It should be noted that Colin Powell's reluctance to visit foreign capitals represented more than simple antipathy to travel. As the Washington Post noted last July, Colin Powell preferred to remain in Washington to serve as the President's primary foreign policy advisor (as it turned out, his advice often went unheeded). This had been the recommendation of none other than legendary Foreign Service veteran George F. Kennan, who in 2000 wrote Powell to express his view that successive Secretary of States beginning with Henry Kissinger had distorted the office's role: by acting too often as diplomats, they neglected their responsibility to advise the White House and they undermined the authority of their ambassadors and other official delegates.

At the time of the Washington Post article, I was interning in the Public Affairs Bureau of the Department of State. I contacted Assistant Secretary and Department Spokesperson Richard Boucher, who provided me with a photocopy of Kennan's letter: I found that it satisfied all of the scholar's high standards of articulation and eloquence. (Sadly, despite being released to the press, I have been able to find no copies of the letter online. If you are curious, I suggest writing a polite request to the Public Affairs Bureau.) I later exchanged some quick words with Marc Grossman, then Under Secretary for Political Affairs, who concurred. In Grossman's estimation, the bipolar system of the Cold War implied that diplomacy conducted at the top levels of government between the United States and the USSR was all that mattered. In the post-Cold War system, this primary relationship has been replaced by the need for strong bilateral relationships with a large number of states, implying diplomacy carried out by seasoned professional diplomats, not politicians.

This is not to say that Powell's preference for decentralized diplomacy was necessarily right or wrong, but it is to say that Powell's style was a product of policy and professional opinion, not personal taste.

So, what are the "unvisited" countries?

Dan, this is a comment on your older post (March 12) about Jeffrey Sachs' book The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time. I couldn't post it under that post, so posting here instead.

I'm also VERY surprised that Jeffrey Sachs' book hasn't generated any discussion in the blogosphere. Even more worrisome was the lack of attention to the University of Michigan C.K. Prahalad’s most recent master piece The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits. According to The Economist, it's "...The best book on capitalism and the poor since Hernando de Soto's "The Mystery of Capital". It calls on big business to regard the world's poor as potential customers, and argues that both firms and the poor will win if it does. There was minimal discussion, if any about this in the blogosphere. Also appaling was the lack of attention to recently published Stuart Hart’s Capitalism at the Crossroads : The Unlimited Business Opportunities in Solving the World's Most Difficult Problems Professor Hart of Cornell University wrote the seminal article "Beyond Greening: Strategies for a Sustainable World," which won the McKinsey Award for Best Article in Harvard Business Review, and helped launch the movement for corporate sustainability and poverty elimination.

This lack of attention is very disturbing but I have yet to find the reason for this.

To state the obvious, the visit of a Secretary of State is a massive event.
But it is not just a celebrity visit or a just an event to reaffirm the strength of the leader occupying power.
I would not advise Condi to visit Lebanon. No, it's not because she wouldn't be safe. William Burns recently visited and Satterfield is the State point person on the matter.
Condi shouldn't visit because she could polarize the electorate right before an election. The perfect time for her to visit would be after the Lebanese election.
If Lebanon goes the way the White House wants it to, Beirut would be the perfect place for a Presidential visit. Although the White House is not at all responsible for the Lebanese revolution, Bush could show up and get plastered across of the American press as the bringer of democracy to Lebanon (an already democractic country regardless of the Syrian perversion).

What some people forget about Kissinger is that he was already the President's principle foreign policy adviser when they started, off his long tenure as National Security Adviser. That and Nixon's preoccupation with Watergate in the 1973-74 period provided insurance against end runs to the White House by other departments.

Subsequent Secretaries of State did not have either advantage, and to the extent that they tried to emulate Kissinger they paid a price for it in Washington. Cyrus Vance and Al Haig in particular might profitably have borne in mind an anecdote about Kissinger that had him being asked, as National Security Adviser, why it was so important for him to speak to the President on some minor matter. "You don't understand," Kissinger is reported to have said, "if I'm not in with the President, someone else is."

But this is only one piece of the puzzle. Kissinger was a much abler man than Colin Powell, whose past success -- which was considerable -- had come when he served as a balance wheel between strong and occasionally volatile buraucratic forces and personalities: between State and Defense as Reagan's NSA, between Norman Schwarzkopf and Cheney as Bush's Joint Chiefs Chairman. As the top guy in the State Department Powell showed some management skills, but lacking detailed views about the strategy of American foreign policy was at a grave disadvantage in the contest to direct policy, a disadvantage he made worse by never threatening to resign if his recommended course of action was not followed as Kissinger did more than once. Powell was not the first Secretary of State whose performance as head of the department did not measure up to what he'd been able to do in subordinate positions.

Wouldn't it be better if Rice's travels weren't partly due to the need to paper over the White House's pathological lies? WaPo:
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In an effort to increase pressure on North Korea, the Bush administration told its Asian allies in briefings earlier this year that Pyongyang had exported nuclear material to Libya. That was a significant new charge, the first allegation that North Korea was helping to create a new nuclear weapons state.

But that is not what U.S. intelligence reported, according to two officials with detailed knowledge of the transaction. North Korea, according to the intelligence, had supplied uranium hexafluoride -- which can be enriched to weapons-grade uranium -- to Pakistan. It was Pakistan, a key U.S. ally with its own nuclear arsenal, that sold the material to Libya. The U.S. government had no evidence, the officials said, that North Korea knew of the second transaction.

Pakistan's role as both the buyer and the seller was concealed to cover up the part played by Washington's partner in the hunt for al Qaeda leaders, according to the officials, who discussed the issue on the condition of anonymity. In addition, a North Korea-Pakistan transfer would not have been news to the U.S. allies, which have known of such transfers for years and viewed them as a business matter between sovereign states. * * *

In an effort to repair the damage, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is traveling through East Asia this weekend trying to get the six-nation talks back on track. The impasse was expected to dominate talks today in Seoul and then Beijing, which wields the greatest influence with North Korea.
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You can admire someone who zooms around putting out fires, or you can ask yourself, "hey, who's setting all these fires?"

What better way to avoid internal policy conflicts with other White House heavies than to not be there? Does anyone really think that Condi Rice is going to push a strong State agenda now that she's in Powell's still blazing seat? She smart, thinks well on feet and will be a great policy mouth piece but she'll originate nothing that's not blessed from elsewhere.

The real reason, as Powell told the UK's Jack Straw, was that every time he left the country, someone in the Administration tried to stab him in the back...