We do have house guests coming over the next several months and kids and grandchildren coming to Tybee but at least it is here.
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Amy (no. 2 daughter) and husband Steve celebrate 30 years .PNG)
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Blake's reaction to being told he was three months old.
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Today Obama and his wrecking crew at The EPA, announced new rules which are designed to cripple the coal industry, throw untold thousands out of work and hurt our economy all because Obama wants us to have clean air and needs to pay homage to the radical greens in his party.
I do not know anyone in his right mind who does not want clean air but the better way to achieve this is to spend money on research that would eliminate emissions from coal. We could pay for this by firing half the bureaucrats in The EPA, close the Dept of Education and probably get rid of several hundred agencies and devote some of that money to a variety of basic research, ie. cancer research, coal emissions etc..
Meanwhile, whatever benefit we derive from wrecking our economy per Obama's methods China and most of the rest of the world continue to pollute.
Sure, we need to lead and hope others will follow but Obama's plan is just one more ideologically dangerous approach.
The man is the most incompetent and dangerous executive ever to preside in the Oval Office and that says a lot because we have had our share of losers!
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If you are interested in what sound physicians propose to resolve our health care mess then go to: http://docs4patientcare.org
My son has a friend who is a consultant to insurance companies and his take is that the Obamacare's demand that insurance companies spend 85% of their income on health care will lead them to acquire hospitals and eventually your health care insurance will be with a company that owns hospitals and the policy cost will be determined by the quality of the hospital etc.
He also believes, this way the insurance companies will finally have an opportunity to reduce health care costs since they will control the medical delivering source and eventually health care costs will begin to decline.
Time will tell.
If he is correct, it will be interesting to see what various insurance companies pay for health care companies such as United Healthcare etc.
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Hilarious blasphemy: http://www.youtube.com/embed/-u6XXOELs_s?feature=player_embedded
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A supporting view that trading American soldiers for Jihad terrorists is not a good idea and Obama's decision to change this policy could have serious repercussions but, then, what's new. Virtually everything Obama does has such.. (See 1 and 1a below.)
Another supporting view that weakness and America's decline, in the eyes of the world, is not a hopeful sign.
China's recent bellicosity at an Asian meeting of the world's top defense leaders is just the beginning of how wrong headed and dangerous Obama's policies are.
Will Putin's Ukraine actions serve as a wake up call or are Americans so tired of being number one that we are going to impose on ourselves, by default, a diminishing role and influence in world affairs? (See 1b below.)
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Reforms can occur when people rise up and send the message they have had enough. (See 2 below.)
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Walter Russell Mead assess Hillary Clinton as Sec of State.
Conclusion: not the best, not the worst - a mixed bag! (See 3 below.)
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Dick
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1) Trading With the Taliban
Other Americans will pay the price for the terrorist hostage swap.
The return of Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl from the clutches of the Taliban is cause for relief for his family and all Americans. But there's no denying that the price of his recovery is high. The Obama Administration swapped five of the hardest cases at Guantanamo in a fashion that will encourage terrorists to kidnap more Americans to win the release of more prisoners.
This does not mean we agree with Republicans who say President Obama broke the law by failing to inform Congress 30 days in advance of the prisoner release from Gitmo. Presidential power is never stronger than in the role of Commander in Chief. Congress did not attempt to use its comparably strong power of the purse. Instead Congress's Gitmo language sought bluntly to constrain Mr. Obama's wartime decision-making.
Private First Class(Pfc) Bowe Bergdahl, before his capture by the Taliban in Afghanistan. Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
This is unconstitutional, as the President averred in a statement at the time he signed the bill. That Mr. Obama—and his liberal friends—denounced George W. Bush for similar signing statements is one more antiterror irony of this Presidency. Readers should watch to see if the same politicians and newspapers that assailed Mr. Bush are more forgiving when a Democratic President is using the same war powers.
The real problem with this prisoner swap is the message it conveys about American weakness, especially in the context of Mr. Obama's retreat from Afghanistan and elsewhere. The world's bad actors have long perceived that the U.S. doesn't negotiate over hostages, in contrast to, say, France or Italy. This has made American soldiers and civilians less promising targets.
The Taliban swap will change that perception and increase the likelihood that more Americans will be grabbed, not least in Kabul. Don't be surprised if 9/11 plotter Khalid Sheikh Mohammed shows up on a list of future prisoner-swap demands.
It's true that Israel has also traded Palestinian prisoners, sometimes hundreds at a time, for its captive soldiers. One difference is that Israel conducts those swaps in the context of an otherwise tough antiterror policy. This includes unilateral targeting of Hamas and periodic military operations against terrorist havens. No one doubts Israeli resolve.
The same isn't true of the Obama Administration, and the Taliban swap will only underscore the perception that the U.S. is tiring of its antiterror fight. Mr. Obama announced last week that the U.S. will withdraw all of its military forces from Afghanistan by the end of 2016, no matter the facts on the ground. The U.S. hasn't used drones to hit a terror target in Pakistan since December. The prisoner swap sends a similar message of retreat.
All the more so because the five freed Taliban killers are likely to return to the battlefield. Though they will supposedly have to stay in Qatar for a year, that means little to men who have been in Gitmo for a decade. They'll probably spend their year boning up on Taliban and al Qaeda war plans.
The reason these five weren't previously released is because they were deemed "high" security risks by the Joint Task Force Guantanamo. They are the most senior Taliban commanders remaining in U.S. custody, and even the Obama Administration approved them for indefinite detention.
Two of them— Mohammed Fazi and Mullah Norullah Nori—were present at the fortress in northern Afghanistan in November 2001 when Taliban prisoners revolted against their captors in the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance. CIA operative Johnny Michael Spann died in the melee, the first American casualty of the Afghan war. The duo are also suspected of war crimes for the mass murder of Shiites in Afghanistan before September 11.
Fazi was a close adviser to Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader who has escaped U.S. capture and is believed to be living near Quetta in Pakistan. Soon they will be back in business plotting new attacks.
The release of these Taliban killers also undercuts U.S. complaints against the Afghan government's release of its dangerous Taliban captives. U.S. officials rightly objected to President Hamid Karzai's February release of 65 prisoners after the U.S. military turned them over to Afghan control. The Afghan military and police who will have to fight these five Taliban also have reason to be upset.
Mr. Obama said in a statement on Saturday that he hopes the prisoner swap will lead to a resumption of peace talks with the Taliban, but this reverses the usual order. In Vietnam and most other wars, the prisoner releases were part of a peace deal. In this case the Taliban can continue the war with their ranks enhanced.
If the Taliban now negotiate, it won't be because Mr. Obama's Guantanamo release has changed their intentions. It will be because they sense they can gain more by talking than by fighting. More likely, the success of their hostage-taking and Mr. Obama's 2016 withdrawal pledge will convince them that they can keep fighting while they talk and still win.
1a) Another law broken by our President and the release of five terrorist!
Bergdahl Before Capture: I'm Ashamed to Be American
By Greg Richter and Melanie Batley
With Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl safe after five years as a prisoner of the Taliban, the circumstances of his capture are getting a fresh look.
Bergdahl was freed on Saturday in exchange for five Guantanamo Bay detainees. His release was celebrated by Washington politicians, including Republicans, but many felt the United States had broken its longstanding policy of not negotiating with terrorists.
Bergdahl walked away from his base, reportedly without a weapon, in June 2009 and was captured by the Taliban-affiliated Haqqani network.
At least six soldiers were killed in subsequent searches for Bergdahl. Moreover, CNN reported that soldiers in his platoon said attacks seemed to increase against the United States in Paktika Province in the days and weeks following his disappearance.
Richard Grenell, a former U.S. spokesman to the United Nations and partner with Capitol Media Partners, told Newsmax that numerous soldiers who served with Bowe reached out to him to express their anger with the decision.
"I have spoken with several of Bowe Bergdahl's platoon mates and they are united in their view that Bowe walked away from them and that many lives were risked and some lost in looking for a guy who willingly left the team," Grenell said.
Former combat medic Javier Ortiz told The Washington Post, "Regardless of what you learned while being there, we still have a responsibility to the men to our left and right. It’s terrible, what he did.
"There were military assets required . . . but the problem came of his own accord."
Another unidentified soldier said, "The unit completely changed its operational posture because of something that was selfish, not because a soldier was captured in combat."
CNN's Jake Tapper, who embedded with and wrote a book about soldiers in Afghanistan,also found much anger.
"I was pissed off then and I am even more so now with everything going on," said former Sgt. Matt Vierkant, a member of Bergdahl's platoon. "Bowe Bergdahl deserted during a time of war and his fellow Americans lost their lives searching for him."
Bergdahl's former squad leader, Greg Leatherman told CNN: "I'm pleased to see him returned safely. From experience I hope that he receives adequate reintegration counseling. I believe that an investigation should take place as soon as healthcare professionals deem him fit to endure one."
According to a 2012 report in Rolling Stone, Bergdahl, now 28, had become disillusioned with his role in America's longest war, sending emails to his parents prior to his disappearance.
"The future is too good to waste on lies. And life is way too short to care for the damnation of others, as well as to spend it helping fools with their ideas that are wrong," Bergdahl reportedly wrote his father. "I have seen their ideas and I am ashamed to even be american (sic). The horror of the self-righteous arrogance that they thrive in. It is all revolting."
He also attacked the army saying it cut down people "for being honest," and rewarded sycophants. "The title of US soldier is just the lie of fools," he wrote. "I am sorry for everything here.
"These people need help, yet what they get is the most conceited country in the world telling them that they are nothing and that they are stupid, that they have no idea how to live.
"We don't even care when we hear each other talk about running their children down in the dirt streets with our armored trucks," he continued. "We make fun of them in front of their faces and laugh at them for not understanding we are insulting them."
His father, Bob, told him in an email, "In matters of life and death, and especially at war, it is never safe to ignore ones' conscience. Ethics demands obedience to our conscience. It is best to also have a systematic oral defense of what our conscience demands. Stand with like-minded men when possible."
Rolling Stone reported that Bergdahl even approached a superior, "If I were to leave the base, would it cause problems if I took my sensitive equipment?" He was told it would, so he left his gun and took just water, a knife, a camera, and his diary and "slipped off the outpost."
Specialist Jason Fry told Rolling Stone that even before leaving for Afghanistan Bergdahl told him, "If this deployment is lame, I'm just going to walk off into the mountains of Pakistan."
Bergdahl left his camp close to the Pakistani border, on June 30, 2009
Bergdahl — who was promoted from private first class to sergeant during his time in captivity — is said to have become increasingly disillusioned with the war after a close friend was killed in the war in Afghanistan.
Though the Obama administration has publicly embraced Bergdahl, one former comrade called on Facebook for him to be executed as a deserter, according to the New York Post.
Bergdahl spent his first night of freedom at the military hospital at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan before being flown to Germany.
He will return to the United States to the Medical Center at Fort Sam Houston in Texas,reported the Christian Science Monitor.
The five Taliban prisoners released by the United States into the custody of Qatar were described by Sen. John McCain Sunday as the "hardest of the hardcore." Human Rights Watch has pressed for one of them, Mohammed Fazl, to be prosecuted for war crimes for allegedly presiding over a mass killing of Shiite Muslims in Afghanistan.
"It is disturbing that these individuals would have the ability to re-enter the fight, and they are big, high-level people, possibly responsibly for the deaths of thousands," McCain said on "Face the Nation."
The government of Qatar negotiated the deal for the prisoner exchange and is supposed to keep the five Taliban members from leaving the country for at least a year.
"I think the big issue here is what’s going to happen to these five individuals," McCain said. "If they re-enter the fight, then it is going to put American lives at risk, and none of us want that to happen."
1b) Putin Did Americans a Favor
Ukraine is a wake-up call for what a post-American world would look like.
By Walter Russell Mead
President Obama last week outlined his foreign-policy vision for the graduating students at the U.S. Military Academy, but a more instructive lesson in foreign affairs has been offered in recent months by Russian President Vladimir Putin. The U.S. may ultimately owe Mr. Putin a debt of gratitude for the reality check. His attack on Ukraine and his continuing efforts to destabilize its government are invaluable reminders of both the intractable nature of America's foreign-policy challenges and the potentially terrible consequences for the world if the U.S. fails the test.
As in their daily lives, Americans like both convenience and comfort in foreign policy. We want a foreign policy that is easy to operate and makes us feel good about ourselves and the state of the world. Analysts who say we can have the kind of world we want without doing any heavy lifting are guaranteed a warm reception; woe betide those who say we can't have it all.
American elites are as susceptible to this national—and bipartisan—predilection as anyone else. Liberal and conservative policy makers have consistently underestimated the complexities involved in building the liberal world order sought by every president in the post-Cold War era.
Vladimir Putin Zuma Press
For the liberal wing of the foreign-policy establishment, the most consequential piece of wishful thinking may be the idea that the core elements of the American world order (a liberal economic system, great-power peace and the global primacy of liberal and humanitarian values) can flourish even as U.S. power declines. Our liberal political and economic values are so luminously true and so universally popular, the thinking goes, that emerging powers like the Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa—the Brics—and established powers like the European Union will take up the slack.
For liberal internationalists and conservative neo-isolationists, this is an attractive idea. Many analysts deem it self-evident that America's relative power in the international system is fated to decline in the 21st century. As countries like India and China continue to develop, we're told, the U.S. cannot hang on forever at the top of the global pecking order. As other countries build their military power and global presence, the U.S. would have to work much harder and spend much more to keep up. Not many Democratic policy wonks want to take that message to their political base.
But if we assume, as these liberals do, that America can rely on the kindness of strangers, the future doesn't look so grim. We can cut defense spending, trim commitments abroad and still feel good about ourselves. We can gradually decline without feeling that we are shirking our duties or endangering our security. The Pax Americana will survive American might; the rule of law will flourish as our power wanes.
Yet Mr. Putin has now thrown a big stink bomb into the middle of the "peaceful and safe decline" celebration. His move on Ukraine sends a strong message: American values and interests are unlikely to thrive if American power is in eclipse. The Pax Americana and the hope of a liberal and humane global system still rest on the weary shoulders of Uncle Sam.
For those willing to see, the signs of what a post-American world would look like are easy to discern. We can look at Bashar Assad's murderous campaign in Syria to see how Iran thinks power should be used. To see what Saudi Arabia thinks about human rights and liberal values, follow events in Egypt and Pakistan. China would become more aggressive in a post-American world, and the chances of Sino-Japanese conflict would increase. South Africa's coldly pragmatic approach to the Mugabe dictatorship in neighboring Zimbabwe speaks eloquently about the prospects of democracy if America diminishes as a presence in Africa. In Europe, only power keeps or can keep Russia from rebuilding its old empire and pushing forward into the former Warsaw Pact states.
Those who think American decline is inevitable must face a tragic truth: The eclipse of American power will be a disaster for our economic interests, for the values we cherish, and in the end for our security at home. What stability, peace and legality now exist in the international system are there because the U.S., with important help from allies and partners, made great sacrifices to build and secure them. The imposing edifice of the liberal world system would soon fall into ruin without that foundation.
The current bout of American weakness, a wobble that has destabilized Europe, the Middle East and Asia, is less about long-term historical decline than about a specific political moment. After two disappointing presidencies, the public is weary of foreign entanglements and deeply skeptical about the ability of either liberal or conservative experts to manage complicated overseas interventions. A foreign-policy establishment that has not exactly covered itself in glory over three presidential terms has lost much of the credibility needed to lead the American people into a new and constructive era.
But thanks to Vladimir Putin and others, Americans are beginning to discover how ugly the world can get when the U.S. takes a breather. In the run-up to elections this fall and in 2016, voters may want to pay close attention to what aspiring candidates have to say about America's role in the world. Freedom and peace world-wide still depend on American energy and engagement.
Mr. Mead is a professor of foreign affairs and humanities at Bard College and editor at large of the American Interest.
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2) The New War Between the States
As businesses and residents vote with their feet, low-tax states like Texas are winning.
Wealth and people are moving in America, from places where local policies inhibit economic growth to places where the tax and regulatory climate is sunnier.
2) The New War Between the States
As businesses and residents vote with their feet, low-tax states like Texas are winning.
Wealth and people are moving in America, from places where local policies inhibit economic growth to places where the tax and regulatory climate is sunnier.
The numbers are clear. Between 1995 and 2010 over $2 trillion in adjusted gross income moved between the states. That’s the equivalent of the GDP of California, the ninth largest GDP in the world. Some of the movement might be due to weather — that helps to explain some of Florida’s $86.4 billion gain and New York’s $58.6 billion loss. But we can attribute a great deal to the fact that capital flows to where it is best treated. Travis Brown, author of the new book How Money Walks, reports that the nine states without a personal income tax gained $146 billion in new wealth while the nine states with the highest income tax rates lost $107 billion.
States are now competing for wealth transfers like never before. In New Jersey, Governor Chris Christie used a recent Wall Street Journal forum toslam neighboring New York as going in the “wrong direction” and to urge residents of the Empire State to move to his home turf. “You see taxes being increased there,” Christie told the audience of CEOs. “You have a new mayor in New York who is aggressively talking about increasing taxes in New York City. While I feel badly for New Yorkers, come to New Jersey."
“Connecticut next year will probably elect a new governor. When it does, Connecticut once again will be the place people want to be in the Northeast.”
Of course, most New Yorkers who will move homes or businesses will leapfrog their neighboring states, which are still much more highly taxed and anti-business than those in the South and West. The Census Bureau reports that Raleigh, Austin, Las Vegas, Orlando, Charlotte, Phoenix, Houston, San Antonio, and Dallas were among the ten fastest-growing metro areas last year.
Metro areas that lost the most population included Cleveland, Detroit, Buffalo, Providence, and Rochester, all firmly under the control of liberal politicians. Indeed, America’s major cities are turning more Democratic than ever. Take Texas, where every statewide officeholder is Republican but all the major cities from Dallas to Houston to San Antonio have Democratic mayors.
But even cities with liberal leadership benefit from statewide policies that increase incentives for job creation. Many states have right-to-work laws that make it illegal to require workers to join a union and pay dues — dues that overwhelmingly fuel the election of liberal politicians. Right-to-work laws are a powerful business-recruiting tool — so much so that even traditionally pro-union Midwestern states such as Michigan and Indiana have recently adopted them. By contrast, many states where unions hold sway are passing super-minimum-wage laws that price low-income workers out of the job market.
Union-dominated states are sinking further into economic stagnation as Democratic politicians increasingly dominate the local political climate. In 2012, California Democrats won a supermajority in both houses of the legislature and proceeded to accelerate a tax and spending spree that has been ongoing for two decades. For example, California now has the nation’s top state income-tax rate, at 13.3 percent.
Those kind of policies have consequences. The Manhattan Institute released a report in 2012 that found that since 1990, California had lost nearly 3.4 million residents to other states with lower tax rates. Over the last decade, an average of 225,000 residents left the state each year. The Manhattan Institute concluded:
States that have gained the most at California’s expense are rated as having better business climates. The data suggest that many cost drivers — taxes, regulations, the high price of housing and commercial real estate, costly electricity, union power and high labor costs — are prompting businesses to locate outside California, thus helping to drive the exodus.
The gulf separating growth-friendly states and “progressive” states is likely only to widen in the future. In a new report, the American Legislative Exchange Council notes that 18 states cut taxes within the last year and a half, but at the same time, slow-growth Illinois, Maryland, Connecticut, and Minnesota all raised their income taxes.
Economists Steve Moore and Art Laffer predict that within the next ten years, a half dozen Southern states will completely eliminate their income taxes. “This would mean that the region stretching from Florida through Texas and Louisiana could become a vast state income-tax-free zone,” they write. Florida, Texas, and Tennessee already have no income tax; and, spurred by their example, Republican governors in North Carolina and Louisiana are publicly proclaiming their goal is to join them. Other states are catching the fever. Kansas governor Sam Brownback vows to end his state’s income tax, and neighboring GOP governor Mary Fallin of Oklahoma says she wants to do the same.
The U.S. is swiftly becoming a tale of two nations. States that are following the Reagan model of low taxes and incentives are booming while states that are opting for the Obama model of wealth redistribution and European welfare-state economics are stagnating.
Some say the competition between them is unfair. “The blue states now have aging infrastructures, large pensions to pay, and entrenched trade unions,” Chicago businessman Kevin Gallagher told me. “The competitive advantage that most of the red states have is that they are a blank page and they don’t have the obligations the blue states have.”
True enough. But even states in a collectivist ditch have shown the ability to dig out of it. “They said we couldn’t reform a state that pioneered the Progressive Era’s policies and saw the nation’s largest public-employee union founded in Madison,” Wisconsin governor Scott Walker told me last month. “But we dared to try, and we succeeded. Now you can tell our reforms are working because our opponents refuse to pledge to roll them back. Any state can reform itself if the people decide they’ve had enough.”
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3) Was Hillary Clinton a good secretary of state?
Walter Russell Mead is the James Clarke Chace professor of foreign affairs at Bard College and editor at large of the American Interest. He is the author of “Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World.”
A forthcoming memoir, speculation about a presidential run, enemies stoking scandal, friends protecting Brand Hillary — it’s business as usual in Clinton World. And with the publication of “Hard Choices,” the fight over Hillary Rodham Clinton’s years as secretary of state is likely to grow more heated and polarizing than State Department post-mortems usually get.
So how does one rate the performance of Madame Secretary? The conventional indicators — landmark treaties, a new doctrine, signature deals — are actually poor guides to assessing the caliber of American diplomats. Just as the best lawyers aren’t the ones with the most famous courthouse victories but those who quietly keep their clients out of trouble and litigation, belt-notching in diplomacy has led presidents and secretaries of state into trouble. When American diplomats restlessly roam land and sea, desperate for that Nobel-worthy moment, the national interest is rarely served.
Remember that secretaries of state don’t control U.S. foreign policy. Clinton wasn’t following her own grand strategy when she reigned in Foggy Bottom; her job was to implement President Obama’s ideas. To make a fair and useful assessment of Clinton’s record in office, one must consider some complicated questions:
How did Clinton understand the interplay of America’s power, its interests, its resources and its values? Was she able to translate that vision into policies that won enough support throughout the government to be carried out? Was she able to gain or keep the president’s confidence, and was the State Department under her leadership able to hold its own in the bureaucratic battles of the day? To the extent that her policy ideas were adopted, how effective were they? How well did she manage on the inevitable occasions when things went horribly wrong?
The worldview
Clinton’s approach to the intersection of U.S. power, interests, resources and values revolves around two big American ideas.
First, Clinton is what I call a Hamiltonian, believing that America’s interests are best served by an adaptation of traditional British strategies: sea power, commercial expansion and a focus on strategic theaters in world politics. She thinks that Asia is where America’s interests are most vitally engaged for the long term, and she consistently argued for a greater focus on the region in our foreign policy. The pursuit of a balance of power in Asia will naturally focus on China, but Clinton is a realist who believes that the United States and China can reach a genuine accommodation based on economic interests and a common desire to avoid war. (She also believes that technology industries are the engines of economic growth and a chief field of competition among states, as in the battle between the American and Chinese visions of Internet governance.)
Traditional Anglo-American geopolitical thought is not Clinton’s only inheritance from the past. She also shares the optimism about America found in the Methodist religious tradition in which she grew up. The spirit of the 19th-century missionaries who fanned out across the world to promote development, human rights, and social and economic reform lives in her and shapes her basic thoughts about what American power is for. For some realists, “global meliorism” — the belief that U.S. foreign policy can and should try to make a better world — is a dirty word. For Clinton, it is a bedrock conviction. “We are the force for progress, prosperity and peace,” she said during a remarkable speechat the Council on Foreign Relations in early 2013.
This combination makes Clinton an American exceptionalist: She believes that the United States has been called to a unique role in leading the world, and that the American state and the American people, at home and abroad, can be powerful instruments for good.
Managing up
Of course, as Colin Powell and Cordell Hull learned, a secretary of state without presidential support has trouble getting much done. How successful was Clinton in winning and holding the confidence of her chief and in persuading Obama to accept her ideas as the basis for foreign policy?
While she did not win all the battles she fought — the president resisted her counsel on Syria, and she failed to persuade him to back Richard Holbrooke’s diplomatic efforts in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region — she managed the relationship successfully and won his trust, to the point that the president wanted her to stay on the job well into his second term. This outcome was not a given; Clinton’s association with Obama began in their bitter 2008 Democratic nominating contest, and her success at building a strong relationship with a president not known for embracing new friends or Washington insiders testifies to her formidable interpersonal skills.
Similarly, her strong ties with former defense secretary Robert M. Gates and former CIA chief David H. Petraeus ensured that the State Department was rarely isolated in the policy process. And while other Cabinet departments sometimes resisted her efforts to assert State’s primacy on issues of interest to them, she was more successful than many of her recent predecessors at ensuring that her agency had a voice at the table for key discussions on economic diplomacy and counterterrorism.
Clinton relied on these relationships to magnify her impact on U.S. foreign policy. Although the Obama White House has centralized more power than any of its predecessors, and although Clinton always worked under the eyes of the president’s staff, she made substantial progress toward building American policy around some of her key ideas.
Two elements of Clinton’s statecraft are often wrongly dismissed as secondary to true diplomacy: her emphasis on the empowerment of women and her push to move beyond government-to-government engagement to work with civil society. Neither concept was original to Clinton; interest in women’s rights abroad has been a feature of U.S. global engagement since the early 19th century, when American missionaries denounced foot-binding in China and launched literacy programs for women and girls across the Middle East. And Condoleezza Rice’s “transformational diplomacy” was an early effort to convert the State Department into a more activist organization with a broader social and political mission.New ideas
Clinton’s focus on the rights of women and girls, a hallmark of her international profile since her appearance at the 1995 World Conference on Women in Beijing, is more than idealism or feminism. It reflects her convictions about the nature of American power and the direction of history. The industrial and information revolutions have created conditions in which more women can overcome limits on their freedom; to the degree that women (and sexual minorities) succeed in asserting themselves, they will support the emergence of the kind of world Americans want to live in.
Meanwhile, Clinton’s emphasis on Internet freedom and connectivity, together with a focus on training civil society actors, came alive in the State Department and USAID’s work with democracy activists and human rights organizers in authoritarian countries such as Tunisia and Egypt. They developed technological work-arounds to curtail the ability of national governments to close down the Internet during times of civil unrest; they trained and promoted female leaders in countries dominated by tradition-minded rulers.
These ambitious new ideas — though not amounting to the Clinton “doctrine” foreign policy junkies hunger for — could come back to haunt us. The U.S. emphasis on human rights and democracy, as well as the active support for civil society organizations, contributed to China’s harsh response to the pivot to Asia and probably deepened Vladimir Putin’s view of the West as a danger to Russia. For Moscow and Beijing, Washington’s work to engage and strengthen democracy activists and movements represents an aggressive effort to undermine the Russian and Chinese regimes. And the push for changing gender relations allows Islamists to portray the United States as a threat to religious values. American opponents often fear ideological and cultural “aggression” as much as U.S. military power.
Shaping a legacy
The answer: Historians will probably consider Clinton significantly more successful than run-of-the-mill secretaries of state such as James G. Blaine or the long-serving Cordell Hull, but don’t expect to see her on a pedestal with Dean Acheson or John Quincy Adams anytime soon.
Clinton was an influential secretary of state and a savvy manager with a clear agenda that, at least in part, she translated into policy. So how did it all work out?
She weighed in hard and strong in favor of the president’s risky but ultimately justified decision to attack Osama bin Laden’s last refuge. The focus on Asia — relabeled a “pivot” before it became a “rebalancing” — reinvigorated America’s Pacific alliances but also elicited a more aggressive China, which has taken a harder line with Japan, the Philippines and Vietnam since the pivot began. The “reset” with Russia enabled concrete cooperation on Iran’s nuclear program and at the United Nations (notably on the resolution authorizing intervention against Libya’s Moammar Gaddafi), but it would be hard to argue that Washington and Moscow have ended up in a good place. Here again the rhetoric of the “pivot to Asia” may have encouraged Putin to think that the United States was taking its eye off Russia’s revisionist ambitions.
In her new memoir, Clinton highlights her attempt to reorient U.S. foreign policy around “smart power” — the integration of military, political and economic tools with grass-roots outreach and efforts to strengthen civil society — but this approach also yielded mixed results. The outreach to Burma led to political reforms and helped move one of China’s closest regional allies closer to Washington. This was an important success, but continuing problems in Burma, including brutal violence against the country’s Rohingya minority, demonstrated the difficulty of integrating human rights with classic geopolitical strategies.
If Burma was a success of the Clinton approach, Egypt and Libya were sobering failures. Except in Tunisia, U.S. efforts to promote democracy after the Arab Spring were largely unsuccessful, with Egypt a particularly dramatic case. But the greatest problem for Clinton’s legacy is likely to be the miserable aftermath of the U.S.-backed overthrow of Gaddafi. Here, advocates of the Libya mission failed to take seriously one of the most important lessons of Iraq: When you overthrow a dictator in the Arab world, expect chaos and violence to follow. The mess in Libya — besides leading to the Benghazi attack that has entangled Clinton in congressional investigations and conspiracy theories — strengthened the voices in the administration opposing the more activist Syria policy Clinton promoted. It also deepened public resistance to more use of American military power abroad. This is not the legacy Clinton hoped to leave behind.
Of course, some of the problems U.S. foreign policy encountered during Clinton’s tenure cannot be laid at her door. There was a constant tug of war within Obama between his desire to transform the world and his strong sense of the limits to American power and will in a post-Iraq age. That struggle often made U.S. policy look indecisive and at times, notably on Syria, created a damaging gap between tough American words (“Assad must go”) and flabby American deeds. That led to questions about U.S. resolve as friends and foes struggled to understand Washington’s intentions. Moreover, the economic and social problems of the Arab world are beyond the abilities of any American government to solve, and the jihadist movement is powered by rage and ideology that Washington can, in the short term, do very little about.
The verdict? Clinton brought a clear vision of U.S. interests and power to the job, and future presidents and secretaries of state will find many of her ideas essential. Yet she struggled to bring together the different elements of her vision into a coherent set of policies. The tension between America’s role as a revolutionary power and its role as a status quo power predates Clinton; the struggle to reconcile those two opposed but equally indispensable aspects of American foreign policy has survived her tenure at the State Department.
Yet, some of the policies Clinton advocated have exacerbated challenges we now face. Her embrace of transformational diplomatic goals probably undermined her realpolitik efforts to reset relations with Russia and work out a modus vivendi with China. And when American advocacy of an open Internet goes hand in hand with revelations of National Security Agency surveillance, U.S. high-tech policy looks less like a philanthropic venture in supporting human freedom and more like an effort by a powerful state to dominate the world’s communication networks.
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