Rice's Mid-Year Report

According to Fred Kaplan:

She reopened nuclear negotiations with North Korea, even authorizing bilateral talks, which George W. Bush had adamantly refused to conduct all through his first term as president.

She persuaded Bush to endorse similar (if less promising) negotiations that Britain, France, and Germany had initiated with Iran, which he had also vigorously opposed.

She crafted the terms of a United Nations resolution to investigate war crimes in Sudan, a measure that first-term Bush had resisted.

She dropped the campaign—which had been launched with great verve by Vice President Dick Cheney—to replace Mohamed elBaradei as chair of the International Atomic Energy Agency and then got U.S. intelligence agencies to resume briefing IAEA officials, a practice that had also been discontinued in the first term.

As a prerequisite to all the above accomplishments, she staved off Cheney's intense efforts to appoint his protégé, John Bolton, as deputy secretary of state and implicitly acknowledged Bolton's unsuitability for a concession prize—U.N. ambassador—by assuring Democratic opponents that he would be carefully "supervised."

Kaplan goes on to say that these feats are only impressive because they were accomplished in spite of our Administration's complete lack of regard for diplomacy.