Nabil Mikhail* examines changes at the State Department in the light of Powell's resignation The transition at the State Department from Colin Powell to Condoleezza Rice promises both continuity and change in American foreign policy. Rice is a Bush loyalist and confidant. Bush hopes that her appointment as the United States' chief diplomat will minimise the friction in foreign policy debates and decisions that plagued his first term. However, the US secretary of state is not only a major figure in global diplomacy; he or she is also a central participant in the administration's own dynamics and operations. The circumstances of Powell's resignation and Rice's nomination are somewhat revealing. They imply that Bush wants to be his own secretary of state. Powell clearly wished that he could have stayed in office longer. He could have chosen to continue into the second Bush term and then resign after a few months; or he could have resigned close to Inauguration Day after making some overseas trips -- especially to the Middle East -- to shape the tone of American foreign policy for his successor. But instead, the language of his letter of resignation makes clear that he was under pressure to go as soon as possible: "Dear Mr President, as we have discussed in recent months, I believe now that the election is over the time has come for me to step down as Secretary of State and return to private life. I, therefore, resign as the 65th Secretary of State, effective at your pleasure." Most likely, Powell's resignation was a concerted move, not a personal decision. Yet the unanimity of voices Bush now hopes to bring to American foreign policy does not mean there will therefore be a consensus over the goals and purposes of American diplomacy. Powell had doubts over going to war with Iraq. Nevertheless, he did not want to overstate his apprehensions about Operation "Iraqi Freedom", fearing this could estrange him further from the president. He predicted that there would be far more violence and chaos in Iraq than anyone else close to Bush expected. Powell could see that Vice-President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, did not share his alarm. Still, he believed he could sway Bush towards a more multi- lateralist approach to regional issues in general and Iraq in particular. If he has left, it is because he concluded that it would cost him a tremendous effort to gain control of the political and intellectual agenda of American foreign policy and wrest it from the grip of the neo-conservatives. Condoleezza Rice, on the other hand, was responsible for setting up the formal operating procedures of America's security and foreign policies. The key was her physical proximity to President Bush. Both occupy offices in the West Wing of the White House. The national security adviser sensed a degree of tension between the State Department and the Pentagon, but she did not seek to influence the personal and institutional rivalry between these two bureaucracies. Instead, she became particularly attuned to addressing the anxieties, frustrations and ambitions of Powell, Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, George Tenet, Douglas Feith, and senior officials in the highest echelons of the national security apparatus of the United States government. Yet, she did not arbitrate policy disputes and preferred that all sides of an argument be aired. Any clash with these formidable egos could well have strained her relationship with Bush, and eventually triggered her own demise. To acknowledge the rise in tension among Bush's foreign policy advisers does not do much to clarify the paradox in America's foreign policy over the past four years. Initially, Bush respected Powell. The former chairman of the joint chiefs of staff is a celebrity, scoring astonishingly high in the popularity ratings. Throughout his tenure, Powell cultivated a cautious disposition towards war and peace, and America's global strategy. Following Operation "Desert Storm", and the interventions in Somalia and the former Yugoslavia, American public opinion seemed to be opting for a more isolationist attitude. The Cold War was over, ethnic and religious conflicts will always be with us, and America was not created to resolve every problem in the world. However, 11 September and the "War on Terror" prompted many Americans to change their minds, and support US attempts to punish "renegade" countries which threatened their new world order. Bush concluded that Powell's doctrine represented the perfect approach which would enable America to do a lot more than just "neutralise" rogue states. While the war on terror is rife with uncertainties, American power as expressed through money, military force and technological supremacy seemed sure to boost its sense of entitlement to global preeminence to a greater extent than that ventured by any previous US engagement in world politics. Condoleezza Rice fuelled the impulse towards an aggressive foreign policy implicit in Bush's persona. She appreciated power, and pre-emptive war and hardball diplomacy had a special appeal for her. As a realist foreign policy thinker, she calculated that America had the power to take many terrorist cells out of action, if not all, and thus roll back both state and non-state terrorism. For her, Powell's commitment to only deploying an overwhelming number of troops, and only when victory in battle was assured, would lead to America missing many opportunities to dominate, and thus allow more and more crises to erupt. As a Sovietologist, she understood the constraints that had been placed on American military power by a bipolar world. The new unipolar world, however, had a strongly optimistic cast, grounded in the sense of virtue having triumphed over evil. She saw herself and Bush as entrusted with a mission to save the American people. This means being alert to subtle points of leverage and opportunities for the projection of power which might otherwise not be noticed. Rice forged an uneasy alliance with the administration hawks. She became convinced, like them, that there was a link between Al-Qaeda and the regime of Saddam Hussein. But, she refrained from preaching at length about Democracy in the Middle East. Rice was hardly involved in the attempts to hatch scenarios for reviving the peace talks between Palestinians and Israelis. Nor did she have much input into American policy on Africa. Yet she did guarantee Bush that the Moscow-Berlin- Paris axis that opposed the Iraq war would risk the moral hazard of seeing a democratic and stable Iraq emerge in the near future. The Bush administration's foreign policy over the next four years is not going to be a seminar on international relations. Nor will it be the product of group-think by dedicated public servants who would not dare to disagree with the president. It is logical that Rice will be led to disagree with Bush, especially if America begins to look for an exit strategy from Iraq. Bush may come to disagree with Cheney and Rumsfeld, just as Rice may also begin to resent the heavy hand of the Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal. While Bush has a more personal stake in the outcome of the occupation of Iraq, each foreign policy principal wants to contribute to the stabilisation of the country. We may yet see a lot of arm-twisting among top policy advisers scrambling to oversee the post-war Iraq recovery, especially after the January elections. However, it will be hard to care much if the administration lacks a unifier, or mistakes multiply in Iraq or other parts of the world. Rice's future may well follow the same trail of bureaucratic paralysis that speeded Powell's departure before her. * The writer is a lecturer in political science and history at the University of Maryland, USA.
