The Condi watchers among us will find informative Rice’s Failure: The Stability-Democracy Conflict by Fred Kaplan.
[..] In the mid-1970s, as a graduate student at the University of Denver, she’d been the star pupil of Josef Korbel (the father of former secretary of state Madeleine Albright). A Czech emigre, Korbel had witnessed the collapse of the world order between the 20th century’s two great wars and concluded that keeping the peace required not laws or ideals but a stable balance of power.
In the late ’80s, Brent Scowcroft, President George H.W. Bush’s national security adviser, hired Rice onto his staff. A protege of Henry Kissinger, the ultimate realist, Scowcroft scorned the idea that morality should dominate foreign policy. While advising Bush’s son during his 2000 presidential campaign, Rice remained firmly in this mold. In an article for Foreign Affairs magazine, she called “power politics” and “power balances” the key elements of national security.
Yet just five years later, she wrote in a Washington Post op-ed, “the fundamental character of regimes matters more today than the international distribution of power.” And: “Democracy is the only assurance of lasting peace and security between states, because it is the only guarantee of freedom and justice within states.” [..]
