By Bronwen Maddox
GRAND professions of warmth towards Britain, and a few conciliatory gestures towards continental Europe, but on the whole, it was a pretty tough statement that other countries should do more to support America in spreading democracy around the world.
Condoleezza Rice, speaking yesterday in London, condensed the Bush Administration’s message to the world’s governments into 15 forthright minutes: Join us in Iraq. Work with us to do something about Iran.
Help us to sort out the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, where we have now decided to be very involved. But while we will thank you for all that assistance, we are not about to sign up to treaties we don’t like. And if you set yourselves up as a rival to the US, it will be at your peril.
Rice, President Bush’s National Security Adviser, probably bridges the Atlantic better than any senior member of the Administration bar Colin Powell, the Secretary of State, and Richard Haass, Powell’s policy director, also in town yesterday. She was glad to be back after two years, “on the soil of one of America’s oldest and most trusted allies”, she said, an expression of comfort echoed, if you like, by the perfect match between the lemon yellow of her jacket and the walls of the International Institute of Strategic Studies.
As her comment implies, none of the Bush team has travelled much since September 11. They’ve been too busy at home. It’s a pity, as their absence has encouraged caricature. Rice, Donald Rumsfeld,the Defence Secretary, and Paul Wolfowitz, his deputy, are all extraordinarily eloquent, even by the standards of ideological politicians.
Some of Rice’s answers yesterday were more than five minutes long. Words stream out of this trio, even more than from Bill Clinton’s teams of policy wonks, and nothing in Clinton’s “Third Way” can compete for the strength of flavour.
But for all the antagonism they attract in parts of European politics, their message is not without nuance, or attempts at rapprochement. Rice gracefully complimented the German Chancellor, a gesture unthinkable in Washington in the past year, by concluding that “perhaps Gerhard Schröder said it best, ‘We only want one pole . . . in politics, the pole of freedom”.
Responding to those who have called the US naive for trying to export its own form of government to very different cultures, she said pointedly that the its own democracy fell short, at its start, of the values the country now holds.
“When the founding fathers said, ‘We the people’ they didn’t mean me”, she said, in a reminder that the founders had considered black Americans to be worth less than whites. But the US improved on its vision, she argued; it would be patronising to assume that other countries were “not ready” for democracy. These remarks count as gestures of conciliation to critics in Europe. Apart from that, the message was unyielding.
The core of her speech was an attack on proponents of a “multipolar world”. By that, she said, she was referring to the theory of rivalry between powers, spawned by the historic division of Europe between “liberal” powers and the autocratic regimes of Russia and the Austro-Hungarian empire.
There is no room for that now, she said. She never uttered the word “France”, but her target was clear: the passion of President Chirac for fashioning the European Union into a counterweight to the US.
She also made quite clear the place the Administration sees for international co-operation: putting pressure on regimes which might be hostile to the US. On Iran, she reiterated the Administration’s belief that Iran “might be using” its civil nuclear programme as cover for a weapons programme (something Iran has vehemently denied).
Is it “next on the list” of America’s targets? Rice stuck to the Administration’s firm line that “this is a problem for the international community”. All governments which wanted to stop proliferation should “demand answers” from Tehran about its weapons programme, should demand “full inspections” of its facilities, and should demand that “Iran satisfies the world in a very aggressive way” that it has no such ambitions.
But perhaps her most significant remarks were on Israel, where she arrives on Saturday. If you were in the Israeli government, you would not have felt entirely comfortable listening to her thoughts. “It is now time for Israel to take the opportunity before it”, she said. “This president would not have called for a two-state solution if he did not think it was in the interests of Israel.”
She explained something of the Bush team’s reluctance until this spring to get involved, saying that while “everybody in our Administration” admired what he did, “it didn’t work, and it caused a crisis of confidence”.
Asked whether Israel was preempting a solution by building a partition wall down the West Bank, incorporating more Palestinian land than the US “road map” would permit, she shrugged. “In the two-state solution the President envisages, there would be no need for any physical separation”, she said.
Idealistic, and uncompromising; even America’s allies will have to meet it on its terms. They may not like Rice’s message, but at least, after this rare trip, they may have a more precise notion of where they stand.
