Now that Condoleezza Rice appears to be on the short list of possible replacements for Colin Powell to run the State Department in the next term, it would behoove us to take a detailed look at her long record in shaping US foreign policy.

During her four years as National Security Advisor in the current administration, we now she has been a general failure. From North Korea's burgeoning nuclear arms program to the debacle in Iraq to the blind dismissal of the ominously titled PDB "Bin Laden determined to strike in US", Rice's record has been consistent at best and incompetent at worst.

Rice's long history of failures does not only extend to this administration. In the previous Bush administration (Bush 41, that is), she was special adviser on Soviet affairs during the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Though she had some successes, her term was marred by misstep after misstep. The Economist laid it out perfectly on December 21 2000 as such:

But if [Rice] deserves credit for [confronting the USSR on East Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall], she deserves blame for a comparable failure: America’s early underestimation of Boris Yeltsin. During Mr Yeltsin’s first trip to the United States in 1989, she overruled the advice of the American embassy in Moscow on how to treat him. Instead of being ushered in to see the president through the front door of the White House, the Russian leader merely saw Mr Bush senior during a stop-by visit at the National Security Council.

This slight culminated in a more fundamental failure: while America was still hoping that Mr Gorbachev could reform the Soviet system, Russia and the rest were declaring independence. Any fool could see the Soviet Union was collapsing. It took the real brainboxes of the Bush White House to get on the wrong side of history. [paid registration required]

Clearly, Rice's blindness to the systematic change brought on by Al Qaeda's pre-9/11 threats is habitual rather than a one time occurence; Rice failed to recognize the gravity of the situation in Russia as the USSR crumbled (either purposefully or negligently) more than a decade before her mishandling of the threat posed by Bin Laden. If this is the person Bush wants as our next Secretary of State, it will surely be a long, hard four years.