Susan Rice Would Be a Mistake for Secretary of State, and Here is Why

On Monday, the Associated Press reported that Susan Rice, “appears to have a clearer path to succeeding retiring Secretary of State Hilary Rodham Clinton” now that John McCain and Lindsey Graham have softened their opposition to her candidacy. “If she is nominated for the position,” the AP’s Steven Hurst predicted, ”it may signal greater U.S. willingness to intervene in world crises during Obama’s second term.”

Bill Kristol believes that it would, which is why he supports Rice over other qualified candidates, including especially John Kerry (D-MA). Asked on FoxNews Sunday why he prefers Rice over Kerry, Kristol said:

“Because I think Susan Rice has been a little more interventionist than John Kerry ... John Kerry has been against our intervening in every war that we intervened.”

That isn’t true, of course: Kerry infamously was for the second Iraq war before he was against it. But as Ben Friedman writes at U.S. News and World Report, within the generally interventionist foreign-policy community, Susan Rice is more interventionist than most.

In that context, I understand why the Senate’s small (and shrinking) Interventionist Caucus prefers Susan Rice. I understand why Kristol and the neoconservatives do. But I don’t understand why other people support her so strongly. Although the political class favors costly crusades abroad, most everyone outside of that tiny circle believes in leading by example. Most favor, Obama’s words, more “nation building here at home.” In short, Americans generally favor global engagement, but they reject the neoconservative variety.

The recent election was not a referendum on foreign policy. The issue barely registered. Although those who cared most about foreign policy favored Obama over Romney by a 56 to 33 margin, those voters represented just 5% of the electorate according to a Fox News exit poll. What’s more, Barack Obama and Mitt Romney agreed on most foreign policy issues. Romney favored more belligerent rhetoric, and huge increases for the Pentagon’s budget, but his prescriptions for the future boiled down to "what Obama did, just more of it." More meddling in distant civil wars, more nation building, a heavy U.S. military footprint wherever possible, and more drone strikes with less oversight where ground troops can’t go.

That seems to neatly summarize Susan Rice’s views, also. If Barack Obama nominates Rice to be the next Secretary of State, he will effectively be saying that he doesn’t care what the public wants, and that Mitt Romney was right.

This article originally appeared on the Cato Institute's Cato@Liberty blog.