The Condi Doctrine

When visitors arrive to see Condoleezza Rice on the seventh floor of the State Department, they are seated down the corridor from Rice’s office, in a drawing room decorated with patterned carpets, Georgian furniture and a grandfather clock. Above one sofa hangs a framed, four-page document, typewritten and signed with the initials “GM.” It is the original copy of the most famous speech ever made by a U.S. Secretary of State: George Marshall’s commencement address at Harvard in 1947, the speech that led to the passage of the European Recovery Act, later known as the Marshall Plan. By today’s standards, the speech is notable both for its brevity–you can get through most of it if Rice is running late–and its ambition. “Our policy is directed not against any country or doctrine,” Marshall said, “but against hunger, poverty, desperation and chaos.” Hanging outside the Secretary’s door, the document is meant to remind guests of a moment when America’s top diplomat managed to change the world.

Rice believes this is her moment. In pep talks to State Department colleagues, she compares the Administration’s drive to implant democracy in the Middle East to the policies devised by Marshall’s generation to combat communism in Europe after World War II. She delivers major speeches on university campuses, rather than in ministerial chancelleries, and seeks out audiences receptive to her declarations of moral purpose. “Our greatest achievements are yet to come,” she told French students in Paris. “We must provide greater prosperity to people all over the world,” she said in Tokyo. “We are supporting the democratic aspirations of all people,” she announced at the American University in Cairo. She is on her way to becoming the most traveled Secretary of State ever: she has visited 38 countries and logged 170,390 miles, according to her staff, which tallies such numbers like baseball stats. When she met TIME at the State Department for an interview, Rice didn’t hide her confidence about making history–in part because she knows she already has. “If somebody had looked at the United States in 1789–or for that matter 1864, or for that matter 1954,” she says, her smile widening, “and said the Secretary of State will be a black woman–and by the way, that will be after the last Secretary of State was a black man and the Secretary of State before that was a woman–people would have said, ‘No, really–are you kidding me?'”

Much about Rice’s six months on the job has been surprising. Her enthusiasm for travel has transformed her image from that of a remote presidential consigliere to a glamorous, globe-trotting operator with first-name-only cachet. (A Madrid hairdresser has started offering “the Condi flip.”) “She has a little bit of star power,” says Democratic Senator Joseph Biden, “which isn’t a bad thing to have.” But she can also play tough: in Sudan last month, Rice demanded an apology from the Khartoum government after members of her traveling party were manhandled by Sudanese security agents; she got one within an hour. At home, Rice has wrested control over the tone and direction of U.S. foreign policy away from war-cabinet hard-liners, curbing their unilateralist bluster. She persuaded President George W. Bush to support negotiations with North Korea and Iran over their nuclear programs, though both countries have balked at offers from the U.S. and its allies. In the process, she has cemented her status as the President’s most trusted lieutenant, a relationship that makes her the most influential Secretary of State in more than a decade. “In foreign policy, you’ve got everybody involved, and so unless you have that degree of confidence with the President, you can’t be effective and activist,” says Rice’s deputy, Robert Zoellick. “That is the critical prerequisite, whether you’re Henry Kissinger, whether you’re Jim Baker, whether you’re Condi Rice. She has that.”

But by assuming the mantle as the chief exponent of the Bush foreign policy, she has also inherited responsibility for cleaning up its biggest calamity: the war in Iraq, which last week claimed the lives of 29 U.S. service members, bringing the total number of American dead to 1,829. Among U.S. commanders, the consensus is that U.S. and Iraqi forces are not capable of extinguishing the insurgency on the battlefield–which Rice acknowledged to TIME. “If you think about how to defeat an insurgency, you defeat it not just militarily but politically,” she says. That has increased the burden on Rice to hammer out a political arrangement that can appeal to disaffected Sunnis and eventually allow the U.S. to beat a dignified retreat. “She’s up to her ears” on Iraq, says a senior White House official. Rice was with Bush in Crawford, Texas, when he learned of the attack that killed 14 Marines last Wednesday. Throughout the week, she engaged in around-the-clock phone sessions with the new U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, discussing how to get Iraq’s squabbling political factions to reach a compromise on a draft constitution by next Monday, the target date set last year by the U.S. When she met with TIME, Rice argued against focusing solely on the rising death toll. “It’s a lot easier to see the violence and suicide bombing than to see the rather quiet political progress that’s going on in parallel,” she says.

The trouble is, neither Rice nor anyone else in the Administration knows exactly where its policy is heading. The push by Rice and Khalilzad to get the Iraqis to meet next Monday’s deadline at all costs has meant that many of the major issues that still divide Iraqis have merely been kicked down the road. Equally unclear is how long the Administration plans to keep U.S. troops in Iraq. Even as Khalilzad suggested last week that the U.S. is discussing with the Iraqis the possibility of a partial withdrawal as early as next year, Bush said that “it makes no sense” to set any timetable for leaving. Rice told TIME she believes the insurgents are “losing steam” as a political force, even though their ability to kill and maim at will appears undiminished. When Rice points to “rather quiet political progress” while the country remains embroiled in chaos, even some of her backers cringe. Says a Republican elder statesman: “I don’t have any sense of where she thinks she’s going on Iraq.”

Rice’s admirers point to her intellect and perfectionist drive and conclude that if anyone can figure out what to do in Iraq, it’s Rice. “She’s done all the reading,” says a British official. “You’re sure she’s seen all the angles.” If the demands of the job are straining her, she doesn’t like to show it. For those who knew Rice before she joined the Administration, it’s striking how little Washington seems to have changed her. (I met her as an undergraduate at Stanford more than 10 years ago, when Rice was provost there.) In person, Rice has a knack for immediately putting others at ease, asking about their lives before the conversation inevitably turns to hers. She fields questions by whispering, “Yeah,” to signal she understands, then launches into answers so fluent that they almost sound rehearsed. It helps that she’s working before everyone else: when she’s in Washington, Rice rises at 4:45 a.m. and works out on the elliptical machine she keeps in her apartment at the Watergate. She eats a small breakfast and is at her desk by 6:30.

But she has never faced a challenge like this one. Although trained as a foreign policy realist who has argued the U.S. should act based on a cold calculus of national interest, rather than to advance ideological goals, Rice has more recently embraced Bush’s gauzy belief that pursuing the ambitious aim of bringing political reform to the Arab world represents the best possible salve against the threat of Islamic terrorism. “What are your choices?” she asks. “Your choices are: to somehow reinstitute control, which would be against our principles, or to have faith in the democratic enterprise as one actually that is quite capable of overcoming difference.” And yet while many Americans share Rice’s desire to spread democracy in the Middle East, far fewer believe it’s still worth the price the U.S. is paying to try to achieve it in Iraq. And so the biggest question facing the country’s top diplomat is not so much whether she can spread the Bush doctrine but whether she can save it.

Rice didn’t plan for this role. As she neared her 50th birthday last November, friends say, Rice had decided to leave Washington and return to Stanford. “She made it pretty clear to us that she was planning on coming home after four years,” says a former Stanford colleague and close friend. But shortly after Bush won re-election, he told Rice he would promote her to Secretary of State. “She went from default mode to return home to a much more active determination to stay,” says the friend. “She said, ‘I think there are some interesting things to be done. We’re moving into an interesting phase.'”

By many accounts, Rice’s tenure as National Security Adviser was an unhappy one, a period marked by the White House’s use of faulty intelligence to hype the threat posed by Iraq’s weapons program and the failure to plan for a postwar insurgency. In the run-up to the war, she was often overwhelmed by the combined duo of Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who ignored her attempts at control. In his recently published history of the National Security Council (NSC), David Rothkopf, a former Clinton Administration official, writes that Secretary of State Colin Powell and his deputy Richard Armitage believed that under Rice’s NSC, “the President was not being well prepared” for the foreign policy challenges that faced him after 9/11.

A friend describes Rice’s transition from the White House to the State Department as “liberating.” “She now has a department to manage. She has duties to perform,” says former Secretary of State George Shultz, one of her mentors. “That’s what she really enjoys and likes.” Rice’s forward-leaning approach leaves little space for formalities. She doesn’t e-mail because it is impersonal and indelible, communicating mainly through person-to-person calls. If she has a bone to pick with a U.S. or foreign official, she will order everyone out of the room and remonstrate in private. “She’s not afraid to pick up the phone and trust her own instincts,” says Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Nicholas Burns. Whereas Rice is not a born diplomat–her mannered speaking style can verge on monotony–she has soothed much of the public friction that developed between the U.S. and its allies during Bush’s first term. “From the first moment she took over,” says a European diplomat, “we’ve got the impression that this Administration is more willing to work alongside Europeans, rather than just leading whether Europeans like it or not.”

Her biggest achievement has been at home: Administration officials say Rice has seized the policymaking initiative from hawks close to Cheney and Rumsfeld. “She has recentered American foreign policy in the State Department,” says Burns. That shift has been most evident in the Administration’s policy toward North Korea. Although Rice is known to have expressed skepticism that Kim Jong Il is prepared to give up his nuclear arsenal in exchange for promises of aid and trade, she nonetheless secured White House approval to allow Christopher Hill, the U.S. envoy to the six-party negotiations with Pyongyang, to exchange views with the North Koreans face to face–authority that was never granted to Powell. With Hill at the six-party talks in Beijing last week, Rice lobbied other members of the Bush team not to undermine Hill’s efforts and phoned Chinese Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing in Beijing after North Korea balked at a proposal for future talks. Even if the talks collapse, the Administration’s show of support for diplomacy may give the U.S. greater leverage in persuading allies to take tougher measures against Pyongyang. “We’ve made more progress in the past 30 days than we have in four years,” Burns says.

For all her personal emollience, Rice’s most outstanding asset remains her relationship with Bush. In private meetings, says an Israeli official, “it takes only about five minutes to see how close Rice is to the President.” For months after Bush gave Rice her new job, he mocked her relentlessly, addressing her with exaggerated puffery as “MADAME SECRETARY!” whenever she entered the room. “He likes to rib her,” says a senior White House official–which in Bush’s world is a sign of his affection. Both rely heavily on the intimate bond forged during the first term. They see each other in weekly small-group meetings but frequently discuss policy issues in private, often over lunch or dinner. When Rice is on the road, Bush phones her at all hours. On the plane back from a surprise one-day visit to Iraq in May, she returned the favor, reaching Bush in the Oval Office to report on a meeting with Iraq’s Shi’ite leaders in which she got them to agree to include more Sunnis in the drafting of a new constitution. “She was charged up,” says a senior White House official.

But on Iraq, Rice has been slow to find her footing. Critics say that early in the year, Rice’s attention to Iraq’s political process lacked focus, causing the U.S. to squander momentum that it is just starting to recover. “After the election, we basically became hands off in terms of the political dynamic,” says Biden. “I don’t see much of her input on Iraqi policy.” Rice’s aides insist she is actively engaged, receiving a daily briefing on the constitutional process, the disbursement of reconstruction aid and the U.S. military strategy. The chronic fractiousness in Iraq appears to have brought out her inner micromanager. In one instance last month, she authorized a team of diplomats, including her deputy senior adviser on Iraq, Robert Deutsch, to tell Kurdish leaders that the U.S. would deny reconstruction assistance in the flash-point city of Kirkuk and the surrounding province unless the Kurds gave four key government posts in the city to other ethnic groups. The Kurds eventually agreed to give the other ethnic groups three posts. And Rice aides say Khalilzad’s arrival in Baghdad paid dividends last week when Iraqi parties agreed to finish drafting the outlines of a new constitution by Aug. 15. “There’s a reason we have an activist ambassador out there,” says a senior official.

But it’s not clear that anything Rice has done has brought the U.S. significantly closer to extricating itself from Iraq or preventing a slide into civil war. When pressed on what it will take to tamp down the insurgency, Rice offers vagaries about process rather than concrete policy initiatives–such as reconfiguring the electoral process to ensure greater Sunni representation in the government or trying to get Iraq’s Arab neighbors to negotiate a settlement with hard-line Sunni groups. “I do think the insurgency has a problem, which is that as the political process matures and the Iraqis every day accept the political process as their future, [the insurgents] become more and more isolated from the population and they become nothing but a destructive force,” Rice told TIME. But that’s a hope, not a strategy–and people who know Rice say they have strained to figure out whether she has come up with one. Capitol Hill Democrats and even some Republicans fault her for failing to enlist Iraq’s neighbors in the political reconstruction of the country. A former government official says that when he spoke to Rice after a recent visit to Iraq, she was unresponsive to his concerns about the lack of clarity in U.S. policy. “She just looks at you, and you don’t know if she’s really listening or if she’s getting ready to give her next speech.”

Even some of Rice’s supporters wonder whether her commitment to the Bush doctrine is impairing her judgment–not just about the scale of the U.S.’s problems in Iraq, but also about the wisdom of pinning so much hope on the idea that bringing democracy to societies that have never known it is the best strategy for making Americans safer. Rice has never been patient: as an aide to Brent Scowcroft in the first Bush Administration, she chafed at Scowcroft’s cautious steps to encourage democratization in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. But the East European model can’t easily be replicated in the Islamic world. From the Palestinian territories to Pakistan–and even in Iraq–holding free elections now would probably produce governments that are even less amenable to the U.S.’s overriding goal of stamping out Islamic radicalism. “The biggest problem I have with Condi and the Middle East,” says the Republican elder statesman, “is that she really has drunk the democratic-transformation Kool-Aid.”

Rice’s most appealing qualities are her optimism and belief in the power of American ideals, a faith she believes has been validated by her rise from segregated Alabama to the top Cabinet post in the U.S. government. Whether she ascends even further–some G.O.P. insiders are already touting her as the running mate for the Republican presidential nominee in 2008–will depend largely on whether she can find a way for the U.S. to declare victory in Iraq before support for the Bush doctrine, at home and abroad, runs out. Toward the end of her interview with TIME, she made clear that she’s prepared to take her chances. “I’ve lived in a place where difference was not tolerated and difference was a license to kill,” she says. “I lived in a place that was not living up to the democratic principles of the United States but where, because the institutions were what they were, people were able to petition from within those institutions, not without … People kept struggling toward those institutions and values and principles and, over time, we’ve gotten closer to the ideal.

“And so when I see Iraqis struggling with really hard issues or Afghans struggling with really hard issues, I’m probably less willing to say, ‘Oh, they can’t do it.’ I look at [our history], and I say what seemed impossible on one day now seems inevitable. Well, that’s the way great historical changes are. And it’s why I have enormous conviction that these people are going to make it.” –With reporting by Christopher Allbritton/Baghdad, Massimo Calabresi, James Carney and Elaine Shannon/Washington, James Graff/Paris, Scott Macleod/Cairo and Matt Rees/Jerusalem