TAMPA, Fla.
What do you do with Condoleezza Rice? If you’re organizing the nominating convention of a Republican presidential candidate in 2012, she presents you with a dilemma.
On the one hand the former secretary of state is an accomplished, proudly Republican black woman, a woman who has parlayed her public service into a prestigious post in academia and a lucrative supplementary career as a consultant and public speaker. She is an icon of opportunity (a Republican mantra) and diversity (a Republican shortcoming). She is one of the first two women admitted to the Augusta National golf club. She reportedly dazzled Romney at a recent high-roller fund-raiser in Utah.
On the other hand, she is a reminder of the Recent Republican President Who Shall Scarcely Be Mentioned at This Convention. She was the national security adviser when America blundered into Iraq, the alarmist who conjured the specter of Saddam’s “mushroom cloud.” She is also an out-of-Republican-fashion moderate on social issues like abortion. I would make a small bet that she voted for Obama in 2008.
Mixed-message-wise, that’s the least of it. On foreign policy, which is her claim to fame, she highlights the party’s longstanding and bitter division over how, and how aggressively, America should project itself into the world.
In the end, if you are that convention choreographer, you swallow any misgivings and put her on stage in prime time. An African-American woman who plays Brahms, loves football and talks patriotism? They are not plentiful in the G.O.P. Besides, nobody is paying much attention to foreign policy, especially on a night when Paul Ryan is being anointed as the vice presidential nominee.
But let’s pay a little attention. Rice is, after all, the only foreign-policy luminary offered such a spotlight. And her story is a cautionary tale about neophyte presidents in a menacing world.
There are, to simplify a bit, three foreign-policy factions in the Republican Party: the mainstream realists, the trigger-happy neocons, and – out in the cold at this point – the Ron Paul isolationists. Rice comes from the first group, the George Shultz/Brent Scowcroft/Henry Kissinger/James Baker school: tough pragmatists, favoring opportunistic diplomacy over sabre-rattling, big on free trade, less big on human rights, endorsing a muscular military but not over-eager to use it. In her last convention star turn, 12 years ago, Rice promised that nominee George W. Bush would “lead the forward march of freedom,” but added this memorable expression of restraint: “He recognizes that the men and women of America’s armed forces are not a global police force; they are not the world’s 911.”
Until suddenly they were. After the trauma of September 11, Rice loyally accompanied Bush on a sharp right turn – into the war on terror, Iraq, rendition, waterboarding, the whole “freedom agenda.” The hardcore hawks – John Bolton, Dick Cheney – never trusted her as a sincere member of their club. (She actually wanted to negotiate with North Korea!) They ran roughshod over her. She let them.
Wednesday night, Rice endorsed another would-be president unschooled in world affairs – conspicuously, embarrassingly so – and this one is already seemingly in thrall to the hard-liners.
The Romney team includes some veterans of the mainstream. Robert Zoellick (a Rice deputy at State, later head of the World Bank, a realist loathed by the neocons) chairs Romney’s foreign policy advisory group. But the happiest campers in Camp Romney are hawks. And Romney has been their megaphone. We don’t have space for a recap of the naïve bluster he has voiced already. Suffice it to say, based on his rhetoric, it’s a close call which would be President Romney’s first war: a bombing war with Iran, a trade war with China, or a new cold war with Russia. (Rice, trained as a Russia expert, must have cringed in March when Romney identified Russia as “our number one geopolitical foe.”)
Romney’s foreign policy, writ large, is a commitment to massively larger military spending (up from 3 percent to 4 percent of GNP) that is not justified by any strategic rationale he has yet revealed; a devotion to “freedom” and American “exceptionalism” without any clear idea how they apply to specific real-world troubles; a policy towards the ferment in the Islamic world that revolves around a bellicose identification with Israel; and a charge of withering American influence under Obama that most voters don’t believe.
Rice has the pedigree and the chastening experience to present a more sophisticated and more temperate Republican take on the world. And Wednesday night she did so.
For starters, she declined to spend any of what remains of her credibility assailing the incumbent president. I’m pretty sure she was the only speaker who did not even utter Obama’s name, and she offered only the most glancing and implicit criticism of his foreign policy. (“We cannot be reluctant to lead, and you cannot lead from behind.”) There was none of the Romney fantasy boilerplate about Obama’s apologetic cringing, no plea to throw more money at the military. Her generic tributes to “peace through strength,” freedom and free trade were squarely in the comfort zone of the party’s traditional mainstream.
For good measure she gave a heartfelt plea for a welcoming immigration policy and sounded more passionate about the crisis in education than any current crisis in foreign affairs.
Her assurance that American security and leadership “will be safe in Mitt Romney’s hands” was almost literally the least she could say.
The hawks may have Mitt Romney’s ear. But Wednesday night, for a while, Rice had the convention – winning a standing ovation from a crowd that may not have appreciated how far she was off message.
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