Condoleezza Rice Recants

Readers may recall Condi Rice's 2000 Foreign Affairs article in which she declared, among other things, that with respect to regimes like Iraq and North Korea,

These regimes are living on borrowed time, so there need be no sense of panic about them. Rather, the first line of defense should be a clear and classical statement of deterrence -- if they do acquire WMD, their weapons will be unusable because any attempt to use them will bring national obliteration.

My own favorite 2000-vintage Riceism is still "Carrying out civil administration and police functions is simply going to degrade the American capability to do the things America has to do. We don’t need to have the 82nd Airborne escorting kids to kindergarten."

But you get the idea that there is a fairly profound disconnect between the 2000 Condoleezza Rice and the 2008 Condoleezza Rice. And sure enough, the Secretary has an article in the current Foreign Affairs that serves as a broad denunciation of her earlier incarnation, and an attempt to cloak airy Wilsonianism in the guise of tough-minded realism. My friend Kara Hopkins over at The American Conservative takes the editorial equivalent of a belt-sander to the piece and is left with little more than a pile of sawdust for her efforts.

[I]n Rice’s convoluted calculus, stability, once the grail in international relations, is no longer a worthy end of itself: “Freedom and democracy are the only ideas that can, over time, lead to just and lasting stability.” To secure peace, we must first, in true revolutionary fashion, destabilize: “the process of democratization is likely to be messy and unsatisfactory.” How else to explain away the electoral successes of Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood? Temporary “untidiness.” She sees this upheaval as a transitional period in a “generational” project—which means she has time to get out of town.

Realism, also overdue for a revival, fares no better in the Rice rebranding scheme. Surely no resident of the reality-based community believes that “what will most determine whether the United States can succeed in the twenty-first century is our imagination.”

[...]

Were these the delusions of a streetcorner radical, they might be silly. But coming from the Secretary of State, they’re dangerously mad–-and appropriating sound labels doesn’t make them less so.

I liked the old Condoleezza Rice quite a bit better, too.