Barack Obama turned up unexpectedly in the press cabin of Air Force One as the plane was high above the South China Sea, about to begin its descent into Malaysia on a flight from South Korea. The president was not one for casual in-flight visits, saving these encounters for the trip home to Washington, when he would ruminate with reporters, off the record, about what he had accomplished overseas. So when he appeared on the afternoon of April 26, 2014, in the middle of a weeklong tour of Asia, something clearly was up. Wearing an open-necked blue shirt, gray slacks, and an unsmiling expression, Obama shook hands with the journalists on board that day: reporters from the four major news agencies; a network producer from CBS News; a correspondent for the Los Angeles Times. Before he reached the third row of seats, where I was standing with a hand outstretched, the president wheeled around, returned to the front of the cabin, and propped himself, arms crossed, against a gray bulkhead, next to a flickering television screen.
It was hard to know if Obama had ignored me intentionally: I was the last in a scrum of reporters, and the president likes to keep these pleasantries to a minimum anyway. But when he swatted away my opening question about China, a chill wind was clearly blowing.
“I’ll answer that in a minute,” the president said, “but first I want to say a few things.”
Obama, it turned out, was angry about two articles that had run in The New York Times the previous day. One, by me and a colleague, Jodi Rudoren, declared that his trip had already been marred by a pair of setbacks: the failure to strike a trade deal with Japan and the collapse of his latest effort to negotiate a peace accord between Israel and the Palestinians. The other said his administration had underestimated the bellicose nature of North Korea’s new ruler, Kim Jong-un. Obama wanted me to know he never expected to sign a trade agreement on that trip, nor, for that matter, did he bear any illusions about North Korea’s boy dictator. The impromptu visit was meant to set the press straight about our coverage of his foreign policy. Obama viewed it as shallow, mistaking prudence for fecklessness, pragmatism for lack of ambition.
“Ben and I have been talking about giving a speech that lays out my foreign policy,” he said, stealing a glance at his foreign policy amanuensis, Benjamin Rhodes, who had slipped quietly into a seat behind the reporters, next to the press secretary, Jay Carney, and seemed as unsure of what his boss was going to say as the reporters were.
“I can sum up my foreign policy in one phrase,” Obama said, pausing a beat for his punch line. “Don’t do stupid shit.”
America’s problems, he said, stemmed not from doing too little but too much, from overreach rather than inaction. The country’s greatest disasters had come from blundering into reckless military adventures, whether in Vietnam or Iraq. The key to managing a sound foreign policy was to avoid entanglements in places where America’s national interests were not directly at stake—Syria, for example, which was caught up in a sectarian war that would defy outside efforts to end it; or Ukraine, victimized by a predatory Russia but a country with which the United States conducted a negligible amount of trade. Warming to his theme, Obama offered a brisk tour of places his White House had not started new conflicts: the Middle East, Asia, eastern Europe. Historic achievements in foreign policy—Nixon’s opening to China—were once-in-a-generation occurrences, he said. He might yet get one if the West negotiated an agreement with Iran to restrain its nuclear program. But in a world of unending strife and unreliable despotic leaders, hoping for more than that was simply not realistic. In such a world, Obama was content to hit singles and doubles, hewing to his foreign policy version of the Hippocratic oath.
As we touched down outside Malaysia’s capital, Kuala Lumpur, Obama kept talking, bracing himself against the bulkhead as the tires squealed and ordering those who were standing in the aisle to sit down. (“I’m the only one who’s allowed to stand,” he said. “I don’t want that liability.”) Before returning to his cabin, where he would put on a jacket and tie and jog down the stairs to another red-carpet welcome in another distant land, Obama turned to the reporters and asked, “Now what’s my foreign policy philosophy?”
“Don’t do stupid shit,” we replied sheepishly, like schoolchildren taught a naughty rhyme by a subversive teacher.
Obama smiled and then was gone as abruptly as he had come. His credo hung in the air, though. At one level, it seemed crude, almost juvenile, particularly coming from a man who cared deeply about words and believed in the power of language to convey ideas. And yet it had the ring of authenticity. More so than his shimmering oratory—his references to the “arc of history” or the “spark of the divine”—those four words seemed to capture what was for Obama the irreducible truth of being commander in chief of the world’s remaining superpower.
As a White House correspondent for The New York Times, I had traveled to a dozen countries with the president over four years, from a state visit to Buckingham Palace, arriving in a thirty-car motorcade, to a secret mission in Afghanistan, flying at night over the Hindu Kush in Black Hawk helicopters. I questioned him at news conferences in the East Room and the Great Hall of the People, listened to him elaborate his worldview in speeches in London, Jerusalem, and Brisbane. And yet it was during a salty Saturday afternoon encounter in the back of Air Force One that Obama uttered what would become perhaps the signature slogan of his presidency—the foreign policy equivalent of “It’s the economy, stupid.”
Soon enough, “Don’t do stupid shit” entered the vernacular. Obama repeated it in a meeting with columnists and editorial writers; his advisers cited it in interviews; it was even codified in a speech he gave the following month at the United States Military Academy at West Point—an address that will surely rank as one of the most ambivalent ever delivered by an American president. The elders of the foreign policy establishment debated the wisdom and meaning of the phrase, usually amending it, in a clumsy attempt to make it more family friendly, to “Don’t do stupid stuff.” To Obama’s critics, it became shorthand for the president’s weak and dilatory leadership—leadership, they said, that had relinquished America’s historic and necessary role as the ultimate guarantor of world order. It seemed, in the wake of the Islamic State’s brutal rampage across Syria and Iraq and Russia’s de facto invasion of Ukraine, hopelessly inadequate to a storm-tossed world.
Among those critics was Hillary Clinton, his onetime rival who had become his loyal lieutenant and now aspired to be his successor. As secretary of state, she had been intimately involved in every major foreign policy debate of his presidency. She would run for the White House, in no small measure, as the custodian of his legacy. And yet, once Clinton had left his cabinet at the end of the first term, she was eager to start delineating her own views about the world. It was an inevitable distancing of herself from her former boss, and like all such partings, it wasn’t pretty.
“Great nations need organizing principles,” she said when she was asked in the summer of 2014 if Obama’s phrase held any lessons for her. “ ‘Don’t do stupid stuff’ is not an organizing principle.”
Dissent was not something I encountered in two years of covering Clinton at the State Department (I moved to the White House beat in 2011). She was robotically faithful and on message in those days, apt to start sentences with “As President Obama said…” or “President Obama has been very clear…” She told off aides who criticized him or his policies, a courtesy the White House didn’t reciprocate. Loyal, disciplined, and determined to be a team player, Clinton rarely, if ever, showed public daylight between her and the president. For reporters who expected the kind of withering sniper fire between Foggy Bottom and the Oval Office that Clinton and Obama had exchanged in South Carolina during the 2008 primaries, their display of unity was stifling.
To travel with the secretary of state as I did, to forty-three countries on four continents, however, was to witness a woman completing a remarkable, decade-long metamorphosis—one that widened, rather than narrowed, her differences with the progressive president she had agreed to serve. Clinton was shedding the last vestiges of her image as a polarizing, left-wing social engineer in favor of a new role as commanding figure on the global stage, someone who could go toe-to-toe with the mullahs in Tehran or the cold warriors in Moscow. A loyal lieutenant, yes, but a general in waiting.
Under the surface, Clinton’s Manichean worldview was always there. It turned up early, in her blunt closed-door prediction to an Arab foreign minister that the Iranians would spurn Obama’s offer of an olive branch. Later, one could see it in her unstinting support of the military commanders in their request for a larger American troop deployment to Afghanistan than the president or even his Republican defense secretary wanted. Or in her support of the Pentagon’s recommendation to leave a residual force of 10,000 to 20,000 troops behind in Iraq. It surfaced in her campaign for air strikes in Libya to prevent a slaughter by Colonel Muammar al-Qaddafi, and it fueled her case, the summer before she left the State Department, for funneling weapons to the rebels fighting Bashar al-Assad in Syria.
Avidly, if discreetly, Clinton played the house hawk in Obama’s war cabinet.
That Clinton is much more hawkish than Obama is no revelation to anyone who watched them brawl in the winter of 2008. She accused her young opponent of naïveté after he said he would negotiate with America’s adversaries “without preconditions.” She warned Iran that if it ever launched a nuclear strike on Israel, the United States would “totally obliterate” it. Their differences, however, were largely submerged by Clinton’s innate caution, relentless self-control, and the common cause the two rivals made when she agreed to join Obama’s cabinet. He recruited her to repair an American image that had been shredded after eight years of George W. Bush’s presidency. She, with her dreams of the White House deferred, recognized this as a way to burnish her national security credentials and keep her place on the world stage. The last thing Clinton wanted was a public rift with her new boss.
Once she was a private citizen, however, with the presidency again in her sights, the fissures between them became harder to conceal. Nor was she as inclined to do so. She came out against his ambitious Asia-Pacific trade pact, after having been one of its most enthusiastic advocates. She began to etch clear policy differences with him on Syria and Russia—a distancing his aides found opportunistic, if unsurprising. In August 2014, Clinton said Obama’s refusal to arm the rebels in Syria left a security vacuum there and in Iraq, which had been filled by the brutal warriors of the Islamic State. Her criticism antagonized a president who already felt embattled. A few days later, the pair hugged in an awkward reconciliation at a birthday party in Martha’s Vineyard for Vernon Jordan’s wife, Ann. “I never saw them interact all evening,” said a guest who watched their stilted body language from a nearby table.
Clinton still embraced central tenets of Obama’s foreign policy; it was, after all, her foreign policy, too. In the fall of 2015, she articulated the case for his much-disputed nuclear agreement with Tehran to an audience at the Brookings Institution. But their public remarks only underscored how differently Clinton viewed the achievement than Obama. He called it “the strongest nonproliferation agreement ever negotiated.” She called it a flawed deal worth supporting only if it was linked to relentless enforcement, a concerted effort to thwart Iranian malfeasance in the Middle East, and an unwavering threat to use military force to prevent Iran from ever getting a bomb. “My starting point will be one of distrust,” she said.
Clinton’s break with Obama over Russia played out similarly. She had long been more suspicious of Vladimir Putin than the president, though she voiced those warnings, Obama’s aides noted, only when Putin’s sinister motives were already well established. At a Democratic fundraiser in California in March 2014, she likened his annexation of Crimea to Hitler’s conquest of the Sudetenland in the 1930s. Eighteen months later, she said Obama’s restrained response to Putin’s bullying of Ukraine was inadequate. And when Putin intervened in Syria on behalf of Assad, Clinton sounded the trumpet of a new cold war. “All the Russian experts that thought that their work was done after the fall of the Berlin Wall, I hope that they will be dusting off their materials,” she said. These retired cold warriors, she said, needed to draw up a battle plan for “how we try to confine, contain, deter Russian aggression in Europe and beyond.”
Their differences surfaced again during the bloody months at the end of 2015, when radical Islamists carried out killing sprees in Paris and California. The carnage propelled terrorism to the forefront of yet another presidential campaign. Suddenly, the tangled conflict in the Levant was no longer just a riddle for foreign policy experts; it posed a direct threat to the homeland, throwing Obama on his back foot and playing out in the crude appeals to nativism and nationalism by the Republican candidates. Syria was where Clinton had first split with him over supplying arms to the rebels; now they split again over her call to impose a no-fly zone over northern Syria, as her husband had done in Iraq in the 1990s to protect the Kurds.
“Look,” she told an audience at the Council on Foreign Relations a few days after the attacks in Paris, “I have made clear that I have differences, as I think any two people do.”
Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are more than just two of the most riveting political figures of our time. They are protagonists in a great debate over American power—one that will decide not only who sits in the Oval Office but the direction she or he will take a nation that faces a new twilight struggle against the forces of disorder.
On one side of the debate stand those, like Obama, who believe the United States resorts too readily to military force to defend its interests, that American intervention in other countries usually ends in misery, and that the nation would be well-served by defining its interests more narrowly than it has for most of the post–World War II era. On the other side stand those, like Clinton, who believe that the calculated use of military power is vital to defending national interests, that American intervention does more good than harm, and that the writ of the United States properly reaches, as George W. Bush once declared, into “any dark corner of the world.” Clinton and Obama have come to embody competing visions of America’s role in the world: his vision restrained, inward looking, radical in its acknowledgment of limits; hers, hard-edged, pragmatic, unabashedly old-fashioned.
This book will explore that divide: how it played out in the major foreign policy debates of the Obama administration; how it will shape the president’s legacy; how it could shape a Clinton presidency; and what it means for a nation exhausted after more than a decade of war yet facing a cascade of new threats, from the medieval jihad of the Islamic State to the nineteenth-century nationalism of Russia to the twenty-first-century muscle flexing of China. The book will go behind the speeches and press conferences to the Situation Room meetings and Oval Office huddles, the phone calls and emails, in which Clinton and Obama wrestled with their options, bringing their different worldviews to bear on an often uncooperative world.
It is a perennial debate in postwar America, sometimes framed as realism versus liberal internationalism, George Kennan versus Woodrow Wilson. The disciples of Wilson regard foreign policy as an idealistic enterprise, a means of transmitting liberal Democratic values throughout the world. The apostles of realpolitik view it pragmatically, as a means of safeguarding national interests. Obama and Clinton don’t fit neatly into those boxes; it is too simple to say she is from Mars and he is from Venus. The reluctant warrior in the Oval Office was nevertheless an avid believer in drones, Navy SEALs, and other instruments of covert warfare. The hawk in the State Department was nevertheless committed to the diplomacy and multilateral institutions championed by Wilson. Realism and idealism coexist in both of them.
Clinton and Obama, it must be said, agreed more than they disagreed. Both preferred diplomacy to brute force. Both shunned the unilateralism of the Bush years. Both are lawyers committed to preserving the rules-based order that the United States put in place after 1945. Yet as that order has begun to fracture, they have shown very different instincts for how to save it. “The president has made some tough decisions,” Leon Panetta, who served as Obama’s defense secretary and CIA director, told me. “But it’s been a mixed record, and the concern is, the president defining what America’s role in the world is in the twenty-first century hasn’t happened.
“Hopefully, he’ll do it,” Panetta said. “Certainly, she would.”
Dennis Ross, a former aide to Clinton and Obama who played a behind-the-scenes role in the secret negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program, said, “It’s not that she’s quick to use force, but her basic instincts are governed more by the uses of hard power.”
The differences between them are not ideological as much as generational, cultural, even temperamental. Clinton is a Midwesterner, a product of the Cold War who came of age during the Vietnam era and watched as her husband articulated a new rationale for humanitarian intervention in the Balkans in the 1990s. She is a woman aspiring to a job that has been held only by men. Obama is a child of the Pacific Rim who came of age after Vietnam and had no firsthand exposure to the Balkans campaigns (he was immersed in state politics in Illinois during those years). The formative foreign policy event of his lifetime was the American misadventure in Iraq.
Obama came into office as a counterrevolutionary, seeking to end Bush’s wars and restore America’s moral standing. But his ambitions were even larger than that: He set out to reconcile Americans to a world in which the United States was no longer the undisputed hegemon. He shunned the triumphalist language of American exceptionalism, declaring that the nation’s unique character lay not in its perfection but in its unending struggle to live up to its ideals. He refused to be drawn into distant conflicts, with the much-regretted exception of Libya. He tied the nation’s security to that of other nations, seeking cooperation on climate change and nonproliferation. And yet he also defended the just use of military force to defend the homeland or to avert genocide. “Our challenge is reconciling these two seemingly irreconcilable truths,” Obama said in accepting his prematurely awarded Nobel Peace Prize in 2009. “That war is sometimes necessary, and war at some level is an expression of human folly.”
Clinton is more conventional and more political. Her foreign policy is less a doctrine than a set of impulses, grounded in cold calculation and what one aide calls “a textbook view of American exceptionalism.” She is at heart a “situationalist,” somebody who reacts to problems piecemeal rather than fitting them into a larger doctrine. Her flexibility has led people to read different things into her foreign policy: Republicans accuse her of being an Obama retread; Obama loyalists grumble that she dramatized her divisions with the president on Syria and Russia for political reasons; Leslie Gelb of the Council on Foreign Relations warns that she could end up in thrall to the neoconservatives who led the United States into Iraq. “She takes the position that leaves her the least vulnerable,” he told me.
Those characteristics make her a ready warrior but a cautious diplomat. Unlike most modern-day secretaries of state, Clinton kept her distance from peace negotiations between the Israelis and Palestinians, judging them to be an uphill climb and not worth the risk of alienating Jewish voters at home. Obama made daring overtures to Iran and Cuba; it’s not clear the United States would have achieved either, but especially the Iran nuclear deal, had Clinton been elected president in 2008 instead of him. Obama’s statesmanship, Dennis Ross noted, flowed from a very different source than Clinton’s: He tended to view adversaries in terms of their grievances toward the United States; Clinton views them more traditionally, in terms of their interests. “It leads you in a different direction,” Ross said.
Predicting how a secretary of state would act as commander in chief is, at some level, a fool’s errand. The last person to make the transition was James Buchanan in 1857; his presidency, which accelerated the slide toward the Civil War, was widely judged the greatest failure in the history of the Republic. Clinton might view the diplomatic stakes differently as president than she did as secretary of state. Militarily, she would face the same constraints Obama did, not just at home but abroad. The breakdown of the twentieth-century American order, Obama’s defenders note, has made the world less amenable to any president’s efforts to control it. “If you look at Obama and his rhetoric in 2008, you would have expected a transformational and maximalist president,” said Joseph Nye, a Harvard political scientist who advises Clinton. “He was going to ban nuclear weapons. He was going to repair relations with the Muslim world. We were going to have a reset with Russia. These were ambitious goals, but he turned out to be a rather prudent retrencher. The pendulum is going to swing back somewhat now, and Hillary Clinton is probably going to be less of a retrencher. The question is how much leeway she’ll have.”
How well Clinton’s hawkish instincts match the country is an open question. Americans are weary of war and remain suspicious of foreign entanglements. And yet, after the retrenchment of the Obama years, there is evidence that they are equally dissatisfied with a portrait of their country as a spent force, managing its decline amid a world of rising powers, resurgent empires, and lethal new forces such as the Islamic State. If Obama’s minimalist approach was a necessary reaction to the maximalist style of his predecessor, then perhaps what Americans yearn for is something in between—the kind of steel-belted pragmatism that Clinton has spent a lifetime cultivating.
It is not easy to find a historic parallel for the relationship between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. In their ambitions and rivalry, they resemble Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson—“the warrior and the priest,” in the words of John Milton Cooper, Jr.—who staked out competing visions for America as a great power in the twentieth century: robust and adventurous; restrained and rule bound. But Clinton and Obama are from the same political party and worked in the same administration. The closer analogy, perhaps, is to Harry Truman and his secretary of state, Dean Acheson, who created the American-led order that Obama and Clinton are both fighting to preserve. Truman embodied the idealistic spirit of Wilson; Acheson reflected the balance-of-power realism of Roosevelt. “While the visions seemingly clashed,” as G. John Ikenberry wrote, “they ended up working in tandem.”
For Clinton and Obama, as for those men present at the creation, it was a story of dreams and disillusionment: Obama’s attempt to reset relations with Russia, mocked by Putin on the battlefields of the Crimean War; Clinton’s fervent plea to the president to rescue Libya from a madman, which ended up pitching the country further into madness, and hardened Obama against doing anything when the savagery moved to Syria. The young idealist who made an eloquent case for humanitarian military intervention in Oslo became the chastened realist who made a pinched argument for avoiding it at West Point four and a half years later.
It is a story with a rich supporting cast: Joe Biden, the windy vice president who honed his foreign policy over decades in the Senate and vied with Clinton for Obama’s ear, arguing for an approach even more minimalist than the president’s; Bob Gates, the Soviet-era spymaster and Bush holdover who became a Clinton ally; John Kerry, the patrician senator who succeeded Clinton at State and whose hell-for-leather style made her look staid by comparison; Richard Holbrooke, the Clinton friend and pathologically driven Democratic statesman, who never found his footing with Obama; and a cadre of advisers, from Ben Rhodes to Jake Sullivan—young men in a hurry, who exercised influence beyond their years as agents of their bosses. Looming just offstage was Bill Clinton, the forty-second president and citizen of the world, who once called the United States the “indispensable nation.” He influenced his wife, both with his wide-angle worldview and through the challenges of his presidency, from the Balkans to Rwanda, which filtered into her views on Libya and Syria.
Ultimately, though, this book is about two supremely ambitious figures: the prickly, distant president who lectured reporters on his plane but could be refreshingly honest as he wrestled with problems; and the practiced, hyper-cautious secretary of state who knocked back drinks with her press corps but could never quite dispel the suspicion that her bonhomie was an act. These were archrivals who became partners for a time, trailblazers who shared a common sense of their historic destiny but different instincts about how to project power. As one prepared to relinquish the presidency, and the other made her long-awaited bid for it, how Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama view America’s role in the world is a central question of our time.