The last two weeks have given a head-spinning distillation of the three-year fight over Hillary Clinton’s time in the Obama Cabinet.
Last week in Cleveland, she was a disastrous failure directly responsible for the deaths of Americans. In the convention hall in Philadelphia, she is the most qualified nominee for president ever, a groundbreaking secretary of state and already a much-admired world leader.
Pure partisanship accounts for some — but not all — of this dissonance. The rhetoric around her relative success or failure as our country’s top diplomat has shrouded the underlying disagreement over political philosophy and the proper role of government. As Americans debate government’s most basic functions, the role of secretary of state has become a battleground. Is the secretary of state, above all, the guardian of our constitutional values against foreign infringement? Is she a global figure whose job is to promote the global good? Or is she a manager, the vice president for global affairs, so to speak, of USA Inc.?
Clinton’s accomplishments at the State Department combined shoring up venerable institutions with creative exploration of new tools and authorities — returning U.S. influence to international bodies where it had declined, negotiating the U.N. sanctions that paved the way for the Iran nuclear deal, restoring visible U.S. leadership in Asia, achieving significant global milestones for women, girls and LGBT people, unprecedented partnerships with social media, business and community groups. But her grade on those accomplishments depends very much on which scale the grader is using.
At the Democratic National Convention, former President Bill Clinton made the case for his wife as a “change-maker,” an activist champion at home and abroad. For decades, international relations departments and popular biographies have taught a single view of what a secretary of state’s leadership looks like: This establishment image, still held by many in both parties, treats the post as a kind of a shadow U.N. secretary-general, but appointed by the president (and with a real army to back her up).
Left and right disagree on what should be done with all that power: Make peace in Syria; create a viable Palestinian state. Solve climate change; defeat terrorism. Do trade deals; undo or re-do trade deals. And above all, do it by using your larger-than-life persona to marshal all the resources of the U.S. government behind you.
An alliance of true limited-government conservatives (think Rand and Ron Paul supporters) and nationalists who are fine with big government as long as it serves narrowly defined American interests (think Trumpistas’ enthusiasm for Medicare, wall building and torture) has effectively sidelined most GOP supporters of activist leadership.
What holds these two groups together is their focus on defending the Constitution and military security and their disdain for laws and norms that originate outside the United States or constrain the United States in any way.
By these standards, requiring American soldiers to obey international humanitarian law is somewhere between foolish and treasonous. Using this rationale, the strategic and humanitarian objectives that led Ambassador Chris Stevens to risk his life, and the lives of his team, in Benghazi fade away. If foreign relations are all competition, and no cooperation, the difference between political competition at home and security competition abroad could get blurry — as seems to have happened in Trump’s encouragement of Russian hackers targeting his political adversaries.
This explains why — while security professionals worry about Russia, China, nuclear weapons and cyberwar — the GOP’s convention devoted most of its national security programming to Benghazi and immigration. And senior Republicans, including Newt Gingrich who only a few years ago were congratulating Clinton on her foreign policy acumen, lined up to criticize her, signaling their acceptance, or at least tolerance, of this newly dominant view on the right.
Ironically, though, Clinton’s tenure also earned grumbles from analysts who felt she failed to loom large enough on the world stage. As Michael Hirsh wrote for Foreign Affairs three years ago, “she leaves office without a signature doctrine, strategy, or diplomatic triumph. It is a stretch to include her in the company of John Quincy Adams, George Marshall, Dean Acheson. …”
But to be fair, it’s hard when the President who hired you doesn’t believe in signature doctrines and larger-than-life diplomacy? Barack Obama, in particular, has made it clear he has little patience for diplomacy by grand gesture, and believes that shaping world affairs is a matter of small nudges rather than visible shoves.
Most first-term presidents, in fact, make sure their secretaries of state don’t outshine them. It’s not an accident that most of the best-known activist secretaries, from Acheson to Henry Kissinger to Madeleine Albright, were second-term hires. The appetite for the more managerial model Obama prefers — call it national security that is seen but not heard — is big enough to split the Democratic Party and attract some conservative non-interventionists as well.
The debate over Clinton’s tenure has implications far beyond the world of foreign policy geeks. Is building coalitions with nongovernment players in social media, and prioritizing human rights concerns, an essential strategy in a world of decentralized power? A waste of time on nonstrategic issues? Or actively detrimental to U.S. constitutional norms? Do we believe our own rhetoric about the importance of empowering women and other marginalized groups? Can one love the Iran sanctions regime but disdain the multilateral engagement and compromise that produced them? Whether the issue is trade courts, climate standards or war crimes, how should American laws and values coexist with others’?
Hillary Clinton will always be, as her husband says, the activist fighting for change and the pragmatist content to do it in small steps. This is likely to mean that purists in any school of political thought will never find her record satisfying. But it’s also likely to mean she follows in the footsteps of John Quincy Adams, the secretary of state who overcame his own inward-looking tendencies to preside with Thomas Jefferson over the Louisiana Purchase — and, of course, went on to become president.
Note: An earlier version incorrectly said that Sen. Bob Corker spoke at the GOP convention.