|
|
|
Last Updated: Apr 26th, 2007 - 09:55:10 |
As the chief architect of American foreign policy in the late 1960s and 1970s Mr Kissinger remains an icon of the "realist" school of diplomacy so pilloried by Ms Rice's current and erstwhile neoconservative colleagues in the Bush administration. A brilliant - if cynical - operator who was able to further US interests from positions of apparent weakness, particularly after humiliation in Vietnam, Mr Kissinger meets the current secretary of state regularly, according to an aide.
There may be lessons to learn in the present day from this experience as America faces a similarly disastrous war in Iraq and, as a result, a dramatically weakened position abroad.
Under Ms Rice, the change in circumstances has led to a shift in the US approach to foreign relations. This has made her a target for criticism by former colleagues such as John Bolton, who stepped down as the US ambassador to the United Nations in January, and Richard Perle, who played a key role advising the Pentagon during the first Bush administration. They see Ms Rice as having betrayed the principles that she had helped to frame as national security advisor to Mr Bush between 2001 and 2005, such as the use of "pre-emptive force" against rogue states.
Their case file on Ms Rice is getting steadily thicker. Whether it is Ms Rice's willingness to talk to North Korea, with whom she struck a controversial six-party deal in February, or her offer last year of talks with Iran on condition that it first agree to suspend uranium enrichment, gone are the days when the Bush administration tended to shoot first and ask questions later. The career diplomats at the state department, who in the first Bush term were largely ignored, are back centre-stage.
"[Under Secretary Rice] the permanent bureaucracy is reasserting itself," says John Bolton. For believers in pre-emptive force, there can be few more damaging criticisms than this. But there is an alternative, equally plausible, way of interpreting Ms Rice's record so far, which is at variance with the neo-conservative charge sheet.
Charts
Far from having a road-to-Damascus experience in which she has embraced the merits of realism, Ms Rice has been forced by America's drastically compromised situation in Iraq into making changes from a position of weakness. "When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail," said a former senior diplomat in the Clinton administration. "But because of Iraq, these guys don't have much of a hammer any more."
Dressed in a light beige suit, Ms Rice received us in an upholstered reception room framed by a large portrait of Dean Acheson - perhaps her most illustrious predecessor.
Now 52 and having served Mr Bush for more than six years, Ms Rice remains the most glamorous member of an ageing administration. During an extensive interview, Ms Rice declined to acknowledge explicitly that she is effecting what many see as a course correction in US diplomacy. Nor, in spite of recurring invitations, did Ms Rice set out an overarching philosophy of diplomacy that would either repudiate or embrace the much-derided neo-conservative approach that she is so widely presumed to have jettisoned.
But in her careful choice of vocabulary, Ms Rice struck more of a multilateralist than unilateralist tone. We asked whether she would reconsider the message of her famous article in Foreign Affairs in 2000, in which she derided the Clinton administration's proclivity for nation-building:?"There?is?nothing?wrong with doing something that benefits all humanity but that is, in a sense, a second-order effect," she wrote then. Seven years on, humanity gets a more prominent billing.
"I have spent a lot of time at the department in something that we generally call transformational diplomacy," said Ms Rice "It really is kind of fancy term for something which is quite simple, which is that the civilian side of our national security establishment has to be more capable in helping to prevent and, if necessary, repair failed states through helping to build governance structures."
The point of her article in 2000, she said, had been to argue against the deployment of the US military in nation-building exercises. Ms Rice said that David Petraeus, the general who is spearheading Mr Bush's "new way forward in Iraq" and the 30,000 troop surge, was involved in counter-insurgency operations - not in nation building.
"We are all involved in one way or another in what is really a continuum between war and peace," she continued. "It is not a matter that you end the war and begin the peace, but rather that you have in many places - whether it's Afghanistan or Iraq or Haiti - that you are simultaneously trying to deal with the sources of insecurity and the violent forces that are trying to destabilise at the same time that you're trying to build healthy forces. Now if you want to call that nation-building, that's fine, but I think that it is a continuum."
And what about the three "axis of evil" states that Mr Bush identified in his January 2002 State of the Union address? Now that Pyongyang has agreed to dismantle its nuclear-weapons facilities - although it has yet to fulfill its side of the bargain following the unfreezing of $25m worth of bank accounts earlier this month - should North Korea be dropped from the list? Ms Rice weighed her response carefully.
"The North Koreans are about to demonstrate, I hope, that they have made an important strategic choice," she said. But had "axis of evil" been a useful phrase? "It was a descriptive phrase," she replied, somewhat unconvincingly. "I do think it was descriptive."
Ms Rice's detractors, including David Frum, the former Bush speechwriter who helped coin the phrase "axis of evil", argue that the secretary of state's six-party deal with North Korea proves beyond doubt her multilateral leanings. Critics point out that the deal is little different from the 1994 framework agreement that Mr Clinton negotiated with Pyongyang, which the Bush administration unceremoniously abandoned in 2002.
Source:Ocnus.net 2007
Top of Page
|
|
|
|