Rice looks back on Bush's foreign policy
On Jan. 20, Barack Obama will inherit a world very different from the one his predecessor found in January 2001. Over the past eight years, the Bush administration has faced great challenges and nurtured grand ambitions; it has tried hard to remake the world. Condoleezza Rice has been a central player in that effort since becoming the chief foreign policy adviser in 2000 to Bush, then a candidate, so we arranged to interview her at the State Department late last month. The interview turned into a wide-ranging discussion of where this government has taken the United States and what sort of world it will leave for the next president....
Legacy of the Bush agenda
Why Bush set the freedom agenda
[RICE] George W. Bush deserves credit for recognizing that the terms were now going to be set for the next big historical evolution. The president recognized that freedom was something that was not just desirable but essential for the United States; that it meant not just freedom from tyranny but also freedom from disease, from poverty. And that if you were going to have democratic leaders, they had to be able to deliver for their people. Thus the president supported the Millennium Challenge and the HIV/AIDS and malaria projects. (Bush announced the Millennium Challenge initiative in 2002. It emphasized good governance and accountability in the structuring of foreign aid and resulted in the formation of the Millennium Challenge Corp. in January 2004.)
And linking up the great compassion of the United States with our security interests. Making it about democracy, defense and development. We're at the beginning of that historical transformation, and yes, sometimes it's lonelier at the beginning than at the end.
It's really recognizing that this is about a single answer to what is the right form of government, and that's democracy. It takes different forms: There is Japanese democracy, and there's American democracy, and there are fragile democracies, and there are emerging democracies, and there are states that are trying to find some form of popular legitimacy....
Read entire article at International Herald Tribune
Legacy of the Bush agenda
Why Bush set the freedom agenda
[RICE] George W. Bush deserves credit for recognizing that the terms were now going to be set for the next big historical evolution. The president recognized that freedom was something that was not just desirable but essential for the United States; that it meant not just freedom from tyranny but also freedom from disease, from poverty. And that if you were going to have democratic leaders, they had to be able to deliver for their people. Thus the president supported the Millennium Challenge and the HIV/AIDS and malaria projects. (Bush announced the Millennium Challenge initiative in 2002. It emphasized good governance and accountability in the structuring of foreign aid and resulted in the formation of the Millennium Challenge Corp. in January 2004.)
And linking up the great compassion of the United States with our security interests. Making it about democracy, defense and development. We're at the beginning of that historical transformation, and yes, sometimes it's lonelier at the beginning than at the end.
It's really recognizing that this is about a single answer to what is the right form of government, and that's democracy. It takes different forms: There is Japanese democracy, and there's American democracy, and there are fragile democracies, and there are emerging democracies, and there are states that are trying to find some form of popular legitimacy....