Think Again: Condoleezza Rice

She is considered the ultimate team player, a woman of intelligence and poise whose loyalty to President George W. Bush is unwavering. But a closer look reveals that Condi is less intellectual, politically savvier, and far more formidable than people realize.

BY MARCUS MABRY | APRIL 18, 2007

"Condi Is a Bush Loyalist"

For now. One of the secrets to the spectacular rise of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is that every boss she has ever worked for was convinced that she shared his worldview. And each, after she left his employ, was left scratching his head as he saw Rice make a 180-degree turn away from the core beliefs he thought they shared. It happened with former National Security Advisor (NSA) Brent Scowcroft, who thought Rice was a rock-ribbed realist only to see her become the most ardent acolyte of idealist President George W. Bush and his "Freedom Agenda." It even happened with former Stanford University President Gerhard Casper, for whom Rice served as provost and vice president -- Stanford's number two -- and with her college political science professor Alan Gilbert, a leftist who says of Rice, "[Her interest] wasn't really Great Power realism. If I had to put her in a category, I'd say she was closer to Marxist."

More surprising than Gilbert's assertion that Rice was a radical is the frequency with which you hear the same refrain: Across the political spectrum, many of Rice's former bosses now question whether she ever identified with them at all. Rice's central philosophy is power -- not realist or idealist or Marxist, but personal power. She does what she has to in order to achieve it in whatever situation she finds herself, and, throughout her career, some would argue, opportunistically conformed to her mentors' opinions in order to rise. "She did this with me and …. she's doing it with Bush now," says Gilbert. "I don't think she doesn't believe [what she espouses], but she believes what is in her interest and what advances her." It's a modus operandi that has worked for Rice for almost all of her nearly 30-year career in academia and government. Don't be surprised if some time after Bush leaves office, Rice makes another strategic about-face.

"Condi Is a Realist"

Yes and no. The conventional wisdom is that 9/11 changed everything for Rice. She first studied international affairs as an 18-year-old junior at the knee of Josef Korbel, the father of former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and founder of the Graduate School of International Studies at the University of Denver. Korbel taught Rice realism from the Hans Morgenthau school. Before Morgenthau's theories came to prominence in the 1940s, international relations was centered around the study of diplomatic history and international law. But Morgenthau argued that international politics was really a struggle for power. Countering the idealists who dominated U.S. foreign policy, he said that every state is out to pursue its interests, and the United States was no exception. Korbel was a realist, and Rice became one, too. As a result, she fit in happily with the foreign-policy team of President George Herbert Walker Bush and Scowcroft.

But realism -- with its hyper-secular, values-neutral concentration on power and interests -- always conflicted with the idealism of Rice's devout Christianity. For most of her career, it didn't matter; she was a comparative politics specialist focusing on the details of Soviet and Eastern European civil-military relations, not theory. And, not a social conservative, Rice kept her religious faith separate from her view of international politics.

Instead of altering Rice's beliefs, 9/11 pointed out the intellectual failings of Morgenthau. The father of realism concentrated on nation-states and interests to explain the world, but the jihadists who attacked the United States were not nation-states and had no interests as realists commonly understood them -- and no territory, population, or infrastructure that could be targeted to deter them or force them to sue for peace. As a result, Rice decided, like George W. Bush, that the internal dynamics of the Middle Eastern Arab nations had to be transformed.

However, Rice never became an idealist in the pure sense. Unlike the neoconservatives, Rice didn't believe that America's values, combined with its military might, meant that it had a duty to transform the world. Instead, she decided that for the United States to be safe, it had to change the Middle East. Rice advocated an idealist foreign policy to achieve realist ends.

 SUBJECTS: BUSH ADMINISTRATION
 

Marcus Mabry is chief of correspondents at Newsweek and author of Twice as Good: Condoleezza Rice and Her Path to Power (New York: Modern Times, 2007).