Hillary Clinton [/caption]
In a recent front-page profile, the International Herald Tribune (IHT) meditated on Hillary Clinton and her prospective legacy as she prepares to step down as U.S. Secretary of State. It is less journalism than homage to a Washington insider who, the article itself fairly states, is distinguished more for her celebrity than for her diplomatic record.
When Clinton leaves office in January, according to the IHT’s account, she will do so as “a rock star” and a “global brand” who remade U.S. foreign policy “in her own fashion, shaped as much by her own personality as by a guiding philosophy.” The author strains, however, to match these claims with substance. That’s not surprising, given Clinton’s brief. Like her predecessor, Condoleezza Rice, Clinton’s mandate was to preserve an obsolete and costly imperial order rather than adjust prudently to the demands of an emerging multipolar world.
At Clinton’s urging, President Obama helped destroy a dictator in Libya while doing nothing to end the killing in Syria; The State Department supported, if belatedly, the revolt that deposed Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak but its response to the smothering of that country’s infant democracy by military elites has been scandalously weak; Clinton was party to the successful liquidation of Osama bin Laden, but by failing to resolve the generational crisis in Palestine, a key motivation behind Bin Laden’s 9/11 terrorist attacks, she helped only to remove the symptom of a disease rather than the pathology itself.
Americans dare to do great things, President Kennedy said when announcing plans to put a man on the moon, “not because it is easy, but because it is hard.” Clinton’s “guiding philosophy” as laid out by the IHT appears to demand just the opposite. The article applauds the Secretary for her appeals to the Chinese government to replace dangerous, environmentally harmful cooking stoves with safe, clean-burning ones. She has invested considerable diplomatic capital in the initiative, which if fully prosecuted could save millions of lives while retarding carbon emissions. It is a laudable goal, but given the challenges that clutter her beat, one worthy more of a capable functionary that America’s top diplomat.
Clinton implied in the profile that a generation of waging war in the Middle East has placed an intolerable burden on the country’s financial and human resources. “The United States,” she said, can’t solve all the problems in the world.” But she also explicitly reaffirmed America’s security obligations to NATO and its Far Eastern allies and, implicitly at least, the Pentagon mission to control the world’s air corridors, sea lanes and land-bridges. By sustaining the country’s imperial writ rather than transferring it to rich allies in Europe and Asia, she revealed a crisis of the imagination that is endemic to the national security state of which she is only a small part. Twenty years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, America’s global military presence has only proliferated, unique as much by its enormous cost and limitations - with regard to the Syria crisis, for example - as by its raw power. Nothing in the IHT article suggested Clinton appreciates the anachronisms of Washington’s militarized foreign policy, to say nothing of the case for demobilization.
The profile concludes by indulging in a favorite Washington parlor sport: gossip over what Clinton will do next. Having punched her ticket at the State Department, so goes informed speculation, she has neatly positioned herself for a presidential bid in 2016. Such an outcome would complete a narrative arc intrinsic to Washington, where reacting to events rather than shaping them is just anther way of marking time.
