“He[Bush]’s had as much effect upon my foreign-policy views as I’ve had on his,” Rice told me. “It is in part, in large part, his unshakable belief in freedom. And his unshakable belief that human beings have not just a right to it, but they’re at their best when they have it.” Like the president, Rice is a regular churchgoer who embraced religious practice later in life—in Rice’s case, after returning from Washington, D.C., to her teaching job at Stanford University, where she served as provost from 1993 to ’99.

Rice’s detractors, and even some of her close friends, see her worldview, which is both intellectually coherent and heartfelt, as deterministic and lacking any real appreciation for the influence of local factors on big historical events. A common term for the core of her thought among her colleagues, past and present, is “the theology,” a reference to her bedrock faith in the likelihood, or inevitability, of progressive historical change [bold mine-DL]. Her views have evolved since she witnessed firsthand the end of the Cold War. ~David Samuels

If that doesn’t worry you, there’s this item a little later:

Where Rice sharply differs from Fukuyama is in her vision of a strong tension between a beneficent order of liberal states and the “transnational forces” that seek to tear down the global system. Her worldview is therefore trickier and more idiosyncratic than it first appears. “Democracy, for Secretary Rice, I think, and for them,” Zelikow says, speaking more generally of the administration, “is a universal safety valve for social conflict. And as they confront parts of the world in profound social and political crisis, they prescribe democracy.”

She thinks that democracy is the remedy for social conflict?  She hasn’t figured out yet that democracy simply becomes another vehicle for social conflict that the rival groups in any conflict use to continue their fight?  That politicising the different groups in a conflict-ridden society through a democratic process simply legitimises the ongoing conflict?  If she still doesn’t understand that this is a real possibility, I think she isn’t fit to be the Secretary of State.  (Of course, she isn’t fit to be Secretary of State, but we’ll leave that for later.)