The Other Shoe

It's looks like Condoleeza Rice will be the next Secretary of State:

For four years as national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice deliberately declined in public to resolve the Bush administration's sometimes tempestuous disputes over foreign policy, defining her role instead as ensuring that President Bush could hear the clashing views, then decide himself.

As secretary of state, the woman who has long been Mr. Bush's single closest foreign policy adviser and confidante would be charged with resolving the clashing views of the world itself - on behalf of a boss whose sentences she can finish, and who trusts her totally to carry out his wishes.

Ms. Rice has been a constant, private counselor to Mr. Bush through the tumult of a first term dominated by a devastating terrorist attack at home and two wars abroad, in which diplomacy often took second place to military action. On the world stage, her challenge now would be to bring renewed attention to daunting diplomatic problems from the Middle East to North Korea.

I wager she will also be charged with changing the part of State's culture that does not understand that it is the Department's job to carry out the foreign policy of the President, not to look for reasons and rationales for not doing so.

The Joe Wilsons of the world, in other words, will be frogmarched out of Foggy Bottom with all due haste.

Let's hope.

Dr. Rice's bio is quite impressive:

Born November 14, 1954 in Birmingham, Alabama, she earned her bachelor's degree in political science, cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, from the University of Denver in 1974; her master's from the University of Notre Damein 1975; and her Ph.D. from the Graduate School of International Studies at the University of Denver in 1981. She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has been awarded honorary doctorates from Morehouse College in 1991, the University of Alabama in 1994, the University of Notre Dame in 1995, the Mississippi College School of Law in 2003, the University of Louisville and Michigan State University in 2004.

In June 1999, she completed a six year tenure as Stanford University's Provost, during which she was the institution's chief budget and academic officer. As Provost she was responsible for a $1.5 billion annual budget and the academic program involving 1,400 faculty members and 14,000 students.

As professor of political science, Dr. Rice has been on the Stanford faculty since 1981 and has won two of the highest teaching honors -- the 1984 Walter J. Gores Award for Excellence in Teaching and the 1993 School of Humanities and Sciences Dean's Award for Distinguished Teaching.

At Stanford, she has been a member of the Center for International Security and Arms Control, a Senior Fellow of the Institute for International Studies, and a Fellow (by courtesy) of the Hoover Institution. Her books include Germany Unified and Europe Transformed (1995) with Philip Zelikow, The Gorbachev Era (1986) with Alexander Dallin, and Uncertain Allegiance: The Soviet Union and the Czechoslovak Army (1984). She also has written numerous articles on Soviet and East European foreign and defense policy, and has addressed audiences in settings ranging from the U.S. Ambassador's Residence in Moscow to the Commonwealth Club to the 1992 and 2000 Republican National Conventions.

From 1989 through March 1991, the period of German reunification and the final days of the Soviet Union, she served in the Bush Administration as Director, and then Senior Director, of Soviet and East European Affairs in the National Security Council, and a Special Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs. In 1986, while an international affairs fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations, she served as Special Assistant to the Director of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In 1997, she served on the Federal Advisory Committee on Gender -- Integrated Training in the Military.

I think Condi Rice will be a fine Secretary of State. A friend of mine, a Fulbright Scholar with a doctorate in political science, considers her to be highly over rated and generally undistinguished..

Here's hoping I'm right and he's wrong.

-posted by Charlie Eklund 

|  Add to del.icio.us |  digg this

• #1 Comment from purcellneil 
  11/18/04 4:45 PM | Permalink

  Hard to imagine how anyone could think Condi is up to this job.  On the basis of her performance leading the NSC, I would say she long ago earned a return ticket to academia.  
  
  Let's hope you're right, and the evidence of the past four years is wrong.
  
  Neil