Outlook: The Case Against Condi

An Ineffectual National Security Advisor, Her Secretary of State Tenure Was Infected by Bush's Unrealistic Idealism

"As Condoleezza Rice jets around the world, she must sometimes wonder where she's going. Over her three years as secretary of state, she has squandered great opportunities by putting faith and loyalty above her old worldview. The problem isn't just that she has swerved from the realism that propelled her to prominence; it's that the result has been a shambles. ... If she is now veering back to realism, it's after too long a detour into post-9/11 messianism. Rice remains one of the architects of a fantasy foreign policy, and her record as secretary of state gives little hope that she'll be able to reverse that verdict in the administration's final months."

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Slate "War Stories" columnist Fred Kaplan was online Monday, Nov. 5 at 1 p.m. ET to examine the failures of Condoleezza Rice's efforts as Secretary of State, many caused by her abandonment of geopolitical realism in favor of her boss's passion for spreading democracy worldwide.

The transcript follows.

Archive: Transcripts of discussions with Outlook article authors

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Fred Kaplan: Hello. I'm happy to be here and look forward to your questions.

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Cincinnati: Mr. Kaplan, thanks for your time. I wonder if the president's "passion" for worldwide democracy is not so much an actual ideological stance, but rather rhetorical cover for the actions taken in the war on terror. If true, can Rice's actions really be explained as a shift to an idealist geopolitical worldview?

Fred Kaplan: Very good question. I think that when President Bush says things like "freedom is God's gift to humanity," he truly does believe it. I think that he has somehow persuaded Secretary Rice to believe it, too. (Several officials whom I've interviewed in the past year say that, while she doesn't speak much about this -- even to many of her friends -- there's a born-again quality to her thinking.) Now, I think it's clear that Dick Cheney does not believe this, nor did Donald Rumsfeld; they're pretty much classic 19th-century nationalists or neocolonialists. But there's a convergence here. If you believe that America represents the highest form of democracy, then the aim of spreading democracy and the aim of spreading American power take you to the same destination. You get into trouble, though, when you start supporting dictators in the (sometimes understandable) pursuit of national interests -- then your rhetoric about democracy begins to look hollow and hypocritical.

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Mount Rainier, Md.: Mr. Kaplan, thanks for the commentary. I remember a quote from Rice, way back in January, that in diplomacy you have to get the context right. It sounded an awful lot like the comment of an academician who is getting to "experiment" with foreign policy instead of trying to decipher it post-hoc. Do you think Rice still is handicapped by her long tenure in academics, or has she also made the transition to working diplomacy?

Fred Kaplan: Another good question. There have been times when Rice has said "I'm a student of history" -- and used her background as an excuse to avoid accountability for her actions. For instance, she'll note that policies that seem disastrous while they're going on sometimes look better 20 years later. I've also been told by some of her former colleagues that she sometimes shows a canny appreciation for the processes of a situation -- but seems reluctant to step in. For instance, one of her top aides advised her to throw some assistance to Fatah before the Palestinian elections -- get the Israelis to lighten up on some roadblocks, for example, and let Fatah take credit. She refused to do that. While she was national security adviser, she testified before the 9/11 Commission about the deep-seated tensions between the FBI and the CIA -- but she did nothing to unravel those tensions. She said nobody told her that there were problems in communication between, say, the FBI and the FAA. It didn't seem to occur to her that she had to look into whether there were problems.

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Jerusalem: Is the proposed peace conference in Annapolis part of Rice's fantasy policy, in your opinion? If so, how? If not, why not?

Fred Kaplan: Well, look, all presidents and secretaries of state are entitled to their dreams of a Middle East peace. The peculiarity of this administration is that they've waited so long. Whenever a president waits till the end of his term to do this, the Middle Eastern leaders know they have him over a barrel. Either they demand too much, hoping that the president will be so desperate for a deal, they'll accept the demands, or they decide to chuck the whole thing and wait for the next president to come into office. Bush and Rice had an excellent opportunity to do something in the summer of 2006, right after Hezbollah sparked the war with Israel. A few days after the war started, the Arab League issued a statement denouncing Hezbollah. That was remarkable, unprecedented. Rice should have got on a plane at once. But she and Bush waited a week. Why? Because "shuttle diplomacy" was what Clinton did, and that made it automatically suspect -- and because they wanted to give Israel a chance to bash Hezbollah, which anyone knowledgeable of warfare could have told him was a bad idea (you cannot defeat guerrillas from the air, and Israel was not about to launch a major ground invasion into Lebanon once again).

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Rockville, Md.: Could one be more dishonest with your premise? Can you make a case for sticking with the usual crowd of Middle East dictators forever? If not, then what should we do?

Fred Kaplan: I'm not saying we should "stick with the usual crowd of Middle East dictators forever." I'm just saying that, whatever goals an American leader might have in foreign policy, he or she has to start with the world as it is -- not with pie-in-the-sky notions that violate everything we know about power and human nature. If you want democracy to come to the Middle East, you can't just topple a dictator and assume that freedom will flow like lava from a volcano. This, incredibly, did seem to be Bush's premise. If you believe that freedom is God's gift to humanity (as he said many times), you might also believe that, once you topple the dictator, freedom -- mankind's default mode -- flows forth. Freedom and democracy are hothouse flowers that have to be carefully tended and that need the proper climate -- the proper institutions, for one thing.

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Bethesda, Md.: I accept your thesis. So where do we go from here? How do we reposition ourselves in the world? Or do other global realities (the economic rises of China and India, price of oil, fall of the dollar, etc.) lead us to inevitable decline?

Fred Kaplan: Good question -- and a very difficult one. Bush and his people came to office believing that, because the Soviet Union was gone, the United States was more powerful than ever, that they could exert their will ... well, at will. But in some ways, the end of the Cold War made us weaker; in the old days, many nations on our side of the divide would sacrifice their interests to ours because they saw the big, growling bear and knew the alternatives. Now, with no looming, common enemy, they can sometimes side with us and sometimes go their own way and pursue their own interests, with little attention to what Washington wants. This is all the more the case, given (as you note) the decline of the dollar, the rise of China, the skyrocketing oil prices and so forth. To my mind, America must stay involved in the world -- both for our own material benefits and because America is still the only country with global reach. But we have neither the army, the money, nor the will to behave like an imperial power. (Cheney and Bush want the imperial power without the imperial budget.) So we have to focus a great deal on forming alliances. Democratic candidates say this a lot, but even they don't acknowledge that this often means making compromises -- alliances will become much more a game of give-and-take. The alternative, though, is to get involved in more unilateral entanglements and eventually to decline as a result.

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Miami: Excuse me for disagreeing, but I would like you to explain how you think Secretary Rice is a failure. Isn't she bringing the Arab League to the Middle East Summit and formulating a possible Palestinian state plan? Haven't her efforts to bring North Korea back to the six-party talks been noticed? What about meeting with Turkey and Iraqi leaders in Istanbul to prevent a military invasion into Iraq to go after the PKK militants? Sounds like she is working hard for our nation. Or did I miss something?

Fred Kaplan: She's bringing the Arab League, but let's see what happens once they're there. We don't have a lot of leverage in that part of the world at the moment, and as long as Bush refuses to talk with Iran and Syria there's little that can be accomplished. As for Korea, funny story: Rice did strike an agreement with North Korea, but only by violating every principle in Bush's playbook (by the way, I think that's a good thing). The deal was struck in one-on-one meetings with North Korean diplomats in Berlin (something Bush said he never would do); it resulted in an agreement where we start giving Pyongyang benefits before Pyongyang totally disarms (another Bush no-no); and above all it put the principles of arms control and nonproliferation above the principle of regime change -- i.e. it assumes that Kim Jong-il will stay in power. The agreement looks very much like Clinton's Agreed Framework, which Bush had spent the previous five years excoriating -- except that North Korea now has an A-bomb and a lot of plutonium, which -- before this administration -- both Clinton and Bush's father had managed to keep locked up.

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Washington: Thanks for chatting. I know this is not directly related, but you mention in your piece that Secretary of State Powell did not travel much during the president's first term. Was there a reason for this? Did he feel a need to stay in the District to try and get an audience with the president while facing off against two people, Vice President Cheney and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, who were incredibly adept bureaucratic warriors and at the height of their influence over the president?

Fred Kaplan: Colin Powell has said several times that he didn't travel because he found it more useful to stay in Washington, manage the State Department, and advise the president. A colleague of his once joked to me that he didn't like to leave Washington because he feared that someone would change the lock on his door while he was gone. (It wasn't much of a joke.) Much of Powell's term was spent locked in internecine conflict with Cheney and/or Rumsfeld. He actually had a fair bit of influence on issues that were of little concern to the tag-team (e.g. China, India-Pakistan) but frequently was outmaneuvered on more high-profile matters.

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Washington: It was said before she entered her current position that "Condi doesn't do the Third World." Hasn't that turned out to be true? I'm not even sure she does her specialty (Russo-U.S. relations) that well, given the recent frost-off she and Gates had in Moscow with President Vlad "feel my pecs" Putin.

Fred Kaplan: Well, she's obviously had to do the third world, but you're right, she often has seemed at sea. The disastrous relations with Russia have been a bit of a surprise. Russia as you note was her specialty -- but her sub-specialty lay in arms control and national-security policy. As someone who studied quite a bit of that myself in college and at grad school, I can say that it's possible to go quite deep in that realm without really understanding power politics. Rice seems to have been outmaneuvered by the extremely wily Putin. In fairness, the sudden rise of Russia's economic power, as a result of high oil prices, came as a surprise to a lot of people. Putin exploited that power in the diplomatic realm before the decision-makers knew what hit them. This too is a terrible failure, but hardly Rice's alone.

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Anonymous: The headline question was "Can Condi come back?" My question is, come back from where? Has there been any situation within the past seven years where she showed even a base level of competence? Perhaps we would be better-served discussing how we as a country will need to rectify all that she and her cohorts have wrought. Thank you.

Fred Kaplan: Good question. There was a moment, I think, when she first became secretary of state at the start of Bush's second term, that it looked like she might accomplish something. Her first good move (and I wrote about this in my column at Slate at the time) was that she successfully blocked Cheney's attempt to impose John Bolton as her deputy secretary of state. This was a titanic bureaucratic struggle, and she won it. (Bolton's subsequent appointment as U.N. ambassador was her victory, though it might not have seemed so at the time -- he had to get some job, and at least this one took him out of Washington.) She also got Bush to endorse the European Union talks with Iran (though he didn't do much beyond that). She revived the Six-Party talks on Korea. All this happened in pretty short order; it looked like Rice, because of her access to the president, might be able to do some things that Powell had only tried to do. But the hopes fell hard very quickly. It turned out Cheney hardly had retired from the game of bureaucratic politics. It also turned out that Rice had shortsighted strategic vision and not much tactical skill either.

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Trenton, N.J.: What has Rice accomplished while in office? Why was she selected in the first place? Did Bush have any clue that Rice was capable of being the secretary of state? In my opinion she is doing an awful job. Bush and his administration are making one big mess of things, both overseas and at home. Rep. Kucinich has his aliens and Bush has God talking to him. You can't make this stuff up!

Fred Kaplan: You may remember, Rice was Bush's main adviser on foreign policy during the 2000 presidential campaign. She came to his attention through his father, who got to know her while she was a senior aide to Brent Scowcroft, Bush Sr.'s national security adviser. Scowcroft had met her at various arms-control seminars and was impressed with her. (She went to work for him on Soviet issues.) Rice got to be very good at boiling down complex issues into simple talking points. Bush liked her for that. (I'm not being snotty here; this is what he said he liked about her.) She did a terrible job as national security adviser, got battered around a lot. She expressed a desire to go back to Stanford once the first term was over; Bush didn't want to lose her, so made her an offer she couldn't refuse -- secretary of state.

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Virginia: Is Condi a great external manager or internal manager? Clinton's Albright was a great external manager but flunked inside because she wasn't a global strategist.

Fred Kaplan: You're right, there are basically two kinds of secretaries of state: One kind manages the building, sees himself (or herself) as the chief foreign service officer and advises the president on foreign policy; the other kind regards himself or herself as the president's agent at Foggy Bottom, the main tasks there being to impose policy on the building, accept help from those who want to come along and ignore the rest. My tone may suggest I prefer the former, but not really -- either type can be successful. James Baker is a good example of a successful secretary of state in the second mode. Condi Rice falls in the second mode, as well. I'm told that she relies on an inner circle of a half-dozen top aides and pretty much ignores the rest of the building. There is much discontent over there; the latest fracas over the announcement that she'll order FSOs to Iraq is more a last straw than something out of the blue. But Rice neither has been a great strategist nor an agile tactician on the global chessboard. She's been pretty much a washout.

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Detroit: I'm somewhat unknowing about Condi's original worldview -- can you give me a summary of it please?

Fred Kaplan: Her original worldview is well summarized in an article she wrote in the Campaign 2000 issue of Foreign Affairs magazine. Look it up, it's online. She writes that the important things are national interests (in the classic sense of that term), big powers (Russia and China) and paying attention to power balances. Ignore the pesky "rogue regimes," whose days are numbered; forget about changing the world. Yes, American values are universal, but many years will pass before they can be realized, and in the meantime you have to deal with big powers that don't necessarily share your values. In short, it's a classic realpolitik view of the world.

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Denver: When is someone at the Washington Post going to write "The Case for Condi"? What is wrong with seeing her as a female Secretary of State who is admired by the people of her country? Any chance that if she is successful in the coming months with world deals that Condi Rice might be selected as vice president for the GOP ticket?

Fred Kaplan: I never have understood the people who think Rice has any aspirations to higher office. Watch her in congressional testimony. She gets very nervous and defensive when anyone criticizes her. She's just not cut out for it. Even if she did have aspirations, I can't imagine too many people voting for her, given her deep association with this administration's astonishingly unpopular record.

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Washington: Sounds to me like one of the biggest diplomatic failures of this administration has been its obsession with Clinton -- viewing anything he did as bad simply because he did it. How likely is it that we see the same closed-minded thinking (i.e. we can't try this because it's what Bush would have done) if a Democrat wins the White House?

Fred Kaplan: Yes, you're right. I have been told by several ex-officials (including Republicans, by the way) that Bush was obsessed with Clinton, that the best way to kill an idea internally was to show that it was similar to one of Clinton's ideas. This is one reason nuclear negotiations with North Korea were taken off the table for nearly the whole first term -- Clinton had done that, and "we're not Clinton." As for the same thing happening with Democrats ("we don't do anything the Bushies did"), I don't see that happening as much. For one thing, the Bush policy isn't very coherent; for another thing, in some disasters -- for instance Iraq -- it's not entirely clear what we should do (no Democrat has yet come up with a comprehensive solution) and I think there's an honest attempt, among some Republican candidates as well, to take a forward-looking stance on this. But I do hope that whoever becomes president, he or she rejects some of Bush's tendencies not because they belonged to Bush but because they so clearly failed: the rejection of alliances, the indifference toward what the rest of the world thinks about us, the assumption that we can do whatever we want because we're America and America is good. I think the world needs American leadership, but America has to earn the mantel, not assume it.

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Colorado Springs, Colo.: Did Condi have a role in rejecting overtures from Saddam, where he offered to go into exile in return for guarantees of protection? I played a small role in one such overture in August 2002, and still am overwhelmed by my Congressman's (Joel Hefley) response that, if President Bush said the country needs to go to war, then it will be good for the U.S. to go to war.

Fred Kaplan: I don't know what her view was, but I do know that even some inside skeptics of going to war were equally skeptical of these overtures. As we now know, though, Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld were at this point more interested in forcing Saddam out. Rumsfeld in particular was keen to demonstrate his new "transformational" military, which could roll over armies with a small number of troops. (He didn't count on how many plain old boots on the ground would be needed for the aftermath.)

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"All presidents and secretaries of state are entitled to their dreams": As are pundits who refuse to recognize the enormous, unmitigated success story this war has been for the administration-connected war profiteers that have benefited from it. You are as gullible as they come, I'm afraid. Good luck in your next career.

Fred Kaplan: Get back to me in six months on that. Good luck on your ... well, do you have a current career?

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Vienna, Va.: Mr. Kaplan: In your response to the first poster, you alluded to a convergence in terms of fostering democracy and spreading American influence. Isn't this a fundamental problem of U.S. foreign policy, in that other countries and leaders may take a more jaundiced view of our initiatives? Particularly in the case of the current administration, I think that the "go it alone" attitude demonstrated in the toppling of Saddam Hussein (discounting the so-called "coalition of the willing") has poisoned the well as far as any meaningful progress by anyone associated with this current administration. Your thoughts? Thanks.

Fred Kaplan: I think you have a good point here. American policymakers, at least since WWII (and, in some ways, throughout the 20th century), have grappled with the tension between our interests and ideals. (One of Bush's and Rice's delusions, especially in the second term, was believing there was no such tension.) It is a very sad legacy of this bunch that "America" and "democracy" are now terms of cynical disrepute. When Condi Rice announced a $75 million program to help democratic activists in Iran, the activists all moaned; they knew that the program would discredit them, that the mullahs would see it as reason to denounce them as CIA agents and arrest them. I take no pleasure in saying this, but one result of the past six years is that the United States no longer can claim the banner of democratic standards or of international law. (We have broken those standards and laws too cavalierly.) If we want to go to war at some future date in the name of some moral principle, or if we merely want to conduct a foreign policy with a moral element, we need allies to come with us -- not just to share the costs and burdens, but also to supply the legitimacy.

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Philadelphia: Er, of what history does she claim to be a student? It seems that a lot of this administration's minor missteps -- to say nothing of its major problems -- could have been avoided if someone in the administration actually had paid attention to history. Or not even history, just the past 20 years or so. Nothing that is going on now really should be that much of a surprise for any administration of qualified people, and yet every time there's a new development anywhere, I get the sense that not only is it unexpected, but that there's also no plan to handle anything that isn't expected or doesn't fit into the narrow worldview of "you're either with us or against us."

Fred Kaplan: Unfortunately, you're right. She is, or was, a student of Russian history. But this often has hurt more than helped; for instance, especially in early 2005, she had a tendency to view nascent antiauthoritarian movements in the Middle East as sequels to similar (but, at root, very very different) reform movements in late 20th century Russia. One big failure of Bush and his top aides is the tendency to disregard views of genuine regional specialists -- except for those who confirm their own preconceptions.

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Detroit: What astonishes me is how everything Condi did and/or failed to do as national security advisor essentially created most of the problems she has to deal with as secretary of state. How could there be no policy in place to deal with Russia, North Korea or Iran? Obviously Iraq pushed everything to the side, but there were still plenty of opportunities for diplomacy, especially with regards to Iran, Lebanon, etc. It pains me to admit it, but this administration really has destroyed our foreign policy.

Fred Kaplan: They had a policy. It was just mistaken. They thought that the mere demonstration of American power would cause Kim Jong-il's regime to fold. They didn't have a Plan B -- for Iran, North Korea, Iraq, or much of anyplace -- because they couldn't imagine a Plan B might be necessary. (Really.)

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Silver Spring, Md.: A very amusing column, Mr. Kaplan. Just one question though: How gullible do you believe your readers are? If this war was about "spreading democracy," then my car runs on hopes and prayers. Nice try.

Fred Kaplan: I never said that's what the war was about. As I suggested to an earlier questioner, there were converging motives. However, as those other rationales vanished (WMD, etc.), the one about democratic dominos in the Middle East rose to the fore. (Heaven forbid they should just admit the policy was wrong and take steps to get out.)

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Fred Kaplan: This has been fun. Thanks very much.

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