Susan Rice to Be U.N. Ambassador?

ABC News is reporting that Susan Rice — you remember her, I’m sure — is now the leading candidate to become Barack Obama’s ambassador to the United Nations.

On the merits, I tend to think Rice is so talented she’ll be great at any portfolio she gets. And given that she’s been part of Obama’s foreign-policy inner circle for nearly two years, it can be assumed fairly that Obama intends to return the U.N. to a position of centricity in U.S. foreign affairs. That’s, in my opinion, a very good thing for both the U.S. and for global security.

From an organization-chart perspective, it’ll be interesting to see if Obama returns the U.N. ambassadorship to the cabinet-level rank that it enjoyed in the Clinton administration. If so, quite a resume point on a woman so young and with such a bright and near-guaranteed future in the U.S. foreign-policy establishment.

And yet. If it’s true that Hillary Rodham Clinton’s anticipated arrival at the State Dept. will mean that a lot of progressive foreign-policy hands won’t have jobs, a number of them hoped that Rice would end up as Jim Jones’ deputy at the National Security Council — essentially so she could hire them. If Rice doesn’t end up as their patron, who will?