To: tekboy who wrote (50870 ) 10/10/2002 2:59:27 PM From: Win Smith Respond to Very interesting story, but what is "Algemeen Dagblad"? W.'s World nytimes.com In fact, Condoleezza Rice, Bush's principal foreign policy adviser during the campaign and soon to be his national security adviser, expressed this distinction with great clarity last year in an article in the journal Foreign Affairs. When foreign policy is centered on values, she explained, "the 'national interest' is replaced with 'humanitarian interests' or the interests of 'the international community.' The belief that the United States is exercising power legitimately only when it is doing so on behalf of someone or something else was deeply rooted in Wilsonian thought, and there are strong echoes of it in the Clinton administration. To be sure, there is nothing wrong with doing something that benefits all humanity, but that is, in a sense, a second-order effect." There is an unsettling coldbloodedness in that "second-order effect," though it doesn't read as if Rice is trying to shock. She simply does not believe in humanitarianism as a goal of foreign policy. If Powell will be the Bush administration's Mr. Outside, Condoleezza Rice, as national security adviser, will be Ms. Inside. A former official on the Security Council in the Bush administration, she met W. in 1995, and the two bonded when Rice talked baseball. Bush quickly found that he was comfortable asking her the most elementary questions. Rice is crisp, knowledgeable, self-assured and quite possibly bionic. She has spoken in the past of having no time for a wide range of otherwise normal human activities, including recreation, family, introspection, "life crises." While Powell will almost certainly be the key figure in the formulation of policy, Rice seems likely to wield a whip hand inside the National Security Council. It was Rice who insisted that she and Powell would speak to me only by conference call; and after we had our conversation, she e-mailed colleagues informing them that they need not -- meaning, ought not -- talk to me, though several did so.
