Chapter 9

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HILLARY CLINTON:
The Good Enough Secretary

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Our challenge is to be clear-eyed about the world as it is while never losing sight of the world as we want it to become. That’s why I don’t mind that I’ve been called both an idealist and realist over the years. I prefer being considered a hybrid, perhaps an idealistic realist. Because I, like our country, embody both tendencies.

—Hillary Rodham Clinton
Hard Choices

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SECRETARY OF STATE HILLARY CLINTON RECEIVED tens of thousands of cables from American embassies and consulates around the world. Although relatively few would make it to her desk, one of her greatest assets going into the job was the foreign service officers and locally employed staff who could give her unvarnished reports from the field. The cables carried analyses, contradictory viewpoints, and occasionally pleas. They revealed the fault lines between Washington’s worldview, by turns both overly neat and overly calamitous, and the minefields American diplomats walk through each day.

These cables matter, because Clinton’s record as secretary of state says a good deal about how she would manage foreign policy as president. Her willingness to consider and act upon messages from American officers on the front lines of diplomacy is of direct relevance, especially when those messages diverged from her own views or contradicted conventional wisdom. She is running on her record, which is a fair predictor of her foreign policy priorities. Should she win, she will carry her recent experiences as secretary of state into the White House, and they will influence the kind of candidate she will pick for her old job, secretary of state, along with the many other appointees who will form her foreign policy team. Counterpoised against her own track record, the leaked cables provide clues about how she might structure her foreign policy apparatus.

As it happens, the WikiLeaks cables are not the only behind-the-scenes lens through which to judge Clinton’s performance as secretary. Her still-jelling legacy was shaken in March 2015 when mainstream media reported that she had exclusively used a personal email account to conduct business as secretary of state and had some 55,000 pages of emails on a personal server. While the emails—usually quick exchanges between Clinton and senior staffers—serve a different purpose than reporting cables, they do offer additional insight into tone, priorities, and managerial style. They tend to confirm a sense that Clinton, whose term as secretary was generally seen as successful, was not a strategic foreign policy thinker and that she and her overseas missions saw the world from different optics. She offers a contrast with some of her predecessors, particularly Condoleezza Rice and Madeleine Albright, who came to the job with doctoral degrees in foreign policy–related fields, as did George Shultz (with a PhD in economics). Colin Powell brought a worldview informed by military service, Warren Christopher was a distinguished attorney, and James Baker had held high-level posts in the departments of commerce and the treasury and in the White House. Clinton was different, coming to the job primarily as a politician. She is one of a handful of modern-era senators to serve as secretary of state and the only first lady to have done so. More than her predecessors, Clinton often used the secretaryship as a means of translating her domestic policy agenda. She played to her strengths, many of which served her well. But few would assess her tenure as brilliant.

In general, Clinton was admired by the foreign service. She traveled hard, worked harder, and brought can-do energy to the job. She came in as a known entity with a worldwide reputation, and she benefited from a global mood swing. The transition from George W. Bush to Barack Obama brought with it a long-needed lift in America’s world standing, and in the first part of her tenure, the giddy enthusiasm overseas for the Obama-Clinton foreign policy team was palpable. America’s international approval ratings surged, with foreign ministry doors swinging open and heads of state clamoring for visits. Most foreign service officers credited Clinton as a key part of that change and were proud to be on her team.

The Washington foreign policy establishment was less kind in its assessment of her tenure. Deputy National Security Advisor Denis McDonough’s 2010 characterization, “She’s really the principal implementer,” was interpreted as a barely polite way of saying that she was never really part of Obama’s inner circle.1 In some ways that distance has stood her in good stead. Many of the Obama administration foreign policy failures, some of which came to light after her departure, cannot stick to her. On the other hand, the vaunted Russian “reset,” an attempt to improve the long-souring bilateral relationship, is dead; the Islamic State has negated American advances in Iraq; and the Arab Spring’s initial promise was eclipsed by violence, instability, and less, rather than more, democracy. The Burma rapprochement is tainted by human rights violations against the Rohingya people; there has been no progress on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; and the situation in Syria has disintegrated further.

More troubling is the relatively few successes she can claim. Clinton universally gets points for being a stand-up secretary. As Washington Post columnist David Ignatius put it, “She is willing to go anywhere, meet anyone, travel to the most remote, god-awful conferences, and press the global flesh,” while Brookings vice president and former senior State Department official Martin Indyk noted peevishly that she was “turning up for a president who prefers to remain as aloof as possible in a world that demands engagement.” 2 Clinton proved to be good at engaging. She readily grasped the logic of reaching beyond the cloistered world of foreign ministries and connected with the global public. She had good strategic instincts at home, too, forging an alliance with former Defense Secretary Robert Gates—a telling move that underscored the fact that they were both Obama administration outsiders.

Unfortunately, that’s where the good news stops. The list of accomplishments seems fairly short for a secretary of her stature, especially when weighed against her successor’s opening to Cuba and achievement of an Iran nuclear deal. Clinton had a penchant for racking up second tier wins: renewed relations in Burma; the Asian “pivot,” an attempt to recognize the growing economic and political importance of that region when the explosive Middle East allowed any time for it; and the Internet freedom agenda, promoting freedom of speech in hopes that it would lead to democracy. Clinton would no doubt add the State Department’s first-ever Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review, a blueprint for managerial planning and accountability, but such a bureaucratic triumph is hardly a recruitment poster for the next generation of adventure-seeking diplomats.

The embassy cables rebut some of the nastiest Washington criticism, but they document a troubling disconnect between Clinton and her embassies on the question of how to advance the lot of women. Second, they expose a “yes, but” rebuttal to key Washington initiatives such as the Russian reset. And occasionally, they reveal opportunities that called for a bolder, nontraditional approach that a risk-averse Clinton was either unable or unwilling to take.

Finally, they reflect an absence of meaningful conversation about how to implement transformational diplomacy. Clinton, by all accounts a better manager than Rice, might have initiated a dialogue on at least some of the elements her predecessor had announced—particularly the global repositioning of the foreign service and the ongoing and controversial collaboration with the military. As secretary of state, Clinton proved to be more doer than thinker, more tactician than strategist. Her reputation guaranteed access to the greatest minds of the American foreign policy establishment, but when she built her team she leaned toward trusted operatives and loyalists. Many of these hires were competent people, but few were leading thinkers in diplomacy, which was also a new field for Clinton. The emails underscore the access of inner circle acolytes such as Cheryl Mills, Huma Abedin, and Phillippe Reines.

Her speeches eschewed the theoretical and intellectual aspects of policymaking in favor of sweeping statements and broad-brush pronouncements. She frequently spoke of smart power and her aim to integrate diplomacy, development assistance, and military force “while also tapping the energy and ideas of the private sector and empowering citizens, especially the activists, organizers, and problem solvers we call civil society.” 3 What she didn’t say was how she would go about it, especially in a world where most foreign ministries still operate within the confines of traditional diplomacy. Transformational diplomacy was meant to be a process, and some of its more revolutionary aspects would require check-ins and refinements along the way. What is missing, along with a vision, is dialogue with practitioners in the field. While the WikiLeaks cables showed they had plenty to say, the Clinton emails suggest a reason for the lack of impact: her inner circle was often distracted, already positioning for the run for the White House. The emails reveal a sometimes fawning group of acolytes intensively monitoring Clinton’s image. These range from the innocuous “you look cute” comment from Cheryl Mills on the soon-to-be iconic photo of a determined-looking Clinton texting on her BlackBerry to an analysis of her Meet the Press appearance from then-spokesman Philippe Reines. The appearance was apparently orchestrated to push back on a comment from Vice President Biden in July 2009 that Russia was a “withering” nation, but Reines was clearly reaching for new ways to praise his boss. “Whenever you do something big on TV we all hear from lots of folks saying you did great. But this time is noticeably different . . . You were definitely on your game. You either threw a perfect game—or at least a no hitter. So this couldn’t have gone better, achieved everything we needed to times 10, and comes on the heels of a great 10 days . . .” 4

The emails show the inner circle forwarding promises of future political support from George Soros and making disparaging remarks about the Obama team. Sidney Blumenthal conveyed a recommendation from former ambassador John Kornblum that Clinton should cultivate a relationship with German chancellor Angela Merkel, who evidently did not like “the atmospherics surrounding the Obama phenomenon.” He also had withering comments about senior Obama advisers David Axelrod and Robert Gibbs, calling their appearance on Sunday talk shows “rock bottom performances exposing utter political vacuity.”⁵

Former adviser Neera Tanden, in answer to a question on domestic health policy reform, wrote, “The president’s policy instincts are to do good and decent things, but the rest of the Administration is just, well, beyond complicated. It’s a bit too much for email.” And in a discussion about an article assessing the Obama administration’s Asian “pivot,” Clinton asked aide Jake Sullivan about the term: “Didn’t we, not the WH, first use the ‘pivot’?” It’s fair to note that any secretary of state has to rely on a team of mere mortals to handle the boring and routine stuff, which evidently included complex charts on who gets to ride with her in the limousine. But in 55,000 pages of emails, one would expect to see more focus on foreign policy, strategy, and vision.

THE “DAMN EMAILS”

Like the phases of grief, those on the receiving end of a serious political scandal pass through several stages: confusion, denial, obfuscation, arrogance, and at long last, contrition.

As the 55,000 pages of emails came to light, Clinton tried an initial strategy of lighthearted jokes and dismissiveness. She was aided by content that showed her struggling to operate a secure fax machine and searching for emoticons on her new BlackBerry, a good way to humanize a woman to all those who have ever struggled with a new piece of technology. Other emails are inane—her search for the show Homeland, reactions to how she arranged her hair, and enthusiastic comments about her appearance from sycophantic staff.

But for her critics, her handling of the situation revealed a tone deafness to an issue on which she is increasingly vulnerable—the idea of being above the rules. Her explanations that it was “more convenient” and that carrying two phones made her handbag too heavy were unpersuasive.

Clinton staffers contributed to the problem in several ways: when getting wind of a possible investigation, they deleted emails deemed to be “personal,” a unilateral decision that later had to be walked back, causing Clinton further embarrassment. They then sent the emails to the State Department as printed hard copies, which meant the department spent several months retyping the messages electronically, prolonging a news story that should have been put to rest quickly.

The State Department’s decision to release the emails as they were read and classified on a monthly basis gave the story very long legs. The media seized on each new release looking for revelations, leading in turn to new headlines and new questions which, to the annoyance of Clinton and her supporters, distracted the public from her presidential campaign.

For some, the most concerning aspect was her inability to deal with the problem and put it behind her. Six months into the scandal Democratic elected officials, many of them Clinton supporters, were willing to go on the record, exasperated that she had allowed the situation to run on and on.6 Clinton’s supporters turned their focus on the State Department, overwhelmed by flurries of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests from media and watchdog organizations. Senior department officials, under pressure from federal judges to speed up the process, explained that while they hoped to hire fifty more staffers to handle the volume, they had made offers to only a few dozen applicants, and only three had started working by mid-October.⁷ The department had fallen behind by the end of 2015, further prolonging the story.

Clinton got help from an unexpected quarter at the October 2015 Democratic presidential debate when rival Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT), with evident exasperation, said, “The American people are sick and tired of hearing about your damn emails!” The line got laughs and applause, but not everyone was happy.

Defenders point out ambiguities in the laws at the time—detractors would call them loopholes. Others say the problem is symptomatic of big data and that the entire U.S. government is drowning under the weight of emails that must be archived for the public record. The State Department alone produces 2 billion emails a year. Agencies are required to classify the information, which inevitably leads to the painstaking job of declassifying it, a job requiring reading, analysis, substantive knowledge, and subjective judgment—all of which takes time and money.⁸

As in many aspects of Clinton’s tenure, it is the small things that matter. The emails revealed the enormous power and close relationships she has with a handful of carefully selected staff. The emails revealed that two of them, Chief of Staff Cheryl Mills and Deputy Chief of Staff Huma Abedin, argued over a staffing change in Clinton’s protective detail. This is a telling exchange. Career officers follow a strict “needs of the service” assignment policy that, as was discussed in chapter 8, sends them to some of the toughest places in the world, occasionally unaccompanied by family. The “needs of the service” imperative is the most frequently heard phrase for officers and supervisors alike come transfer season. But this exchange between Abedin and Mills showed that the needs of Clinton threatened to trump the needs of the service.

Abedin was upset that a trusted security agent was about to be transferred, and she argued that he had given them wider leeway—an unsubtle indication that rules don’t apply. “[Redacted] just filled me in on your conversations. I would have appreciated a chance to discuss this before it was finalized,” Abedin wrote Mills. The person, she continued, “has been a HUGE asset protecting our interests and balancing usss [U.S. Secret Service] politics. He has gone above and beyond in every way and anyone more stringent will make our life and travel more complicated. Starting from scratch with someone else is going to be challenging.”

Protective details are all about being stringent—even when it makes life and travel more complicated. That’s their job. Starting from scratch is a normal part of the foreign service, where tours are seldom longer than two or three years.

Mills took the high road stating that the transfer would offer “an opportunity for career growth and development for [redacted] something I know you support . . . We should embrace and reward that, even when it means we have to make new adjustments . . . This is rotation time and while I am sure if asked he would stay, he would miss the chance to manage the security at the [redacted].” 9

In such trivia lie larger truths. In this instance at least, the emails support the notion that in the Clinton State Department expedience sometimes prevailed over following the rules.

WOMEN’S RIGHTS ARE HUMAN RIGHTS

Clinton owns the women’s rights issue like no one else in Washington. At a watershed speech at the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995, she had told the world that “human rights are women’s rights and women’s rights are human rights,” and she has never looked back. “The message of Beijing and the lifetime of work it represented had become so much a part of my identity it was practically written into my DNA,” she wrote in her memoirs.10

Following the Beijing speech, she, former secretary of state Madeleine Albright, and then-ambassador Swanee Hunt laid the groundwork in Vienna in 1997 for an organization to promote the empowerment of women. The Vital Voices Democracy Initiative was launched with funds from the U.S. government, along with the United Nations, the European Union, the Nordic Council of Ministers, the World Bank, and the Inter-American Development Bank. By 2000, the organization had evolved into the Vital Voices Global Partnership, a nonprofit, nongovernmental organization, the purpose of which is to “identify, invest in and bring visibility to extraordinary women around the world by unleashing their leadership potential to transform lives and accelerate peace and prosperity in their communities.” ¹¹

No one argues with the goals of Vital Voices. Embassy officers have seen firsthand and reported on how women in many parts of the world face violence, abuse, and stultifying poverty; are denied education and the tools of economic betterment such as lines of credit and bank accounts; and are shut out of participation in government. Apart from being unfair, holding women back holds societies back.

The problem, at least in the early years, was that a very American message about enabling women to become “agents of change” was entangled with cultural hubris. The United States has a history of missteps in this field. As we saw in the discussion on anti-Americanism, Bush administration under secretary Karen Hughes’s gaffes to all-female audiences in Turkey, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia were heavily reported, as was her audiences’ anger at her presumptuous characterization of their lives. American foreign service officers living overseas were more likely to understand such cultural nuances but were rarely asked their opinion on how to address women’s issues outside the United States. There is no indication that Clinton’s team had any inkling how tricky the initiative might be.

Vital Voices’ privileged pedigree gave it traction with ambassadors and embassies, but it didn’t always translate locally. Cultural differences sometimes contrasted with the very American can-do image the organization promoted. For example, women in post-Communist countries were suspicious, recalling how the Communist party exploited women’s issues for propaganda purposes. There was sometimes a naive assumption that the goals of Vital Voices were so universal that every woman in every country and society must embrace them.

Vital Voices’ outreach overseas proved awkward. Washington staffers relied heavily on help from embassies to run its seminars, programs, and training sessions. This led to demands made on behalf of well-connected big names in Washington and left local embassy staff scrambling to accommodate them. Training sessions were often funded through already strained embassy public diplomacy budgets and representational funds (earmarked for embassy receptions), diverting resources from other post-designed programs that had been calibrated to address unique local issues, which ranged from Muslim outreach to indigenous rights to environmental protection, among other themes. Vital Voices staffers didn’t always listen to public affairs officers, and their stubborn insistence on doing it their way led to a canned approach, consisting of a reliance on blockbuster conferences but little follow-through. For embassies already straining to staff reporting requirements for human rights, religious freedom, trafficking in persons, and setting up programs for congressional delegations, Vital Voices became just one more Washington-mandated chore.

The big names swept in and swept out, leaving embassies to sweep up. A week after a conference it was hard to see any impact. The organization’s political clout in Washington ensured a virtuous circle of triumphal reporting cables, and embassies found it easier to claim victory than take the fall. There is no analysis, no frank discussion of the organization’s limitations. Of the sixty-some WikiLeaks cables mentioning Vital Voices, the organization frequently comes in for a mention only when a post was asked to enumerate a laundry list of women’s outreach efforts or in debriefings of participants returning from conferences. Everyone is always “energized, empowered, and excited.” Reporting on measurable results is vague. The danger of such perfunctory reporting was that it perpetuated more programs in more countries.

The Vital Voices experience suggests the limits of relying on embassies for advancing agendas. The lack of follow-up with conference participants does not reflect indifference but rather the limitations of embassies already tasked with advocating for so many policies with limited time and resources. As Vital Voices gained experience, it shifted away from embassies and began working directly with local NGOs. Removing the embassy as middleman was probably a good move—allowing Vital Voices an opportunity to invest in sustained contact with women leaders who embraced its goals and could work directly with the organization. No one argues that Vital Voices as it exists today hasn’t benefited tens of thousands of women, but its early days show what can happen when programming in the field is directed by Washington.

Clinton’s use of the State Department as a platform for advancing women’s issues goes back a long way. At one time the women’s agenda was the purview of State’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, but the first Clinton administration created a new office, the Senior Coordinator for International Women’s Issues, authorized by Congress in 1994. That entity evolved into the current Office of Global Women’s Issues, which ensures that the rights of women and girls are fully integrated into the formulation and conduct of U.S. foreign policy.12

Keeping a focus on women throughout the U.S. government required interagency coordination, so in 1995 President Clinton created the President’s Interagency Council on Women, headed by Hillary Clinton as honorary chair and Madeleine Albright as council chair. The body was initially charged with seeing that gains made at the Beijing conference would be implemented throughout the federal government, and the Council headed U.S. activities around the Beijing Plus Five, a special session of the UN General Assembly to review implementation of the Beijing Platform for Action, a comprehensive document enumerating how women and girls are affected by global issues such as poverty, education, health, violence and armed conflict, economic development, governmental leadership roles, human rights, media, and environment.

The council lasted until 2003, when it was disbanded by President Bush, an indication, perhaps, that the government’s role in global women’s issues is not without controversy. The experience offered Clinton a cautionary tale: presidentially created entities could be dismantled. A decade later she ensured that the position she created for the ambassador-at-large for women’s issues would have better long-term prospects, convincing President Obama to sign a memorandum making it permanent and ensuring that the position reported to the secretary of state. The first appointee, Melanne Verveer, came from the Vital Voices operation and had the access and the profile to make a big splash.

Clinton as secretary of state had no patience for stragglers on women’s issues and insisted on their priority. As she recalled in Hard Choices, “Women’s issues had long been relegated to the margins of U.S. foreign policy and international diplomacy, considered at best a nice thing to work on but hardly a necessity . . . We had to push tradition-bound bureaus and agencies to think differently about the role of women in conflicts and peacemaking, economic and democratic development, public health, and more.” 13 She went on to say:

Even at home in Washington our work on behalf of women was often seen as a parenthetical exercise, somehow separate from the important work of foreign policy. In one Washington Post article about our efforts with women in Afghanistan, an unnamed administration official sniffed, “Gender issues are going to have to take a backseat to other priorities . . . There’s no way we can be successful if we maintain every special interest and pet project. All those pet rocks in our rucksack were taking us down.” I have to admit, I got tired of watching otherwise thoughtful people just smile and nod when I brought up the concerns of women and girls.¹⁴

An alternative interpretation of the quote that so troubled Clinton might be fatigue and exasperation with Washington’s habit of chasing too many priorities with too few dollars. Single-issue advocacy of the latest policy trend can make those tasked with implementing new directives feel as though they are operating with no overarching strategy. Clinton’s impatience also revealed a lack of political space for nuanced points of view on women’s issues. It should not be heresy to suggest that in some countries at certain moments, women’s issues, vital though they are, might need to take a back seat. Clinton might have done better to consider why the person quoted believed this to be true. She would have heard that cultural complexities—especially in war-torn places like Afghanistan—were getting trampled under the relentless march of multiple Washington directives from multiple agencies.

Several factors combined to suggest a communications problem over women’s issues, and American diplomats were an audience Clinton needed to reach. As one example, at a time when many were still redefining their roles in the age of transformational diplomacy, female foreign service officers were battling low promotion rates and low representation at the highest ranks. Some had been advised to focus on hardcore policy issues such as trade, economics, and arms control and to avoid career-slowing backwaters such as women’s issues. Scores of foreign service women had in some cases put off marriages and pregnancies to be “all in” for the rigors of a job that now featured unaccompanied assignments to Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, service in countries requiring mefloquine and other antimalarial prophylaxes with side effects, and postings in which the best treatment for any medical complication might be the next flight out. This, too, was part of transformational diplomacy.

A second factor was the knowledge gap. As gender studies have matured, there is an ever-growing body of specialized knowledge, literature, and scholarly thought leaders. Being a woman in an embassy hardly qualified one as an expert on global women’s issues. Few officers had the background to be authoritative advocates, and not every female foreign service officer shares an innate passion for women’s issues.

A third factor was that some American women in the diplomatic corps were uncomfortable working on women’s issues when the United States suffered in comparison to countries with more family-friendly policies. Women in Western Europe have access to paid maternity leave for months and sometimes years, child care is heavily subsidized, and working hours are more family friendly. As one foreign service officer put it, “How am I supposed to advocate for women’s issues when my own country won’t even give me time off for breast-feeding?” That only changed relatively recently with the Affordable Care Act of 2010. For nursing mothers, the State Department headquarters building offered many reminders that diplomacy had long been a male domain. Bathrooms featured outmoded toilets, and for years there was no private place for nursing mothers who wanted to pump breast milk. Overseas, embassies had even fewer facilities.

Finally, there is the definitional problem of what constitutes global women’s issues. Clinton’s tendency to focus on women in the developing world meant she missed (or ignored) conversations in the developed world. In many embassies, women were not talking about honor killings in Pakistan but about Sheryl Sandberg’s book Lean In, Marissa Mayer’s chances of success as CEO of Yahoo, and Anne-Marie Slaughter’s frustration as evinced in her Atlantic article “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,” the most-read article in the history of the magazine, and one uniquely relevant to Clinton’s State Department, given Slaughter’s position.

Clinton’s reply to Slaughter’s “manifesto” unfortunately got mangled in a quote to a reporter from the magazine Marie Claire, in which the secretary seemed to be saying, stop your whining. In the wave of media interest that followed, the State Department released a transcript that made it clear that the “whining” remark was in response to the interviewer’s tangential question on the character of Holden Caulfield from the book Catcher in the Rye. That helped somewhat, but Clinton’s annoyed tone was still troubling.

The reporter wrote,

When I asked Clinton about Slaughter’s claim that “juggling high-level governmental work with the needs of two teenage boys was not possible,” Clinton’s disapproval was palpable. She reminded me that she has spent her career advocating on behalf of women, that she is committed to the idea that “it’s important for our workplaces . . . to be more flexible and creative in enabling women to continue to do high-stress jobs while caring for not only children, but (also) aging parents.” But, she said, Slaughter’s problems were her own. “Some women are not comfortable working at the pace and intensity you have to work at in these jobs . . . Other women don’t break a sweat. They have four or five, six kids. They’re highly organized, they have very supportive networks.” 15

The Clinton emails reveal another angle—Anne-Marie Slaughter’s shock over her boss’s reaction to her article. She emailed Mills and Abedin under the subject line “I am really devastated,” and asked, “Is she really talking about me? I have been 500 percent supportive and loyal in every possible way I can be? Can I at least talk to her?” Abedin reassured her that Clinton’s comments were not accurate. “There is a lot going on here and philippe has been pushing back hard.” Subsequent emails show Slaughter did get a chance to talk with Clinton, but Clinton never enlarged the dialogue with other women at the State Department. In other emails Slaughter nudged Clinton to leave for the holidays on December 21 (so that others might also do so) and praised her for working from home on a snow day. Clinton’s perfunctory replies suggest bafflement at best or tone deafness at worst over work-life balance issues.16

Clinton had missed an opportunity to weigh in on a new direction in the debate on women in the workplace—and link it to similar debates taking place beyond U.S. borders. This issue is never as simple as being highly organized and having supportive networks. It resonates for women in public life as well as those in ordinary jobs. In 2014, Michèle Flournoy took herself out of the running to replace Chuck Hagel as secretary of defense on family grounds.¹⁷

Another example of Clinton’s rigidity on women’s issues was continuance of the annual Women of Courage Awards begun under Secretary Rice. A case could be made that it was time to review this practice. The annual ritual of seeking out women who qualify for the adjective of “courageous” often meant embassies nominated women who suffered violent physical abuse, perpetuating the notion of women as victims, as was recounted in the “Frenemies” chapter. That view spilled over into other aspects of reporting, with embassies supplying depressing quantities of examples. The leaked cables offer 13,619 reports on trafficking (mostly concerning women), 3,002 on rape, and nearly a thousand more on other forms of violence against women.

There are other ways to celebrate women in countries undergoing change: as innovators, entrepreneurs, researchers, and leaders. In response to Clinton’s request to integrate women’s issues into the broader work of the State Department, embassy reporting became more interesting. The USEU Mission reported that the “EU was looking for guidance and increased cooperation and participation . . . ensuring issues affecting women continue to be a focus of EU foreign policy in a way that supports U.S. interests.” 18 The U.S. embassy in London wrote about its outreach to minority communities and its sophisticated partnership with British government agencies.¹⁹

Embassy Kabul, surely on the front lines of women’s issues, described a dramatic meeting between the Afghan Women’s Network, an umbrella group of seventy women’s NGOs and the government’s lead official on reintegration and reconciliation efforts. This was a major effort, overseen and encouraged by the United States, to bring together multiple facets of Afghan society, including insurgents. The cable reported that the women pressed the official on concerns that the government would focus on the south, further tipping the balance of development resources and efforts away from the safer provinces in the central and northern regions. In a stunningly patronizing display, the official asked the women for a two-page paper on this complex topic. The embassy commented that the women “are unlikely to accept that submitting a two-page paper on their views suffices; rather they rightfully expect women to be involved in the negotiating process.” ²⁰

Embassy New Delhi’s EST (Environment, Science, and Technology) officer noted a troubling absence of Indian women scientists from conferences, laboratories, and universities and hosted a workshop to better understand the hurdles they had to leap to be successful in their society. The women said that caste, the rural versus urban divide, and social customs in which they are expected to place family considerations first were largely to blame.

The Indian scientific establishment tends to be rigidly stove-piped with scientists often spending their entire careers climbing the ladder within a single institution. This organizational structure offers little or no consideration for work-life balance. Those who take time off for family often find they are not welcome back in the workplace, and there are no opportunities for part-time work, flexible hours or work-based childcare facilities to accommodate family demands.21

The search for a work-life balance became a drumbeat in reporting everywhere from Malta—where a conference on female entrepreneurship considered best practices for a work-life balance—to Malaysia, where the embassy said the women’s minister cited work-life balance as one of what she called four adversities affecting women.²²

Embassy Warsaw wrote that even though women run a third of all companies in Poland, “Polish women find it difficult to balance an active professional career with family life.” ²³ In Shanghai, the Women’s Federation hosted a meeting of women mayors that focused on Shanghai’s economic development but also looked at how to maintain a healthy work life.²⁴ In Japan, the minister of state for Consumer Affairs, Food Safety, Social Affairs and Gender Equality, when asked about ways in which the United States and Japan could cooperate on empowering women, said, “We need to find ways of improving the work-life balance.” ²⁵

MISSILE DEFENSE AND THE RUSSIAN RESET

Woody Allen once said that 80 percent of life is showing up, an adage that could well serve as a motto for diplomacy’s many ceremonial tasks.²⁶ There are wreath layings, national days, inaugurations, receptions, commemorations, and state funerals. While there is usually no substance in these, there is great symbolic value in showing the flag and having productive conversations with other world leaders on the margins of the main event.

The presence of the United States can catapult a ceremony to the A list, and the question of who will lead the U.S. delegation is watched intensely. Jokes aside, vice presidents do, in fact, attend a lot of funerals, but some are so important that the president himself will go. Obama attended Nelson Mandela’s memorial service in 2013 and would have attended Polish president Lech Kaczynski’s funeral in 2010 had it not been for a cloud of volcanic ash that spread across northern Europe, closing Polish airspace to all flights. Obama caught flak from conservatives for skipping Margaret Thatcher’s funeral in 2013, which only rated two former secretaries of state from previous administrations, yet the death of Václav Havel in 2011 brought Secretary of State Clinton, former president Clinton, and former secretary of state Madeleine Albright.

Sometimes a purely ceremonial event becomes more than the sum of its parts. This was surely the case for the Polish seventieth anniversary commemoration of the beginning of World War II. The Poles always meant for it to be a big deal, and the date, commemorating events that included the Holocaust, the deaths of millions, and an all-out U.S. military engagement, could hardly have caught Obama by surprise. Yet the administration was oddly resistant to any meaningful involvement in the Poles’ September 1, 2009, ceremony, despite the presence of Vladimir Putin, Angela Merkel, Gordon Brown, Nicolas Sarkozy, and many other heads of state. The United States initially planned to send a very former secretary of defense, William Perry, who had served from 1994 to 1997. The Poles pressed for a currently serving official, and finally, days before the ceremony, the administration announced it would send National Security Advisor General James Jones.

This tiny tempest had overtones that were not only symbolic but cumulative, seen by some observers as one in a series of actions in which the Obama administration and the Clinton State Department were devaluing Central and Eastern Europe. The Polish commemoration came amid a succession of diplomatic dustups in the administration’s approach to the region, encapsulated by the Russian “reset,” a policy initiative that seemed to demand ever more concessions to Russia from the United States. One of those friction points involved the missile defense program.

Missile defense, revived under the George W. Bush administration, called for the placement of Patriot missiles in Poland and a radar tracking station in the Czech Republic. A relatively modest proposal, the Patriots would be limited to ten, and the X-band radar station, looking like a gigantic white golf ball, was to be moved from its site on an atoll in the Marshall Islands and rebuilt in a village outside of Prague. The two installations would work in tandem to defend against missile threats from Iran.

Russia cried foul, insisting that any defensive system was a red line and a violation of prior arms control treaties, destabilizing the carefully negotiated nuclear balance of power. Each step of progress on missile defense brought new and hostile declarations from Putin and Medvedev, including threats to place offensive missiles in Kaliningrad, a Russian enclave sandwiched between Poland and Lithuania, that would target missile defense installations. The rhetorical escalation alarmed many Europeans. When a Russian general warned Poland, “This will not go unpunished,” NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer dismissed it as a “pathetic remark,” but others were less sanguine.

Installation of the system deeply divided many Poles and Czechs, too. The Atlanticists among them loved the idea of a security guarantee that would pull them ever farther westward and provide an added layer of security on top of NATO. Opponents—and there were many—attacked the idea of foreign troops—even NATO allies—stationed on their soil, becoming a potential target, militarizing their countries, and despoiling the environment. In Poland, after tough negotiations, Secretary Rice and Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski signed an agreement in late summer of 2008. It took considerable political capital from Czech politicians to push the agreement through the upper house of parliament, which was signed in July 2008 by Rice and Czech foreign minister Karel Schwarzenberg. An agreement in the Czech lower house proved more elusive, as Obama’s election and his administration’s subsequent announcement of a missile defense policy review took the wind from the sails.

Days after his inauguration, President Obama sent a secret letter to Russian president Dmitri Medvedev offering to scrap plans for missile defense in Poland and the Czech Republic if the Russians would agree to stop Iran from developing long-range nuclear weapons.27 Three weeks later Obama’s letter leaked, causing upset in Poland and the Czech Republic, as much for the lack of consultation as for the content. And on February 7, 2009, mere weeks after the inauguration, Vice President Joe Biden used the now infamous “reset” word at the Munich Security Conference, the Wehrkunde. “The last few years have seen a dangerous drift in relations between Russia and our alliance. It’s time to press the reset button and to revisit the many areas where we can and should work together.” ²⁸

Secretary of Defense Gates echoed that idea in a speech on February 20, 2009, at a NATO meeting in Krakow, Poland. “I told the Russians a year ago that if there were no Iranian missile program, there would be no need for the missile sites.” Obama’s inauguration, he said, offered the chance to start again. “My hope is that now, with the new administration, the prospects for that kind of cooperation might have improved.” ²⁹

Gates, of all people, should have been aware of Central European sensibilities on the issue of Russian involvement. In a visit to Prague while still in the Bush administration, Gates had let slip that a possible “Russian presence” at the radar site might assuage Russian sensitivities to the program. The thought of any sort of Russian military or inspection workers on Czech soil, coupled with the tacit admission that the Czech government had not been consulted before the offer was made, produced a firestorm in Czech media and weakened an already teetering coalition government in Prague.³⁰

The embassy was straightforward in describing the damage. “Foreign Minister Schwarzenberg told the Ambassador he was ‘surprised and disappointed.’ . . . He was even stronger with a visiting American that same weekend, complaining that the U.S. ‘announcement’ about the Russian invitation to the radar site ‘had been made with no prior warning’ to the [government of the Czech Republic], which was ‘an embarrassment to him.’” 31 In unusually pointed language, the embassy relayed that both the deputy prime minister and deputy foreign minister complained of “continued USG inability to consult and coordinate fully with the Czechs and Poles in advance of important USG negotiations (e.g., with Russia) or announcements (e.g., the NIE [National Intelligence Estimate]).” ³²

Against this backdrop of a potential policy shift in an uneasy region, Clinton met her counterpart, Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov, for the first time as secretary of state in Geneva on March 6. She and her staff had embraced the idea of a gag gift—a big red button bearing the word RESET. Clinton’s instinct to inject a bit of humor in a frosty relationship might have worked save for two factors. Despite a wealth of Russian-speaking advisors, the word for reset was mangled in the translation as “overcharged.” Lavrov was ungentlemanly enough to point this out publicly, embarrassing Clinton and her team. He then took the innocent gesture to draconian lengths, suggesting the red button was less reminiscent of a computer keyboard than a nuclear hot button. “It is a very, very large red button,” he said. “I do hope that Russia and the United States and other countries would never ever push any other buttons associated with initiation of destructive hostilities.” ³³

Awkward moments have a way of sticking and the reset became burdened with all the subsequent policy steps, missteps, and reversals. Poles and Czechs were notified of the Obama administration policy review on missile defense but were never an active part of it. The pass over rankled in a region that had witnessed Munich and Yalta, potent symbols of the habits of great powers deciding “about us without us,” a phrase that has become something of an unofficial national motto. The Czech government had its own problems, and the coalition collapsed in disarray midway through its European Union presidency in winter of 2009, leaving the Czechs to be governed by a caretaker regime. The coalition, already hanging by a thread, was undone by a few parliamentary defections in a no-confidence vote that came March 24, 2009, a dozen days before hosting the Obama visit and U.S.–EU Summit April 4–5.

By summer 2009, the sense of nervousness in Central and Eastern Europe had grown. Obama’s speech at the New Economic School in Moscow had done nothing to reassure skittish officials in Prague and Warsaw. “As I’ve made it clear this system is directed at preventing a potential attack from Iran. It has nothing to do with Russia . . . But if the threat from Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile program is eliminated, the driving force for missile defense in Europe will be eliminated, and that is in our mutual interests.” 34

The speech rattled the region, and twenty-two Central and Eastern European leaders wrote an unprecedented open letter on July 16 to the Obama administration.³⁵ Seen as a desperate action by leaders of friendly nations who couldn’t seem to get a hearing or find a foothold in the still-new Obama administration, the letter was also read as a sign that something was amiss within the administration to have set off friendly nations so badly. The New York Times called it “a remarkable breach of convention” that “boiled down to a public expression of mistrust.” ³⁶ The underlying assumption was that such a letter should never have been necessary, and that its public nature was a shot across the bow, with observers noting “open letters are not the typical means by which close partners and allies voice their concerns to one another, and though one could argue with the validity of their arguments, the Obama administration clearly did not receive either the message or the method of delivery very well at all.” ³⁷

Speaking as Atlanticist voices, the writers worried that “all was not well” in the relationship, that “NATO seems weaker,” and that Washington didn’t understand the threat from Russia. “It uses overt and covert means of economic warfare, ranging from energy blockades and politically motivated investments to bribery and media manipulation in order to advance its interests and to challenge the transatlantic orientation of Central and Eastern Europe.” While the writers ostensibly welcomed the reset, they quickly warned, “The danger is that Russia’s creeping intimidations and influence peddling in the region could over time lead to a de facto neutralization of the region.”

U.S. embassies across Central Europe scrambled to provide context for the letter and sent cables warning about the timing of any announced decision on canceling the missile defense program, along with concerns about its impact on internal politics. In Bratislava, the embassy warned Assistant Secretary Alexander Vershbow of the testy mood within a normally friendly forum, the Slovak Atlantic Council, the country’s leading transatlantic-oriented security and defense NGO, where he was scheduled to speak. “You should be aware, however, that there is a good deal of skepticism among this group (which includes several signatories of the CEE open letter) about the direction of U.S. policy. They believe we do not have a strategy toward Russia other than appeasement and they are worried.38

The coup de grace arrived on September 17, when the Obama administration abandoned missile defense. It was done in rapid-fire one-hour meetings—just long enough to deliver the blow in person—first with the Poles, then the Czechs, and then at NATO headquarters. The three-member delegation consisting of Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Michèle Flournoy, Lieutenant General Patrick O’Reilly of the Missile Defense Agency, and the State Department’s Under Secretary for Arms Control and International Security Affairs Ellen Tauscher delivered the news behind closed doors, answered a few questions, and left what can only be called a mess behind.

Obama’s reticence to engage the leaders directly was best symbolized, at least in the Czech case, with a perfunctory midnight phone call to Prime Minister Jan Fischer—a fact Fischer was quick to let the Czech media know. In Poland, the September 17 announcement came on the anniversary of the day the Soviet Union had invaded Poland. Thus World War II–related anniversaries came full circle, managing to haunt the United States twice in one season.

From any political vantage point in Central Europe, it had been a terrible summer. A departing ambassador, Victor Ashe in Warsaw, wrote an end-of-tour cable lecturing Washington on how to put relations “back on track”—a startling tone, even for an official soon to depart. The disappointed Polish reaction to the president’s missile defense policy shift did not occur in a vacuum, he argued, nor was it mainly about missile defense. Rather, he wrote, Poles felt their military (and economic) contributions in Europe, Iraq, and Afghanistan were consistently underappreciated.39

A week later, thirty-one American officials, some of whom were former ambassadors, wrote their own open letter to Obama, echoing the concerns of the original open letter writers. “Though the signatories of this bipartisan letter have varying views on the merits of your administration’s proposed missile defense architecture for Europe, we are united in our concern about the effect that even the perception of U.S. disengagement from Central Europe could have on our allies in the region.⁴⁰ In response to the outcry, the administration dispatched Vice President Biden to the region in November 2009 to soothe wounded feelings and put relationships back on track.

As a final symbolic slap to the Czech Atlanticists, the signing of the new START treaty between the United States and Russia on April 8, 2010, which reduced the number of nuclear missile launchers by half and instituted a new inspection and verification process, was held in Prague, a location that resonated with Obama as a bookend to his speech on nuclear nonproliferation a year earlier. The successful conclusion to the treaty negotiations was tightly linked to the administration’s willingness to abandon missile defense, and the choice of Prague for the signing sent a discouraging message to those Czechs who continued to see Russia as a security threat.

The Obama administration insisted it had not abandoned missile defense but rather exchanged it for what it called a “European Phased Adaptive Approach,” which envisioned a network of radar facilities and interceptor sites in Europe, all focused on threats from Iran. This, too, met with huge opposition from the Kremlin, and in March 2013 Obama would capitulate and drop the most controversial fourth phase of the program, citing budgetary limitations and a need to shift resources to protect against a growing missile threat from North Korea.

Secretary of State Clinton left office in February 2013. Events in Ukraine did not begin until November of that year, and the Russians did not illegally annex Crimea until March 2014. Nonetheless, as secretary of state during the now-infamous Russian reset, she must at least share responsibility for a U.S.–Russia policy that largely failed. The cables leave a damning trail of evidence, not only from Poland and the Czech Republic, but from Ukraine, Georgia, and the Baltics, showing that American diplomats on the ground were sending her plenty of information about Russian destabilization and aggression.

As the Czech politician Alexandr Vondra had warned, the demise of missile defense left the region a different place. Atlanticists were hard to find. “Some statements from the new generation of politicians who incline to realpolitik in Prague, Bratislava, Budapest or even Warsaw have shown that even in those parts of Europe, a pro-Atlantic stance should not be taken for granted.” 41 After the Ukraine crisis in 2014, both Czech and Slovak government leaders had a tepid response, dismissing the notion of sanctions and stating that they had no desire for NATO troops on their soil (despite being NATO members) and that Obama’s belated initiative to bolster defense in Central and Eastern Europe would have to take place elsewhere.

It’s hard to find Clinton’s footprints in anything concerning missile defense. The topic is almost absent from her memoirs. She makes the briefest of appearances in the fall of 2010 when the Obama administration turned to the ratification process of the new START accord, a treaty that was negotiated by her State Department. Her contribution centered on finding the necessary votes in the Senate, work for a skilled politician but not necessarily a diplomat.

In some ways, Clinton’s absence as a key player in missile defense—and in the Russian reset—might burnish her credentials with Russia skeptics. Her treatment by Lavrov—not only with the reset button but in other encounters—makes her an unlikely champion for any new forays into Russian rapprochement. Her admiration for Walesa and Havel seems genuine and suggests a rapport with the region’s Atlanticists that Obama lacked. But as the embassies reported, the heyday of dissidents has waned. A new generation of European politicians has risen with no memories of pre-1989 conditions. Former secretary Albright’s iconic statement of the United States as “the indispensable nation,” first stated in 1998 as justification for military intervention in Iraq and repeated frequently since, might be contested or puzzling to a younger audience that has neither lived through World War II nor the Communist divide that separated Europe. As pro-democracy dissidents like Havel and Walesa leave the scene, Clinton might find forging partnerships with a new and younger Europe more difficult, thanks to the painful lessons the region learned on missile defense.

A GREAT COMMUNICATOR FOR A NEW ERA

Forty years ago, no one asked if Henry Kissinger was a great communicator. His job was to think strategically and to propose and carry out global initiatives. If he had something important to announce, he could simply call a press conference. No secretary of state in today’s world could replicate his secret trip to China. The public scrutiny he was able to avoid is now a critical part of the job.

Clinton’s tenure coincided with an unprecedented era of social media, and new formats for conversation seemed to pop up every week. She proved to be an adept practitioner of all kinds of public diplomacy to reach foreign audiences—often at the end of what must have been exhausting days. The foreign policy establishment has not given nearly enough weight to this job requirement, nor enough credit to her successes. The embassy reporting cables, by contrast, come alive with an enthusiasm that would be hard to fake. Officers from around the world praised her willingness to engage and her knack for outreach.

On a March 2009 visit to Ramallah, Clinton agreed to an interview for a Palestinian youth television show, Ali Soutik. According to the consulate, the director of the NGO that produced the program said feedback was overwhelmingly positive. “You cannot believe the phone calls we received, the emails . . . everyone is talking about the [opportunity] Mrs. Clinton has given to Palestinian youth,” the director said. The program, which normally attracts half a million viewers, was watched by 1.2 million people, including both President Abbas and Prime Minister Fayyad.42

Embassies deployed a new format, called a “townterview,” in which Clinton would be interviewed onstage in front of a live, town hall–type audience, usually a mix of civil society leaders, students, NGOs, business professionals, and others. The success of the format requires that the interviewer—as well as the interviewee—engage in a conversational style that plays to the audience. For a while, these hybrid media events were new enough to create news stories of their own, producing an additional publicity bounce.

Clinton tried the format in Bangkok, going onstage with two of Thailand’s leading broadcast journalists before an audience of about 250 and a television audience of some 2.4 million. “The event received overwhelmingly positive media coverage, not only for its substantive policy discussions but also due to the witty banter between Secretary Clinton and the co-hosts that created a comfortable, at-ease atmosphere that had the audience erupting in laughter throughout the Townterview.” ⁴³

Clinton used a variation on this theme in her first visit as secretary of state to Turkey in March 2009, agreeing to appear on Turkey’s most popular talk show Come and Join Us, hosted by four Turkish women and filmed in front of a small studio audience of students and NGO members. She won points for openness and honesty from the cohosts, and the broadcast was hailed in major Turkish newspapers as “the perfect way of practicing public diplomacy to improve the U.S. image in Turkey.” She published an article for the Turkish daily Zaman in connection with International Women’s Day, noting, “Problems today are too big and too complex to be solved without the full participation of women.” 44

Clinton also included one of the first bloggers to join the more traditional traveling press corps on her Asian trip in 2009. Japanese blogger Nozomu Nakaoka wrote an engaging account of how he was invited.

Last weekend, I received a telephone call from someone at the U.S. Embassy who asked me: “There has been an instruction from the Department of State to include a Japanese blogger in the press corps traveling with Secretary Clinton. You, Mr. Nakaoka, are a blogger, aren’t you? Can you join them?” I said in response, “I am a journalist and have my own blog,” and I accepted the offer, seeing it as the chance of a lifetime. I heard later on from a U.S. Embassy employee that including a Japanese blogger in the traveling press corps was the Secretary’s personal desire.⁴⁵

The cables also reveal some imperfect coordination between Clinton’s Washington staff and the embassies. On any given day, the secretary is deluged with media requests from all over the world, and deciding which, if any, interviews to grant is a strategic process. In countries where media outlets are divided strictly along government and opposition lines, such decisions inevitably are an act of taking sides.

One day in 2009, Clinton’s State Department staffers decided she should grant an exclusive interview to Venezuela’s embattled opposition television Globovision, in which she would announce the role of Costa Rica’s Óscar Arias as mediator in the Honduran coup and call for better relations between the United States and Venezuela. However, relations between the United States and Venezuela were at such a low point that no such interview would be seen as innocent or neutral. Even before the interview hit the airwaves, the U.S. embassy in Caracas was fielding complaints. The embassy noted, with some asperity, that it had not been consulted about the interview and had just learned of it before the phones started ringing—an awkward position to be in. They nonetheless tried to soothe Venezuelan feelings without great results.

The DCM [told the foreign minister] that Chávez had publicly expressed doubts about the true intentions of the U.S. government in Honduras, accused the United States of being behind the coup, and that Clinton was responding to a request for an interview by Globovision that allowed her to speak directly to the Venezuelan people on the issue of Honduras and our hopes for an improved dialogue with Venezuela. The foreign minister protested . . . saying that the Globovision principals were nothing more than coup plotters.46

The interview would cause the embassy headaches for months afterward.

THINKING SMALL

One of the themes of Clinton’s tenure was the dilemma she articulated in her memoirs, and one that is occasionally posed in diplomatic cables: What happens when U.S. interests conflict with U.S. values? This question played out in Egypt’s Tahrir Square, where an impetuous Obama wanted to be on the right side of history and a clearly torn Clinton counseled caution. It played out in Syria, where Clinton’s instinct to arm the rebels fighting the Assad regime clashed with the White House’s hesitation. Clinton was forthright in expressing her views but loyal in supporting the president’s. A more fundamental question might be: What is the proper role for a modern secretary of state and what can be learned from Clinton’s relationship with her embassies?

There are too many places where Clinton was either inactive or sidelined. Clinton has said little about global corruption, despite copious reporting from the embassies. Disarmament was President Obama’s initiative. The ongoing problem of Iraq was given to Vice President Biden. Afghanistan and Pakistan belonged, until his death, to Special Envoy Richard Holbrooke. George Mitchell was named special envoy for the Middle East. In fact, the Obama administration named an unprecedented twenty-four special envoys, special representatives, special advisors, and special coordinators for a host of global hotspots. None required Senate confirmation. They operated with staffs ranging from one to thirty, and only eleven of them reported to the secretary of state. Clinton dismissed the notion that she risked becoming marginalized by so many special envoys. “That’s not the way I saw it. Appointing people who were qualified to serve as Secretary themselves [she was thinking of Holbrook and Mitchell] enhanced my reach and the administration’s credibility.” 47

But that assessment is too facile for State Department hands with long experience of the special envoy problem—and it is a problem. There has been extensive debate over the utility of special envoys. While they can elevate the profile of an issue and secure meetings with high-level counterparts, they come at a high price. They have trouble moving policy papers through a turf-driven bureaucracy, their mandate is often too vague, and there can be nasty disputes over confused lines of authority.⁴⁸

A 2014 U.S. Institute of Peace study on the role of special envoys, with many examples drawn from the Clinton State Department, illustrates how these individuals—especially those who are White House–appointed—can marginalize not only the secretary, but embassies. The first U.S. special envoy for Sudan and South Sudan

made poor use of the embassies, cutting them out of both the policy and negotiating process and Washington policy debates. They were asked, in effect, to serve simply as travel and logistics support for the [office] and were often not included in meetings in the country. This lowered morale in the embassies and bifurcated reporting and analysis channels. . . . [The office] was not structured well to oversee all the projects it initiated, some of which were ill-conceived and poorly supervised.49

The report also mentioned the stormy stints of Richard Holbrooke, whom Clinton refused to fire despite strong White House pressure, and George Mitchell, who reportedly resigned over differences on Middle East policy within the Obama administration. By failing to challenge the insertion of twenty-four special envoys into her State Department, Clinton lost chances to influence foreign policy processes or to impose her own overarching worldview across countries and issues, tacitly agreeing to the compartmentalization of foreign policy. It is hard to imagine some of her predecessors meekly agreeing to so many oft-called baronies.

Being secretary of state is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, which leads to the second observation: Clinton tended to settle for too little and squandered her influence on the small stuff. She fought the Obama White House to get the right chief of protocol—why? She wrote in her memoir that she learned from her time as first lady that protocol is important to diplomacy. This is a misreading. Protocol chiefs work on guest lists, table seating, and VIP gifts. What’s far more important to diplomacy is policy, and she might have traded the chit for her favorite protocol officer for something more substantive.

She found time to promote a clean cookstoves initiative, an issue she said was at the crossroads of energy, environment, economics, and public health, and certainly benefited people who used inefficient and dangerous stoves.50 Bravo, but was this the best and highest value use of her time? She stated that her key foreign policy goals were food security, global health policy, LGBT rights, and Haiti.⁵¹ That’s an interesting list but one better suited to USAID than to the State Department. She mentioned other priorities, too, such as engaging activists on social media, helping determine energy pipeline routes, limiting carbon emissions, encouraging marginalized groups to participate in politics, standing up for universal human rights, and defending common economic rules of the road, a list that speaks for itself.⁵²

Perhaps James Dobbins said it most diplomatically: “Circumstances have denied her opportunities for the transformative accomplishments of Dean Acheson,” secretary of state to President Truman from 1949 to 1953 and one of the architects of the postwar world.⁵³ The Berlin Wall did not fall on her watch nor was the World Trade Center attacked. She did not bring peace to the Middle East, although she did manage to broker a ceasefire in November 2012 in Gaza between the Israelis and Hamas. Unlike Henry Kissinger, she did not orchestrate an opening to China, but she was largely responsible for the opening to Burma, which she began at the start of her tenure in early 2009. In general, she stayed within the lines and played the hand that history dealt her.

Clinton believes firmly in the power of public-private partnerships, and therein lies both the strengths and weaknesses of her approach. Her list of foreign policy priorities, logically enough, frequently coincides with the work of the Clinton Global Initiative, established by Bill Clinton as a policy platform for an activist approach to scores of global issues, and her earlier work with Vital Voices. The proliferation of NGOs—some of which are well funded and powerful—means outside voices can influence foreign policy without the scrutiny of the electorate or the mandate of the ballot box. Unlike NGOs, the State Department is uniquely able to speak for the U.S. government, yet it will increasingly have to speak more loudly as it navigates a global landscape littered with private organizations—some of which will have agendas decidedly at odds with the policies of a U.S. administration. As vested interests clash, future secretaries of state may find their speeches pay less homage to starting more public-private partnerships and instead delineate where those partnerships end.

Clinton, always a practitioner rather than a theoretician, searched for a phrase that would accurately encompass her worldview. She chose the term idealistic realist to emphasize the duality of both the idealistic and the realistic aspects of the issues she confronted. She also believed in smart power, a term she has continued to use following her tenure as secretary, which encapsulates the crossroads of what she called the three Ds—diplomacy, development, and defense. Clinton defined smart power as an ever-expanding toolkit in which diplomats might work on unconventional issues using new technology and skills. It echoes the theme of what she hopes will be her lasting contribution to the State Department itself—the Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review.

The QDDR, conducted in 2010, is probably the best reflection of Clinton’s worldview from within the State Department looking out. Through it, she attempted to tackle the single most debilitating problem for the department, year after year: erratic funding from Congress. The QDDR focuses on four areas:

  Building America’s civilian power by bringing together the unique contributions of civilians across the federal government to advance U.S. interests

  Elevating and transforming development to deliver results by focusing investments, supporting innovation, and measuring results

  Building a civilian capacity to prevent and respond to crisis and conflict and give the U.S. military the partner it needs and deserves

  Changing the way America does business by working smarter to save money, planning and budgeting to accomplish priorities, and measuring the results of investments54

Here is Clinton the CEO at her best. Not the first to try to impose managerial order on the inherently unmanageable State Department, she tried throughout the document (clearly prepared with Congress in mind) to link initiatives, resources, and measurable outcomes. She reached out to the field multiple times, seeking input, ideas, and reactions.⁵⁵ The field responded in kind, and she heard in rapid succession from posts as varied as Tel Aviv, Mexico, Ankara, Dhaka, Abuja, Brussels, and Maputo. No doubt the dialogue continued beyond the last date of the leaked cables on February 28, 2010.

Unsurprisingly, Clinton used the QDDR to recapitulate her call for women to play larger roles. She continued to think about her working definition of smart power, suggesting in a controversial Georgetown University speech in December 2014 that it might even include empathizing and showing respect for one’s enemies. She offered the example of two women in the Philippines who became agents for peace in a decades-long conflict. “This is what we call smart power—using every possible tool . . . leaving no one on the sidelines, showing respect, even for one’s enemies, trying to understand and insofar as is psychologically possible, empathize with their perspective and point of view, helping to define the problems, determine a solution.”⁵⁶

Clinton’s perseverance in the areas she valued most and her insistence on defining her own role as secretary of state may have clashed with State Department traditionalists looking for a Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, or Colin Powell, but in areas where she had a free hand she demonstrated consultative engagement, managerial prowess, and an instinct for outreach. And, depending on the State Department’s ability to institutionalize the QDDR architecture, she may be one of the few modern secretaries of state to have left the institution financially stronger than she found it.

There is no “Hillary doctrine,” and no true diplomatic breakthroughs, perhaps reflecting the fact that in today’s era even powerful people have less freedom of action. There are too many problems and too many stakeholders. Should Clinton become president, she would do well to reconsider the many cables from embassies describing anti-Americanism, corruption, and threats to security and democracy. These enduring issues resist once-and-for-all resolution. They will continue to delimit America’s place in an uneasy world. Her determination as a future president to chart a new course may well be circumscribed by the nuances of what the embassies were telling her all along.