To the Secretary

by Mary Thompson-Jones

  “We must use what has been called ‘smart power,’ the full range of tools at our disposal—diplomatic, economic, military, political, legal, and cultural—picking the right tool, or combination of tools, for each situation. With smart power, diplomacy will be the vanguard of foreign policy.” 32

  In between soft and smart power came Condoleezza Rice’s contribution to the discussion in 2006, when she coined the term transformational diplomacy. All three ideas aimed to redefine America’s position in the world in light of challenges such as globalization and violent extremism. Each notion in turn assumed that a new world order would require diplomats to take on unconventional roles and think in different ways about the intersections of diplomacy, development assistance, and military power. This would be a lengthy conversation—Rice thought it would be “the work of a generation.”

  As secretary of state, Rice gave two speeches on transformational diplomacy, both at Georgetown University, two years apart. Her first speech in 2006 focused on new threats to the United States that were emerging within states rather than between them. “It is impossible to draw neat clear lines between our security interests, our development interests and our democratic ideas. American diplomacy must integrate and advance all of these goals together.”

  But the headline grabber was the case she made for a global repositioning.

  To advance transformational diplomacy, we must change our diplomatic posture. In the 21st century, emerging nations like India and China and Brazil and Egypt and Indonesia and South Africa are increasingly shaping the course of history . . . Our current global posture does not really reflect that fact. For instance, we have nearly the same number of State Department personnel in Germany, a country of 82 million people that we have in India, a country of one billion people. It is clear today that America must begin to reposition our diplomatic forces around the world, so over the next few years the United States will begin to shift several hundred of our diplomatic positions to new critical posts for the 21st century.33

  Yet the most controversial aspect of her speech, at least in retrospect, was her willingness to join diplomacy to the work of the military. Rice outlined her vision of future diplomats working alongside military officers, citing a need to work at the “intersections of diplomacy, democracy promotion, economic reconstruction and military security.” She foresaw what she called a “jointness” between soldiers and civilians.

  Rice’s second speech about transformational diplomacy, in 2008, offered a darker worldview in which the United States was buffeted by the chaos of failed states.

  Globalization is revealing the weaknesses of many states, their inability to govern effectively and to create opportunities for their people. Many of these states are falling behind. Others are simply failing. And when they do they create holes in the fabric of the international system where terrorists can arm and train to kill the innocent, where criminal networks can traffic in drugs and people and weapons of mass destruction, and where civil conflict can fester and spread and spill over to affect entire regions.34

  Here too is a foreshadowing of the precarious state of Iraq and its vulnerability to the ensuing chaos that was brought by ISIS and other rival factions.

  Rice made a reference to the town hall meeting in Foggy Bottom and spoke approvingly of how the Foreign Service had responded. “To staff our positions in Iraq, we have had to transform our personnel system and that is working. We now have some of the most senior and outstanding members of our Foreign Service leading out efforts in Baghdad, including four ambassador-rank officers. And most importantly, our diplomats in Iraq have answered the call to serve voluntarily and I thank them for that.” Her use of the word voluntary hinted that the threat of directed assignments probably was a heavy-handed and unnecessary approach.

  All good officers read the boss’s speeches, and not surprisingly, many embassy cables began connecting the phrase “transformational diplomacy,” to their reporting efforts. Lacking any context beyond the hot spots mentioned by Rice, posts began using the term transformational diplomacy to cover a multitude of concerns, ranging from outreach to the Lebanese diaspora in Brazil, to a post visit of the USS Cowpens Navy cruiser in Vladivostok, to a funding gap for a U.S. pavilion at the Shanghai Expo. At its worst, “transformational diplomacy” became a catchall term to justify costs or staff for new programs.

  A test of any policy is whether it outlives the incumbent who first articulated it. By this standard, Rice’s initiative indeed made an impact, although whether she would agree with all that is being done in the name of transformational diplomacy remains an open question. In retrospect, all the speeches, articles, and debates in Washington and the foreign policy think tanks about whether U.S. foreign policy should be soft, smart, or transformational seem almost irrelevant when set against the incredible challenges diplomats faced in many of the countries mentioned.

  Rice’s second speech made a revealing point about the tentativeness and uncertainty in charting a new course. “There are no precedents or playbooks for this work. We are trying to do things, quite literally, that have never been done before.” She referred to earlier periods of international upheaval, quoting Dean Acheson, who wrote, “The significance of events was shrouded in ambiguity. We groped after interpretations of them, sometimes reversed lines of action based on earlier views, and hesitated long before grasping what now seems obvious.” 35

  Given the intellectual honesty of that admission, Rice seemed curiously eager to buy into a new scenario in which diplomats would work alongside the military, as she tried in the Georgetown speeches to provide the intellectual underpinnings for why that might be a good idea. What’s missing from her speeches is any sense that she had taken the pulse of the field. Diplomats had been serving alongside the military in Iraq since 2003. There should have been ample institutional memory available to her of what worked and what didn’t. In general, the conversations among foreign policy luminaries failed to connect to the concerns of real-life diplomats, many of whom were still asking a legitimate question: How will America’s diplomats work in war zones?

  Iraq was only one of the critical threat posts—officers wrote equally compelling cables about Afghanistan and Pakistan. The Iraq cables from 2006 to 2010—some 6,651 in total—are not the output of officers triumphantly crowing that they had it figured out. They would be the first to insist they did not. The multiplicity of ethnicities within these countries would take a lifetime to decipher, not to mention fluency in more than one of the many languages spoken in the region.

  What makes the Iraq cables noteworthy, and newly relevant given the subsequent unraveling of Iraq in 2014, are the stories they tell of officers, often ill prepared, gamely trying and making the most of the skills they had and experiencing the small victories that come from connecting with people, however fleetingly. They wrote cables because they wanted to let it be known to Washington that they had shown up and done their best in tough circumstances, reason enough to write home.

  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 det
ermined-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.