Condoleezza Rice has lacked a long-term vision as America’s Secretary of State, Washington Post reporter Glenn Kessler told several of Rice’s colleagues during a Wednesday lunch seminar in Encina Hall.

International Relations Prof. Stephen Krasner, who served as director of policy planning in Rice’s State Department from February 2005 to April 2007, strongly disagreed.

“The administration did have a vision,” Krasner told Kessler. “It was strategic. It’s just proved hard to implement.”

Political Science Prof. Michael McFaul, moderator of the event and a director at the University’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, said that — since he first met Rice more than two decades ago — she has always seemed like someone with her eyes on the big picture.

“There’s a strategy to her life, if you will, a rather grand strategy,” McFaul said.

Both men said they had not read Kessler’s book, “The Confidante: Condoleezza Rice and the Creation of the Bush Legacy,” which was published last month.

Kessler said many of Rice’s most well-known successes have been serendipitous. Her ascent from a weak National Security Adviser to a strong Secretary of State was by no means certain, he said. He pointed out that, after the 2004 election, the former provost had planned to return to Stanford.

“She looks at the problem right here,” Kessler said pointing to one corner of the room, “and doesn’t realize the narrow alleys she finds herself in because she’s not thinking down the road.”

Kessler acknowledged that his new book is “pretty downbeat” about Rice’s reactions to developments in global hotspots, such as Iran, North Korea and Palestine.

But Kessler, who still covers the State Department for the Post, said that he only passed judgment after intensive reporting and five hours of exclusive interviews with Rice for the book.

“It allowed me to step back and put everything in context,” he said of the writing process in an interview yesterday. “As a day-to-day beat reporter, it’s hard to ever put it together in one single narrative.”

Kessler’s goal was to publish a first draft of behind-the-scenes history that both experts and his mother could understand. His chapters, with dramatic titles like “Showdown near Seoul” and “Blowup over Beirut,” are case studies on how Rice specifically dealt with the foreign policy crises that boiled over on her watch.

Kessler, an award-winning journalist, spent more than 75 minutes with the group of 45 people at the event, co-sponsored by the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the Knight Fellowships program.

The audience seemed more interested in foreign policy than in her likely return to Stanford [see sidebar].

At the moment, Kessler said her legacy looks bleak.

But, he added, “The tide of history turns.”