Commentary: Why Europe will miss Condoleezza Rice

Has Condoleezza Rice, as some fellow-diplomats claim, been the most powerful black woman in history? Historians will continue puzzling over that for a while.

Certainly Europeans have been intrigued, often charmed and sometimes impressed by a U.S. Secretary of State whose razor-sharp intellect has never been questioned. Rice combines an iron personal discipline with enough musical ability to have made her a concert pianist if she had chosen the keyboard over the political platform.

As part of her farewell tour around the capitals of Europe, Rice showed off her musical talents, playing Brahms to Britain's Queen Elizabeth.

She was accompanied, appropriately, given the two countries' alliance, by Louise Miliband, the wife of Britain's Foreign Secretary. Watch Rice play for Queen Elizabeth »

But has the U.S. Secretary of State always struck the right note in Europe?

Certainly she cannot be faulted for effort. There cannot be an important diplomatic hand in Europe she hasn't shaken -- several times. NATO gatherings. Tours with U.S. President George W. Bush. Foreign ministers' crisis gatherings.

Lately, those have been mostly friendly encounters. But regular observers like Robin Shepherd, of the Chatham House think tank, recall when she used to play hardball.

"Amid the Iraq crisis, when France, Germany and Russia were leading opposition to the U.S., it was Condoleezza Rice who famously talked about those countries as constituting an 'axis of weasel", in contrast with the 'axis of evil' which George W. Bush had set out, meaning Iran, Iraq and N Korea", he says.

Europe has in general been disappointed with US efforts in Rice's time toward securing peace between the Israelis and Palestinians, which they see as the key to the wider battle against terrorism.

Another key test has been Rice's effort to persuade European governments, especially the Grand Coalition in Germany, to put more troops and resources into Afghanistan. It is another test on which she emerges with a minus score. Not all have been persuaded that NATO, formed as a defensive alliance against the old Soviet Union, should now be playing an "out of area" role as world policeman.

As Rice admits herself: "This was a different fight than NATO was structured to do."

Rice has been very much on the defensive, explaining U.S. policies on Guantanamo Bay and the CIA's so-called "extraordinary renditions'" -- seen by most Europeans simply as kidnapping under another name, even if some of their own governments have been complicit.

Time and again Rice has insisted: "The U.S. doesn't engage in torture, doesn't condone it, doesn't expect its employees to engage in it."

Her hosts were not always convinced. Robin Shepherd argues: " I don't think that Europeans have believed the assurances of anybody in the Bush administration when it comes to issues such as extraordinary rendition."

But Condoleezza Rice, whose first academic studies centered on the then Czechoslovakia, did play a major role in persuading Europe to make the U.S. missile defense plan -- with its proposed installations in Poland and the Czech Republic -- not just an American objective but part of NATO policy.

Part of her success is down to a change of style, a revival of multilateral discussion which she engineered during George W. Bush's second term. As other conservatives in the administration were felled in political battles, Rice realized and argued that "our interaction with the rest of the world must be a conversation, not a monologue."

Europeans responded well to the second-term Bush administration's greater willingness to listen and consult. They put much of that down to the diplomacy of the former Stamford professor. Although she has been the representative of one of the most unpopular presidents ever, so far as Europe is concerned Rice has been largely exempt from such strong antipathy.

The explanation runs that Rice, as a better communicator than her boss in the White House, has been regarded as the purveyor and not the maker of policy. People haven't blamed her for what they dislike.

Robin Shepherd puts it into a sharper perspective. "I don't think that Condoleezza Rice has ever been seen as the key player in American foreign policy," he says. " think she comes a very distant second in people's perceptions, especially in Europe, and probably around the rest of the world too, to George W. Bush."

Iraq made President George W. Bush a high-profile and divisive figure in Europe. Now with the White House about to be occupied by a man whom they hope will be high profile for different reasons, Europe will be agog to see if Rice's expected successor, Hillary Clinton, will also have difficulty emerging from her president's shadow.