Condi on the Rise

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Bush may have no choice in the end but to offer Pyongyang an array of carrots and sticks like the ones he has dangled at Tehran. But in the meantime, you can tell a lot about Bush's regard for Rice by where he is placing her friends--and where he has dispatched her likely rivals. The transfer of former Undersecretary of State John Bolton to the U.N. was shrewdly sold as a win for hard-liners--and there was indeed something in it for them. But it's increasingly clear that Bolton's departure is at least as much of a win for Rice, and probably more so. Rice refused to appoint Bolton to the job he wanted--as her deputy--and those who know her say she will not tolerate the kind of free-lancing Bolton was famous for when he worked for Powell. One of the few times the normally cool Rice blew her stack during the first term was when a U.S. official at the U.N. made a medium-size decision without clearing it first with the White House. Bolton, a top official predicts, won't be able to make a move without Rice's explicit O.K.

Besides, Rice went out and got a great big gun of her own, bringing on board the only other person (besides Laura Bush) who is closer to Bush than she is: Karen Hughes, Bush's longtime spin doctor in chief. As Undersecretary for Public Diplomacy, Hughes is taking on the difficult task of selling the idea of the U.S. to the Muslim world. But the mere fact that Hughes and Rice will work just steps apart on the State Department's storied seventh floor will make that agency a newly formidable counterweight in policy debates. Meanwhile, the other burr in Powell's saddle, the Pentagon, is having at least as much trouble retaining its ideologues as retaining its infantry. The two top aides to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld--Wolfowitz and policy chief Douglas Feith, who created a special intelligence office to iron out what hard-liners believed were imperfections in the CIA's too evenhanded work--will be departing the policymaking arena. Though he was never as doctrinaire as many people believed, Rumsfeld swam comfortably in the hard-liners' slipstream for months. Now, without those guys on point, he moves much more carefully. His aides say he would like to remain in place at least through the fall.

So now that the bureaucratic pieces have fallen her way, what does Rice plan to do with them? She has led the push in the Administration for reform in the Middle East, canceling a trip to Egypt after Cairo jailed a leading political activist (the next day, Hosni Mubarak stunned the Egyptian public with a call for multiparty presidential elections). Rice executed a course correction on Lebanon, cooling U.S. denunciations of the militant group Hizballah, aware that the organization will almost certainly increase its clout in the May elections. And Rice quietly prevailed two weeks ago, when the U.S. backed European efforts to induce Iran to give up its nuclear weapons in exchange for economic and trade incentives. Until that time, the hard-liners in the Administration had regarded the European efforts with a mixture of amusement and disdain. For now, Washington has joined the "EU-3" effort, though it holds out the possibility of ending the partnership if that doesn't bear fruit.