A new Condi, but who cares?

In 2000, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice published an essay in Foreign Affairs, "Promoting the National Interest." Back then, Rice was a Stanford professor and presidential candidate George W. Bush's senior foreign policy advisor, and the Washington establishment hung on her every word.

The article was brash, bold and widely seen as a Bush campaign manifesto. In it, Rice made the case for a hard-nosed U.S. foreign policy, one that would keep our national interests front and center and not be led astray by mushy globalist or humanitarian instincts or a foolish yearning for ideological purity.

Rice insisted that "it is simply not possible to ignore and isolate other powerful states that do not share [American] values." Realpolitik had to trump ideology. And she worried about what she saw as the "thinly stretched military," left "close to a breaking point" after eight years of values-based Clinton-era military interventions.

Though she asserted that our "commanding technological lead" gave our military "a battlefield advantage over any competitor" (Rice failed to predict insurgents or suicide bombers), she warned against nation building. "The military is ... not a civilian police force, it is not a political referee. And it is most certainly not designed to build a civilian society. ... It is one thing to have a limited political goal and to fight decisively for it; it is quite another to apply military force incrementally, hoping to find a political solution somewhere along the way."

Mmm-hmm.

Eight and a half years later, Rice has a new essay in the July/August issue of Foreign Affairs. This time, she's "Rethinking the National Interest."

Good plan.

She begins with a politician's rhetorical trick: When possible, evade responsibility with the passive voice.

"What is the national interest?" she muses. In 2000, she now writes, "monumental changes were unfolding -- changes that were recognized at the time but whose implications were largely unclear." Then, after 9/11, "the United States was swept into a fundamentally different world. We were called to lead with a new urgency and with a new perspective."

Presumably, being "called to lead ... with a new perspective" explains all the administration's numerous foreign policy about-faces. In "Rethinking the National Interest," there's little trace of the steely-eyed Kissinger disciple who warned against humanitarian diversions. Instead, Rice now tells us that the U.S. must focus on promoting democracy, human rights and economic development, especially in the poorest countries.