January 8, 2013--Hillary Report Card

Perhaps slowed by her blood clot, the talk is still fast and furious about Hillary and the 2016 election. It is said the Democratic nomination is hers for the asking and maybe that's even true for the presidency itself.

I feel certain that if her health allows she will run in four years. How can she not, having such a great chance to really make history? Considering that more than half the population is female, it would be an even bigger deal than Obama's election if Hillary were to win it all.

Not much discussed is what kind of Secretary of State she has been. Actually, it is almost universally agreed that she has been a very effective one, perhaps even an historic one. Not because of her gender (she is the third women to serve as Secretary), but because of her accomplishments. High on the list of evidence is how tirelessly she has worked and how many miles she has flown on her visits to more than 120 countries. Nearly a million miles in less than four years.

There is no doubt that she has worked herself, literally, nearly to death; but, objectively (if that is possible about anything political or Clintonian), how successful has she been in this changing, tumultuous world?

A good source for an assessment is a series of mini-essays by a half dozen or so bipartisan foreign policy experts assembled last summer by Foreign Policy magazine. Heavy-hitters such as David Ignatius, associate editor and columnist for the Washington Post; Ken Adelman, former director of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency; James Dobbins, former ambassador to the European Union: and Martin Indyk, Director of the Foreign Policy Program at the Brookings Institute and former ambassador to israel.

Here is an excerpt from what Indyk wrote. To me it is an excellent summary of her incumbency:

Shimon Peres, Israel's only remaining statesman, had a penetrating insight last week when he spoke at a Brookings event about Hillary Clinton's tenure as secretary of state.  He noted that all her predecessors had to deal with international relations, but Clinton has to deal with "global responsibility." Peres observed that we live in a world that has a global economy without global government and Clinton has been filling the gap by constantly engaging with people as well as governments with her passionate commitment to improving the world, one trip at a time. 

In "Head of State" (FP Magazine, July/August 2012) Susan Glasser captures well these peripatetic requirements of the first global secretary of state and the impressive way that Clinton handles them. It accounts for her popularity at home and abroad, in contrast with her president's standing in both arenas. She is after all "the principal implementer" of policies decided in the White House, as Denis McDonough, Obama's deputy national security advisor, describes her in Glasser's article. But Clinton is turning up for a president who prefers to remain as aloof as possible in a world that demands engagement. At a time when the United States can no longer dictate the way and has to try to lead by consensus, it's the secretary of state who is out there working at it every day. 

It paid off in Libya, and it will eventually pay off in Syria, where Obama delegated the heavy lifting to her from the outset while the political dictates of his re-election campaign left her without the tools of coercive diplomacy. Her unenviable task is to split the Russians from Bashar al-Assad using the unlikely combination of diplomatic deftness, a ringmaster's whip, and a verbal sledgehammer. 

The "pivot" to East Asia will probably be Obama's most lasting strategic achievement, as we argue in Bending History: Barack Obama's Foreign Policy (written with my colleagues Kenneth Lieberthal and Michael O'Hanlon). But as Glasser points out, it is Clinton's too. She laid the groundwork, built the relationships, and developed the complex architecture of the new strategy -- and she turned up at that pivotal moment in Vietnam in July 2010 to declare the U.S. commitment to the region. 

Of course, there were failures too. Diplomacy is really hard, especially these days.  Clinton so wanted to finish the job of Middle East peacemaking that her husband had been unable to do at the end of his presidency. Skeptical of Benjamin Netanyahu's intentions, she used her envoy George Mitchell to test the waters. But in the summer of 2010 she weighed in and by the fall she was spending eight hours straight with Bibi negotiating an agreement to extend the settlement moratorium that might have given the peace negotiations more time to succeed. We will never know what she might have achieved. The White House pulled the plug on that agreement and then the president walked away from the larger effort, leaving his "implementer" without a "decider."