As Condoleezza Rice begins her second year as US 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 George W. 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 Harry S Truman for decisions that helped win the Cold War.

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 US foreign aid. "We are always going to carry out our humanitarian objectives."

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-Second World War 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 President George H.W. 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 administration of President Bill Clinton. "Take nation-building. 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 centre 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." — Associated Press