During his tenure as secretary of state, Colin Powell ranked as the most immediately likable visible member of the first-term Bush administration. After receiving wide bipartisan support at his confirmation, Powell worked both as the president’s spokesman and, for a while, as a steady, audible foil to the administration’s swelling hawkishness. As the term wore on and the war on terror demanded increasingly tight devotion to the administration’s ideology, his credentials remained impressive, but his reputation as a thoughtful, independent counterpoint waned.
It is in part for this reason that incoming Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice’s first weeks at the post seem, well, refreshing, if not cheery. Her first-term hawkishness has given way, at least so far, to a more amicable public demeanor: Her latest trip took her to Paris, where she told an audience of diplomats and students at Institute d’études politiques, the elite French politics school, that America and Europe ought to move beyond a “partnership of common threats” to one of “common opportunities, beyond the transatlantic community.”
While setting Rice’s first major keynote speech in Paris underscores that Franco-American (and, largely, Euro-American) relations have been defined since 2002 more by disagreements over presumptively common threats than partnerships, European diplomats seem largely pleased with Rice’s recent, more dovish overtures. French Foreign Minister Michel Barnier proffered at a joint press conference “a new phase, a new sheet” in Euro-American affairs. Using — oddly appropriately — family therapy language, his program for revitalizing the relationship called on both “to speak and listen more to each other, and respect each other’s convictions.”
Right-of-center former French President Valery Giscard d’Estaing offered measured praise, hailing her talk the “affirmation of a new line of American foreign policy,” but pointed out the difficulty of America’s ostensible goal: “The main aim of America is to see the spread of freedom, but that is not enough to organize the world.”
Whether Rice’s visit guarantees a new foreign policy more palatable to Old Europe has yet to be seen: After the (relative) unilateralism of the invasion of Iraq (and France’s and Germany’s disapproval), even paranoid cynicism might be due. Europe and the American public alike will get a better taste of what international (mis)adventures Bush’s second term will hold when the president visits Brussels this month.
If parliaments are as welcoming to future U.S. foreign policy efforts as diplomats have been to Rice’s overture, the present appears to be a remarkable opportunity to realign interests between the world’s two most important economic powers, and one that the Bush administration ought to embrace legitimately. (Much of Old Europe’s press remained more skeptical: In a BBC translation, the French daily Liberation asked whether the Bush administration has “really undergone a strategic conversion to the virtues of multilateralism and dialogue [or if Rice’s speech is] a mere tactical adjustment resulting from his difficulties in Iraq.”)
A steadier Euro-American foreign policy relationship might presage more danger in the Middle East: While the United States has busied itself in Iraq, the European Union has been the primary player in Iran’s nuclear energy debacle. At best, the combined international pressure might elbow the rogue state into dropping its nuclear ambitions outright. But such optimism, too, is best counterweighted by a healthy dose of cynicism.