It’s always nice to have a traveling secretary

As I’ve said before, Colin Powell’s biggest failing as Secretary of State was that he didn’t leave Washington, DC all that much. Which is kind of important for America’s chief diplomat. In Time, Elaine Shannon reports that Condi Rice seems to have grasped the importance of getting outside the Beltway:

According to a source in the State Department, Jim Wilkinson, a senior adviser to Condoleezza Rice, recently asked the department’s historian for a list of countries that have never been visited by a U.S. Secretary of State. An unlikely Trivial Pursuit question, his inquiry signals that Rice’s travels, which have already taken her to 11 countries in her first six weeks on the job, will be more extensive than most of her predecessors’. “The Secretary will travel when there’s serious diplomatic work to be done,” says Wilkinson. “There’s no better diplomacy than personal contact.” After three trips to Europe and visits to Jerusalem, Ramallah and Mexico City, Rice is taking her frequent-flyer diplomacy on a six-nation mission to Asia this week. Even skeptics who wrote off her early forays as standard grip-and-grin fare are beginning to pay attention…. Rice’s travel routine is grueling. Her 15-hour days typically start at 5 a.m., when she hits the elliptical machine in her hotel’s fitness center. After her Asian tour (which will take her to Afghanistan, India, Pakistan, Japan, China and South Korea), she will attend a meeting next month in Santiago, Chile, on emerging democracies. Rice has visited eight NATO nations, and by summer, she or her deputy, Robert Zoellick, plan to travel to the remaining 17. By then, she may be ready to tackle Wilkinson’s list.

UPDATE: Time has a follow-up story in this week’s issue that offers the contrast between Rice and Powell:

Sometimes the hardest thing about being Secretary of State is managing relations with 191 other countries across the globe. And sometimes it’s just making nice with three or four of your colleagues in the Cabinet. Colin Powell once told his British counterpart, Jack Straw, that intramural squabbling in Washington kept him from traveling. Every time he stepped onto an airplane to fly overseas, Powell said, someone in Washington stuck a knife in his back. A shiv in the ribs is one worry Condoleezza Rice doesn’t have. As she flew across Asia last week in her latest overseas trip, holding private meetings with leaders of six nations and appearing almost everywhere on TV, it was clear that in two months in office, Rice has consolidated her power as the chief exponent of the Administration’s foreign policy, a perch bolstered by her exceptionally tight relationship with George W. Bush…. For someone who, as National Security Adviser during Bush’s first term, often seemed overwhelmed by rivals in the war Cabinet, Rice has displayed striking confidence in her early forays as a diplomat. Foreign officials note that she likes to play solo, holding meetings without a phalanx of regional experts. Others report that she is unexpectedly generous with her time, even to countries that have been sharply critical of the U.S. At the Sharm el-Sheikh summit in February between Arab and Israeli leaders, Rice met with all the participants individually but steered clear of the summit to avoid the appearance of U.S. overreach. And an Israeli official notes that in private negotiating sessions, Rice has a clever way of pushing hard on an issue, even if only to elicit a vague agreement. But then she immediately doubles down. “She’ll restate it in a firmer way,” says this official, “and then pocket it as a commitment.” Says an Arab diplomat: “This one is nimble, very nimble.” But Rice’s best asset is her direct line to the Oval Office. “You get the feeling as you speak to her and listen to her,” said an official who met with her in Europe last month, “that you are actually listening to the President’s voice. You don’t have to make a calculation about whether this is the view of all the government in Washington–or just part of it.”