The Hillary Doctrine: Sex and American Foreign Policy

THIS BOOK WAS born of an unlikely friendship between two women whose disparate paths crossed in 2009. At the time, one was working as a journalist in Kabul, Afghanistan and one as a university professor in Provo, Utah. Pat Leidl emailed Valerie Hudson late that November and asked for a Skype interview about Afghanistan’s sex ratios in connection with a policy analysis she was then writing for USAID. She had just finished Hudson’s co-authored book Bare Branches: The Security Implications of Asia’s Surplus Male Population, and felt she was witnessing the same linkage between sex ratios and violence play out in Central Asia that Hudson had observed in China and India.

In many ways we couldn’t be more different, but we were both noticing the same thing: the insecurity of women was seriously undermining the security of the nation-states in which they lived. While Leidl was documenting this connection through careful fieldwork and interviews, Hudson was doing the same through collecting, scaling, and analyzing massive amounts of cross-national data. We felt that our voices could be stronger if we pooled our skills and experience, and so we did, beginning in 2010 with a co-authored piece appearing in Foreign Policy.

The idea for the present volume came as we realized Hillary Clinton was determined to serve as U.S. Secretary of State for only one four-year term. She was (and is) the world’s most influential and eloquent exponent of the proposition that the situation of women and the destiny of nations are integrally linked. During her term as secretary, she pulled out all the stops to incorporate that vision within the foreign policy establishment of the most powerful state in the international system, the United States. No such alignment of the constellations had ever before taken place—and it would be over in the proverbial blink of an eye.

We became determined that this unique moment in U.S. history—in world history—not disappear quietly into the slipstream of time. We wanted to document this window of time in which women became, at least rhetorically, a “cornerstone” of U.S. foreign policy.¹ Surely there were important lessons to be learned from both the successes and the failures of such a serious effort to integrate women into the world of foreign and security policy, and to place their concerns on the agendas of top policy-making bodies.

It is important our readers understand from the outset that this book is not, in the first place, about Hillary Clinton herself. Rather, it is the story of an idea—the story of the Hillary Doctrine, as we term it. This doctrine puts forward the revolutionary proposition that “the subjugation of women is a direct threat to the common security of the world and to the national security of the [United States].”² The Hillary Doctrine: Sex and American Foreign Policy also details and assesses the intensive efforts within the United States to turn the ship of state in this direction of seeing and acting upon the importance of women to its national interests and foreign policy.

In order to effect a comprehensive examination of the Hillary Doctrine, we marshal three complementary streams of analysis: history, fieldwork, and policy analysis. These correspond to the three parts of the volume.

In part 1, we focus on the historical backdrop of the Hillary Doctrine. Using Hillary Clinton’s own journey as a springboard, we trace the earliest efforts within the U.S. foreign policy establishment to be more inclusive of women and their concerns, starting with the Carter administration’s signing of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). We examine key benchmarks, such as the Fourth World Conference on Women in 1995, where Hillary Clinton asserted that human rights are women’s rights, and then the unanimous approval in 2000 by the U.N. Security Council of Resolution 1325 mandating inclusion of women in peace negotiations and post-conflict reconstruction. We survey how the George W. Bush Administration implemented its own vision of the Hillary Doctrine following the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq in the wake of 9/11, and from there we move forward to explore what Hillary Clinton herself accomplished as U.S. secretary of state from 2009 to early 2013.

In part 2, we offer the reader a series of insights gleaned from experience in the field in order to determine whether the foundational premise of the Hillary Doctrine is correct. Is there in fact a direct connection between the relative security or insecurity of women in a given society and that society’s level of stability, security, and resilience? We begin by surveying the existing literature and then going to ground to see for ourselves. This section of the volume contains two in-depth case studies, that of Guatemala and of Saudi Arabia and its neighbor Yemen. Through this more detailed and nuanced treatment, we are able to trace the causal processes leading from women’s insecurity to national and even international insecurity. It is also through this analysis that we come to understand otherwise mysterious phenomena, such as why contestations over political power often involve the strategic targeting of women and girls.

In the final part of the book, part 3, we undertake a focused evaluation of attempts by the U.S. government to implement the Hillary Doctrine while Clinton was secretary of state during the first term of the Obama Administration. During her tenure, Clinton devised an impressive array of action plans, guidance, regulations, and programming, and assembled a dream team to oversee the coherence of the effort. If the Hillary Doctrine has merit, this should have been the ideal moment to observe it. What was the result? And what lessons can be learned from U.S. governmental efforts to implement the Hillary Doctrine?