Condoleezza Rice may surprise both friends and foes of the US, writes Conor O'Clery, North America Editor
Colin Powell is fond of telling the story of how, in the 1940s, US secretary of state George Marshall disagreed with his president, Harry Truman, over the decision to recognise Israel but, seeing himself as an adviser and not a policy-maker, did not offer to resign. When Colin Powell became US secretary of state there were high expectations that he would prevail against the hard-line neo-conservatives around the new president.
In the end, the charismatic former general disappointed his admirers who may have felt that he should have ignored Marshall's example and resigned over Iraq. The voice of reason in foreign affairs, he had little apparent influence on the single-minded, ideological and often tactless foreign policy that President Bush represented to the world.
There are lower expectations for Condoleezza Rice as she comes to the job. She is perceived as a loyalist with little experience in direct diplomacy, so she may surprise the US's friends and foes alike. She is certainly a tough, formidable official with impressive credentials. She is a former university provost, a trained classical pianist, a linguist and an accomplished ice-skater and tennis player. She is no pushover, as a blustering Boris Yeltsin once found when he created a scene at the White House more than a decade ago and was told off in fluent Russian by Rice, then a young official.
Seen in the wider context of the changes in the Bush administration, however, the American media has been expressing scepticism that Rice will be an independent voice, or will have the inclination to urge a different course as an audacious president centralises power in the White House and takes his basic foreign policy direction from Vice-President Dick Cheney.
She isn't known for pushing back in foreign policy discussions dominated by Cheney and Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld. What she is best known for now, after four years in office, is loyalty. As a polished consigliere, she protected the president when he was wrong and was protected in turn. She represented Bush's views and gave little clue of her own.
When the President advocated war on the basis that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, Rice argued his case by warning Americans of a "mushroom cloud" and declaring that aluminium tubes acquired by Saddam were "only really suited" for nuclear weapons. Her office knew that all this was disputed by intelligence professionals. Did she believe what she was saying, did she fail to screen out bad intelligence, or was she making the case to justify decisions already made?
Her job as coordinator of foreign policy planning has also raised questions about competence, even within the administration: Powell's deputy Richard Armitage, a brash diplomat who is also heading for the exit, described her coordinating efforts as "dysfunctional". She was also criticised by the 9/11 commission for her lack of attention to the terrorist threat before the attacks on the US.
All Bush's promotions since he was re-elected have rewarded loyalty. Rice's deputy as national security adviser, Stephen Hadley, was also heavily involved in the abysmal post-war planning. He continues to promote doubtful intelligence, arguing as recently as June that the administration was right to make the link between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein to justify war - a near-obsession of his mentor, Cheney.
Hadley was the only top official to accept publicly any of the blame for the pre-war hype. A chronically media-shy bureaucrat, he volunteered the information to reporters that he had offered to resign for putting into the president's State of the Nation address the discredited information about Saddam's uranium quest in Africa. By loyally taking the rap, he deflected criticism from his boss and the president.
World leaders dealing with Rice will at least know she has a direct line to the Oval Office. Her relationship with Bush - whose fond kiss on the cheek as he announced her nomination must be a historical first - is more symbiotic than any president and chief diplomat since Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger. What she says will be accepted as the president's view - which was not always the case with Powell. And when she makes a promise, it will be kept, something else Powell could not always guarantee. The downside is that loyalty to Bush is unlikely to prompt tough debate about the tough foreign policy decisions that will confront her in the next four years.
Her problems start with the fact that as secretary of state for an administration chasing what many consider to be the utopian dream of bringing democracy to troubled regions, Rice may have to face the prospect that the US is reaching the limits of its powers, over-extended, over-ambitious and tied down like Gulliver in Iraq. She has to deal with the reality that Bush's agenda for the world has alienated and irritated important allies, not just over Iraq but on a range of issues, from his brusque rejection of the Kyoto Treaty to the warm embrace of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
There are many pitfalls and opportunities for the second term. The death of Yasser Arafat removes the main reason for not dealing with Palestinians, and Washington has a better chance now to do something about its two-state rhetoric. But the onus for progress may remain with the Palestinians: Rice is a committed friend of Israel and has declared that the Palestinians will get their state only in circumstances in which the Palestinian leadership fights terror. However, she is reported to be impatient with Sharon, and if she presses for a more even-handed policy it might now actual have more effect.
Critical questions arise about other crises. Will Rice adopt Powell's argument for direct engagement with North Korea or accept the Pentagon's insistence on isolating the communist regime? On Iran, where Europeans have negotiated to curb Tehran's nuclear ambitions, will she pursue regime change through support for dissidents, which could make any European deal collapse. And what would she and Bush do if Israeli jets bombed Iran's nuclear installations?
Another challenge for Rice is finding the managerial skills to run a department of 29,000 employees, compared to some 250 in her old job, and to win their allegiance. Many are Powell loyalists who shared his deep misgivings about the influence of the neo-conservatives and frankly hoped to be working for a Democratic president. It will seem to them that Bush is simply extending his control over a truculent bureaucracy.
But the high personal regard for Rice among power brokers in Washington, and the suspicion that, privately, she might sympathise more with Powell than with Cheney could help ease her transition.
A first test will be Rice's appointment of a deputy. Undersecretary of State John Bolton, a hawkish neo-conservative, has been lobbying for the job. If he gets it, some top officials at the Department of State are likely to contemplate taking the same path as the CIA professionals who are quitting under their new director, former Republican senator Porter Goss, whom they accuse of emphasising loyalty to the president more than the questioning of inconvenient intelligence. If she appoints someone such as Arnold Kanter, a senior official in the first Bush presidency, it will be interpreted as a move towards a greater emphasis on multilateralism.
Another test will be how she organises her work. One of Powell's great failings was his fondness for conducting diplomacy by telephone in a universe where personal relationships still can carry the day. Rice loves travel.
The world is likely to see a lot more of her than they did of Colin Powell.