Hillary Clinton meets with Israeli President Shimon Peres in Jerusalem [/caption]
About the only principal of physics I remember from school is the third law of thermodynamics, which holds that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Exactly how this works in the natural world is beyond me, but one can see it applied in the netherworld of diplomacy generally, and by America’s top diplomat in particular.
Early in her service as U.S. secretary of state, Hillary Clinton forcefully and openly called for Israel to stop building Jewish settlements on Palestinian land. It was extraordinary opening gambit in the Obama administration’s bid to restart a failed peace process and it failed miserably. Chastened publicly, the Israelis dug in their heels, sat back, and allowed their attack dogs in Congress to bash the White House. Needless to say, the atrocities of Israeli occupation of the West Bank and its quarantine of Gaza is alive and well.
This week, on a tour of Asia, Clinton indulged in another round of high-profile hectoring. On a historic visit to democratic Mongolia, she celebrated her host’s liberal reforms, which she said “stand in stark contrast to those governments that … work around the clock to restrict people’s access to ideas and information, to imprison them for expressing their views, to usurp the rights of citizens to choose their leaders, to govern without accountability.”
No points for guessing to whom Madam Secretary was referring. If her remarks were conveyed as sincere advice to the Chinese government, rather than to gratuitously annoy it, they should have been advanced privately. Instead, they appear to have chilled Washington’s Asian allies who, having demurely supported America’s increasingly militarized relations with a critical trading partner, a key exporter of capital, and an emerging regional hegemon, are starting to have second thoughts.
Only a day before her stop in Ulan Bator, The New York Times noted how the White House has belatedly come to understand that it has “overemphasized the military component of its new focus on Asia, setting up more of a confrontation with China than some countries felt comfortable with.” According to a senior Southeast Asian diplomat quoted in the Times story, “No one wants to choose sides” between China and the United States. “There is a nervousness that the two of them shouldn’t get into a fight.”
Of course, Clinton’s instincts, however motivated and informed, are spot on. Just as she was right to demand a settlement freeze in the West Bank as a vital step towards the creation of an independent Palestine, a core U.S. interest in the Middle East, she is correct that Beijing’s top-down, autocratic model for economic development is threatening diminishing returns, particularly in the form of a middle income trap. Public browbeating, however, is likely to be as effective in persuading the Chinese leadership to dismantle its scaffolding of entitlement as it was in forcing the Likud Party to negotiate in good faith with the Palestinians by relinquishing the dream of Eretz Yisrael once and for all.
Clinton is a product of her times, when America lorded over its alliances and relationships with impunity. In an increasingly multipolar world, however, Washington’s foreign policy elites will have to think less like headmasters and more like physicists.
