Why is there a gathering storm of opposition to the prospect of Susan Rice, the U.S. Ambassador, becoming Secretary of State? Rice is as much a child of the Washington establishment as anybody in the Obama Administration—her father was a governor of the Federal Reserve Board, and she has risen steadily through the ranks of the foreign-policy world. She’s hardly an outsider with unorthodox views.

The constitutional requirement of Senate confirmation for cabinet appointees gives the party that lost an election a chance to strike back quickly by attacking nominees of the party that won who seem vulnerable. Rice’s vulnerability is related to the Republican supposition that the deadly attack in September on the U.S. embassy in Libya can be seen as a major failure by the Obama Administration: her sin was going on the Sunday morning talk shows immediately after the attack and saying that it looked to be spontaneous, a reaction to an anti-Islamic film, rather than attributing it to Al Qaeda affiliates. Attacking her is a way of keeping the spotlight on Benghazi, and of using it to promote the perception that the Administration is weak and inept in foreign policy.

But if Rice might be Secretary of State, it’s worth wondering about her world view, beyond one morning’s misstatement. It’s not immediately easy to discern. The foreign-policy world extravagantly admires intellectual brilliance, but rarely produces it. Sweeping conceptual breakthroughs don’t come along very often, and foreign-policy makers tend to be thinker-practitioners (They think when their party is out of power, and practice when it’s in.) who can’t afford to say or write anything very memorable, lest it offend someone and sully their confirmation hearings. George Kennan was a major thinker but a minor practitioner. James Baker was a major practitioner, but good luck figuring out what his conceptual framework was.

For Rice, about the closest we have to an over-all vision statement is a document published during the summer of 2008 by the Center for a New American Security. (I wrote about Rice and the report in a piece for The New Yorker that year.) Most of the ten named authors—at the time, up-and-coming Democratic foreign policy types—wound up serving just below Cabinet rank in the Obama Administration. They were all members of a project called “the Phoenix Initiative,” one of whose founders was Rice, who wrote the preface to the 2008 document but announced in it that she had left the group to work in the Obama campaign.

The document itself is clearly the product of people who are in a cautious, career-preserving mood. Its most ringing call is for “strategic leadership”—who could be against that? But, read carefully, it does stand as a pretty good predictor of the Obama Administration’s first-term foreign policy. Beginning with Rice’s preface, it stresses diplomacy over power and imagines that a United States that has become less bellicose than it was during George W. Bush’s Presidency can exert greater influence in the world. The report makes this assertion about the establishing principles of the United States:

Our founders believed that they were creating a nation that would secure life, liberty, and prosperity for all Americans. At the same time, our nation would also stand together with all other people against tyranny, inequality, and injustice.

That’s putting a positive spin on the intentions of a bunch of prosperous male aristocrats, many of whom owned slaves, but it’s really there to show the role that Rice’s generation in the democratic-foreign-policy establishment believes the United States should play now.

Photograph by Spencer Platt/Getty.