Condoleeza Rice Sounds Like A Carter-Era Throwback

I’ve been really disappointed with the Bush administration over the past year or so. I had thought, with the twin invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the robust and vocal support of the downtrodden in Iran, and the huge push to establish ourselves as something much less than the Devil in Southeast Asia, that the President had finally driven a sake into the black heart of realpolitik.

Unfortunately, he forgot to clue in the State Department, which career bureaucrats have done everything in their power to blunt our strong message and have explicitly and openly bucked the administration to praise tyrants like Mad Mahmoud and his “democracy”. Condoleeza Rica hasn’t been much better than the feckless Colin Powell, who we already knew was going to push realpolitik as hard as he did when he preferred to leave the Iraqis to be slaughtered in 1991. Here’s Rice’s latest, on what we might do with Russia after their ravaging of Georgia:

“But we need to keep the focus on the culprit here, and the culprit here was that Russia overreached, used disproportionate force against a small neighbor, and is now paying the price for that because Russia’s reputation as a potential partner in international institutions — diplomatic, political, security, economic — is frankly in tatters,” Rice said. “It is Russia that miscalculated, it is Russia that misjudged, and Russia is now seeing that the European Union and the United States will not tolerate the kind of behavior that they engaged in as the Soviet Union before the end of the Cold War. The Cold War is over.”

That sounds great, but it’s really a big fluffy cloud of nothing. Russia isn’t paying any price at all. Russia did not exactly have a sterling reputation to begin with and, as of today, it’s still part of every institution it was before, in exactly the same position it was before.

Rice says that we won’t tolerate the Russians’ behavior but what have we done? We’ve tossed out some strong words and suggested that maybe we will do something about it. But there has been no action at all.

Condoleeza Rice sounds like a distant echo from the old Carter administration where the Soviet Union did whatever it pleased and a tinpot dictator in Iran held us hostage because we could never muster the courage to do more than talk big from a distance. Maybe the coming Obama administration could use her. I’m sure she’d fit in right nicely with his “talk first, talk last, talk forever” foreign policy.

Other Posts of Interest:

• Two Good Columnists on Russia
• A Return to Realpolitik?
• Ace vs Robert Scheer, Drooling Moron. Guess Who Wins?

Tags: Colin Powell, Condoleeza Rice, Foreign Policy, Georgia, Iran, Realpolitik, Russia

Category: Alliances and Allies, No More Tyrants