Rice's Toughest Mission

Here's what it's like to face Condoleezza Rice. When she walks into the room, she opens a slim leather notebook and pulls out a couple of 3-by-8 note cards imprinted with the words SECRETARY OF STATE and filled with half a dozen key words distilled from hours of speed readings and briefings. She will let her hosts do most of the talking while she tries to assess their bottom lines. In a negotiation, she sits archer-straight, lowers her voice and deploys a laser-like glare. "You need to do better than that," she will say. "You can't sit there and tell me that is the best you can do." If you continue to resist, she will dismiss her entourage, then go at it, mano a mano, until someone relents. Says a close Rice adviser who has witnessed her technique: "The phrase 'hammer it out' comes to mind."

Rice is not accustomed to failure. The prodigious accomplishments of her youth--she learned Beethoven at 5, finished college at 19 and earned tenure at Stanford at 26--have been followed by a glide to global prominence. Even as the Bush Administration's support has slid to historic depths, Rice's image has been relatively unsullied. She remains not just the most glamorous member of the Bush Cabinet but also its most popular, with job-approval ratings 20 points higher than her boss's. Among the top officials in the Administration, she is the only one who could reasonably expect to have a political future beyond 2008.

But none of that is of much use now. With the U.S. military tied down on two fronts and the rest of the world growing resistant to American power, the challenges for Rice are as daunting as they have been for any Secretary of State in the past three decades. After six years of tussling with others on Bush's national-security team, Rice has seen off her rivals and emerged as the principal spokesperson for Bush's foreign policy. Her reward has been to inherit responsibility for selling a failed policy in Iraq and salvaging a legacy for Bush at a time when few in the world are in the mood to help her. "Bush is severely weakened and has very little credibility or support at home or abroad," says Leslie Gelb, former president of the Council on Foreign Relations. "That is also true for his Secretary of State. So they are basically flailing around."

That's a grim assessment, since the threats to international order are bigger today than at any other time since the end of the cold war. The most immediate source of instability emanates from Iraq, where the country's civil war risks igniting a region-wide conflict. Across swaths of the greater Middle East--from Lebanon and the Palestinian territories to Afghanistan and Pakistan--armed militants are undermining the authority of U.S. allies. Anti-U.S. regimes in Iran and North Korea have accelerated their pursuit of atomic arsenals. In Africa, genocide, poverty and disease threaten the survival of millions. And in the shadows lurks the danger of al-Qaeda and its jihadist kin, who thrive on the very dislocation the U.S.'s war on terrorism was supposed to combat.