HILLARY WAS A GREAT AMBASSADOR, NOT A GREAT SECRETARY OF STATE
Posted by John Cassidy
Having stopped off in a hundred and twelve countries during her four years as Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, in her last week in office, seems intent on visiting almost as many televisions studios. At the weekend, she did “60 Minutes” on CBS. Today, she will be on ABC, NBC, CNN, and Fox. Tomorrow, it’s the BBC. If you are a news producer at CNBC, Bloomberg, New York 1, or the Weather Channel, give the State Department a call. As far as I know, Thursday and Friday are still open.
O.K., O.K., all you Hillary fans. I’m just being flippant. We all know that once she decides to do something, she gives it her all, and this is probably just another case of the Wellesley-Yale standout overdoing things. And, perhaps, after playing the role of the dancing monkey to President Obama’s organ grinder during the interview with Steve Kroft, she is eager to speak for herself about her record, without the boss looking over her shoulder.
That would be understandable. Still, in view of all the publicity she is receiving, and her elevated approval rating—sixty nine per cent in the latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll—a nagging question remains: What has she really achieved?
During the joint “60 Minutes” interview, Obama said, “I think she will go down as one of the finest Secretary of States we’ve had.” But while he praised Hillary’s stamina, her professionalism, and her teamwork, the President was a bit short on specific achievements that could be put down to her efforts. Asked by Steve Kroft about the biggest foreign-policy successes of his first term, he mentioned ending the war in Iraq, drawing down U.S. forces in Afghanistan, and dismantling the leadership of Al Qaeda, adding, “That’s all a consequence of the great work that Hillary did and her team did, and the State Department did, in conjunction with our national-security team.”
Fair enough. But it’s no secret that the Administration’s policies on Iraq, Afghanistan, and counterterrorism were conceived and managed in the White House. In foreign-policy circles, the knock on Hillary is that, unlike some of her storied predecessors—John Quincy Adams, George C. Marshall, Dean Acheson, Henry Kissinger—she failed to carve out a historically significant role for herself. “There’s no question that Clinton has been terrifically energetic, as well as a loyal team player,” Stephen Walt, a professor of international relations at Harvard, wrote last July, shortly after a profile in the Times Magazine referred to Hillary as a “rock star diplomat.” “The problem, however, is that she’s hardly racked up any major achievements… She played little role in extricating us from Iraq, and it is hard to see her fingerprints on the U.S. approach to Afghanistan. She has done her best to smooth the troubled relationship with Pakistan, but anti-Americanism remains endemic in that country and it hardly looks like a success story at this point… She certainly helped get tougher sanctions on Iran, but the danger of war still looms and there’s been no breakthrough there either.”
Other experts agree. “She’s coming away with a stellar reputation that seems to have put her almost above criticism,” Aaron David Miller, a former diplomat peace negotiator, said to Paul Richter, of the Los Angeles Times. “But you can’t say that she’s really led on any of the big issues for this administration or made a major mark on high strategy.” A former diplomat who served in the Obama Administration told Richter, “If you go down the line, it’s tough to see what’s happened in world politics over the last four years that wouldn’t have happened without her. So, it’s tough to see how she gets into that category of truly great, transformational secretaries, like Acheson and Marshall.”
It’s hard to quibble with that assessment. Marshall gave his name to an economic-recovery plan for war-torn Europe. Acheson laid down the Cold War policy of containment and helped create NATO. Adams helped conceive the Monroe Doctrine, which defined Central and South America as part of the U.S. sphere of influence. Kissinger pioneered détente with the Soviets, instigated a rapprochement with the Chinese, and did much else besides (by no means all of it estimable). By contrast, Hillary’s signature achievements look like small beer. She was the public face of the U.S. response to the Arab Spring, which involved persuading Hosni Mubarak, the Egyptian President, to step aside peaceably, winning international support for U.S. military intervention in Libya, and resisting international pressure for similar action in Syria. How these policies will ultimately play out, it is too early to say.
The Benghazi killings and their aftermath, for which she has taken responsibility while insisting that more lowly officials made the key decisions, or pieces of indecision, were the most controversial incident of her tenure. The most serious gap in her record, and the record of the Administration, is any serious attempt to tackle the Arab-Israeli conflict—but there, too, the White House held sway. The fact that Hillary didn’t bring peace to Palestine, or redefine the relationship between the United States and China, doesn’t mean she was a failure. Far from it. In carrying out the task she was allotted, she was a big success. It’s just that the nature of her job was very different from the ones that Acheson and Kissinger held. In reality, she wasn’t directing American foreign policy, or anything close. At times, she wasn’t even the Administration’s chief troubleshooter—a niche occupied by a series of special envoys: Richard Holbrooke, George Mitchell, and Dennis Ross. The post she really had was that of U.S. Ambassador to the world, and she made a pretty good fist of it.
In the “60 Minutes” interview, President Obama was surprisingly explicit about how he conceived of Hillary’s role. Referring back to late 2008, he said, “She also was already a world figure. And I thought that somebody stepping into that position of Secretary of State at a time when, keep in mind, we were still in Iraq. Afghanistan was still an enormous challenge. There was great uncertainty in terms of how we would reset our relations around the world. To have somebody who could serve as that effective ambassador in her own right without having to earn her stripes, so to speak, on the international stage, I thought would be hugely important.”
As a globe-trotting representative for the United States, Hillary has had few equals. According to the Travels With the Secretary page on the State Department’s Web site, she has logged 2081.21 hours on the road—not 2081.20, mind you—and clocked up 956,733 miles on the federal frequent-flyer program. In total, she was traveling for four hundred and one days—more than thirteen months—enduring hundreds of long flights and sitting through countless boring meetings. How far this crazy schedule contributed to her recent illness can only be speculated upon—after contracting a stomach virus in Europe, she fell and suffered a concussion that led to a blood clot—but nobody can ever fault her work ethic.
As well as adhering to Woody Allen’s motto that ninety per cent of life is showing up, she also delivered a distinctive message. While it hardly added up to a full-blown “Clinton Doctrine,” it did present a different and more inclusive image of America than the one conveyed by G.I. fatigues and drone missile attacks. Throughout her tenure, she was a vocal proponent of female empowerment, gay rights, and equitable economic development in poor countries. She also defended freedom of expression. Perhaps her most memorable moment was helping to secure the freedom of Chen Guangcheng, the Chinese dissident, who is now a scholar in residence at N.Y.U.
Doubtless, these actions by themselves, were insufficient to drastically change how the world sees the United States. According to polling data from the Pew Foundation, since 2009, shortly after Obama’s election, the number of people holding favorable views of the United States has fallen modestly in China, Europe, and Muslim countries. Even now, though, the Pew survey shows, America is more popular in Europe and Asia than it was at the end of the Bush Administration. (In Pakistan and parts of the Middle East it is less popular.)
Hillary didn’t create these trends, but she did her part for Team U.S.A. As a “rock star diplomat,” she toured tirelessly and put on good shows. Since that’s what she was hired to do, it seems a bit unfair to judge her too harshly.
Photograph: Theron Kirkman-Pool/Getty
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