Word: rice
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...certainly good for the Democrats that elections aren't decided on foreign policy matters - and not only because the GOP has the formidable Condie Rice in its corner. Bill Clinton in '92 even made a selling point of the fact that his experience was in domestic, rather than foreign, policy. And after eight years of a skittish, improvisational and haphazard U.S. foreign policy unkindly called "ad hoc-racy" by its critics, Al Gore should hope the same holds true today. Then again, some of the GOP's own record and positions don't exactly reinforce its criticism of the Clinton...
...convention speech, Rice took a couple of sideswipes. She warned that the U.S. can't afford to become the world's 911 number - a reference to what GOP heavyweights see as the administration's inconsistent and misguided policy of "humanitarian intervention." Valid criticism, perhaps, although it's also worth remembering that the defining humanitarian debacle of the '90s - the death of 18 U.S. soldiers during a botched raid on a Somali warlord in Mogadishu -occurred in the course of a mission bequeathed by the Bush administration...
...Rice also emphasized the need to work with America's allies, reflecting a real concern that Clinton-era unilateralism has alienated Washington's European NATO partners and left the Gulf War alliance in tatters. Again, a solid diagnosis of the problem, although the party that put Jesse Helms in charge of foreign policy on Capitol Hill may be ill-placed to excoriate unilateralism...
...Rice's primary concern, expressed in a Foreign Affairs essay earlier this year, is that there's no overarching intellectual framework guiding today's U.S. foreign policy. Having taken the reins just as the collapse of the Soviet Union nullified the organizing principle of postwar U.S. foreign policy, the Clinton administration failed to define the U.S. national interest and formulate the resultant strategies and priorities. Instead, Republicans charge, it's been a mishmash of Band-Aid solutions and crisis management that has often simply deferred problems while fundamental concerns have been neglected...
...Russia, where Gore is particularly vulnerable since he personally presided over much of the relationship, Rice and others harshly criticize the administration's record. "Support for democracy and economic reform became support for Yeltsin," writes Rice. "The United States certified that reform was taking place where it was not, continuing to disburse money from the International Monetary Fund in the absence of any evidence of serious change. The curious privatization methods were hailed as economic liberalization; the looting of the country's assets by powerful people either went unnoticed or was ignored. The realities in Russia simply did not accord...