Rice: A 'Europeanist' with a tough reputation

By Douglas Herbert, CNN.com Europe writer

LONDON, England (CNN) -- Her first name is an Italian musical term that means "with sweetness."

But those who know Condoleezza Rice say America's national security adviser-in-waiting is a strong-willed woman who tempers her sugary charms with a heavy dose of realpolitik that puts U.S. strategic interests first -- even when doing so may challenge the status quo.

KEY POINTS  Who is Condoleezza Rice? •  She brings Cold War know-how to top U.S. national security post. •  The 46-year-old Russia expert and former university provost is first woman pegged to head up traditionally all-male council. •  Her appointment comes a decade after previous White House stint as Soviet affairs adviser to George W. Bush's father. •  She says America's armed forces should not be "a global police force" for world's hot spots. •  She is still seen as relatively green on a range of other global policy areas, from China and Taiwan to Iran and Afghanistan.

During the presidential election campaign, Rice raised eyebrows in some diplomatic circles when she suggested that a Bush administration would pull back American troops from peacekeeping duties around the world.

She also hinted that troops would be withdrawn from Bosnia and Kosovo, and their missions relegated to European peacekeepers closer to the scene of potential strife.

"American foreign policy in a Republican administration should refocus the United States on the national interest," Rice wrote this year in an article in Foreign Affairs magazine. She was laying out her credo for greater selectivity in dealing with outside conflicts in a post-Cold War world.

"There is nothing wrong with doing something that benefits all humanity, but that is, in a sense, a second-order effect."

At first sight, Rice -- a black, single, 46-year-old university professor born in a segregated Birmingham, Alabama -- might seem a misfit in the fraternity of patrician, grey-haired males who have traditionally headed up the National Security Council, the U.S. president's in-house pipeline to the State of the World.

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But then you scan her biography.

There, you learn that her diverse achievements range from playing classical piano to governing a billion-dollar budget as a former provost of Stanford University.

In her spare time, she is a devoted sports fan and fitness enthusiast -- passions she shares with her new boss, George W. Bush, whom she met in 1995 during a visit to his father in Texas.

Listen to Rice talk about the issues she knows best -- Russian-U.S. relations, disarmament, ballistic missile defence, nuclear security -- and the impression that emerges, observers say, is of a woman comfortably in command of her mission.

"There aren't too many females in this business, she was really an exception in this almost 100-percent-male crowd -- which may be one of the reasons she earned the reputation of being tough," said Sergei Rogov, director of the Russian Institute of U.S. and Canada Studies in Moscow, who has known Rice for nearly two decades.

Rogov said Rice managed to convey forcefulness and defend her country's corner without reverting to the visceral Russia-bashing that marked the U.S. relationship with the Soviets during the Cold War.

"She's very frank and direct," he said. "When I talk to her I don't have to waste my time to repeat the official propaganda or to hear the official propaganda," he said.

It is perhaps this very combination of political smarts, steeliness and even-handedness, analysts say, that has made Rice such a palatable spokeswoman for the policies of the embryonic George W. Bush administration.

At last summer's Republic National Convention, Rice drew a rousing ovation from the partisan crowd when she proclaimed from the podium that Bush "recognises that the magnificent men and women of America's armed forces are not a global police force, they are not the world's 911 (the emergency number for police in the United States)."

If Rice has an Achilles heel, critics say, it is that her international expertise lies almost exclusively in Russia -- and a Soviet-era Russia that no longer exists, at that.

Rice acknowledged gaps in her knowledge when she told The New York Times in a recent interview: "I've been pressed to understand parts of the world that have not been part of my scope. I'm really a Europeanist."

Dmitri Trenin, deputy director of the Carnegie Moscow Center, has met with Rice and said she impressed him as a very "thoughtful and serious" expert who would quickly master any task she was given -- including getting to know China, Afghanistan and Iran, countries likely to demand more national security attention in years to come.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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