Memo to Madam Secretary: First, Do No Harm

Hillary Clinton's first visit to a changed Arab world is full of promise and peril.

BY AARON DAVID MILLER | MARCH 14, 2011

The sudden onset of the Arab spring and winter has reminded us yet again that America doesn't run the world. And the country must be wary, in the elegant phrasing of the late Reinhold Niebuhr, of its own dreams of managing history.

Like the children's game Where's Waldo?, a coherent and effective American response to what's taking place these days in the Arab world seems hard to find in a sea of faces and events over which the United States has little control.

And no one knows this better than America's smart, superstar secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, whose Arab spring/winter tour begins Monday, March 14. Never has there been a less hospitable world and greater challenges for serious American diplomacy.

Despite her popularity and adept practice of public diplomacy, Clinton understands her own limitations and those of the United States. She knows she's between a White House and a military that owns all the consequential hot-button issues. Indeed, more than two years in, America's top diplomat -- one of Washington's ablest, smartest, and savviest players -- has yet to put her signature on a high-profile issue of peace or war likely to get her admitted into the secretary-of-state hall of fame.

And now this: a transformative, historic wave of political change sweeping the Arab world that on paper would seem to offer huge opportunities for bold American action, but in practice has left Barak Obama's administration more sidelined than central, playing whack-a-mole with ad hoc responses in a frantic effort just to keep up.

From Libya to Egypt, Washington has been forced to recognize -- and this is mostly for the good -- that change in Arab world isn't primarily an American story. And yet, America isn't a potted plant. It must work to find a role that tries to reconcile its interests and its values with policies that somehow just don't seem to fit anymore.

The secretary's trip is an important part of that effort. America needs to be seen as identifying itself with progressive, peaceful change, supporting those who demand it and to oppose those who practice violence and cruelty. But it's also Mission Humble.

JEWEL SAMAD/AFP/Getty Images

 

Aaron David Miller is a public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and author of the forthcoming Can America Have Another Great President?.

KEVINSD

9:51 PM ET

March 14, 2011

All right, Mr. DeMille, I'm ready for my close-up

I don't contest that Hillary Clinton is a powerful symbol and has become more popular during the past two years, but if there weren't this powerful publicity machine going on about how brilliant and effective she was I don't think that's a conclusion most observers would reach on their own. And yet the crisis in the Middle East seems so large we might get that rare situation: a sequence of events where success or failure is so transparent it can't be spun. I hope she pulls a rabbit out of a hat. What I'm expecting, honestly, is that she'll be the same well-intentioned but befuddled plodder we saw during her 2008 campaign.

 

ZATHRAS

11:04 AM ET

March 15, 2011

Superstar or Gas Giant?

I've been hearing how bright, capable and savvy Hillary Clinton is for the last twenty years.

As First Lady, Senator from New York, Presidential candidate and now Secretary of State, she has always managed to impress the same kind of people. These are mostly either people with a weakness for celebrity, or people with strong policy views of their own flattered that a political superstar either does or might agree with them.

The people so impressed by Clinton do not, as a rule, dwell on anything she has actually accomplished. This is pretty significant when one is talking about a Secretary of State. The greatest modern occupants of that office, after all, have been people who could not possibly have been elected to anything: a career soldier who didn't vote, a superstar lawyer and intellectual, a foreign-born Jewish professor, a backroom political operator. They became famous by doing foreign policy. Hillary Clinton got to do foreign policy because she is famous.

Having said all that, I don't consider myself anti-Clinton. I know of and value some of the steps she has taken to strengthen the State Department as an institution, and I know that any Secretary of State would struggle in an administration headed by a President who kind of thinks he should do that job himself. Moreover Clinton, like Obama, has a brief to repair the damage that the last administration did to American interests and America's image around the world; that damage was considerable, and every American should want her to succeed.

What would make her success more likely in North Africa and the Middle East? The single most important step Clinton should take would be to step away from the fatuous narrative, first popularized by former President Bush, that holds (pre-Bush) American foreign policy responsible for Arab tyrannies, corruption and assorted other defects of political society. These defects were always the result primarily of Arab choices, not American ones. The United States accommodated itself to the governments it found in the region in the past, and will now accommodate itself to political change. We will pursue our interests.

One way to reduce the credibility-sapping gap between our ideals and our interests is to ensure that foreign audiences know what we know -- that America is a nation, not a missionary society. We have interests apart from making other societies more free and less backward, and some of those interest (like, for example, peace in the region) will take precedence for us most of the time. Every nation pursues its interests; what has gotten the United States into trouble on numerous occasions is our weakness for pretending that we are interested only in promoting our values. This is self-deception that would be less harmful if we were the only ones fooled.

I'm not sure Sec. Clinton understands this, or whether she could act on her understanding given the views of her chief. I am sure a successful foreign policy has to stand on a sure foundation, something more substantial than the affected humility of the "listening tour" Mr. Miller seems to recommend.