Foreign policy
Susan Rice: Obama’s Right-Hand Woman
BY JONATHAN BRODER 12/16/14 AT 4:26 PM
Susan
Rice at the Wall Street Journal’s CEO Council meeting in Washington. Some
question whether she can steer U.S. foreign policy in the right direction. KEVIN
LAMARQUE/REUTERS
Who
runs American foreign policy? Over the past year, as President Barack Obama has
struggled with a string of overseas crises—from the Russian invasion of Crimea
to the rise of ISIS—the answer has been a mystery. But with the ouster of Chuck
Hagel—the third defense secretary in six years—all arrows now point to Susan
Rice. She’s the president’s national security adviser and one of his closest
allies. But some question whether she has the strategic chops for the job.
A
diminutive but commanding presence in the White House, Rice frequently clashed
with Hagel, especially in recent months as the former Republican senator from
Nebraska criticized Obama’s Syria policy and seemed in no rush to sign off on
transferring low-level detainees from the U.S. prison in Guantanamo Bay.
Closing Gitmo has been one of the president’s priorities, and Hagel’s
foot-dragging—he wanted to be sure that no prisoner would ever post a threat on
the outside—so angered Rice that she reportedly fired
off a blistering memo ordering him to step up the pace of the transfers and
report every two weeks on his progress.
If
there were any doubts about Rice’s status, Obama quickly dispelled them. Not
long after announcing that Hagel was stepping down, the president dropped by a
meeting of the National Security Council (NSC), which Rice directs, and said
that over the next two years he was counting on the group to shore up his
foreign policy plans. And with good reason. Rice is fiercely intelligent
and eminently qualified. A Stanford graduate and Rhodes scholar with a
doctorate in international relations, she worked as a top NSC and State
Department hand during the Clinton administration. Before becoming Obama’s
national security adviser in July 2013, Rice also served as his ambassador to
the United Nations, one of the country’s highest-profile diplomatic posts.
But
Rice is also a study in contrasts. Insiders say she regularly peppers her
remarks with four-letter words, raising questions about her temperament and
shocking some of her colleagues and foreign envoys. One much-publicized anecdote involved a March meeting
between Obama and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas at the White House. The
Palestinians rejected a forward-leaning U.S. proposal, setting the stage for
the latest collapse of the peace process. After the meeting broke, a witness
recalled that Rice scolded Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator: “You
fucking Palestinians can never see the fucking big picture,” she said.
Not
everyone is fazed by Rice’s crude language. Martin Indyk, the special U.S.
envoy for the Middle East who was at that meeting, didn’t blink. “I found it
refreshingly candid, and Erekat did too,” he told Newsweek. “But I can imagine others might find it
startling and potentially offensive.”
Others
have taken issue with her bluntness. After Rice dropped a “motherfucker” during
a 2013 huddle with German officials to win support for military action against
Syria, Christoph Heusgen, her German counterpart,reportedly said it
was the worst meeting of his career…
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