BLACKBURN HAS seen nothing like it. This weekend Condoleezza Rice, the US Secretary of State, will descend with Jack Straw, the local MP, on the northern town in one of the odder pieces of diplomatic tourism.

The visit is a gentlemanly complement to the trip Mr Straw made last November to Dr Rice’s home state of Alabama. The Secretary of State took the Foreign Secretary then on a tour of her childhood haunts. They watched a college football game and ate barbecue. They visited the church where four black girls, including one of her classmates, died in a bombing by white supremacists in 1963. Dr Rice spoke movingly about her experience as a black girl in the segregated South and how it had shaped her views.

There is, of course, something fatuously ersatz about this return visit. Blackburn is hardly to Mr Straw what Birmingham, Alabama, is to Dr Rice. Mr Straw was born in Buckhurst Hill in suburban Essex. He went to school in nearby Brentwood. It is not known if any iconic moments in the history of the struggle of middle-class white boys occurred in that vicinity.

And so Blackburn, Mr Straw’s adopted multicultural home for the last 25 years, gets to play the role of prop in the latest stage production of Condimania, the box office hit that’s sweeping the world.

This unusual piece of statecraft is of a piece with the radically new style of the US Secretary of State. With a series of eye-catching events Dr Rice has been busy humanising herself and her office. The Straw visit to Alabama was one; the most recent was an arresting appearance on US breakfast television in which she cheerily detailed her daily fitness regimen for the cameras.

There has been no Secretary of State like it. One can’t imagine Dean Acheson or John Foster Dulles traipsing English Cabinet ministers through the culinary and sporting delights of their native towns. The mind rebels at the thought of George Schultz or Madeleine Albright interrupting the nation’s breakfast clad in spandex leotard and designer sneakers.

So, what’s it all about, Condi?

As her aides put it, it is about presenting the human face of American foreign policy. Demonised as never before, America needs an ambassador with the charm, elegance and intelligence of Dr Rice, living proof as she is of the freedoms and opportunities modern America represents.

But she’ll never quite be able to dispel the notion that there is something else afoot — that this is all part of a careful unrolling of an eventual presidential campaign. She has repeatedly denied such ambitions, but the stories won’t go away.

Some have wondered whether she has the political experience or whether her race or gender might tell against her. But there’s a much more serious problem with the idea of a President Rice. If she is going to run one day, she is going to have to explain what it is she stands for, because by my count there have been four radically different Condoleezza Rices in the 20 years since she moved into the front ranks of foreign policy.

She started out as a protégée of Brent Scowcroft, the first President Bush’s national security adviser — the ultimate realist, in foreign policy parlance. Realists believe that the US has no choice but to work, even as allies, with brutal regimes that might, for all their faults, further US interests; to sup, in other words, with the devil. General Scowcroft and Dr Rice were arch realists. They not only supped with the devil back then; they seemed to want to help the devil cook the supper from the detritus of human history that he had created.

Under Dr Rice, the Soviet specialist in the White House, the US was uncomfortable with democratic change in the Soviet Union. When Boris Yeltsin, pushing a pro-democracy agenda, came to the White House, Dr Rice physically blocked the door to the Oval Office so her President would not have to meet him. She was behind the thinking that produced the infamous “Chicken Kiev” speech in 1991, in which President Bush warned Ukrainians against “suicidal nationalism”.

Phase Two Condi struck out in a sharply different direction. From the academic heights of Stanford University she opined on the failings of the Clinton Administration and etched out a Republican foreign policy for her mentor, George W. Bush. In a famous 2000 article in Foreign Affairs, she chided the Clinton team for its global overreach, called for a more narrowly focused foreign policy and mocked the pretensions of “nationbuilding”: “The President must remember that the military is a special instrument. It is lethal, and it is meant to be. It is not a civilian police force. It is not a political referee. And it is most certainly not designed to build a civilian society.”

Phase Three Condi was different again. As national security adviser to the second President Bush after 2001, she helped to implement the most radical change in US foreign policy in half a century — pre-emptive war and an aggressive pro-democracy, nationbuilding agenda. She had little use for multilateralism. She told colleagues soon after the invasion of Iraq that the US should “punish France, ignore Germany and forgive Russia”.

Now, in the last year and a half at the State Department, we have Phase Four Condi, the Light of the World, still favouring democratic reform in principle but insisting it be done through co-operation. She has bowed to European efforts to engage with Iran and has worked tirelessly though the UN. It is hard to think of a single way in which US foreign policy would have been any different if John Kerry rather than George Bush had won the 2004 presidential election.

Dr Rice is without doubt one of humanity’s most multitalented souls – diplomatist, academic, concert pianist, ice-skater, sports buff. But while versatility is a compelling virtue in human character, a hint of intellectual consistency on the biggest issues would be more appealing still.

gerard.baker@thetimes.co.uk

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