"When your barn is burning you don't sit there and have wine and cheese in the house. You put out the fire," said Ivan Eland, author of "The Empire Has No Clothes: U.S. Foreign Policy Exposed."
The U.S. invasion of Iraq and its chaotic aftermath will dominate the history books, predicted Ivo Daalder, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.
"Iraq is a blemish which overshadows everything. Whatever positive legacy will be negated by the fact that Iraq is a war that this administration started," he said.
But former Rice adviser Philip Zelikow said that while Iraq might cast a shadow he believed it was too early to make judgments on a legacy.
"It could be a much more complex story a year from now," said Zelikow, who was Rice's counselor until January when he returned to teaching at the University of Virginia.
He listed what he saw as Rice's achievements so far -- improved ties with western European allies and better cooperation with China on issues ranging from Darfur to punishing Iran over its nuclear plans.
On the debit side, he put the Iraq war, a perception that the United States had overreached and the failure to pay enough attention to global warming.
"Now the administration is turning that around, but we could be justly criticized for the tardiness of it," he said.
Zelikow pointed to China as a success, but others said Iraq had dominated the foreign policy agenda to the detriment of places like China and Africa.
"The true tragedy of Iraq, aside from the fact that it has destroyed the U.S. reputation in the world, is that the world has not stood still," said David Rothkopf of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Historian Allan Lichtman from American University in Washington said assessments change over time, but he predicted Iraq would be to the Bush administration what Vietnam was to President Lyndon Johnson's legacy.
"Bush and his team may be more rebuked by history as Bush and his advisers had the Vietnam example in front of them and yet they still blundered," he said.
