It was a crisp, clear Saturday morning in late January 2011, patches of snow on the ground, when the cellphone in Frank Wisner’s pocket began buzzing. Wisner, a lawyer and diplomat who had served as American ambassador to Egypt, had a shotgun in his hands and his eye trained on the sky above him. He was shooting ducks at the Clove Valley Rod & Gun Club, an exclusive four-thousand-acre range in the woodlands east of Poughkeepsie, New York, that has attracted hunters from Dwight D. Eisenhower to Dick Cheney. The caller was Bill Burns, an old colleague of Wisner’s then serving as the ranking career diplomat in the State Department. Cellphone reception at the range was wretched, but Wisner heard enough, amid the static, to hop in his car and drive the seventy miles back to his apartment in New York City. “Would you give us a hand and try to get a message to Mubarak, on behalf of the president?” Burns asked him that morning. “The secretary would like you to consider this.”
For Wisner, a bluff, bullet-headed seventy-seven-year-old who came of age at a time when American diplomats jumped at the chance to parachute into the world’s trouble spots, there was only one answer: Yes. He spoke again with Burns, Dennis Ross, and Tom Donilon that day and the next, going over the script of what he was to say to Egypt’s longtime president Hosni Mubarak, whose people had suddenly risen up in revolt against him. He asked for, and got, a ten-minute phone call with Obama. Wisner told Burns he was comfortable with the plan to ease Mubarak gently into yielding power, but he warned against any threats to cancel U.S. military aid. “It will do no good,” Burns emailed Clinton that morning, relaying his argument, “and only spark angst in the wider region and within the Egyptian Armed Forces—the one national institution likely to survive all the current uncertainty.”
On Sunday, Wisner was driven to a distant section of the tarmac at John F. Kennedy International Airport, where he boarded a blue and white Air Force 757 bound for Cairo. He landed the next day at ten A.M., and was driven straight to Mubarak’s palace through streets empty but for a single tank guarding a traffic circle. Omar Suleiman, the vice president, was waiting for him at the door. A suave general who spoke perfect English, Suleiman was a familiar figure to Wisner from his days as ambassador, when Suleiman had run Egypt’s feared military intelligence service. Now he was Mubarak’s right-hand man. Clearly agitated, Suleiman badgered Wisner to preview the message he was bearing. Wisner declined until he was taken inside, where he found the president holed up, grimly resisting the call of protesters in Tahrir Square that he step down.
“I was never a chum or a pal,” Wisner told me of the man who had ruled Egypt with an iron hand for three decades. “I had a lot of time for Mubarak; I still do. He was a great friend of this country for many, many years. He stayed too long in office, which is a different matter.”
Wisner delivered a two-part message from Obama, according to officials who briefed him: that Mubarak not permit his security forces to crack down on the demonstrators, and that he set a timetable for the transfer of power. Wisner repeated the message to make sure it got through. When he left the palace two hours later, he felt sure that Mubarak wanted him to believe there would be no blood on the streets. He also sensed, even if the president didn’t say it, that Mubarak knew his time was up. The Egyptian leader was a proud man, though, and he made clear he would not be stampeded into a departure date.
Back at the American embassy, Wisner dictated a summary of his meeting and took part in a secure video conference call with officials from the White House and the State Department. They were impatient to see results from Wisner’s mission, but he told them that Mubarak needed time to come to terms with the finality of his situation. Wisner was still counseling patience the following Saturday, after he had returned to New York. By then, Tahrir Square had turned bloody, with pro-Mubarak thugs, some on horseback, storming the protests, and the security forces opening fire. Wisner spoke, via satellite, to the Munich Security Conference, a high-level meeting where world leaders gather to discuss geopolitics. (Clinton was there.) The United States should not hustle Mubarak out the door, Wisner warned the group. He had an important role to play through the end of his term in September, seven months away. “It’s his opportunity to write his own legacy,” he said.
At the time Wisner was speaking, Clinton and her aides were in meetings elsewhere in the Bayerischer Hof, the elegant nineteenth-century hotel where the conference was held. They did not see his video presentation as it happened. Shortly afterward, Jake Sullivan walked to the nearby Charles Hotel to brief Clinton’s press corps. He blanched when a reporter read him Wisner’s remarks from a BlackBerry.
When the president was told about Wisner’s speech that afternoon, he hit the roof. Four days earlier, Obama, prodded by a circle of younger aides who worried that he was not reacting enough to the tumultuous events in Tahrir Square, had shifted from patiently nudging Mubarak to demanding that he begin the transition “now.” As his press secretary Robert Gibbs memorably embellished it, “Now started yesterday.” But in Munich, his own emissary was arguing that yesterday didn’t start for seven months. And Clinton was reinforcing Wisner’s languid timetable: An orderly transition, she said at the conference, would require constitutional amendments, the assembly of voter rolls, the creation of political parties, and the emergence of credible opposition leaders after thirty years of repression. All that would take time. The previous day, Clinton told Sullivan she felt she had gone too far in publicly pressuring Mubarak to accept a swift handover. “I’m afraid what I said yesterday is being used to support the idea that we are pushing his leaving,” she emailed Sullivan. He replied that the State Department had softened its message from “the transition must begin now” to “negotiations must begin now.”
When Obama gets really mad, his aides said, he doesn’t raise his voice or unleash a stream of profanity. Rather, his speech becomes clipped; his words pointed. “What was Wisner doing speaking at the Munich Security Conference?” a clipped and pointed president asked Clinton by phone before she flew home. “And why was he saying different things than I have?” Obama told her to put a stop to the mixed messages.
“He took me to the woodshed,” Clinton later wrote.
It was the angriest phone call Obama ever made to Clinton, one that laid bare stark differences in how they thought the United States should respond to the first of the great Arab uprisings.
The State Department, on White House orders, immediately disavowed Wisner. He was speaking as a private citizen, a spokesman said, not a presidential emissary. Bill Burns, who had suggested Wisner for the job, was chagrined to see a respected elder stumble after he had dutifully carried out his instructions. White House aides, never shy about playing Monday-morning quarterback, clucked that Wisner had been too close to Mubarak. One NSC adviser said he had floated the idea of sending Richard Armitage, a Republican diplomat even more bullet-headed than Wisner, who would have been tougher. Clinton’s aides evinced little sympathy, saying Wisner should have kept his mouth shut. But she was gentler: Wisner said she spared him the gory details of her conversation with Obama, and told him she regretted how it had worked out. Though Wisner was not a Clinton person, he had served as her husband’s ambassador to India and had been a lifelong friend of her friend Richard Holbrooke. They shared a dais, along with Obama, at his memorial service.
Reflecting on his misadventure four years later, Wisner abjured bitterness or regret. Sensitive to the obligations of an envoy, he insisted that he had followed his talking points to the letter. He got out of sync with Obama, but that was because they were in different time zones and Wisner did not realize how much the president’s position had shifted. He still thought his remarks in Munich were valid, if impolitic. But he acknowledged the White House may have been right in concluding that events in Tahrir Square had gone too far for an orderly transfer of power.
“Would it have been possible,” he mused, “for Mubarak to organize a transition, assuming he wanted to? Or was there too much emotion on the street? I suspect it was too late. But the right American strategy was to seek a responsible transition.”
Frank Wisner’s story is worth recounting not because he was right about Egypt—though he may well have been—but because in its tensions and contradictions, it set the stage for how Obama and Clinton would respond to the cascading upheavals in the Arab world. From Egypt and Bahrain to Yemen and Libya, the president and his secretary of state struggled to reconcile values with interests, democratic hopes with geopolitical realities—often wrapping themselves around the axle in the process. Their struggle culminated in the horrors of Syria, where the United States ended up a bystander to the deadliest war of the twenty-first century.
How Obama and Clinton reacted to these upheavals says a lot about their instincts and views of America’s role in the world. Clinton generally prized stability and loyalty to allies; Obama worried more about not being on what he considered the “right side” of history. Clinton put faith in America’s ability to influence events in storm-tossed countries; a more skeptical Obama was determined to limit American involvement. But they didn’t always revert to type. As the uprisings mutated—becoming less democratic and more sectarian—Clinton and Obama evolved in their positions. Sometimes they all but reversed roles. The same idealistic president who stood up for the fervent young crowds in Tahrir Square refused to call it a coup when Egypt’s generals put Mubarak’s democratically elected successor, Mohamed Morsi, in chains two years later. The same realist secretary of state who wanted to stick with Mubarak and warned of the need for an orderly transition in Egypt, talked Obama into joining a risky NATO bombing campaign in Libya to stop Colonel Muammar al-Qaddafi from slaughtering his own people in Benghazi.
The zigzagging made for an unnerving spectacle, laying bare not just the differences between Obama and Clinton but also the contradictions in their own positions. Clinton worried that Egypt would be portrayed as the first major break between her and the president. When The New York Times was preparing a story on the behind-the-scenes wrangling over Mubarak while she was in Munich, Clinton emailed Sullivan to ask “Is this a State-WH rift story? A POTUS-S rift? There’s more (and less) than meets the eye.” She had a point: The Arab Awakening was perhaps the biggest foreign policy challenge to arise during the Obama presidency, and the first such crisis the president and his secretary of state had faced in real time. It was bound to test them. In the six tumultuous weeks between Cairo and Benghazi, three decades of American thinking about the Middle East had been upended. “We’ve had a way of engaging with Egypt for the last twenty to twenty-five years,” said Brian Katulis, an expert in the Middle East and a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. “The uprising threw a huge dust cloud in the face of policy makers.”
And yet it’s incorrect to say the administration had no warning it was coming. The previous August, Obama had ordered his staff to produce a report assessing the risks for violent upheavals in Arab countries. The eighteen-page classified document, known as Presidential Study Directive 11 (PSD-11), identified four countries—Egypt, Jordan, Yemen, and Bahrain—as ripe for popular revolt, and offered a country-by-country analysis. “There’s no question Egypt was very much on the mind of the president,” said Samantha Power, then an NSC staffer, who wrote the report with Dennis Ross and a development expert, Gayle Smith. “You had all the unknowns created by Egypt’s succession picture,” she said, “and Egypt is the anchor of the region.”
Revolution was also on Clinton’s mind when she spoke to Arab leaders in the Gulf emirate of Qatar on January 13, 2011. The region faced an explosion of unrest and extremism, she warned, if the leaders did not liberalize their political systems and curb the corruption that permeated their societies. “In too many places, in too many ways,” she declared, “the region’s foundations are sinking into the sand.” These proved to be the most prescient words she would utter as secretary of state.
Tahrir Square crystallized an internal debate, stretching back to Obama’s first days in office, about how he should respond to unrest abroad. The president came in reflexively opposed to anything that smacked of the freedom agenda of George W. Bush, which he felt had come to be seen by Muslims as coercive and hypocritical. In his first speech to the United Nations in September 2009, Obama erected four main pillars of American engagement with the world; spreading democracy was not one of them. In June 2009, he said little on behalf of the young people at the vanguard of Iran’s doomed Green Movement. Dissidents inside Iran had urged the United States not to champion the protesters because it would tarnish them domestically. But the decision left Obama’s advisers queasy, especially after the Iranian regime sent paramilitary thugs into the crowds with hoses and truncheons.
Obama’s aides regularly tried to inject references to democratic values into the president’s speeches. At midnight the day before that first UN address, Ben Rhodes and Denis McDonough summoned Michael McFaul, a Stanford University political scientist and Russia scholar who had just joined the NSC, to the Waldorf Astoria to help craft some last-minute language on democracy. McFaul had just finished cowriting a book called Advancing Democracy Abroad, a manifesto for promoting democracy without the my-way-or-the-highway unilateralism of Bush. When Obama walked into the room, McFaul, who hadn’t been told the president would be joining them, realized his job was to persuade him to add a fifth pillar to his speech. Obama pushed back: The world is a complex place, he said; the collapse of regimes creates conflict. But he agreed to add a short coda on the American belief in universal values.
Until Cairo, McFaul, Rhodes, and other aides had measured their victories in terms of getting a few worthy lines stuck into an Obama speech. Now, with tens of thousands of people in Tahrir Square calling for Mubarak’s fall, the idealists suddenly had a chance to influence an honest-to-God revolution. But they faced a wall of opposition: Clinton, Gates, and Biden were urging Obama not to throw an old friend at the heart of America’s Middle East policy overboard; Tom Donilon agreed, as did a stream of worried callers from Israel and the Persian Gulf. Mubarak, for all his autocratic tendencies, had been a steadfast, dependable ally who had honored Egypt’s peace treaty with Israel. In private conversations, Clinton reminisced fondly about the friendship that she cultivated with his wife, Suzanne Mubarak, during reciprocal visits to Cairo and Washington when Bill was president.
Obama’s war council played to his pragmatism; his staffers played to his sense of history.
Clinton and Gates raised the specter of Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution, which had the same populist roots as Egypt’s uprising, but was hijacked by mullahs who turned Iran into a repressive Shiite theocracy and an implacable enemy of the United States. The ayatollahs, in this narrative, were the Muslim Brotherhood; Obama was Jimmy Carter. McFaul argued that the better analogies were the Philippines, Chile, or South Korea—countries the United States had nurtured from autocracy or Communism to democracy. That would make Obama Ronald Reagan, not Carter. Rhodes talked about Wael Ghonim, the fearless young Google executive who had started a Facebook page to spread the word about the demonstrations. He was detained and interrogated by Mubarak’s police for eleven days, and after his release, gave an emotional interview on Egyptian television that made him the face of Tahrir Square. What was the value of Obama’s presidency, if not to fight for people like him?
At times, the tug-of-war seemed less between Obama’s top advisers than within Obama himself. When a circle of aides asked him, amid the hue and cry of the protests, to predict the outcome, he replied, “What I want is for the kids on the street to win and for the Google guy to become president. What I think is that this is going to be long and hard.”
Obama, who had built his foreign policy on the goal of extracting the United States from the Middle East, struggled to understand this convulsing region. His government was of little help. It could churn out country-specific assessments such as PSD-11, but no one could create a larger mosaic of what was happening. The idealists on the NSC who pushed democracy knew little about the Arab world. The Arabists in the State Department’s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs were hidebound and lacking in imagination; they prized stability—read, Mubarak—above all. The CIA’s Middle East analysts failed to foresee the chain reaction: how the uprisings leapt from country to country in an arc of instability that stretched from Tunisia to Syria. At night, in the residence, Obama resorted to surfing the blogs of experts on Arab affairs or news sites to get a local take on events. He sounded out journalists such as Fareed Zakaria about their visits to the region. The president, Zakaria said at the time, was “searching for a way to pull back and weave a larger picture.”
To the extent that Obama ever formed that larger picture, he remained as cynical about Arab leaders as he had been in 2002, when he first came out against the Iraq War. Back then, he pointed to “our so-called allies in the Middle East”—Egypt and Saudi Arabia—as a better target for George W. Bush’s pressure than Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. “He thinks they are pre-civilized,” said a person who has discussed the region with him.
For Bill Daley, the White House chief of staff, who stood firmly in the stability camp, it was clear how the Egypt debate was going to play out. “This was the eighty-seven-year-old doddering, hack politician versus the young revolutionaries with their iPhones,” said Daley, whose father, Mayor Richard J. Daley, ruled Chicago like a pharaoh for twenty-one years and died in office. “This is like my dad in some ways: He’s the old politician trying to hold on, while the young guys try to throw him out.”
In the end, it was the old man, not the kids, who tipped the scales. Speaking to the Egyptian people on February 1, 2011, the day after he saw Wisner, Mubarak was imperial, defiant, and condescending. “This is my country,” he said, announcing he would not stand for reelection but would stay until the end of his term. “This is where I lived, fought, and defended its land, sovereignty and interests, and I will die on its soil.” Obama watched the speech with his aides in the Situation Room. Unlike Clinton, he had no nostalgic memories of a younger Mubarak, who succeeded the assassinated Anwar Sadat, or his gracious wife; he found Arab strongmen to be dissembling and unreliable. Fed up, he asked to be patched through to Mubarak.
“I know the last thing you want to see is Egypt collapse into chaos,” Obama told him. “How can you help manage the change?”
“You don’t understand my people,” Mubarak replied. “I do understand my people.”
“Let’s talk tomorrow,” Obama pressed.
“We don’t need to talk tomorrow,” Mubarak said. “You’ll see. It’ll all be done in a few days.”
The two men never spoke again. After the phone call, Obama reconvened his National Security Council. He was clutching the text of a statement on Egypt that he planned to deliver to the American people in forty-five minutes. It included a line calling on Mubarak to step down. He polled the group: Clinton, Gates, and Biden urged him to hold off making the statement, or if he did, to take out the line about Mubarak leaving; the backbenchers, led by Rhodes, pleaded with him to go ahead. To the surprise of some in the room, John Brennan lined up with those who wanted to jettison Mubarak.
“He’s toast,” Brennan said.
Normally, a president does not announce a decision this momentous on the spot. But with his TV appearance less than an hour away, there was no time to put it off. Obama told the group he planned to call on Mubarak, a stalwart American ally for three decades, to step aside. Things had gone too far, the president said; the only way he could cling to power would be through an unconscionable use of force. Speaking from the grand foyer of the White House a few minutes later, Obama declared, “What is clear, and what I indicated tonight to President Mubarak, is my belief that an orderly transition must be meaningful, it must be peaceful, and it must begin now.”
Nine days later, with the bloody clashes in Cairo and other cities across the country causing Mubarak’s support in the Egyptian army to crumble, Obama told a college audience in Marquette, Michigan, “We are witnessing history unfold.” The United States, he said, would “do everything that we can to support an orderly and genuine transition to democracy in Egypt.” At the White House, Rhodes, McFaul, and Samantha Power savored another small victory: the words “democracy in Egypt.”
“We finally got him to say that phrase,” one of them exulted. A bigger victory came the next day when Omar Suleiman wanly announced that Mubarak had quit. A euphoric group gathered in McFaul’s office in the Executive Office Building, cracking open bottles of booze and watching images on Al Jazeera of the delirious crowds in Cairo.
At that moment, the movement justified the optimistic label “Arab Spring.” It seemed the fulfillment of one of Obama’s favorite aphorisms: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Within a few months, though, the promise of Tahrir Square had wilted.
Clinton, it turned out, had been right to worry about what came after Mubarak. After decades of authoritarian rule, Egypt had no real political parties. Its most cohesive opposition movement, the Muslim Brotherhood, had been ruthlessly repressed for decades. The White House signaled that it would be open to working with the Brotherhood so long as it was part of an orderly transition. McFaul was assigned to compile lessons from other such transitions: how to draft a constitution, how to sequence elections, and so on. (Ross dubbed him the head of the “nerd directorate.”) But Egypt’s generals weren’t interested in any advice from the nerds. They scheduled parliamentary elections without laying the groundwork for the emergence of parties. Predictably, the Brotherhood won a thumping victory.
Obama, having championed democracy, had little choice but to support the winning party and its president, Mohamed Morsi. But the Brotherhood, to the surprise of few outside the West Wing, soon showed it had no plans to follow through with democratic reforms. Far from getting on the right side of history, Obama and Clinton were blamed by bitter Egyptians for taking sides with the Islamists. When Clinton visited Cairo in July 2012, her motorcade was pelted with tomatoes and shoes, while demonstrators chanted “Monica, Monica”—showing, if nothing else, that Egyptian crowds knew their Beltway scandals.
“How do I correct this image that we support the Muslim Brotherhood?” a frustrated Clinton asked Ross.
In hindsight, people close to Clinton said, the White House erred by wading into the debate. The Egyptian army would probably have removed Mubarak with or without Obama’s disavowal of him. The president, by putting his finger on the scale, gained little favor with the protesters and lost credibility with other important constituencies in Egypt and throughout the region, especially in the Persian Gulf. “The lesson,” said a senior official who worked with Clinton at the State Department, “is keep your powder dry because what you think you are accomplishing by being on the right side of history, you are not accomplishing.”
In July 2013, thousands of antigovernment protesters were again thronging Tahrir Square—this time calling for Morsi’s head. The Egyptian army obliged, ousting his hapless government, throwing him in jail, and ordering a bloody crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood. Fireworks erupted in the square, but at the headquarters of the Republican Guard, where Morsi was believed to be held, soldiers fired on pro-Morsi crowds, killing at least fifty. The next day, Obama, clad in khakis and a dark blue golf shirt, gathered his advisers in the Situation Room to begin what turned into a Star Chamber–like debate over whether the United States should call the army’s ouster a coup. At issue was $1.3 billion a year in military aid, which by law could not be given to a regime that had seized power in a coup d’état.
The State Department’s top lawyer, Mary McLeod, said it was an open-and-shut case. To the admiration of some in the room, she refused to back down, even under intense pressure from officials who warned that cutting off the aid would further shake the region. Finally, the White House finessed the issue by deciding it did not have to make a call. “We will not say it was a coup; we will not say it was not a coup; we will just not say,” an NSC spokeswoman said, channeling Dr. Seuss. Obama subsequently did hold back a little aid, though by March 2015, he had reinstated all of it, sending Egypt twelve F-16 fighter jets and twenty Harpoon missiles. The generals were back in charge, and the White House was resigned to dealing with them, even at the price of the democratic values Obama had championed two years earlier.
“Nobody had the energy to do the right thing,” a senior White House official said.
Hillary Clinton’s sermon to a roomful of stone-faced sheikhs in Qatar about the looming Arab revolt came four weeks before Mubarak fell. But it seemed to anticipate everything that happened during the first year of the Arab upheavals. In early January 2011, before the first protesters had taken to Tahrir Square, Clinton met with her staff to plan a coming trip to the Persian Gulf. She told them she was frustrated by the sclerotic pace of change in the region and wanted to say something that might get through to its leaders. At two A.M. on January 13, in a staff room at her hotel in the Qatari capital, Doha, Jake Sullivan and Dan Schwerin, one of her speechwriters, pored over a draft. They were noodling with a sand metaphor, which they worried might be a cliché or convey the wrong image. (“There’s no way to climb out of quicksand,” Schwerin noted.) They settled on “sinking into the sand.”
Unlike Obama, Clinton is not a sparkling orator. With a couple of notable exceptions—her UN women’s conference address in Beijing in 1995; the eighteen-million-cracks-in-the-glass-ceiling concession speech in 2008—she doesn’t hit the high notes of Obama. Her speeches are laden with laundry lists and rest on familiar formulations (on the State Department beat, I lost count of the times she said something was “not only…but also”). Obama has his well-worn riffs, too: He often describes a thorny dilemma as a “false choice”—as in, the “false choice” between our freedom and our security. (“It’s not a false choice,” a Clinton aide once pointed out to me. “It’s an actual choice.”) But in Oslo, where he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize, or in Selma, where he marked the fiftieth anniversary of a bloody civil rights march, Obama was eloquent in a way that very few politicians could match.
There was little reason to think Clinton would surprise her audience when she walked into the gloomy ballroom of the Ritz-Carlton hotel that morning. She was speaking to a group called the Forum for the Future, which brings together leaders from rich countries and the Arab world to talk about political reforms. The rule of thumb at such gatherings is to utter well-meaning platitudes. On this day, though, Clinton spoke like a Puritan preacher, Jonathan Edwards in a charcoal jacket and headband. Her message seemed even more powerful because she was at the end of a four-day tour of the Persian Gulf that had showcased the failed promise of the Arab world: from the medieval autocracy of Yemen—where men with traditional curved daggers in their belts stared coldly as her motorcade snaked through the sandstone alleys of Sanaa’s old city—to the engorged, self-satisfied fief of Qatar, still exulting from winning the 2022 soccer World Cup, for which it would soon employ a virtual slave-labor force of migrant workers to build stadiums in the desert.
“Those who cling to the status quo may be able to hold back the full impact of their countries’ problems for a little while,” Clinton said, “but not forever. If leaders don’t offer a positive vision and give young people meaningful ways to contribute, others will fill the vacuum. Extremist elements, terrorist groups, and others who would prey on desperation and poverty are already out there, appealing for allegiance and competing for influence.”
“So this is a critical moment,” she declared, “and this is a test of leadership for all of us.”
Clinton scolded her hosts for their corruption. Try to open a business in an Arab country as a foreigner, she said, and “you have to pass money through so many different hands. Trying to open up, you have to pay people off. Trying to stay open, you have to pay people off. Trying to export your goods, you have to pay people off. So by the time you pay everybody off, it’s not a very profitable venture.”
If Clinton was right about the sinking sand, though, she found it harder to strike the right tone when it entrapped a strategic American ally. A month before her broadside in Qatar, she was in Bahrain, home to the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet. The postage-stamp kingdom, ruled by Sunnis but with a majority Shiite population, did not have as repressive a record as the worst of the Arab states. But it had begun arresting lawyers and human rights activists, a precursor to the larger crackdown to come. At a meeting in the capital, Manama, on December 3, 2010, a member of Bahrain’s parliament asked Clinton if she was alarmed by the signs of repression. “I see the glass as half full,” she replied. “I think the changes that are happening in Bahrain are much greater than what I see in many other countries.” Three months later, Bahraini security forces opened fire from a helicopter on protesters in Pearl Square, a traffic circle not far from where Clinton had spoken.
That wasn’t the only faulty prediction she made that morning in Manama. Asked by a student whether she had another White House run in her future, Clinton smiled and said, “I think I’ll serve as secretary of state as my last public position and then probably go back to advocacy work, particularly on behalf of women and children.”
Scarcely had Clinton and Obama tried to deal with the turmoil in Egypt when they were confronted with a crisis in the country next door. Three weeks after protests flared in Libya’s restive east, Muammar al-Qaddafi had ordered his tanks to put down a rebellion in the ancient seaside city of Benghazi. Mobilizing artillery, planes, and ships, Qaddafi pounded one city after the other on the road to the rebel stronghold. Once in Benghazi, he vowed to hunt down the rebels house-to-house like rats.
Libya posed a different kind of dilemma. It was not an ally of the United States, nor did it have clear strategic implications for American national security. Its uprising began with Arab Spring–like protests but rapidly spread into a civil war that split the country along geographic and tribal lines. It featured a cartoonish villain in Colonel Qaddafi, who had bedeviled presidents going back to Ronald Reagan, but had been more of a curiosity than a curse since 2003, when he signed a deal with George W. Bush to give up his weapons of mass destruction (indeed, he had been modestly useful in the battle against al-Qaeda). Rich in oil and gas, Libya was of far greater consequence to the Europeans—in particular to French president Nicolas Sarkozy. He had been embarrassed by the ouster two months earlier of the strongman Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia, a former French colony, and he was itching to reassert himself.
None of this argued for American military intervention, and at first, Clinton and Obama were united in their skepticism. Clinton, as usual, was acutely sensitive to the Pentagon’s perspective; Bob Gates was implacably opposed to military action. Libya was not a vital U.S. interest, he argued, and Americans should not get into another war against a Muslim country. Nearing the end of his tenure, Gates had become grouchy—impatient with a White House that he thought was blind to the lessons of history and with a president who he felt was overly swayed by a coterie of young political aides. “They made exactly the same mistake in Libya that they accused Bush of in Iraq,” he told me. “Failure to plan for what comes after the bad guy is gone.”
Gates was backed up by his commanders. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said, “We’re stretched in too many places, as it is,” a former NSC official recalled. Mullen gave a tutorial on no-fly zones—the most obvious short-term response to Qaddafi—describing how the Pentagon would have to launch waves of bombs and missiles to take out his radar sites and command-and-control centers. That would be costly, Mullen said, and would not by itself shift the struggle in favor of the rebels. James Clapper, a retired air force general who was the director of national intelligence, cast doubt on whether there was even a viable rebel force on the ground to support. Hoss Cartwright, the vice-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was open to intervening, but only if there was evidence that Qaddafi was moving his stockpiles of chemical weapons. (He still had some because the uprising had halted the internationally supervised operation to destroy them.)
On March 10, 2011, Clinton told Congress that if the United States waded into Libya without the imprimatur of the international community, it would find itself in a conflict that could escalate unpredictably. “And I know that’s how our military feels,” she said. That wasn’t how her husband felt, however. The same day she was tapping the brakes on Capitol Hill, Bill Clinton told a women’s conference in New York that he favored imposing a no-fly zone. “Nobody wants to see an arms race in Libya,” he said, “but it’s not a fair fight.” Obama’s aides were furious. They told Daley, whom they viewed as a Bill handler because of his days in the Clinton cabinet, to put a muzzle on his former boss.
By then, however, Hillary had been hearing the case for military action from many others. On February 21, her friend Sidney Blumenthal had sent her an email pointing out that Britain’s former foreign secretary David Owen was calling for a no-fly zone over Libya. “What do you think of this idea?” she asked Jake Sullivan. On March 3, John Kerry, usually the White House’s most faithful defender in the Senate, had used a budget hearing to press Clinton to support a no-fly zone. “The global community cannot be on the sidelines while airplanes are allowed to bomb and strafe,” he said. Kerry won an attaboy from Senator John McCain, the Arizona Republican, who had been flaying Obama for his inaction. But he got unhappy phone calls from senior State Department officials.
With Qaddafi’s tanks bearing down on Benghazi, even other Arab nations began to pound the war drums, adding to the pressure that was building on Capitol Hill. On March 12, the Arab League voted to ask the United Nations to authorize a no-fly zone over Libya—a major symbolic step that would give the United States political cover for getting involved. A more concrete step came two days later when Clinton met in Paris with Abdullah bin Zayed, the boyish, aristocratic foreign minister of the United Arab Emirates, whom she refers to by his initials AbZ. (American officials are fond of abbreviating the names of Gulf sheikhs this way: Mohammed bin Zayed, the crown prince of Abu Dhabi, is known as MbZ.) The Emiratis, AbZ told her, were willing to send fighter planes. Still, there was no decision by the Americans.
Clinton spent February and March of 2011 shuttling among Geneva, Paris, Rome, and London for emergency meetings on Libya. She was prodded relentlessly by Nicolas Sarkozy, David Cameron of Britain, and Silvio Berlusconi of Italy to join a NATO operation. At a dinner meeting on March 14 in Paris with the foreign ministers of the G-8 countries, Washington’s indecision became excruciating. One by one, the Europeans called for action, staring pointedly at Clinton. “This is pathetic,” the Italian foreign minister, Franco Frattini, spluttered. “We need leadership, we can’t just do nothing.” Clinton’s aides sweated and scanned their BlackBerrys in vain for new instructions from the White House. When it was her turn to speak, Clinton had to punt. “I agree with Franco,” she said. “It’s a very dangerous situation.”
Things were about to change, however. At ten P.M., after her dinner with the foreign ministers, Clinton met at her hotel with Mahmoud Jibril, a former economic official in the Qaddafi regime who had emerged as the head of Libya’s embattled opposition. The meeting was orchestrated by Bernard-Henri Lévy, the flamboyant French writer and philosopher. Lévy had turned Libya into a cause célèbre, hitching a ride into the country from Egypt in a vegetable seller’s truck at the height of the uprising. He later introduced Sarkozy to the rebel leaders. With his flair for self-promotion and legion of detractors, Lévy is to French intellectuals what Richard Holbrooke was to Washington policy wonks. Clinton was beguiled, describing him as a “dramatic and stylish figure, with long wavy hair and his shirt open practically down to his navel.” Her fascination lingered: Eighteen months later, she asked her aides to track down a copy of Lévy’s documentary film about the Libyan civil war, The Oath of Tobruk, in which Sarkozy heaps praise on Clinton’s role. (“I think Harvey [Weinstein] made it and showed it at Cannes last spring,” she wrote.)
While Lévy waited in the next room, Clinton was joined by Chris Stevens, a fifty-year-old lawyer and diplomat whom she had recently named as her special envoy to the Libyan rebels. A fluent Arabic speaker with deep roots in the Arab world—he had served in Tripoli, Damascus, Cairo, and Riyadh—Stevens symbolized the promise of American engagement in Libya. Clinton wanted him to help her take stock of one of the men who proposed to shape the country’s future. Mahmoud Jibril laid out a compelling case for military action. He reminded Clinton of Rwanda and the Balkans, two cases where the world—translation: her husband—had failed to stop mass killings. “My belief is that the fifty-minute encounter with Jibril was decisive,” said Lévy, who was briefed afterward by Stevens. “Before, she had no clear position at all; she did not know. He moved, convinced, and persuaded her. She was impressed. She was moved in a human way, not only political.”
Gates viewed Clinton’s change of heart less dramatically. “My sense is, she was trying to be more responsive to our allies,” he told me. Either way, right after the meeting, she dialed into the Situation Room. The Europeans were ready to take the lead in a NATO mission, she reported to Obama, the Arabs told her they would take part in it, and from what she had seen of the opposition leaders, they were worthy of American support.
“I met them, I looked them in the eye,” Clinton said in an interview with my colleague Michael Gordon and me the day before she stepped down. “I was able to go back and say to the president, ‘These are people you can count on, you can bet on, and we need to help them.’ ”
History hung over the Libya debate.
For Clinton, it was reminiscent of the Balkans, where her husband had sat back and allowed Europe to take the lead for the first two years of his presidency. The conflict metastasized until July 1995, when the horrors of Srebrenica finally jolted Bill to seize control of events. He mounted a NATO air campaign, committed twenty thousand ground troops, and sent Richard Holbrooke to broker the Dayton peace agreement. The Europeans, by and large, thanked him for it. “They grumble that we dominated Dayton,” Secretary of State Warren Christopher wrote in a private memo to Clinton in December 1995, “but they really know that it wouldn’t have gotten done otherwise.”
For Susan Rice, the UN ambassador, it was the ghosts of Rwanda. She had been a twenty-eight-year-old aide on Bill Clinton’s NSC in 1994, when the United States stood by while Hutus armed with machetes murdered eight hundred thousand Tutsis. Clinton later said the failure to prevent that was his greatest regret as president. Even more shameful, the question of whether to intervene to halt the slaughter never rose to the top levels of the NSC. Rice, whose portfolio included peacekeeping operations, questioned using the term “genocide” about Rwanda because it could put the president in an awkward position in midterm elections. Years later, she told Samantha Power, then writing for The Atlantic, “I swore to myself that if I ever faced such a crisis again, I would come down on the side of dramatic action, going down in flames if that was required.”
Power, as it happened, was now on the NSC herself. Seared by her own experience as a journalist in the Balkans, she had written about America’s chronic inaction in the face of mass killings, from the Armenian genocide and the Holocaust to Cambodia and Srebrenica. Speaking up from the backbench in the Situation Room, Power articulated the most fervent, unwavering voice in favor of intervention. The United States, she argued, had a moral obligation to protect the 630,000 people of Benghazi, who faced imminent extermination by Qaddafi’s forces. Power was essentially invoking the “Responsibility to Protect,” a foreign policy principle that calls on countries to intervene to prevent genocide and other mass atrocities. Known by its sterile acronym R2P, the concept has its roots in the weak responses to Rwanda and the Balkans. It was adopted at a United Nations summit in 2005 and has been widely endorsed, including by the United States, but remains the subject of scorn from some on the right, who view it as a threat to American sovereignty.
At first, Obama bristled at the lecture. “This isn’t an opportunity for you to write a new chapter of your book,” he snapped at Power, according to people who were in the room. But her arguments stuck with him. In laying out his case for joining the NATO campaign, the president came as close as he ever had to embracing R2P. “To brush aside America’s responsibility as a leader, and more profoundly, our responsibilities to our fellow human beings under such circumstances would have been a betrayal of who we are,” Obama said in a speech to the nation on March 28, 2011, from the National Defense University in Washington. “Some nations may be able to turn a blind eye to atrocities in other countries. The United States of America is different.”
It was the first, and last, time that R2P would find a receptive audience with Barack Obama.
Some news accounts painted the Libya debate as an archetypal gender battle, pitting Power, Rice, and Clinton—the three Valkyries, in the phrase popularized by Maureen Dowd—against a roomful of reluctant men: Obama, Biden, Gates, Mullen, Daley, Brennan, and Donilon. (Gayle Smith, an NSC development official who also favored military action, joked to colleagues that their group should be named vagina.com.) Clinton doesn’t play up the gender divide in her book beyond a line noting that Power and Rice both favored intervention. One explanation is it wasn’t quite that clean a divide: Ben Rhodes argued for military action, as did Tony Blinken, then serving as national security adviser to Biden.
A more likely explanation is that the Three Amigas made for a strained sisterhood. Power and Rice both had chilly relations with Clinton dating from 2008, when they spurned her for Team Obama. Power, in the heat of the campaign, fatefully referred to Hillary as a monster. “I have regretted it pretty much every day since,” she told NBC News in 2013, having put herself through an act of contrition that included a Holbrooke-brokered meeting with Clinton in which Power begged forgiveness. (She and Clinton became civil, if not chummy.) With Rice, who has scratchy relationships with friends as well as foes, there was no single rupture. She and Clinton met regularly at the State Department, where Rice kept an office and worked most Fridays so she could see more of her family in Washington. But Clinton’s view, a former White House official said, was that Rice “works for them, not for me.”
Clinton arrived at her recommendation for military action later than either Power or Rice, and then only after she had determined that the building blocks for an effective intervention were in place. To Jim Steinberg, Clinton’s deputy, that made her an influential voice in turning the debate, not merely a third of a female triumvirate calling on Obama to act. “She opposed ineffective demonstrative action, like stand-alone no-fly zones, because they wouldn’t achieve the objective,” Steinberg said. “But she was prepared to act if there was a comprehensive strategy that could achieve the result.”
The girls versus guys narrative paints Obama as a curiously passive figure, buffeted by the clamor of voices around him. There’s no question he was reluctant to act until the end of the debate, and without Clinton’s strong push, probably wouldn’t have. That said, he leaned forward on Libya in a way he had not done on Egypt and would not do on Syria. At an NSC meeting the afternoon of March 15, 2011, the president declared that he was ready to act, but was dissatisfied with his options. He bought Gates’s argument that a no-fly zone would not make a difference. But rather than use that as a pretext to avoid military action, he told his war cabinet to reconvene—minus the backbenchers—at nine P.M. that evening, and bring some better ideas.
“Let’s make a difference,” he told the group.
At the later session, Obama and his aides discussed the growing certainty that Britain and France would seek a UN Security Council resolution authorizing a no-fly zone. They debated abstaining or even vetoing it. But then Obama fastened on the idea of a larger operation, in which NATO warplanes would bomb Qaddafi’s tanks and trucks to halt his advance on Benghazi, once American missiles had taken out Libya’s air-defense system. The no-fly zone would, in effect, become a no-drive zone. He ordered Susan Rice to obtain authorization for “all necessary measures” to protect civilians.
While Obama was stiffening his spine, Rice was sparring at the United Nations with the Europeans, who were telling her they would go ahead with or without the United States. Earlier that evening, Rice had called France’s ambassador, Gérard Araud, reaching him in his car. “You’re not going to drag us into your shitty war,” she told him. The equally sharp-tongued Araud replied that France wasn’t a “subsidiary of the United States of America, Inc.” At eleven P.M., after Obama had decided to back the NATO campaign, she called the Frenchman again to say, “OK, we’re a go.” Rice was not trying to avoid military action, her former aides insisted, merely a European-style no-fly zone, which the White House feared would be inadequate. Araud’s interpretation was that the United States was bowing to the inevitability of European action. Whatever the reality, Rice maneuvered expertly through the Security Council to win a 10–0 vote. Russia abstained, and Vladimir Putin later condemned the air strikes as a medieval crusade by the West.
For the president, it was a risky and uncharacteristic decision, one that would have profound ramifications for his presidency, for the future of America in the Middle East, and for America’s relations with Russia. The broader Security Council authority turned the NATO operation from a quick-strike humanitarian mission into a prolonged military campaign, exactly the kind of entanglement Obama had run against in 2008 and tried to avoid in the White House. The alliance’s bombing raids continued for seven months, ending only with the killing of Colonel Qaddafi on October 20, 2011, after rebel soldiers flushed him out of a drainage pipe near his family home of Sirte.
Obama’s hard line on Libya is often overlooked because he coupled it with clear restrictions. First, the United States would not deploy any ground troops—“boots on the ground,” in the military parlance that has become a Sunday talk show cliché. Second, the United States would leave the bulk of the combat to the Europeans. It would provide what Obama called “unique capabilities on the front end”—destroying the regime’s air defenses, jamming its communications, gathering intelligence—but French and British planes would rain the fire on Qaddafi’s convoys. The goal, in Denis McDonough’s phrase, was to “cabin” America’s involvement.
This outsourcing of the mission was turned into a devastating bumper sticker when an unnamed senior administration official told Ryan Lizza of The New Yorker in May 2011 that Obama was “leading from behind.” The White House chafed at the suggestion of weakness, and with some reason, given that it had committed eleven vessels, including guided-missile destroyers and nuclear attack submarines, and dozens of aircraft, from B-2 bombers to F-16 fighters. What was less understood at the time was that the president was drawing bright lines, not just to manage the expectations of America’s gung ho allies but to rein in his own wartime bureaucracy.
In the linoleum-lined hallways of the Pentagon, the State Department, and USAID, midlevel officials rubbed their hands together gleefully at news of the NATO operation. After watching Iraq and Afghanistan slip away, Libya presented one more chance to get nation-building right. Without the limits Obama imposed, the government’s muscle memory would have kicked in, and its interventionist machinery would have begun grinding. “ ‘No boots on the ground’ was there to prevent the U.S. government from doing what it would normally do,” said Jeremy Shapiro, a former State Department official who worked on Libya and Syria, referring to the inevitable influx of experts from USAID, the Treasury Department, and other agencies who would follow the troops into the country. “And it was still a constant struggle.”
Even with these limits, the rapid growth of the mission was striking. By the end of March, less than two weeks after the operation began, the United States had launched nearly 200 Tomahawk cruise missiles, flown 370 attack missions, and dropped 455 precision-guided munitions. It was intercepting Libyan radio transmissions and conducting a full-blown psyops campaign, broadcasting messages in Arabic and English that encouraged Libyan soldiers to turn against Qaddafi and abandon their posts.
In his speech at the National Defense University, Obama said he had decided to act only because he thought the United States had a “unique ability” to avert a slaughter. The goals of the mission were to protect the Libyan people from “immediate danger” and to establish a no-fly zone. “Broadening our military mission to include regime change would be a mistake,” Obama said. “If we tried to overthrow Qaddafi by force, our coalition would splinter. We would likely have to put U.S. troops on the ground to accomplish that mission, or risk killing many civilians from the air. The dangers faced by our men and women in uniform would be far greater. So would the costs and our share of the responsibility for what comes next.”
Those last words would prove prophetic, nowhere more than in the ashes of Benghazi.