[Mb-civic] Rice's Blind Spot - Sebastian Mallaby - Washington Post Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

Rice's Blind Spot

By Sebastian Mallaby
Monday, January 23, 2006; A15

Nobody doubts her star power. She speaks Russian and talks football, 
wears dominatrix boots and plays Dvorak, weaves her segregated Alabama 
childhood into speeches about geopolitics. But the strange thing about 
Condoleezza Rice is that, when it comes to the stuff that a 
professor-politician should be really good at, she can be oddly 
flat-footed. This was true when she emerged as George W. Bush's fitness 
buddy and foreign policy tutor seven years ago. It is still true now.

In January 2000, as the Bush campaign got underway, Rice published a 
manifesto in Foreign Affairs that laid out the classic "realist" 
position: American diplomacy should "focus on power relationships and 
great-power politics" rather than on other countries' internal affairs. 
"Some worry that this view of the world ignores the role of values, 
particularly human rights and the promotion of democracy," she 
acknowledged. But the priority for U.S. foreign policy was to deal with 
powerful governments, whose "fits of anger or acts of beneficence affect 
hundreds of millions of people."

Even six years ago, this was an outdated position. The Clinton 
administration was certainly preoccupied with powers such as Russia and 
China, but it was also tracking Islamic terrorists who had already 
attacked the World Trade Center. The importance of other non-state 
actors, from rebels to environmentalists to bond traders, had become a 
cliche of globalization commentary; AIDS had been recognized as a 
security threat. The era of great-power politics was widely thought to 
have ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Rice seemed like a 
Sovietologist who hadn't quite caught up.

Even more curiously, Rice was leaning against the tide in her own party. 
Ever since the 1970s, the heyday of the ultra-realist Henry Kissinger, 
his followers had been retreating. The realists favored accommodation 
with pro-American autocrats, but then Iran's shah fell, followed by 
dictators in the Philippines and South Korea -- and the realists found 
themselves on the wrong side of history. Likewise, the realists favored 
detente with the Soviets, but Reagan's denunciations of the evil empire 
proved more effective. Time and again, the idea that diplomacy consisted 
mainly of relations with powerful governments proved wrong. As a rising 
cadre of neoconservative Republicans argued, diplomacy was often about 
judging the currents within countries -- and backing democratic ones.

Fast-forward to 2006. Rice gave two speeches last week calling for 
"transformational diplomacy," meaning diplomacy that will transform 
undemocratic societies: The internal affairs of other countries turn out 
to be important after all. "The greatest threats now emerge more within 
states than between them," she said Wednesday. "The fundamental 
character of regimes now matters more than the international 
distribution of power. In this world it is impossible to draw neat, 
clear lines between our security interests, our development efforts and 
our democratic ideals."

Well, that's quite a turnaround. But it's not a completely satisfying 
one, because the debate has recently moved on. Rice has caught up with 
the 1990s consensus that powerful states may pose less of a problem than 
disintegrating weak ones and that the best hope for peace in the long 
term is a world of stable democracies. But she's only half-acknowledging 
the next question: Yes, weak and autocratic states are a problem, but 
can we do anything about them?

The best formulation of this new debate comes from Francis Fukuyama, who 
famously proclaimed the universality of the democratic urge in his 1989 
essay on history's end. Fukuyama certainly believes in spreading U.S. 
values, but he has emerged as a critic of the Iraq war because he 
believes its ambitions were unrealizable. The United States lacks the 
instruments to transform other societies, Fukuyama argues; to build 
nations you must first build institutions, and nobody knows how to do 
that. Conservatives, who have long preached the limits to what 
government can achieve with domestic social policies, should wake up to 
government's limits in foreign policy as well.

Rice shows some signs of seeing this. She is not content with the 
instruments of foreign policy as they exist, and her speeches last week 
were about fostering new ones -- a strengthened office for post-conflict 
stabilization and a reconfigured foreign aid program. But this only 
begins to confront Fukuyama's worry, which is that no amount of 
tinkering with the apparatus of government will make nation-building 
possible. Creating a functional Iraq or Afghanistan requires creating 
norms of work and trust and honesty, and such norms can't be conjured by 
outsiders, no matter how well organized they are.

The big question today in foreign policy is not whether you are a 
realist or an idealist. It's whether you are an optimist or a pessimist: 
whether you think that Iraq has gone badly merely because the Bush 
administration mishandled it, or whether you believe that no amount of 
skillful management could have achieved stability after three years. 
I've watched Rice handle squadrons of aggressive journalists, and 
there's no doubting her intellect. But her forays into grand theory are 
disappointing. Last week's call for "transformational diplomacy" merely 
slides past today's big question. It doesn't offer an answer.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/22/AR2006012200949.html
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