Rice has three advantages

Suitably for one about to become America's senior diplomat, Condoleezza Rice had something for everyone but gave relatively little away when she stepped out of the shadows on Tuesday. As she deftly parried a barrage of questions, one thing was clear: America will have a vigorous advocate in the next four years. She has three advantages over her predecessor, Colin Powell, who tried but mostly failed to make diplomacy count.

She has the ear of United States President George W. Bush, who is clearly minded to repair a few broken bridges. With Iraq in turmoil, she has the edge over that other big beast of the Beltway: Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary. Rice, 50, arrives at Washington's top table with one of the more distinguished CVs of any senior American official.

Growing up

Since growing up in the segregated Deep South, she has triumphed as a concert pianist and champion skater, a linguist and precociously young professor, before rising effortlessly to become Bush's closest aide. Yet while her achievements have become almost the stuff of cliche, her views have remained opaque, not least because of the many marked shifts in her career.

Under the first President George Bush, she worked closely with Brent Scowcroft, then national security adviser and a high priest of old-fashioned Republican realpolitik. More recently she has been one of the key figures in shaping Bush's aggressive post-9/11 foreign policy. As a result, since she was nominated as secretary of state two months ago, competing voices in the Washington chorus have claimed her as their own. Hawks have hailed her as an assertive nationalist who will bring the lily-livered or cautious State Department diplomats into line. Opponents have pointed to her closeness to Bush and given warning that she will be a channel for his views.

Her supporters have highlighted her robustness in standing up to Boris Yeltsin and other foreign leaders, and on occasion even Rumsfeld, and predicted she will steer her own course. All the while "Condi" has kept her own counsel until Tuesday in her Senate confirmation hearings.

Her forceful criticism of the United Nations over the oil-for-food scandal and her unflinching defence of the Iraq policy confirmed what even the most hopeful European diplomat has long accepted: that she will be no pushover, still less a "dove". She was, after all, the official who argued after the overthrow of Baghdad that America should "punish France, ignore Germany and forgive Russia" for their opposition to the war more the advice of a Machiavelli than a Metternich.

But while she is unquestionably more comfortable with the idea of a muscular foreign policy than Powell was, she is no caricature hawk. Carefully timed leaks have recalled how in 2003 she confronted Israeli officials over its controversial "security barrier" and demanded they take more account of Palestinian concerns. Her recent moves suggest that her talk of diplomacy on Tuesday should not be dismissed out of hand. One key indication was her appointment of Robert Zoellick, the administration's senior trade negotiator, as deputy secretary of state, rather than one of the more ideological candidates that conservatives were touting.

No softie

He will be no softie in European trade talks but his background is that of an internationalist in the old-fashioned Republican mould. Also she has made clear she intends to travel more than her predecessor.

Powell defends his record as one of the least-travelled secretaries of state in decades, saying it was his job to co-ordinate policy and it was up to his ambassadors to conduct diplomacy in the field. But the impression was of a beleaguered figure who had to stay in Washington to defend his turf.

As a regular weekender at the Bush ranch in Texas and at the president's Camp David retreat, Rice will never have a problem securing "face time" with the boss.

Alec Russell is the Foreign Editor of the Daily Telegraph.