Combative Consigliere

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The Combative ConsigliereWill Susan Rice bring out a more muscular side of Barack Obama?

BY JAMES TRAUB | JUNE 6, 2013

After the White House announced that Susan Rice would be replacing Tom Donilon as the president's national security advisor, I asked a foreign policy analyst

who is close to the White House if he thought the change in personnel portended a change in policy. "Sure," he said, sardonically. "Susan will bring her magic wand

and solve every problem in the world through intervention." He was mocking not Rice herself, but nave activists who imagine that a more idealistic national

security advisor will forge a more idealistic approach to the world.

More than four years in, Barack Obama has figured out what kind of foreign-policy president he wants to be -- less the visionary of the 2008 campaign than the

faithful steward of national interests who closes out the ruinous misadventures of the post-9/11 era and husbands, rather than recklessly spends, America's limited

resources. And it is reasonable to assume that this strategic recoupment will necessarily define Rice's tenure, whatever her personal convictions.

But I wonder if that's so. At first, after all, Secretary of State John Kerry looked a lot like his predecessor. Someone -- me, actually -- calledhim "Hillary Clinton in

pants." But that hasn't been true at all. Hillary was an icon, with an iconic sense of her own role as America's face to the world; Kerry is a private figure enamored of

back channels and shuttle diplomacy. Hillary was preoccupied with "cross-cutting" issues like the status of women; Kerry is a throwback who yearns to broker

deals among sovereign states. And so he has frontally attacked deadlocked situations in Syria, Pakistan, and Palestine which his predecessor largely left to others.

Good for him, I say.

Rice and Donilon are more obviously dissimilar. Donilon is a political insider with a deep regard for process, a man committed more to the neutral principle of

ensuring that all voices are heard than to any specific policy outcome. He is a cautious man who wins the plauditsof foreign-policy realists for helping Obama

steer clear of reckless entanglements, in Syria and elsewhere. Rice is a foreign-policy professional with deep convictions and a blithe self-assurance about her own

judgments. She is a morally driven figure who makes those same realists uncomfortable. Michele Flournoy, the former under secretary of defense, says that Rice

"may be more willing to take action in support of our values than many others would be who are more realpolitik."

The distinction is meaningful, but easily overdrawn. I once asked Rice if she considered herself idealistic, and she bridled. "`Idealistic' to me connotes believing in

things or wanting things that are not achievable," she said. She would accept "principled," but she was fine with "pragmatic." At the United Nations, where she has

been the U.S. ambassador, she is known for aggressively pushing American interests, not global goods. Rice also has an extremely well-developed instinct for where

the president wants to be on any given issue, and will not stray beyond his views. She will wave no magic wands of intervention. Yes, she pushed the president to

intervene in Libya; but she has not done so with Syria. She did not, intriguingly, join Hillary and former CIA director David Petraeus and others in urging the

president last year to arm the rebels.

So why does it matter that Susan Rice will be the next national security advisor rather than, say, the estimable Tony Blinken, the current deputy? Is it just a

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question of style -- of Rice's famously short fuse, her battle-tested skills as a turf warrior, her special relationship with the president as a fellow African-American

superstar? All those things matter, and have already been subjected to a great deal of scrutiny (as in here, for example). But one senior administration official I

spoke with said that the salient differences between Rice and Donilon are not in temperament but in outlook.

Again, think of the analogy with Kerry, whose travel schedule and pubic oratory give the impression that he is tugging the White House deeper into the Middle East

at the very moment it is trying to leave the region's savage conflicts behind. Kerry isn't doing this because he's a lone wolf, but because he knows the region so well

and is passionately committed to sorting out its problems. Susan Rice has a different, if overlapping, set of commitments. She spent much of the eight years

between Democratic administrations at the Brookings Institutionwritingabout the connection between weak and failing states and American national security --

and, yes, humanitarian intervention. The one issue she made her own as ambassador to the U.N. was nation-building and peacekeeping in Africa.

Both Rice and Kerry, in short, care deeply about the kind of intractable and generally unrewarding -- and morally urgent -- problems which have absorbed the

energies of American statesmen since the end of the Cold War. The "pivot" to Asia, for which Donilon is given a good deal of credit, represents a recognition that

the United States needs to prepare itself for both new opportunities and new threats in the region; but also a national exhaustion, even disgust, with the thankless

task of peace-making, state-building, democracy promotion, and above all military intervention of the last generation. Americans don't want to meddle with the

insides of countries any more.

But the Middle East is going to keep tugging at the American sleeve. What is Washington going to do if not just Syria, but also Lebanon and Iraq, slide deeper into

sectarian warfare? What if declining oil prices destabilize Saudi Arabia, or a third intifada breaks out in Palestine? The African success story is real; but so, at the

same time, is state failure in much of the continent. InDispensable Nation, Vali Nasr harshly criticizesObama for favoring drones and counterinsurgency over

diplomacy and development, and mocks the pivot to Asia as a kind of escapist fantasy. It's a one-sided narrative, but there's a lot of merit in it.

So I wonder if Rice will rebalance the rebalancing, and remind Obama that America can not walk away from the world's weak and failing places. Egypt and Libya

need the United States, no matter how vexing they are; and Washington needs to let Egypt's president, Mohammed Morsi, know that cracking down on Hamas will

not be enough to buy American goodwill if he continues cracking down on his domestic opposition as well.

Meanwhile, the rebels in Syria need the United States as well. Kerry has done Obama a favor by arranging with Moscow to bring the two sides together in Geneva,

and thus buy more time for U.S. inaction. But the conference is almost mathematically certain to fail -- if it is held at all -- and then Washington will have to choose

between obviously futile diplomatic encouragement and some form of military assistance, whether facilitated or provided directly. Is it such a foregone conclusion

that Obama will continue to stand by as the body count mounts towards 100,000? The wisdom of restraint may come to feel intolerably craven. And Rice -- and

Kerry -- may wind up urging him to arm the rebels. They might even work together!

The Barack Obama we have come to know over the last four years is a deeply cautious man with an acute awareness of how noble-sounding missions can miscarry

disastrously. And the economic failure he inherited has compelled him to argue for "nation-building at home" rather than abroad. But he is a complex man with an

ambitious sense of his nation's destiny, and his own. Tom Donilon reinforced one side of Obama. Perhaps Susan Rice will reinforce the other.

Save big when you subscribeto FP.Alex Wong/Getty Images

James Traub is a fellow of the Center on International Cooperation. "Terms of Engagement," his column

for ForeignPolicy.com, runs weekly. Follow him on Twitter:@JamesTraub1.

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Conversation on FP.com

TedFolke

Not sure if "combative" is the quality we want in our NSA consigliere. How about "wise", "seasoned", " reasonable" and other words that one usually associates

with good diplomats? Some people think Mr. Donilon has " sharp elbows"? They ain't seen nothing yet - ask French UN Ambassador Gerard Araud. Bottom

line - a very unfortunate choice. Do we want a female Iago pouring her poison in the President's ear?? To borrow a phrase from "All About Eve" , looks like

we'd better buckle up - its going to be a bumpy ride!

mewcomm

I took a Politics of National Security Course at the University of Texas in the mid 70's . The Professor piqued my interest as did WW Rostow who had sought

sanctuary in academe by then. (Despite not having a Phd yet his wife did) I read about McGeorge Bundy, and later Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brezhenski,

Brent Scowcroft and Condi Rice. Big Resumes. Big Thinkers. I read JW Fulbright's "The Arrogance of Power" and Yarmolinsky's "The Military Establishment"

. I read "Ramparts" and "Rolling Stone". I read Foreign Affairs at the Library when it was in that big heavy light gray paper.

I skipped over the minor National Security advisors ( Clark/Poindexter/Powell/Donilon). Yet never did I imagine the position being filled by some one like Susan

Rice. Is it me? Are all you important Foreign Policy thinkers unconcerned? Is Ms Rice not a possible disaster ? Go ahead tell me to relax. And why!

fmaxrobs

mewcomm I have no national security experience and took no related courses.

Your questions are v. to the point. Unfortunately, others may out-of-hand dismiss your UT school experience as too red-statish.

Susan Rice is a very polarizing person. Not the solution for already polarized times.

When she was born in DC, segregation was already rooted out, but its hangover lingered. At elitist National Cathedral School her experience

with other girls would have been all smiles, but at day's end some would go off together one way and others would go off together another

way..

Pres Obama, a v. bright guy became president with little experience in electoral politics, none in handling lawmakers or as a governmental

executive. Great affability, vision and intellect, but little walking-around smarts.

Fireworks ahead. Very sad, indeed.

TedFolke

Sorry, James, but I have seen both Hillary Clinton and Susan Rice in action on the ground in Africa, and my first-hand impressions are very different from

yours. To make a long story short, our foreign policy in Africa is a mess. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, for example, we have been the mainstays of

the world's largest peacekeeping mission ( now MONUSCO) for more than 10 years - yet the two countries actively undermining this mission- Rwanda and

Uganda (according to the UN Group of Experts' Report) have been our client states for more than a decade. It is no secret that Ms. Rice is very close to

Rwandan dictator Paul Kagame, and enjoys a lucrative relationship with Rwanda through the consulting firm Intelbridge, but is driving that part of the world

towards another regional war really in American interests????

fmaxrobs

Does a polarized government need another polarizer--and not just any polarizer, an extreme one? Sometimes one wonders whether brainy Obama checkedhis brains at the door upon becoming above-the-fray First Citizen.

Irv Lipshitz

This article was as useful as used toilet paper. It belongs in People Magazine, not here.

Ben Enki 2020

Now that boots are on the ground in Jordan as a warning to Assad, Putin, and the Ayatollah... Susan Rice is needed in the White House to help President

Obama predict what the Russians will do in response to US actions. Rice has jostled against the Russian representative in the UN and has a visceral feel for

the US/Russian conflict that John Kerry and Chuck Hagel do not.


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