Fire From the Right
Secretary of State Rice has her own set of troubles
On Iran, Rice has slipped the bonds of past policy and offered to meet with Iranian officials and discuss any topic if Iran will only suspend its nuclear work. At last week's meeting in Egypt, she merely exchanged pleasantries with the Iranian foreign minister, though she did meet with her Syrian counterpart. On the Middle East, Rice has shelved past hesitation to mediate directly, arranging for Palestinian and Israeli leaders to meet twice monthly on security and other issues. Over Israeli opposition, she has started meeting with Palestinian officials who have joined a coalition government led by Hamas, a designated terrorist group. Even those who back the efforts are hardly optimistic. "It's a futile thing to do," says Martin Indyk, a former Clinton administration diplomat and director of the Saban Center at the Brookings Institution, "but I give her full credit for trying."
Rice has injected more flexibility into U.S. policy on all those issues, moderating the previous emphasis on pressure over engagement. She has also been cleaning up the fallout with allies over Iraq. The overall shift-studiously unheralded-has the effect of reducing moralism and reasserting what foreign-policy watchers usually call realism. "There's a certain amount of yielding," says Helmut Sonnenfeldt, who was Henry Kissinger's counselor at State. Adds a senior European diplomat, "She deserves credit. ... She's the one who has corrected the hubris and injected pragmatism."
Some analysts see the moves as overdue correctives but question whether they go far enough. "What she's trying to do is make unsound policies a little better," reasons Dimitri Simes, president of the Nixon Center. Simes worries that the administration still lacks "a conceptualizer." He adds, "There is no attempt to introduce an alternative vision of the American role in world affairs."
The secretary's tacking may also reflect the reality of her position. Anyone running foreign policy in the second term was destined to be dealt a weaker hand. Rice must operate on a battered landscape: low approval ratings for her boss, an assertive Congress in Democratic hands, entrenched anti-Americanism overseas, a colossal problem in Iraq, and an inability so far to rein in North Korea and Iran. She is also working against the clock, with but 20 months left to achieve an enduring breakthrough, somewhere. "We haven't scored the touchdown yet, but the question I have is, What are the alternatives?" asks Voinovich. "We are in a very fragile position in many places around the world."
Rice's aides say her policy departures do not signal a philosophical change and that the administration's principles remain undiluted. Rather, says one, "changed circumstances have allowed us to pursue a different strategy." Aides try to knock down talk that Rice is edging back to what many suspect are her realist roots. "She's not going to be pigeonholed one way or the other," says McCormack. What's important, contend Rice's backers, is for her to stick with the new flexibility-whatever name it goes by.
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