Susan Rice For A Resurgent UN Post?

By Cernig

The rumor factory has it that Susan Rice, Obama's trusted foreign policy advisor, is set for the post of UN ambassador in an Obama administration that would perhaps elevate that position back to being a cabinet post as it was during the Bill Clinton years. Spencer Ackerman writes:

it can be assumed fairly that Obama intends to return the U.N. to a position of centricity in U.S. foreign affairs. That’s, in my opinion, a very good thing for both the U.S. and for global security.

And in a profile of Rice a couple of weeks ago, Spencer wrote:

“After eight years of George Bush,” Rice told me for an American Prospect cover story, “when the next president puts his or her hand on the Bible to be sworn in, the U.S. is going to get one brief second look [from the world] about whether the U.S. truly learned to change from its past mistakes, recent and historic, and whether we’re again the kind of America people look to lead in a constructive fashion, or whether we’re hopeless.”

I think Rice has that exactly right. There's a short window of opportunity for an Obama administration on the international stage where even those with a long-term axe to grind about American policies will wait to see what happens next. Primarily, that's a function of the hype the Obama campaign built itself upon but it's there nonetheless and in a way that a Hillary Clinton or John McCain administration wouldn't have had.

If Obama has a tight hold on HRC, such that she won't try to run her own mini-presidency from State, and he carries through on implications of his campaign rhetoric that all past bets were in some sense off, that America was willing to start from a clean slate if everyone else was, then there's a chance to do some extraordinary good in the world while rebuilding America's prestige abroad and defusing the Bush legacy of ill will.

Rice comes across as a progressive-leaning realist, someone who gets the one-world thing but is no hippie pushover. In that much, she really does encapsulate how "the center" has moved on foreign policy post-Bush. That she's involved at a senior level at all gives me hope that Obama's first term won't just be a Clinton revival in foreign policy. That she'll be at the UN, the premier day-to-day contact point with the world if Obama chooses to make it so, is even better - I'd rather see her there than at the NSC. Many progressive foreign policy types were apparently hoping she'd be their patron inside the Obama administration and are now wondering who, if not her. But if Obama is giving her vision of the possible roles of the UN and America free reign, then they may just find that she still has enough clout to sponsor a bunch of other likeminded hirings.

And, of course, if Obama doesn't take advantage of that "second look", then it will be same-old time and the world will conclude that, no matter who is president, America isn't the good big brother but just the biggest bully on the block. That would be an immense disappointment and shame, for much though we in the rest of the world complain about American hubris and American hegemon, we wish we didn't have to. Bar a very few extremists like Osama, we all wish America would live up to its potential. That's why the world overwhelmingly said "Yes, you can!"