The world is starting to get a glimpse this week of what President Bush no doubt had in mind when he elevated Condoleezza Rice to represent America to the world. Mr. Bush’s new state secretary delivered in Paris yesterday a stunning speech, in which she sought to illuminate certain common values and the common opportunities for those nations that are, as she put it, on the same side of the great divide over freedom. She spoke frankly about the problems between France and America, acknowledging that France and America “have not always seen eye to eye.” But she declared that it is “time to open a new chapter in our relationship and a new chapter in our alliance” and she declared that America “stands ready to work with Europe on our common agenda – and Europe must stand ready to work with America.”

Our own instinct is that Ms. Rice would have done better by confronting some of the deep differences between France and America. “The founders of both the French and American republics were inspired by the very same values, and by each other,” she said at one point, adding: “They shared the universal values of freedom and democracy and human dignity.” Yet many of the key founders of America – and here we speak such men as Samuel and John Adams, Patrick Henry, the Rev. Samuel Cooper, and General Washington – were motivated in part by religious values, by a desire to protect freedom of worship, and by the story of the children of Israel fleeing slavery in Egypt. America’s founders included slaveholders and other racial bigots. But their vision and goal was of liberty. France’s revolution swarmed with anti-religious bigots who formally outlawed religion. They sacked the Cathedral of Notre Dame and converted it into a “Temple of Reason.”

At one point in Paris, Ms. Rice cited French and American activity in Lebanon as a sign that the nations have “a deep, broad, active relationship that is very effective on behalf of world peace.” But if Lebanon stands for anything today it is for the bankruptcy of both French and American policy in the Levant. Syrian-occupied Lebanon is the headquarters of the Hezbollah terrorist group that is waging a war against the Jews. America and France may have tried to clean the country up, but the Hezbollah leader, Sheik Nasrallah, can testify that they have not been “very effective.” No one will object to Ms. Rice putting on the best face in respect of the Palestinian Arabs. But she asked, “How could you not be impressed with … the Palestinian people going to elect a leader who says that it is time to give up the armed Intifadah and live in peace with Israel?”

Well, put us down among the skeptics. Mahmoud Abbas, like Yasser Arafat before him, may be calling for a tactical truce, but, judging from his record, only to gain advantage in an eventual plan to destroy Israel. Mr. Abbas, a longtime crony of Arafat, has ordered the speeding up of the executions of Palestinian Arabs accused of collaborating with Israel. Under Mr. Abbas, the Palestinian state information service on its Web site calls Israel the “1948 Occupied Territories,” sells posters of Hamas terrorist leaders, and glorifies pictures of masked, armed men in Islamic extremist garb as “occupation resistance.” It’s one thing for Ms. Rice to try to put the best face on things. It’s another to gloss over the problems, a tendency that only allows them to grow worse.

The part of Ms. Rice’s speech that we liked the best, though, is what we’ll call the Rice Doctrine. She spoke of how the American and French revolutionaries “knew that history does not just happen; it is made. History is made by men and women of conviction, of commitment and of courage, who will not let their dreams be denied.” Even if the march of democracy she ticked off was incomplete or, in some quarters, tarnished, democracy is clearly on the march. Reading the transcript of Ms. Rice’s appearance at the French school known as the Science-Po, for political science, one can almost sense the excitement of a young and brilliant American envoy representing an administration that has emerged leaps and bounds ahead of Old Europe in the current war, the battle in the field and the battle of ideas.