It's always nice to have a traveling secretary
danieldrezner.com
As I've said before, Colin Powell's biggest failing as Secretary of State was that he didn't leave Washington, DC all that much. Which is kind of important for America's chief diplomat.
In Time, Elaine Shannon reports that Condi Rice seems to have grasped the importance of getting outside the Beltway:
According to a source in the State Department, Jim Wilkinson, a senior adviser to Condoleezza Rice, recently asked the department's historian for a list of countries that have never been visited by a U.S. Secretary of State. An unlikely Trivial Pursuit question, his inquiry signals that Rice's travels, which have already taken her to 11 countries in her first six weeks on the job, will be more extensive than most of her predecessors'. "The Secretary will travel when there's serious diplomatic work to be done," says Wilkinson. "There's no better diplomacy than personal contact."
After three trips to Europe and visits to Jerusalem, Ramallah and Mexico City, Rice is taking her frequent-flyer diplomacy on a six-nation mission to Asia this week. Even skeptics who wrote off her early forays as standard grip-and-grin fare are beginning to pay attention....
Rice's travel routine is grueling. Her 15-hour days typically start at 5 a.m., when she hits the elliptical machine in her hotel's fitness center. After her Asian tour (which will take her to Afghanistan, India, Pakistan, Japan, China and South Korea), she will attend a meeting next month in Santiago, Chile, on emerging democracies. Rice has visited eight NATO nations, and by summer, she or her deputy, Robert Zoellick, plan to travel to the remaining 17. By then, she may be ready to tackle Wilkinson's list. |
