Can State Department rise again?

When Condoleezza Rice goes to the Senate next week for confirmation hearings as secretary of State, she will appear before a row of senators as something of an enigma: a national security adviser who oversaw a steady shift of authority over foreign policy toward the Pentagon and the vice-president's office, and is now taking over the agency she helped eclipse.

The big question in Washington is whether she will reestablish the preeminent role of the State Department in foreign affairs, helping the careerists on C Street exert more influence over everything from Iraq to Ukraine. Certainly the early signs suggest this is her goal. Even her taking the job at State offers some indication. President Bush's closest confidante on foreign policy since the 2000 election, she initially hoped for the Defense secretary's chair.

Yet the signs are also visible in some of her initial appointments. Most notable is her choice of US Trade Representative Robert Zoellick, a longtime associate and foreign policy pragmatist, to be her deputy. His

selection sends a signal of independence from neoconservative elements that have influenced both Dick Cheney's and Donald Rumsfeld's offices.

A tough trade negotiator who along with Ms. Rice was part of Gov. George Bush's original foreign-policy advisory team, Mr. Zoellick - already a cabinet-level official as US Trade Representative - would not have taken the deputy secretary of State job, sources say, if the agency were to continue to be overshadowed by the Pentagon or White House factions.

What the Zoellick choice suggests, they say, is that Rice intends to pursue a style that can not be pigeonholed as either multilateralist or unilateralist, traditional Republican or neoconservative, but assertive and reflective of the post-9/11 world.

Zoellick's appointment, which will not become official until after Rice is confirmed, "is no victory for the Scowcroft wing of the Republican Party, but neither is it a victory for the neoconservatives who were out to extend their hold on foreign policy," says Ivo Daalder, a foreign-policy specialist at the Brookings Institution here. "It signifies at the very least that [Rice] is determined to make the State Department a major player again in Bush foreign policy."

In other moves, Rice is taking with her Nicholas Burns, US ambassador to NATO, and Robert Joseph from the National Security Council. Like Zoellick, they are not ideologues.

Some of Rice's friends say her tenure as national security adviser revealed little about the Russia expert and former Stanford University provost, but that her new job is likely to bring out a mix of both her realist roots and a 21st-century world vision forged by the Sept. 11 attacks.

Rice is "an interesting combination of the traditional and the transformational," says Coit Blacker, director of the Stanford Institute for International Studies in Stanford, Calif., and a former colleague of Rice's. "In many ways, she's a traditional foreign-policy realist, but at the same time she's the first to say that the events of Sept. 11 have been transformational in nature."

On the "traditional" side, Mr. Blacker says Rice will attach great importance to reinvigorating important bilateral relations. Noting that Bush's first foreign trip of his second term will be to Europe to mend ties frayed as a result of the Iraq war, he adds, "We can see her handwriting all over it."

Rice has set as one of her top goals the repair of ties to traditional allies - and Bush's trip to Europe next month is evidence of that. (Bush, who will visit German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder after a stop in Brussels at NATO and European Union headquarters, could also receive French President Jacques Chirac in Washington before or after the trip).

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