Opinion

Over the Cut: Why Hillary looms as a dangerous choice for State

Over the Cut
Tom Halsted
Published: November 29, 2008

Next week President-elect Barack Obama is expected to name his national security team: Hillary Clinton for Secretary of State, incumbent Robert Gates for Defense Secretary, and retired Gen. James Jones for National Security Adviser.

While Gates' appointment is supposed to be only temporary, Obama's decision to choose Clinton as Secretary of State raises troubling questions.

For all her popularity — she walloped Obama in the Massachusetts primary 56 percent to 41 percent, winning in Gloucester by nearly the same convincing percentage margin, 55-43 — and her demonstrated confidence and skills as a communicator, can she help him create a new model for American foreign policy to match his ambitious plans to create a less militant, more cooperative approach to the world? Can the United States get past the my-way-or-the-highway attitude that has dominated American foreign policy for more than half a century? With economic hard times likely to continue, can we afford not to?

Boston University Professor Andrew Bacevich has written a terse, incisive analysis of the shortcomings of American power projection over many decades: "The Limits of Power." I suspect President-elect Obama has read it. I hope Hillary Clinton has too.

Bacevich — who will be a featured speaker at Gloucester's Cape Ann Forum next spring to discuss his book and the challenges facing President Obama — points to a "culture of exceptionalism," a conviction that America is and should be the dominant global power, as the underlying factor in modern American foreign policy, one that has grown from Cold War competition with the Soviet Union to the delusion that America has the right and moral authority to overthrow other governments if they do not meet our ideas of "democracy."

He is skeptical that President Obama will be able to do much to reverse the status quo, even if he does succeed in improving America's image abroad. He wrote his book before Obama had clinched the Democratic nomination and gone on to win the election, and of course before Clinton was named Secretary of State.

But he also wrote the book before the disastrous plunge in the global economy, which could provoke major changes in foreign policy. With the country in economic distress, with two ongoing wars further draining our coffers and increasing our indebtedness to others, we can neither afford to continue operating in the role of global emperor, nor should we wish to do so.

During his successful campaign for the presidency, Barack Obama called for new openness in foreign policy, for treating other nations as equals, and for reversing many other post-Cold War foreign and defense policies, not unique to the Bush-Cheney years, that have served to increase U.S. isolation and create new adversaries. What is most worrisome about the Clinton appointment is not just that she lacks foreign policy expertise (quite true; visiting eighty countries a decade and more ago for largely ceremonial functions does not qualify; by definition, said Obama campaign adviser Susan Rice, "there is no crisis to be dealt with or managed when you are first lady").

A greater concern, rather, is that, in the absence of any real diplomatic or negotiating experience, she will look for advice to people who will be comfortable with the same foreign policy model and promote the same policies that they produced in the 1990s. Her insistence on naming her deputies and other senior State Department appointees all but guarantees the re-establishment of a foreign policy bureaucracy most comfortable with the priorities and solutions of 8-16 years ago — ones that will not be appropriate for the years ahead.

In addition, she has never explained how her politically expedient Senate vote in 2002 in support of the Iraq war resolution could be reconciled with the National Intelligence Estimate that undermined Bush's war rationale.

The Bill Clinton years saw some foreign policy successes: an unpopular but necessary intervention in the Balkans; significant progress toward halting North Korea's nuclear weapons, some movement toward resolving the Arab-Israeli crisis; and helping broker peace in Northern Ireland.

But there were other, less successful Clinton foreign policy actions: he paid scant attention to arms control. He failed to follow up on Ronald Reagan's successful nuclear arms agreements of the 1980s to negotiate more extensive reductions in strategic weapons. And for nearly eight years he carried out a massive (but largely unnoted) bombing campaign in Iraq, which served only to strengthen the rule of Saddam Hussein and cause increased misery for the Iraqi people.

But his most notable failure was to ignore the opportunities presented by the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union to create a more cooperative relationship with Russia.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization was created in 1949 to deter an attack by the Soviet Union on Western Europe, a mission that ended with the fall of the Soviet Union. Clinton could have called for its abolition and replacement by a Europe-wide mechanism. Instead, he set out to expand the old NATO, bringing in new members from the former Soviet bloc, all but guaranteeing the icy state of US-Russian relations that exists today.

If Hillary Clinton staffs the State Department with the architects of such short-sighted initiatives of the Bill Clinton years, with men and women who embraced the culture of American exceptionalism and paved the way for the excesses of the Bush regime, the new Secretary of State will serve neither her president's or her country's best interests.

With her appointment to head the State Department, one can only hope that she will justify the confidence of her ardent supporters, prove wrong the misgivings of the skeptics and become an effective leader and team player as she helps Barack Obama remake the image and role of the United States in a world in turmoil.

Tom Halsted is a regular Times columnist.