Russia and Eastern Europe have played an outsize role in the life of Condoleezza Rice. For nearly 35 years, her closeness to these countries and has been one of the central organizing principles of her academic career, her public persona, and, indeed, her self-image.

So the Russian invasion of Georgia, involving her area of expertise, coming in her final months as secretary of state, must carry a particular sting. It also raises anew a concern that has troubled many of her closest friends and some of her relatives during much of her time in the Bush administration: what will remain, come January, of the reputation Rice brought to Washington seven years ago. Rice rose to prominence as the go-to midlevel adviser who helped the first President Bush finesse the relationship with the Russians as their Eastern European satellites slipped away. She was one of only three U.S. negotiators in the talks that led to German reunification.

Soviet affairs and events in Eastern Europe affected her long before that.

Having to explain, over and over, how a little black girl from Birmingham, Ala., became an expert on the Soviet Union, she developed a deeply affecting personal narrative. Her best friend, Chip Blacker, a fellow Stanford professor and Russia specialist, called it her personal myth of creation.

She said, for instance, that as a 7-year-old in 1962, she was more frightened of the Russian missiles stationed in Cuba during the Missile Crisis (they could reach Birmingham) than she was of the night riders who terrorized her neighborhood. And more than once, she told journalists that though Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated in 1968, the event that struck her the most that year was the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.

“I can still feel the strong sense I had of remorse and regret that a brave people had been subdued,” she told a Stanford University newspaper in December 1983. She has even said she felt more comfortable in Moscow, given her intimate knowledge of the country and its people, than in any U.S. city.

Yet, despite her intimate knowledge of Russia and its history, it has been on Rice’s watch that Russian tanks have rolled once again toward the capital of a democratic state in the Caucasus. Analysts point to de facto annexation of parts of Georgia as the latest demonstration of the limits of American power, even in an age of U.S. military supremacy. There are other examples: the resignation last week of Pakistan’s leader, Pervez Musharraf, an administration ally; a Taliban resurgence in Afghanistan; a lack of sustained progress in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict whose resolution Rice and President Bush said would be the focus of their last two years in office; and a failure so far to pressure Iran to abandon nuclear enrichment.

But Rice never claimed to be an expert on the Middle East or Pakistan or China when President Bush named her national security adviser in December 2000. She knew Russia.

It is not clear, at this point, whether that knowledge somehow failed Rice during the current conflict or whether she lost a power struggle inside the administration.

She may have anticipated Russia’s violent reaction to moves by Georgia to reassert control over the breakaway regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. At the least, according to news reports, she warned the Georgian president, Mikheil Saakashvili, that if he provoked Russia, he should not count on American intervention.

But Vice President Dick Cheney and his aides were reported to have backed stronger support for Georgia, including delivering anti-aircraft missiles to the country.

Perhaps Rice’s message to Saakashvili was muddled by conflicting signals from Cheney’s side. Whatever the case, many of Rice’s friends and former administration colleagues would probably say the crisis might have been avoided — if only she had stayed true to her roots as a foreign policy realist. Realists believe primarily in power — as a measure of standing in the world; as a tool for getting things done; as a predictor of outcomes on the global stage.

In the first Bush presidency, Rice had been a hard-nosed realist. In the 2000 campaign, when she served as Gov. George W. Bush’s lead foreign policy adviser, realism guided their foreign policy blueprint. “Mr. Bush and his advisers intended to restore order — or, at least, predictability — to American foreign policy and, therefore, international relations by clearly laying out what was and what was not in the United States’ vital interests, and sticking to it.” In a seminal piece in Foreign Affairs in January 2000, she described a policy that “separates the important from the trivial” and wrote, “the Clinton administration has assiduously avoided implementing such an agenda. Instead, every issue has been taken on its own terms — crisis by crisis, day by day.”

But a new global order, supported by American strength and consistency, did not arise. Instead, Sept. 11, 2001, gave birth to an entirely different agenda, based not on realism, but the belief that America could change other countries’ internal politics. Liberal democracy in the Muslim Middle East would ultimately make America safe from Muslim extremists, the thinking went. If alienated young Arabs could voice their dissent freely at home, the appeal of extremism would wane.

Rice the realist became a leading voice of the so-called freedom agenda. The Sept. 11 attacks had shown her the limits of realism — neither traditional “interest” nor power had motivated the terrorists. But the freedom agenda has so far fallen short. In a number of countries, elections have led to extremist Islamist parties coming to power. Rice made headlines by publicly calling on allies like Egypt to democratize, but not much has changed in those countries’ internal politics.

Critics say that rather than laying out America’s interest or imposing a more orderly framework on international relations, American power and prestige have been largely devoted to mastering the situation in Iraq. In the meantime, they say, crises like the one in the Caucasus have erupted around the world on Rice’s watch.

Her legacy may yet come down to Russia — and whether she can draw on her understanding of the country to accomplish some diplomatic coup, whether in the Caucasus or, perhaps, Iran, where Russia’s influence is crucial.

Otherwise, critics say, Rice and the administration will have broken the cardinal rule of realism: leaving behind an America that is not only weaker than the one they found Jan. 20, 2001, but looks that way to the world, too.