Why Her Dreams Crashed

Her friends and colleagues gasped at the reversal. Cynics ascribed it to a psychological complex about powerful male tutors. The merely skeptical attributed it to a pragmatic realization that she had to adopt Bush's messianic views to keep her job. Others accepted her own explanation: that the shift was driven by the September 2001 attacks, which traditional realism could not entirely explain or respond to. The 9/11 terrorists, most of them Saudis, were the products of fuming discontent in "stable" but tyrannical regimes -- proof that the character of a regime did affect U.S. security.

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Finally, there was a personal dimension to Rice's turnaround. One academic colleague recalls her telling him, "Remember where I come from." Rice, who was born in Birmingham, was 8 when racists bombed a local black Baptist church. She was friends with one of the four girls killed. Bush's passionate talk of freedom reawakened a dormant strand of her character. But she got caught up in the agenda emotionally and took too long to spot its illusions.

By 2006, the dreams of '05 had dissolved into nightmares. Iraq's elections had only deepened its sectarian fissures; Ukraine's reformers retreated into a glum compromise with their Moscow-backed foes; Syria's withdrawal from Lebanon left a vacuum that the Shiite radicals of Hezbollah eagerly filled; and elections in the Palestinian territories, which Rice had insisted upon, were won by the Islamist militants of Hamas.

Democracy, it turned out, was no cure-all. Democratic governments thrive or crumble on whether they can mediate conflicting claims without much violence. Had Rice understood this, she might have done more to shore up those fledgling democracies. She could have bolstered Prime Minister Fouad Siniora's embattled government in Lebanon with investment and aid -- but she didn't.

One price was the first Arab-Israeli war in 24 years. In July 2006, Hezbollah militiamen in southern Lebanon crossed the border, kidnapped two Israeli soldiers and killed three more. Israel responded with massive air and artillery strikes; Hezbollah struck back with rockets. Aides urged Rice to start shuttle diplomacy, but she said she had no interest in a mere cease-fire; she would work only for a "lasting peace" that addressed the "root causes" of the violence, and shuttling wouldn't bring that.

When the fighting finally stopped, America's reputation as a world power had taken another hit; Israel's image of invincibility was shaken; and a strengthened Hezbollah was crowing. Rice could have sought some redemption by leading a vast reconstruction program for Lebanon's bombed-out areas, but she offered only a pittance. The player with a bold postwar plan was Hezbollah, which funneled massive sums of Iranian money, bolstering the militia's influence and weakening Siniora yet again.

This fiasco may have awakened Rice from her reverie. Last January, she traveled again to Cairo. Ayman Nour was back in prison, but she didn't utter the dissident's name. Instead, she publicly thanked Mubarak "for receiving me and for spending so much time with me to talk about the issues of common interest." Washington's relationship with Egypt, she added, is "one that we value greatly." Had Rice not let loose her populist roar two years earlier, this diplomatic boilerplate could have served as prelude to pressuring Mubarak privately about his backpedaling on reform. Instead, the contrast made her seem craven. Her words came across less as politesse than as a display of American weakness.

At times this year, Rice seems to have returned to her realist roots, most notably in striking a quick nuclear disarmament deal with North Korea. After years of scorning Arab-Israeli diplomacy, she now hopes to assemble a last-ditch Israeli-Palestinian peace conference; but Washington's leverage has diminished, the parties know she and Bush are lame ducks, and the region's ground is burning. She is said to be locked in a face-off with Cheney over Iran policy: He wants to bomb, she wants to keep talking. But it is a sad comment on the endurance of her one great asset -- her influence with the president -- that nobody knows whose side the decider will take.

Finally, there looms Iraq, where the only recent tactical successes have involved building up tribal warlords, not creating a beacon of democracy. This war has been Rice's war as much as anybody's in the administration. Long after her celebrity and charm have been forgotten, her epitaph will endure: She pursued democracy at the expense of stability, and achieved neither.

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Fred Kaplan is Slate's national security columnist and the author of the forthcoming "Daydream Believers: How a Few Grand Ideas Wrecked American Power."