Condi on the Rise

By MICHAEL DUFFY, Elaine Shannon

Sometimes the hardest thing about being Secretary of State is managing relations with 191 other countries across the globe. And sometimes it's just making nice with three or four of your colleagues in the Cabinet. Colin Powell once told his British counterpart, Jack Straw, that intramural squabbling in Washington kept him from traveling. Every time he stepped onto an airplane to fly overseas, Powell said, someone in Washington stuck a knife in his back.

A shiv in the ribs is one worry Condoleezza Rice doesn't have. As she flew across Asia last week in her latest overseas trip, holding private meetings with leaders of six nations and appearing almost everywhere on TV, it was clear that in two months in office, Rice has consolidated her power as the chief exponent of the Administration's foreign policy, a perch bolstered by her exceptionally tight relationship with George W. Bush. Rice and Bush are closer than any other President and Secretary of State since Bush 41 and James Baker did their memorable duet 16 years ago. And Rice and Bush may have an advantage over that team: unlike Baker, Rice doesn't have to worry about becoming bigger and more popular than her boss. She already is.

In Asia last week, she garnered big headlines and huge photos by saying and doing perfectly ordinary things. She schmoozed election workers in Kabul, did the normal round of interviews on local TV and flung herself into a bear hug with Hawaiian-born sumo superstar Konishiki in Tokyo. Reporters from Washington to New Delhi pressed her on whether she would run for President in 2008. Her reply: a not-quite-Shermanesque no. "She brings the spotlight with her wherever she goes," an aide says.

Around the globe, diplomats are busy comparing notes on what they see--and they aren't talking about her stiletto boots. To some, Condi's rise augurs a return to a more pragmatic U.S. diplomacy for an Administration exhausted by war, occupation and ideological infighting. That perception was given a boost last week by Bush's announcement that Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, the chief architect of the war in Iraq, would leave the Pentagon to take over as head of the World Bank--another sign that Rice and her realist deputies have gained the upper hand over their neoconservative rivals at the Defense Department. In policy, too, the Administration has shown a new willingness to work with allies, most recently by signing on to European efforts to negotiate an end to Iran's nuclear program. Says a French diplomat: "We have heard things and seen things that were unthinkable a month ago, and she's part of it."

For someone who, as National Security Adviser during Bush's first term, often seemed overwhelmed by rivals in the war Cabinet, Rice has displayed striking confidence in her early forays as a diplomat. Foreign officials note that she likes to play solo, holding meetings without a phalanx of regional experts. Others report that she is unexpectedly generous with her time, even to countries that have been sharply critical of the U.S. At the Sharm el-Sheikh summit in February between Arab and Israeli leaders, Rice met with all the participants individually but steered clear of the summit to avoid the appearance of U.S. overreach. And an Israeli official notes that in private negotiating sessions, Rice has a clever way of pushing hard on an issue, even if only to elicit a vague agreement. But then she immediately doubles down. "She'll restate it in a firmer way," says this official, "and then pocket it as a commitment." Says an Arab diplomat: "This one is nimble, very nimble."

But Rice's best asset is her direct line to the Oval Office. "You get the feeling as you speak to her and listen to her," said an official who met with her in Europe last month, "that you are actually listening to the President's voice. You don't have to make a calculation about whether this is the view of all the government in Washington--or just part of it."

Rice needed all those moves and more last week, as she shuttled across Asia on her first swing through that region. What she brought back home was not immediately tangible. Unable to win from India or Pakistan an agreement to halt participation in a natural-gas pipeline from Iran, a country that the U.S. would like to isolate, she repeatedly emphasized that Washington backs recent efforts by both nations to mend their 58-year bitter dispute over the divided region of Kashmir. After stops in Afghanistan and Tokyo, where she called for greater democracy across Asia, Rice moved on to Seoul before flying to Beijing, where the real work of the trip was waiting.

China put out a small welcome mat before she arrived, releasing its most prominent political prisoner, Muslim business executive Rebiya Kadeer, after five years in jail--a move designed to remove the issue of human rights from the bilateral agenda. But Rice's overriding goal was to find a way to restart the six-way talks among North Korea, the U.S., China, Japan, Russia and South Korea, stalled since Pyongyang confirmed in early February that it possessed nuclear weapons. Bush and Rice have long believed that the best way to disarm Kim Jong Il is to persuade China, which has the greatest stake in the region, to muscle the North Koreans into multilateral talks. Lately, the Chinese have been cool to cutting North Korea's aid to get them back to the table. China's Foreign Minister has even hinted that the U.S. should engage the North Koreans directly, something Bush has ruled out. And so Rice's goal was to put the Chinese back on track. There's no guarantee that the talks can be restarted, and even if they are, it's just as uncertain how the U.S. and its allies can force the North Koreans to give up their hard-won arsenal.

Bush may have no choice in the end but to offer Pyongyang an array of carrots and sticks like the ones he has dangled at Tehran. But in the meantime, you can tell a lot about Bush's regard for Rice by where he is placing her friends--and where he has dispatched her likely rivals. The transfer of former Undersecretary of State John Bolton to the U.N. was shrewdly sold as a win for hard-liners--and there was indeed something in it for them. But it's increasingly clear that Bolton's departure is at least as much of a win for Rice, and probably more so. Rice refused to appoint Bolton to the job he wanted--as her deputy--and those who know her say she will not tolerate the kind of free-lancing Bolton was famous for when he worked for Powell. One of the few times the normally cool Rice blew her stack during the first term was when a U.S. official at the U.N. made a medium-size decision without clearing it first with the White House. Bolton, a top official predicts, won't be able to make a move without Rice's explicit O.K.

Besides, Rice went out and got a great big gun of her own, bringing on board the only other person (besides Laura Bush) who is closer to Bush than she is: Karen Hughes, Bush's longtime spin doctor in chief. As Undersecretary for Public Diplomacy, Hughes is taking on the difficult task of selling the idea of the U.S. to the Muslim world. But the mere fact that Hughes and Rice will work just steps apart on the State Department's storied seventh floor will make that agency a newly formidable counterweight in policy debates. Meanwhile, the other burr in Powell's saddle, the Pentagon, is having at least as much trouble retaining its ideologues as retaining its infantry. The two top aides to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld--Wolfowitz and policy chief Douglas Feith, who created a special intelligence office to iron out what hard-liners believed were imperfections in the CIA's too evenhanded work--will be departing the policymaking arena. Though he was never as doctrinaire as many people believed, Rumsfeld swam comfortably in the hard-liners' slipstream for months. Now, without those guys on point, he moves much more carefully. His aides say he would like to remain in place at least through the fall.

So now that the bureaucratic pieces have fallen her way, what does Rice plan to do with them? She has led the push in the Administration for reform in the Middle East, canceling a trip to Egypt after Cairo jailed a leading political activist (the next day, Hosni Mubarak stunned the Egyptian public with a call for multiparty presidential elections). Rice executed a course correction on Lebanon, cooling U.S. denunciations of the militant group Hizballah, aware that the organization will almost certainly increase its clout in the May elections. And Rice quietly prevailed two weeks ago, when the U.S. backed European efforts to induce Iran to give up its nuclear weapons in exchange for economic and trade incentives. Until that time, the hard-liners in the Administration had regarded the European efforts with a mixture of amusement and disdain. For now, Washington has joined the "EU-3" effort, though it holds out the possibility of ending the partnership if that doesn't bear fruit.

Rice will head to Lithuania in late April, and plans swings through Latin America and Africa before the summer ends. She is still ascending her learning curve. On the road last week, she was at times a little vague on the facts, slightly ill at ease with some subjects. She continues to resort to her talking points--a reporter on her plane likened her to a metronome. Needled at every stop in India and Pakistan about which country would first be allowed to buy F-16 fighters from the U.S., Rice tried to dodge. When all else failed, she dived for cover in a self-deprecatory joke that made reference to the two countries' shared love of cricket--a game she didn't understand but promised she would try to learn. The joke got a little tired after the fourth outing.

But you can bet Rice will be a cricket expert the next time she hits the subcontinent. Are the disagreements among Bush foreign policymakers gone? Of course not. But for now, the nonstop dissonance of the first term has subsided, replaced by something new: a single voice who speaks confidently for the boss. --With reporting by Bruce Crumley/Paris, Matthew Forney/Beijing, Sayed Talat Hussain/Islamabad, Jeff Israely/Rome, Donald Macintyre/Seoul, Scott MacLeod/Cairo, J.F.O. McAllister/London, Alex Perry/New Delhi, Matt Rees/Jerusalem, and Paul Quinn-Judge and Yuri Zarakhovich/Moscow

With reporting by Bruce Crumley/Paris, Matthew Forney/Beijing, Sayed Talat Hussain/Islamabad, Jeff Israely/Rome, Donald Macintyre/Seoul, Scott MacLeod/Cairo, J.F.O. McAllister/London, Alex Perry/New Delhi, Matt Rees/Jerusalem, Paul Quinn-Judge, Yuri Zarakhovich/Moscow