A New Direction for U.S. Foreign Policy?

June 22, 2005, Washington Post

In a June 22, Washington Post op-ed entitled “Rice’s Useful Rhetoric” columnist David Ignatius comments on Secretary of state Condoleezza Rice’s speech in Cairo. Ignatius observes: “Speeches don't change the world, but they sometimes put down markers for policymakers and help ordinary folks understand what's going on.” According to Ignatius, the initial thrust of Rice’s speech was a democracy progress report on Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Syria, Lebanon and Jordan, in which she pressed these countries to reform their political systems and become the ones setting “the pace of change.” However, Ignatius notes, “it established guideposts by which to measure the policy of the United States”. He continued, “she enunciated a pro-democracy position so forcefully that if the Bush administration deviates from it, or undermines its credibility through belligerent, anti-democratic actions, it will be open to the charge of hypocrisy.” He goes on to say, “Rice was not advancing an expedient wartime ethic, of the sort we have heard too often from the Bush administration, but a universal moral one. America's mission, by her account, isn't a war against terrorism but a struggle for democracy. That may sound like a mere change in semantics, but it moves the United States from a situation in which every Muslim is a potential enemy to one in which every Muslim is a potential ally.”

The column’s identifies the key passage in the Rice address as: “"For 60 years, my country, the United States, pursued stability at the expense of democracy in this region here in the Middle East, and we achieved neither. Now we are taking a different course." For David Ignatius, this “…was the clearest enunciation yet of a policy that has been evolving since Sept. 11, 2001.” There are still doubts as to the true path that American Foreign policy will take but according to Ignatius, “…if the administration can be consistent in applying its ideals, and follow the markers Rice laid down, perhaps America can begin to find its way out of the dangerous thicket into which it has wandered since Sept. 11, 2001.”