When President Bush was praising Condoleezza Rice, his choice to be the next secretary of state, for embodying “the strength, the grace and the decency of our country’’ this week, I couldn’t help thinking that while I’m happy for my childhood acquaintance’s good fortune, I’m nervous for the nation.
That Rice is smart, tough, accomplished, well-informed and has a great life story is well established by now. The problem is that she has supported some policies that were very bad.
I remember a meeting that I and a group of liberal-minded columnists had with Rice six or seven years ago when she was still the provost at Stanford University. One of us asked her what she thought of the United States’ outdated and rather silly policy of enforcing sanctions against Cuba, when the Cold War was long over, and our government had somehow managed to forgive the Soviet Union, China and Vietnam.
Tough luck, Rice scoffed. Fidel Castro had “bet on the wrong horse,’’ so let him suffer the consequences.
I thought she was a hard-liner then, and none of her actions since then has made me change my opinion of her. Unlike Colin Powell, who tried to moderate the more hawkish instincts of the Bush administration insiders, Rice is hawkish herself. Her most egregious act was being one of the main cheerleaders for the war with Iraq. She actively touted the theory that Saddam Hussein and his alleged weapons of mass destruction posed an imminent threat to us. Rice in particular revised the whole concept of the pre-emptive strike. Not only was it permissible to wage war on a country that posed an imminent threat to you, she argued. You could also strike at a country that you thought might do. The world’s only superpower can do pretty much what it wants to do in the world, and that it can reshape regions in pursuit of its own interests, and do so with impunity. As one professor told me, it’s an imperialistic view, in which the rules that apply to other countries don’t apply to us, and we don’t feel the need to respect anyone else’s views.
The Bush administration went to war without the support of the world community, and when most of the other countries refused to join us, it disparaged them. It has flouted the Geneva Convention in its treatment of suspected terrorist prisoners and has denied them due process under our constitution. It has refused to recognize the international criminal court. All of this has put the United States in the bad graces of the world.
Prof. Esther Brimmer, deputy director for trans-Atlantic relations at Johns Hopkins University and a former State Department official, says Rice belongs to the classic realist school, which sees international affairs as being all about relationships between big powers. To build a law-abiding society during a time of terrorism, genocide, large refugee movements and the proliferation of nuclear weapons, however, the United States will need lots of partners, Brimmer said.
As Rice moves up to secretary of state, I would like to see her approach to foreign policy with less hubris and with a more cooperative spirit. She has considerable charm, and is capable of it. But it would be a sharp departure from the way she and the Bush administration have done business so far.
