Colin Powell’s bowing out and Condoleezza Rice’s stepping in as secretary of state, have triggered a massive tidal wave of speculation regarding the course of American foreign policy over the next four years. Powell is routinely described as the moderate who, whenever possible, tried to rein in the excesses of the radical neoconservatives in the first Bush administration. Rice, on the other hand, is presented as a she-hawk, always poised to attack rather than negotiate.
Such descriptions, however, are at once both exaggerated and unhelpful. In the American system the ultimate arbiter of foreign policy options is the president in conjunction with the Senate. It is, therefore, at Bush II and the new Senate that we have to look to guess what changes may be afoot in US foreign policy.
During his first four years, Bush was a relatively vulnerable president with a cloud hanging over his re-election. He was further handicapped by his lack of foreign policy experience. Under those circumstances, Powell was an asset to Bush. As a safe pair of hands with considerable experience in foreign policy and security issues, Powell was reassuring. At the same time, Powell, known as a moderate, was able to persuade the split Senate to give the president the benefit of the doubt whenever one was needed.
Bush II presents a different perspective. He has been re-elected with the largest number of votes in US history. His Republican Party has an unprecedented majority in the Senate. And, we live in the post-9/11 world in which the US has been forced to put foreign policy and national security at the top of its agenda.
Over the past four years Bush has developed a foreign policy strategy that is a far cry from the classical Cold War balance of power politics that nurtured Powell’s generation. He is the first US president since Ronald Reagan to be determined to use American power to reshape the world rather than maintain the status quo. In that sense, someone like Powell could not be regarded as other than an intruder. Condoleezza Rice, on the other hand, is a well-established member of the president’s political coterie. An expert in communism, Rice was among the first American scholars of her generation to assert what was at the time regarded as the supreme political heresy — that the Soviet empire could be brought down. Bush’s regime-change and exporting-democracy politics sounded out of place in Powell’s discourse but constitute a vital part of Rice’s political mother tongue.
Those who do not agree with the Bush doctrine of regime change and democratization will feel uneasy about the change at the State Department. But those who endorse Bush’s use of American power in the so-called “war on terror” will see the change as a step in the right direction. When all is said and done, however, no US president, not even one just elected by a dramatic margin, can do as he pleases. The US is a democracy with many checks and balances on the powers of its government. And the world at large is far more complicated than the neocons appear to believe.
