As Condoleezza Rice jets around the world, she must sometimes wonder where she’s going. Over her three years as Secretary of State, she has squandered great opportunities by putting faith and loyalty above her old worldview. The problem isn’t just that she has swerved from the realism that propelled her to prominence, it’s that the result has been in a shambles.

Rice is not used to failure. In Beltway wisdom, she’s the star of President Bush’s second-term team, someone who has employed smarts, sense and style to try to steer a wiser course in the world. But if she is now veering back to realism, it is after too long a detour into post-9/11 messianism. Rice remains one of the architects of a fantasy foreign policy, and her record as Secretary of State gives little hope that she will be able to reverse that verdict in the administration’s final months.

The case against Rice starts with her dismal tenure as National Security Adviser in Bush’s first term. Her main task was to coordinate policy, but she was outmanoeuvered at every turn by the ruthless infighters around her.

So, she focused on the job’s other mandate: counselling the unschooled President on foreign affairs. As Bush’s tutor in the 2000 campaign, she gained his trust.

The State Department seemed a place where she could make the most of that asset. She would finally be a player, a Cabinet Secretary with a budget, a bureaucracy and something her beleaguered predecessor Gen Colin L Powell never had. At first, she did things that Bush had previously resisted — reopened nuclear talks with Iran and North Korea, pushed a UN Security Council resolution on war crimes in Sudan, and (unlike Powell) travelled, a lot.

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