Fire From the Right
Secretary of State Rice has her own set of troubles
Condoleezza Rice started as secretary of state saying that "the time for diplomacy" has arrived. Now, in her third year, so has the time for enduring a widening array of pressures, both of policy and politics.
The closest of President Bush's confidants, Rice has been taking some unprecedented knocks. A new book by former Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet portrays her as failing, as national security adviser, to slow the rush to an ill-considered Iraq war. She has been subpoenaed by a House committee to testify about promoting faulty prewar intelligence. A top deputy, the head of the U.S. foreign aid program, abruptly resigned after being implicated in the "D.C. Madam" sex scandal. And, from the right, neoconservatives are exercised over her pragmatic policy shifts. Notably, they have seized on North Korea's delays in halting its nuclear weapons program as reason to denounce a Rice-approved denuclearization deal.
Focused. And yet, as Rice prepared for a conference on Iraq's security woes last week with envoys from neighboring countries, including Iran and Syria, aides insisted that she was neither distracted nor perturbed. Her backers, who dispute Tenet's depiction of her as "remote" and ineffectual on Iraq matters, expect the book flap to pass quickly. As for the subpoena, Rice maintains she has already answered the probers' questions. "This is Washington," said her spokesman, Sean McCormack. "Part of what you see is Washington politics at play."
The more enduring risks to Rice, though, lie in the policy shifts she has been engineering. Rice has been taking political risks that are significant in an administration that has generally shunned bilateral talks with adversaries, particularly those branded by Bush as "evil." On issues from North Korea to Iran to Middle East peacemaking, she has broken with earlier hard-line positions. "It's multilateralism-quite frankly, what we should have done the first four years," Ohio Republican Sen. George Voinovich tells U.S. News.
Rice's innovations are drawing fire from conservatives who argue that the State Department is abandoning Bush's first-term principles and weakening the pressure on outlaw regimes. Rice is thought to be scrupulous about staying in sync with the president on any policy departures. Even so, as time passes with no breakthroughs-particularly on North Korea and Iran-she is being exposed to more criticism from hawks. On North Korea, Rice and her top Asia hand, Christopher Hill, won Bush's approval for easing barriers to direct talks, adding incentives for North Korea to halt nuclear work, and, most surprisingly, reversing course on sanctions against a Macao bank that has held suspect North Korean accounts. That concession-key to persuading Pyongyang to accept a February deal-went down badly with hard-liners. It was painful inside the administration as well. "It was a very difficult decision on our part," says a senior official.
Potshots. The criticism has intensified as North Korea has not followed through. A former administration policymaker who backs the deal calls the North Korean stalling "embarrassing." The North Korean delay "increases their [State's] proclivity to concede more," contends John Bolton, Bush's hawkish former ambassador to the U.N. "I fear that the State Department may now be in a 'save-the-deal' mode." Bush himself may be getting antsy, hinting at renewed sanctions and warning that "our patience is not unlimited."
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.
This story appears in the May 14, 2007 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.