Foreign Policy Guru Tapped To Aid Rice, a Former Employee
By Robin Wright
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, December 23, 2003; Page A19
Robert D. Blackwill is the new "grand pooh-bah" of U.S. foreign policy.
His official title is coordinator for strategic planning, a new post that makes him the in-house visionary at the National Security Council. It means he has free rein to think, track global trends and predict the unnoticed or unintended consequences of U.S. foreign policy decisions anywhere in the world, according to officials.
In his spare time, Blackwill also handles three of the trickiest foreign policy challenges facing the Bush White House -- Iraq's political transformation, Afghanistan and Iran.
The job was designed to provide cohesion and long-range planning for a White House foreign policy team under stress from breaking wars and ongoing crises. Blackwill has quickly become the alter ego to national security adviser Condoleezza Rice.
It's a role reversal: Rice's last big job in government was working for Blackwill when he dealt with the Soviet empire's tumultuous unraveling in the first Bush administration. Now he is her adviser -- with some speculation that he might succeed her in a second Bush term.
Blackwill has been with the Bush team from the beginning. Under Rice, he was one of a coterie who had advised the president during his first campaign. The ambassadorship to India was his reward.
A Peace Corps volunteer in Malawi who went on to serve as a diplomat in Africa, the Middle East and Europe, Blackwill had never been to India. But with a lifelong focus on the world's major powers, he sought the assignment because of President Bush's designation of India as a "rising great power of the 21st century."
Although he returned this summer, part of Blackwill's heart is clearly still in India. A huge map of "Mother India" adorns the cream-colored walls of his fastidious office in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. The only item on his vast desktop -- besides precisely arranged wooden "in" and "out" boxes -- is a tiny figurine of Ganesh, the Hindu elephant-headed god of wisdom and success.
During his two-year stint, Blackwill oversaw one of the fastest transformations in relations between the United States and any country by peaceful means, he noted in a farewell address to the Conference of Indian Industry in New Delhi this summer. When he arrived in 2001, India was under U.S. economic sanctions because of its 1998 nuclear tests and was considered "a nuclear renegade whose policies threatened the entire nonproliferation regime," he recalled.
By the time he left, sanctions had been lifted, and cooperation flourished on issues ranging from counterterrorism to the HIV/AIDS crisis. And the U.S. and Indian militaries were engaged in almost monthly joint training exercises.
"The Bush administration perceives India as a strategic opportunity for the United States, not as an irritating recalcitrant," Blackwill said shortly before leaving India.
But India, in which he traveled by both rail and elephant, transformed him somewhat, too. In a farewell reflection in July, Blackwill said the world for him now falls into two groups -- those who have seen the Taj Mahal and those who haven't. An avid reader, he lauded the Indian novel in English. "Who is writing better fiction today than these folks?" he said.
Blackwill has long been noted for pulling quotes out of the air, from Humphrey Bogart's lines in "Casablanca" to Aristotle pithily defining analysis -- "illumination through disaggregation." In India, he added Krishna to the list -- "Be thou of even mind" -- as well as a taste for sugar in strong tea and Indian dancing.
In his farewell address, Blackwill fondly recalled "gyrating frenetically in a borrowed red turban with a professional local dance group on a lawn on a balmy evening in Chandigarth" -- and his disappointment that members of the group did not ask "the long-legged whirling dervish" to join them permanently.
Other parts of South Asia, however, were relieved to see him leave New Delhi.
He was dubbed "Mr. Black-will" by Pakistani analyst Ershad Mahmud of the Institute of Policy Studies, in an article welcoming his departure, for acting as "Delhi's front man rather than U.S. ambassador to India."
Blackwill "damaged" U.S.-Pakistani relations "in every possible way," Mahmud charged. "He even encouraged India to take [a] hostile stance against Pakistan."
Some State Department officials, frustrated when they were bypassed in policy formulation because of Blackwill's close ties to the White House, weren't sorry to see him go, either. He also sometimes overpowers those he works with, colleagues say.
"He's extremely bright. He has a very penetrating intellect that produces great ideas," said one official who worked with him and, like others, spoke on condition of anonymity. "He's also utterly charming and has more energy than anybody around him. He never sleeps. He's a double-A type.
"But he's also a prickly demanding personality who can become impatient with others who don't keep up with him," the official added. "He's hard on people because he's smart. He wants things now."
Blackwill's style may in part reflect his prairie roots, another strong influence in his life. He grew up in Kansas. His mother, who called him "Bobby Dean," hailed from South Dakota.
"From my boyhood on the Great Plains, I brought back east more than 30 years ago the values of Kansas and its people: honesty, candor, compassion, hard work, a dogged stamina in the face of challenge and adversity, a sense of humor, a recognition of one's own limitations, and a deep and abiding love of country," Blackwill said at his June 2001 Senate confirmation hearings to become ambassador to India.
He pledged to "take these prairie values" with him to India. He also brought them back. The other most noticeable art in his office is a poster of the lonely landscape around a Texaco gas station in rural America, a blowup from a 1953 Life magazine photograph by Andreas Feininger.
Blackwill almost did not return to Washington, however. From India, he was headed back this fall to Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, where he had taught for 14 years. Then he got the call from Rice asking him to come to Washington.
He fits in well with this administration. Although a colorful and highly public figure in the past, Blackwill is now among the least accessible officials. In his heart, he tells colleagues, he's a 19th-century man who believes in the necessity of secrecy.
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