WASHINGTON (AP) – As Condoleezza Rice begins her second year as secretary of state, she appears to be striking a newly confident and more compassionate stance in her foreign policy pronouncements.

During her four years as President Bush’s national security adviser, Rice kept a low profile and largely avoided any public display of her policy views. In her first months as secretary of state, she carefully followed administration scripts and seemed, at times, a bit uncomfortable in speeches and news conferences.

But now, she has begun displaying a sure-footed ease as Bush’s top diplomat. Last week she displayed self-assurance as she praised the administration of Democratic President Truman for decisions that helped win the Cold War.

That perspective would smack of blasphemy to many rock-ribbed Republicans more inclined to credit former President Reagan with bringing down the Soviet Union.

Rice also supported increased foreign aid and called for a humanitarian approach overseas. That could reflect a practical view that a nation engaged in an Iraq war widely unpopular overseas, and with interests flung widely across the globe, needs help from other countries rather than confrontation with them.

“America is a compassionate society,” Rice said last week in announcing a reshuffling in the management of U.S. foreign aid. “We are always going to carry out our humanitarian objectives.”

She sounded that theme repeatedly in a series of speeches and question-and-answer sessions designed primarily to promote the administration’s democracy policy and the pending realignment in handling foreign aid.

Rice went out of her way to praise a Democratic predecessor, Dean Acheson, who along with Truman was a target of right-wing conservatives of the post-World War II era.

“When I walk into my office, the other portraits that I look at in addition to (Thomas) Jefferson, the portraits of George Marshall, but especially Dean Acheson,” she said.

Marshall and Acheson, secretaries of state under Truman, not only constructed the NATO alliance out of wartime chaos but pressed for democracy in Germany and Japan, Rice said.

Recalling that as a Soviet specialist working for the first President Bush in 1989, she “got to participate” in the fall of the Iron Curtain and the dissolution of the Soviet Union itself.

“People like me were just harvesting good decisions that had been taken in 1946 and 1947 and 1948,” she said last week in tribute to the Truman administration.

“They (Bush administration officials) are becoming closer to how Democrats viewed the world,” said Ivo H. Daalder, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a White House staffer in the Clinton administration.

“Take nation-building,” Daalder said in an interview. “The Democrats believed strong and capable and democratic states were fundamentally in our interest.”

Rice referred positively during the week to nation-building, a process the current president opposed during his first White House campaign but has become heavily involved with in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia’s center for politics, said in an interview that Bush and Rice have been reaching out to past officials of both parties.

“Maybe Bush’s own slogan, ‘compassionate conservatives,’ is finally finding some life in the diplomatic field in his second term,” Sabato said.

Michael Mandelbaum, of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, detected a practical purpose in Rice’s stance.

“We need friends and we need help in dealing with Iran, and we would like help in dealing with Iraq,” Mandelbaum said. “So we are talking in ways designed to appeal to governments and people that we think might be willing and able to help us.”

Rice spoke positively about foreign aid, which in years past drew heated opposition from conservative Republicans. She spoke of a commitment to “lay a foundation for the kind of world we want to see.”

She spoke approvingly of a threefold increase in development aid for countries in Africa during Bush’s presidency, for instance, and hinted at increases in foreign aid requests to Congress in the president’s budget next month.

Current spending by the State Department and the Agency for International Development ranges from about $18 billion to $20 billion, depending on which programs are included.

Still, Rice gave assurances that taxpayer money would be spent carefully. And she said that in distributing foreign aid abroad, “we do not want to create permanent dependence. We want countries to develop resources” to take care of their people.

Her dominant theme was humanitarian, though.

“Our goal ought to be to use our assistance to help people to better their lives, but also to help their governments to be better able to deliver for them,” she said.

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An AP News Analysis