uncertain Allegiance: The Soviet Union and the Czechoslovak Army(1984).
