I was glad to read Aaron David Miller make the point in the Los Angeles Times: You don't play politics with the secretary of state position and expect to run an effective foreign policy. Barack Obama may not have politics on his mind if he picks Hillary Clinton at State. But the rest of the world will see virtually nothing but politics at play. And Clinton herself, seeing virtually nothing past her next chance to run for president, would oblige. This is not a relationship conducive to the most important ingredient between a president and his secretary of state: trust.
As Miller, who worked for six secretaries of state as a Middle East specialist, wrote,
The assumption that a new president will appoint a secretary of State who is close to him and has his confidence is not always accurate. Of the six secretaries I worked for, only one -- Baker -- had a truly close relationship with his president. And yet this relationship is crucial. You simply cannot expect to do serious diplomacy abroad, or in the sometimes even more perilous world of Washington, without knowing that the president has your back, will not allow domestic interest groups to undermine you or permit his other advisors to do so. [...] It takes America's friends and adversaries about five minutes to figure out who really speaks for the White House and who doesn't. If a secretary of State falls into the latter category, he or she will have little chance of doing effective diplomacy on a big issue. More likely, they'll be played like a finely tuned violin or simply taken for granted.Can anyone say with a straight face that there's a close relationship, let alone a friendship, between Obama and Clinton? This is the same Clinton who refused to shake Obama's hand on the Senate floor after Obama declared for the presidency. The same Clinton whose campaign was a management disaster, as one of her top campaign advisers described it to Newsweek: "It was a terribly unpleasant place to work. You had seven people on a morning call, all of whom had tried to get someone else on the call fired, or knew someone on the call tried to get them fired. It was not a recipe for cohesive team building." The same Clinton who, it should be said, had no commanding strategy for why she should be president other than the sense that she should: a visionary, she was not. A visionary is what American foreign policy seriously needs at this juncture.
And she's also, and tragically, the same Clinton who, no matter what's tried, what's negotiated, what's promised, brings Bill Clinton along. That can be an advantage to her in her negotiating sessions with the likes of Mahmoud Abbas and Banjamin Netanyahu. But it's still Bill Clinton, the man who called Obama "a fairy tale" and whose history remains mucked up by his dismal lack of personal discipline. An Obama presidency can deal with one Clinton. It can't deal with both.
But there's also the matter of what a Hillary Clinton foreign policy would look like. Is this really a good fit for the Obama presidency? I don't think so. She is more McCain than Obama: she, like McCain, does not believe in negotiations as the default position of America's dealing with adversaries. Whether she believes in that or not, the secretary of state's position is by definition where diplomacy begins: she would be the one who'd start conversations with the likes of Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or his more powerful superior. She would be the one to start conversations with Venezuela's Hugop Chavez or whoever succeeds Fidel Castro. She would be the one, if the United States intends to displace Turkey and Qatar as the most effective mediators of Middle East peace deals, to start conversations with Bashar Assad, the president of Syria, or force the next prime minister of Israel to the table (if he happens to be Netanyahu; she'd have to do no forcing if it's Tzipi Livni).
Is that what the nation's foreign policy needs right now? I think so. So does Obama. Is that what Clinton really wants to be seen doing as she prepares for her next run? Court dictators and ex-enemies? I doubt it.
Clinton's strength has always been domestic policy--health care, that weird, mostly for-show monster known as domestic security, energy to some extent. She's tended to leave foreign policy to her husband and to Joe Biden, who would have made a pretty good secretary of state. But she's neither a natural fit at State nor a politically desirable one. Obama is trying to mend fences with her over the appointment. All he'd achieve is the encrusting of fences between the United States and its adversaries, as well as, assuredly, some of its friends, who'd rather get to work mending the damage done by the Bush administration for eight years, not watching the damage perpetuated internally by a Clinton-Obama rivalry.
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