Rice's Reality-Based State Department

There's a lot to be said about this New York Times article which argues that Condoleezza Rice and Robert Zoellick will be trying to implement a more reality based foreign policy in the second term. The mere fact that some people close to Rice and Zoellick want to get this message out is good news of a sort. But I have concerns.

Most notably, we already spent four years under George W. Bush with a Secretary of State and a Deputy Secretary of State who advocated a more reality-based approach than the one we had, and it didn't do us much good. Instead, we got a much more Cheney/Rumsfeld sort of approach. And I don't think there's any real reason to believe that Cheney, Rumsfeld, and their more properly neoconservative underlings somehow bewitched the president into following their line. At times they wound up getting overruled. Bush is able to make up his own mind. He just usually chose to side with them. The changed dynamics of a Rice regime at Foggy Bottom might change that, but they very well may not.

My other major concern relates to the evidently heavy emphasis Rice is putting on better public diplomacy as a solution to our problems. Public diplomacy is important. And we haven't been doing it very well or investing nearly the appropriate level of resources. On the surface, then, the rise to power of someone who's aware of this is a good thing. But public diplomacy can also be a trap. For many people, it seems to be an excuse for not seeing that substantive action is needed to give public diplomacy a real chance. Many people, for example, believe that our continued presence in Iraq is motivated not by a desire to create an Iraqi democracy, but by a desire to install a pro-American regime that will host permanent US military bases. This perception isn't really driven by a failure on the part of the administration to explain itself better, nearly as much as it's driven by the fact that, near as anyone can tell, we're trying to establish permanent military bases in Iraq.

The entire Broader Middle East Reform agenda is shot through with similar problems. When we're for a free press, but against al-Jazeera, people conclude that we're not really for a free press. Again, not because we're not communicating our message, but because we're actually hostile to the essence of the idea of a free press -- that the powers that be and their agenda may be subject to criticism, including overly-harsh criticism, by the media. When we say that we can't have diplomatic relations with Iran because it's a dictatorship, and Israel can't have relations with the Palestinian Authority until it becomes democratic, but we have no problem dealing with the existing regimes in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, then democracy looks like an excuse rather than a reason for US policy taking the shape that it does. Again, we're not failing to communicate the sincerity of our desire for democracy. We're failing to be sincere. Or, at least, we're failing to take actions that would be consistent with a sincere belief. I'm sure that in some sense the president's subjective understanding of what he's doing is perfectly genuine, but communicating the contents of his heart isn't the issue. To effectively communicate the message that the United States is a force for good, we need to act like we are. To effectively communicate the message that we don't have a hidden agenda in Iraq, we need to not have hidden agendas. To effectively communicate the message that we're on the side of freedom, political reform, and justice, we need to actually be for these things, even when it creates short-term inconveniences.