GLOBAL COLUMN© BY TED CORDOVA

The time for Condi

The time for Diplomacy is now, has proudly stated Condolezza Rice to the severe committee from the US Senate while taking the constitutional exam for the high position of secretary of State.(foreign relations).

So now that she is officially the Secretary of State, she discovers, this is the time for Diplomacy.

And what was happening before and what were the many previous personalities that sat on the global desk almost during two centuries of historic span of the Nation developed as the first superpower of the planet?; What happened to the previous policymakers about relations with global powers facing global problems from the building in “foggy bottom”?

If something is historically foggy is Condi’s statement that it is only now when diplomacy begins for the first superpower of the World!

The United States, its true, has never had a great chancellor that filled its historical times like a Maetternich or a Molotov or a Gromyko of the Soviet power to say the least, or even a Harold Macmillan during the fading away of the British Empire.

The difference is that, in the U.S., a Republic with its Democratic Constitution, the decisions on foreign relations are made by the chief executive officer, the President, like a King only to be obeyed, once considered in the Congress, not rejected, though perhaps questioned. And so it has happened with several presidents that displayed not only policies, but even geopolitical doctrines for their times thus contributing to the shape of the world as long as the power of the U.S. was growing and consolidating.

President James Monroe set the limits to European colonialism in his times (19th Century), yet his Secretary of State, John Quincy Adams, later a President, was more famous for his advocacy of individual liberty. ”Liberty is inherent to human nature’, he said almost one hundred years before the abolition of slavery and the Civil War.

President Theodore Roosvelt, beginning the 20th Century, launched his big stick policy, yet his sec of State Henry Clay was nothing more than just a well dressed but intellectually obscure diplomat ready to run and sign all treaties stemming from the big stick policy that expanded the new empire. E.g. Guantanamo Bay in the island of Cuba, today better known for the infamous concentration camp for people of all the world allegedly suspected of terrorism. which epitomizes the mentality of prez Bush’s first administration.

In her already well known examination in Capitol Hill, Dr. Rice was both savvy and careful when dropping names or explaining world situations. For example, she mentioned several times Dean Acheson the aristocratic sec of State of president Harry Truman, when the Cold War was demanding new and more ingenious diplomacy. But she avoided references to Foster Dulles, secretary under Eisenhower, while his brother Allen was waging his own private war against everything he believed was Soviet Communism. Dr Rice has had an excellent academic education in world affairs, but she was mostly prepared for the Cold War. During her years in Stanford University, where she was in charge of international studies she had a very important experience. She was managing a budget of 1.5 billion with 4000 first rate academic teachers and 14,000 students. To my knowledge, no current foreign minister in the world has ever had that kind of training in foreign policy. She speaks Russian, but nothing of Pin Yin Chinese, or for elemental regional geopolitical reasons, some Spanish.

Since she was using a lingo of axis of evil, tyrannies and other adjectives of the Bush administration, for her presentation as a master in Diplomacy, it was not wise to show herself as close to such compadres as the Dulles bros.

Her sense of world affairs, where she seems to be inspired as when she plays Beethoven or Brahms in the piano, anticipate some surprises, the least you can expect from a new diplomacy from the superpower.

BIP