Deconstructing Hillary
Speaking at the Council on Foreign Relations yesterday, Hillary Clinton laid out the Obama administration's approach to American leadership:
The same forces that compound our problems - economic interdependence, open borders, and the speedy movement of information, capital, goods, services and people - are also part of the solution. And with more states facing common challenges, we have the chance, and a profound responsibility, to exercise American leadership to solve problems in concert with others. That is the heart of America's mission in the world today....The question is not whether our nation can or should lead, but how it will lead in the 21st century. Rigid ideologies and old formulas don't apply. We need a new mindset about how America will use its power to safeguard our nation, expand shared prosperity, and help more people in more places live up to their God-given potential.
President Obama has led us to think outside the usual boundaries. He has launched a new era of engagement based on common interests, shared values, and mutual respect. Going forward, capitalizing on America's unique strengths, we must advance those interests through partnership, and promote universal values through the power of our example and the empowerment of people. In this way, we can forge the global consensus required to defeat the threats, manage the dangers, and seize the opportunities of the 21st century. America will always be a world leader as long as we remain true to our ideals and embrace strategies that match the times. So we will exercise American leadership to build partnerships and solve problems that no nation can solve on its own, and we will pursue policies to mobilize more partners and deliver results.
Given the venue, one wonders if she hasn't been cribbing from Leslie Gelb. It sure sounds like it.
The challenge with the Clinton/Obama approach isn't that it will fail, but that any successes will be so modest that they'll easily be lampooned as failures. It will be success of the lowest common denominator variety, which doesn't sit comfortably within the historical framework of "American leadership."
I think that Clinton is correct to argue that the U.S. can only lead if others will follow, but we need to be realistic about what this means. When the world was confronted with the unambiguous threat of Soviet tanks in Eastern Europe, it rallied. But even then there were fractious disputes among allied powers. Turning to contemporary issues, we have seen time and again that the so-called global threats of proliferation, climate change, terrorism and disease simply do not galvanize the world to rally behind America's preferred solutions.
Give that, as Clinton noted, most of these major global problems cannot be solved by the U.S. alone, it will become increasingly necessary to simply accept that the low bar of consensus solutions is going to be the rule, not the exception, and then spell out a subset of interests that cannot be sacrificed on the altar of global consensus.
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Photo credit: AP Photos
