To the Secretary

by Mary Thompson-Jones

  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. milita
ry 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 t
hat 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