ALREADY beset by a long and demoralising war in Iraq and a steep decline in its prestige around the world, the US confronted a new and frighteningly unpredictable challenge to its global power this week.
North Korea’s claim of a nuclear weapons test cast doubt on the credibility of a Bush Administration that once vowed to stop the “world’s worst dictators from acquiring the world’s worst weapons”. President Bush was assailed at home and abroad after the test for having attacked the wrong country — Iraq — in 2003 and allowing the North Koreans to develop the bomb. Meanwhile, that other founder member of the Axis of Evil, Iran, continues to defy US efforts to stop it joining the nuclear club.
The task of unravelling the various Gordian knots into which the Administration seems to have tied itself falls to Condoleezza Rice, the Secretary of State. Dr Rice returned this week from her first lengthy trip to the Middle East since the war in Lebanon in the summer — another area where US policy seems troublingly ineffective — and walked straight into the spinning propeller of the North Korea crisis.
But if she was feeling the heat from running a foreign policy that is evidently close to boiling point, she showed no signs of it when I sat down with her in her elegantly panelled offices on the seventh floor of the State Department.
The Secretary acknowledges that what unites so many of the challenges that now confront the US is a widespread alarm in the world at American intentions and Washington’s effect on global stability. What has concerned people, she believes, is a sense that the US has moved too fast and has destabilised the Middle East. It’s an understandable concern given what has happened in Iraq and elsewhere, but Dr Rice says that it is based on an unreasonable reading of recent Middle East history.
When people say life is worse in the Middle East today, she asks: “Was it better when Lebanon was occupied by Syrian forces? Was it better when Saddam Hussein ruled Iraq and invaded two other countries? Was it better in 1979 when Iranian students held Americans hostage in Teheran for 444 days? Better when Yassir Arafat led the second intifada in the Palestinian territories? Sometimes I sit in wonderment at what we are supposed to have destabilised.”
Yet it is clear that Dr Rice has spent most of her two years at the State Department trying to clean up some of the debris that was produced by the brusque diplomatic style of the first Bush term.
She has, more or less single-handedly, altered fundamentally the emphasis of Bush policy, spearheading efforts to produce multilateral, co-operative solutions to crises with America’s allies.
This approach was illustrated again with North Korea. She was at pains to point out that the US had no intention of attacking North Korea. Dr Rice and her team, in fact, have spent much of the past week in intense negotiations with other members of the United Nations Security Council to try to get “sanctions that matter”. Senior American officials expressed confidence privately that a UN agreement on measures would be achieved within days.
But the US is still under pressure this week from critics who say the refusal to negotiate directly with North Korea sets back any prospect of a lasting settlement. On Wednesday Kofi Annan, the UN Secretary General, called on President Bush to agree to direct bilateral discussions. In Dr Rice’s view, however, this is a red herring. She insists that the reason Kim Jong Il is urging bilateral discussions has nothing to do with any specific commitment he might be prepared to offer the US.
She said this week: “If he wants a bilateral deal it is because he doesn’t want to face the pressure of other states that have leverage. It’s not because he wants a bilateral deal with the United States. He doesn’t want to face the leverage of China or South Korea or others.”
In the Middle East Dr Rice senses from her trip last week a significant change in sentiment in many states in the region since the Israel-Hezbollah conflict. Senior European diplomats say that they have detected a shift in American policy as a result of the war — an awareness that the US must do more to promote a peace between Israel and the Palestinians.
But if anything, the message Dr Rice seemed to draw from her trip is that the Arab countries in the region have viewed with alarm the rise of Iran — abetted by its support for Hezbollah against Israel — which they see as a troubling potential shift in the strategic balance.
This may augur better for efforts to isolate Iran than it does for any new breakthrough on peace between Israel and the Palestinians, though Dr Rice insists that the US is still pursuing a peace settlement, in spite of the stance of Hamas in the territories.
One result of the recent diplomacy may be the engagement of more of Iraq’s neighbours in efforts to stabilise the country. But that is unlikely to be anywhere near enough. With Democrats looking increasingly likely to take control of Congress in next month’s mid-term elections, and with the British military now apparently in open revolt against the Government’s policies, as evidenced by the remarkable outburst by General Sir Richard Dannatt, Chief of the General Staff, all eyes are on a possible US-led exit plan.
James Baker, the former Secretary of State, has been heading a bipartisan commission charged with coming up with recommendations for a new path in (and presumably out of) Iraq. One foreign policy specialist involved in the Baker effort said this week that it was almost certain that it would end up recommending engagement with America’s enemies and adversaries — not only the insurgents in Iraq but also the Syrian and Iranian regimes. The Secretary of State is careful not to rule that out. Indeed, she points out that there have been various discussions between the US and Syria and between Iraqi leaders and insurgents.
And earlier this year Zalmay Khalilzad, the US Ambassador to Baghdad, was scheduled to hold discussions with representatives of the Iranian Government. The US has become increasingly concerned at the extent of Iranian interference in Iraqi politics and in Iraq’s security, and wanted some form of political dialogue. But shortly before the talks were due to take place in Baghdad the Iranians withdrew unexpectedly. Dr Rice has also said that the US and Iran could hold their first face-to-face talks in 27 years if Tehran is prepared to meet its obligations over its burgeoning nuclear programme.
Dr Rice is confident that transatlantic relations will withstand not only the present tensions but also whatever political transitions there may be on both sides of the Atlantic.
She declines diplomatically to comment on imminent changes at the top in Britain, though biographers might wish to note that, while she has been politically close to Tony Blair, she has at least one thing in common with Gordon Brown. They are both the children of ministers of religion.
One political change will not be happening, she says wearily, yet again: there will be no Condoleezza Rice presidential campaign in 2008. And she insists that the current strength of anti-US opinion needs to be placed in some historic perspective. “I remember the Reagan Administration. I can remember back in the 1980s when women were chaining themselves to the gates of Greenham Common. People thought Ronald Reagan was going to cause a nuclear war. Nobody thinks that today.”
