| 摘要 | On her first foray outside the US as secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, who flies to London today, says she is bringing Europe a message stressing the importance of alliances and diplomacy at a moment of opportunity in Iraq and the Middle East peace process.
Ms Rice’s close relationship with President George W. Bush may convince sceptics in Europe that the process of reconciliation that began unsteadily a year ago really is a serious effort by the US to rebuild transatlantic ties.
One of the foreign ministers she will meet on her tour of seven European capitals, as well as Turkey, Israel and the West Bank, remarked last year that it was always pleasant to meet Colin Powell, her predecessor. “But you could never cut a deal with him,” he added, explaining that it was never sure whether he would be shot down by Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary, or other “hawks ” in the administration.
“Powell was a decent man but he allowed the Europeans to have this illusion that US policy was what they wanted, not what it was. But with Rice they will hear it for what it is,” said Radek Sikorski, a former Polish deputy foreign minister who works on the transatlantic relationship at Washington’s American Enterprise Institute.
One of the key moments on Ms Rice’s tour will be a speech on transatlantic relations next Tuesday. The secretary had made a point of choosing Paris, the strongest opponent of the Iraq war, as the venue, a senior aide said.
“The speech in Paris, I think, will make that argument that we are looking at a time of opportunity with this alliance,” Ms Rice said before her departure.
She has made it clear that the Bush administration wants to look forward, not back. In the immediate future, the US was looking for real commitments of support for the incoming government in Iraq, and co- ordination to build on the momentum of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.
The focus in Iraq, Ms Rice said, should not be talk of an “exit strategy” for the US but the obligation of democracies to help the country become self-sufficient in its security.
On the nuclear ambitions of Iran and North Korea, the emphasis will also be on the process of diplomacy.
However, Mr Bush and Ms Rice share a much longer term view of what they see as agenerational struggle against the ideology of militant Islam.
In her Senate confirmation hearings, Ms Rice drew comparisons with former president Harry Truman and Dean Acheson, his secretary of state, who built the cold war alliances to contain the Soviet Union.
Mr Sikorski sees both sides of the Atlantic ready to look at a new relationship, with US foreign policy shifting towards a more pragmatic, traditional Atlanticist viewpoint.
“I think there is more realism in Europe and more willingness in Washington to humour Europe,” he said. “They are drawing the right lessons from what happened.”
Leslie Gelb of the Council on Foreign Relations said the rhetoric from the US would be more sensitive but warned that leaders in Europe and the US had “got out of the habit of serious co-operation”.
Trust has been lost. “We will see if leadership on both sides can restore that. But it won’t happen with one Rice trip or five Rice trips,” Mr Gelb said. |
