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Loud Voice, Tiny StickTrying to make sense of Condoleezza Rice's latest statement.

By Fred KaplanPosted Wednesday, Aug. 20, 2008, at 5:39 PM ET

Secretary of State Condoleezza RiceCondoleezza Rice has said many strange things as secretary of state, but few stranger than this remark at an Aug. 18 press conference onboard her plane en route to Brussels, Belgium:

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Russia is a state that is unfortunately using the one tool that it has always used … when it wishes to deliver a message, and that's its military power. That's not the way to deal in the 21^st century.

It would have been mere hypocrisy if Rice had said, as President Bush did in the wake of the assault on Georgia, that invading a sovereign country is "unacceptable in the 21^st century." It would have been too clever by at least half had she repeated U.N. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad's protest that the "days of overthrowing leaders by military means in Europe—those days are gone." (It took Jon Stewart to italicize the phrasing's loophole, which implies that coups in other regions may proceed as usual.)

But for America's top diplomat to say that "military power" is no way to deal or deliver messages in the 21^st century is simply perplexing. Military power has always been used for these purposes and, alas, always will be. That is, in part, what military power is for. This is International Relations 101.

Rice, who has a Ph.D. in international relations, surely knows this. And the Russians, Georgians, Iraqis, Iranians, Afghans, Pakistanis, Israelis, Lebanese, Iranians, Syrians, North Koreans—all the world leaders whose armed forces have (or have been) shot, strafed, or bombed (or have issued or received threats of such violence in recent years)—know that she knows this, too.

And that's the problem. Bush and most of his top officials have now reached the point, if they haven't raced past it long ago, where nobody can afford to believe a single thing they say.

Imagine that you are the foreign minister of a NATO nation, and you're trying to devise a response to Russia's aggression against Georgia, some action or warning that has credibility and potency—that the Russians would have reason to take seriously and find worrisome. Then you hear Secretary Rice's remark about military power in the 21^st century, and you realize that, if Vladimir Putin heard it, too, he must be laughing, wondering only if it reflected duplicity or naiveté. And then you realize that, if you did come up with a plausible response to the Russians, it's probably now doomed to failure, because the United States would have to be involved in putting it on the table and enforcing its terms if necessary, and therefore Putin would feel safe in ignoring it.

The Bush administration tarnished its credibility still further Wednesday when Rice signed an agreement in Warsaw, Poland, that allows U.S. ballistic-missile-defense batteries to be deployed on Polish territory. For more than a year, ever since the issue arose, Bush and Rice have tried to assure Putin that a BMD system in Eastern Europe is meant to counter Iran's missiles, not Russia's. However, the rush to an accord in the wake of (justifiable) nervousness about Russia's move on Georgia—combined with Bush's pledge to send Poland conventional air-defense weapons for the explicit purpose of staving off a Russian attack—seems only to confirm Putin's suspicions. (Putin, I think, is silly to regard 10 anti-missile missiles, each of dubious effectiveness, as a threat to Russia's vast nuclear deterrent, but that's another matter.)

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Fred Kaplan is Slate's "War Stories" correspondent and author of 1959: The Year Everything Changed. He can be reached through his Web site, http://1959thebook.com.

Photograph of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice by John Thys/AFP/Getty Images.

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