← The Political Scene | The New Yorker
The Political Scene | The New Yorker
John Cassidy and Ryan Lizza review Hillary Clinton’s performance and her prospects.
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John Cassidy and Ryan Lizza review Hillary Clinton's performance and her prospects.
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- [00:00]
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Dorothy Wickenden
This is the Political Scene, a weekly conversation with New Yorker writers and editors about Politics. It's Thursday, January 31st. I'm Dorothy Wickenden, executive editor at the New Yorker. This week, John Kerry was confirmed as the new secretary of state and Hillary Clinton is stepping down. On Sunday, Clinton and President Obama discussed her four years as America's chief diplomat in an interview on 60 Minutes.
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John Cassidy
You have to be thoughtful.
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Dorothy Wickenden
You can't rush in, especially now where it's more complex than it's been in decades. You know, I certainly am grateful for the president's steady hand and hard questions and thoughtful analysis as to what we should and shouldn't do. Ryan Lizza and John Cassidy are talking with me today about Clinton, Obama and the administration's foreign policy agenda. John, you argued this Week online that Hillary Clinton was a great ambassador, not a great secretary of state. Explain the distinction.
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John Cassidy
Well, if you look back at her history and say, you know, who were the great secretaries of state? People like George Marshall or Dean Akerson or even going further back, John Quincy Adams. They tend to be associated with sort of big foreign policy doctrines. Marshall and Akerson obviously are associated with the reconstruction of Europe and the Marshall Plan in Europe. Even Henry Kissinger is associated with the detente and, you know, the rapprochement with China, even after that. You maybe think of James Baker, who put together the coalition for the first Iraq war. I remember covering him. Hillary, you know, she did a lot of things, flew around a lot, did have some successes, such as the ceasefire in Gaza and getting out the Chinese dissident. But there's no real overarching theme to her tenure. You know, historians look back, I don't think they're going to say, look, this was the Clinton Doctrine that she laid down. So I think the main role she played, and Obama was pretty explicit about this in the interview, was as a sort of ambassador for America post the Bush era. When he appointed her back in 2008, Obama clearly knew he was going to be busy with domestic policy because of the financial crisis, et cetera. The role that he envisaged for Clinton, which is the one she played, was as the sort of frontman for the US While he was busy taking care of business at home. And I think she did very well at that. You know, she was incredibly diligent, as she always is. She flew all over the place. She logged nearly a million miles. She visited 112 countries. So I'm not saying she was a bad Secretary of state by any stretch of the imagination, but I don't think she was a great one.
- [03:43]
Dorothy Wickenden
Okay, Ryan, you profiled Hillary in 2011. Do you agree with John's assessment?
- [03:48]
Ryan Lizza
Yeah, I mean, I think the first thing to say is the policy making across the board, from economic policy to foreign policy over the last several decades has become more and more concentrated in the White House and less and less out in the cabinets and agencies. And this was especially true for the Obama White House, which had a very strong National Security Council, led by Tom Donilon and Then later Denis McDonough, who's now the chief of staff. They controlled foreign policymaking. So Hillary Clinton and the State Department were much more about implementation rather than coming up with grand ideas. So that's the backdrop of how much action does she have given that power dynamic? And then, you know, the other thing to say is that the staff level distrust between the White House and national security officials at the White House and the officials around Hillary Clinton eased, but it never disappeared.
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Dorothy Wickenden
And what do you think, Ryan, since you were writing that piece just a year or so after the start of the Arab Spring, so you had a very Sort of coherent argument at the time. Things have gotten a lot scarier since then in Egypt, Syria, and then, of course, the recent hostage crisis in Algeria. We see that Al Qaeda isn't actually vanquished. It's just mutating. Talk a little bit about that and whether your assessment of her has changed at all since we won't be able.
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Ryan Lizza
To judge her for a few decades. I think, just like we can't really judge the Bush foreign policy team for a long time. I agree with Cassidy on a lot of what he said. I would give her maybe a little bit more credit. I mean, I was just thinking four areas where she was active with personal diplomacy that seemed to make a difference, for good or bad. Early in the administration, 2009, the big foreign policy project was figuring out Afghanistan. And I think, unfortunately, she was on the wrong side of that debate, and.
- [05:37]
Dorothy Wickenden
Biden was on the right side of that debate.
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Ryan Lizza
I think in the end, Biden was. Holbrooke and Biden were pushing for basically to pull out and reduce our footprint in Afghanistan to as little as possible. And Hillary Clinton aligned herself with the generals, aligned herself with the more hawkish people who wanted a military defeat of the Taliban before America moved to any kind of negotiated settlement. So I think she was wrong on that one. Even on getting the United nations to put sanctions on Iran was a pretty significant diplomatic success for the Obama administration. Susan Rice gets some credit for that, but so does Hillary Clinton. I mean, she was deeply involved in those negotiations. And, you know, getting Russia and China not to veto that. That was a pretty big victory. And it's having some success. I mean, the Iranian economy is not doing well because of that. And then the Arab Spring is a mixed bag, as you point out, Dorothy, Egypt does not look very good right now. We won't know the outcome for a while. But on Libya, she was really forceful in getting the Obama administration to intervene in Libya. And that was the period of time when I was sort of covering her closely and flying around with her. And the period in the spring of 2011 when I was on these trips, she was in France and Switzerland, and we eventually ended up in Tunisia and Egypt. And during that period, she was doing some very nitty, gritty copy. Coalition building. Not that different to what you were talking about, John, with Baker building a coalition against Iraq. And eventually that coalition that she built led to the UN resolution that authorized force in Libya. Now, whether this was the right decision or not, history will judge, but I think she should get some credit for that. And then finally, something that doesn't get talked about much, but which the Obama administration is very proud of and talks about all the time and argues that it will be their sort of legacy is what they call this pivot to Asia. And she's done a lot of sort of boring but detailed diplomacy, building alliances with East Asian countries in this effort to sort of, you know, some people call it soft containment of China. So the big example, of course, is Burma. They're now an ally. She's done similar things in Vietnam and other East Asian nations and really strengthening our ties across the Pacific. And so, you know, that's one that doesn't get much attention, but that they point to and, you know, and are rightfully proud of.
- [07:54]
John Cassidy
China's a very interesting one and is sort of undercovered, as Ryan says. I mean, the sort of pivot to Asia, which Hillary was deeply involved in. It's called a pivot to Asia here in China, it's called an anti Chinese policy. It's basically a way of trying to contain China and, you know, keep America as the top dog, keep China down, ally ourselves with their former enemies, including Japan and some of the other islands, et cetera. So far, it's been a big failure in China if the aim of the policy is to foster better relations with the Chinese. So it'll be very interesting to see whether Kerry sticks with that. So I think, you know, the Chinese, even though there is this pivot to Asia to some extent, a lot of foreign policy experts think it's a sort of neglected area. How America deals with China is the big issue of the 21st century. It's more important than dealing with a few, you know, sort of ragtag Islamic militias in North Africa. It doesn't get that precedence in sort of US foreign policy debates.
- [08:51]
Dorothy Wickenden
John the joint appearance of Clinton and Obama on 60 Minutes was riveting, at least to me, even though it was essentially scripted by Obama. And neither of them really said anything surprising except about what good friends they are. And they do seem to have worked remarkably well together, especially given the fact that Hillary's hands were tied on a number of issues. As we've talked about. Talk a little bit about your impression of their relationship, their evolving relationship.
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John Cassidy
Yeah, well, Ryan probably knows more about it, having covered it more closely than I have, but certainly looking from afar, they appeared to have, you know, reached a rapprochement after 2008 pretty quickly. As Ryan says, the staff people on both sides were still mutually suspicious.
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Ryan Lizza
But I think, I think you have to throw in Bill and Michelle in terms of the staff.
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John Cassidy
Right, right, right. But I think, you know, Obama and Hillary, I mean, although they had, you know, the great set too, in 2008, I think they're actually basically pretty similar. They're both pretty pragmatic people. And I think they worked out pretty quickly at the end of two that, you know, rather than continuing to have this sort of sniping from the outside, Obama clearly thought it was a better idea to bring Hillary inside. And that worked. And the deal was that Hillary would have a sort of relatively limited role, that, as Ryan said, foreign policy would be conceived and largely managed from inside the White House, but that she'd also have a big public Persona. And, as Ryan said, she would be able to implement things and deal with certain policies, which she did well. But, you know, the sort of implicit deal was that she had to be very loyal and with never a word of criticism of Obama or even a suggestion of any criticism. And I think she kept to that, and Obama kept to his side of the deal. And over the years, it seems that, you know, they actually struck up a reasonable relationship. She seems to have been involved in most of, you know, the big meetings about Al Qaeda and Iran, et cetera. And Obama said, and there's no reason to doubt him, that by the end of her tenure, you know, he valued her advice. From my perspective, it's sort of two pragmatic, centrist politicians working out that it's in their own interest and in their mutual interest to get along. And they did a very good job. And as for the 60 minutes thing itself at the end, I mean, there's been a lot of speculation that it was sort of payback for Bill Clinton's speech in Charlotte at the convention. I don't know if it's that much of a quid pro quo, but there was certainly an element of payback there. It wasn't an endorsement of Hillary in 2016, but if you were Joe Biden, or if you were Joe Biden's potential campaign manager, you wouldn't have been too pleased to see the President out there saying what a great job Hillary did.
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Ryan Lizza
Ryan, I agree with that last part. I mean, the mystery of how that interview came about. I would like to understand, John, one.
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Dorothy Wickenden
Obvious achievement of the past four years is that the Republicans in 2012 had little to criticize about the Obama foreign policy. The assassination of bin Laden pretty much took care of that. What are their major grievances?
- [11:34]
John Cassidy
I mean, as you say, I don't think they really have any, or they'd have ran on them last year. I mean, I guess the big rap on Obama from the ride is that he hasn't been tough enough on Iran and that Iran will ultimately get a nuclear weapon if we don't either go to war with them or support an Israeli strike. Obama's argument has always been that we can negotiate our way out of this. In appointing John Kerry and Chuck Hagel, who both are skeptics about military action, he's clearly going to stick with that policy. That's one of the great unresolved issues for the second term. But certainly, I mean, just looking back over the past four years, Obama, Obama and Clinton, however you want to put it, just from a strictly political perspective, they neutralized the old traditional weakness of the Democratic Party on foreign policy. And they did that by, you know, to some extent, really extending the George Bush's war on terror through drone attacks, through attacking Al Qaeda all over the world. So Obama was willing to alienate the left of the party, kept Guantanamo open. As I say, he's expanded the missile program. He sits in the office and picks out the targets himself. I mean, it's an astonishing, you know, fact of 21st century American presidency. The President oversees the kill list, or at least approves them. How can a hawkish Republican criticize that?
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Dorothy Wickenden
John, what do you think about Hillary's recent testimony on Capitol Hill about the killing of four American diplomats in Benghazi, including the ambassador Christopher Stevens? Pundits have spent a lot of time dissecting her performance. But beyond that, how major a diplomatic setback was that?
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John Cassidy
I think she's done as well as you can in the circumstances. I mean, if you're the Secretary of State and you lose your first ambassador, I think. Since when was it? Since the 70s? At least 30, 40 years. First ambassador killed in office, in his own office, in what is effectively a war zone. And there was very little protection afforded to him. And it turns out that he'd been requesting more protection, but it was turned down. Just logistically, that's a disaster. Given that, I think she's handled it pretty well. She's basically done what you can do in the circumstance. She said, look, I take ultimate responsibility for it. But the issue of providing security for Ambassador Stevens didn't reach my level. The key decisions were taken at a lower level. Nobody has come out and contradicted that or not effectively. Some people on the right have suggested that she was in some meetings, et cetera, but, you know, there's nobody out there from the State Department saying that's just not true. We sent a memo up to Hillary saying this guy needs more protection. And she said no way. So handed a disaster. She's handled it as well as she could. I don't know what Ryan thinks about it.
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Dorothy Wickenden
Yeah, Ryan, what do you think?
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Ryan Lizza
Well, I basically agree. I mean, at the end of the day, the State Department is responsible for the security of our diplomats all around the world. That's sort of your number one obligation, right before anything else. You're responsible for making sure our embassies are secure and that her personnel, especially in dangerous places, are okay. This is a black mark on her record. Is it going to matter politically for her going forward? I doubt it. I doubt, you know, in a primary this would ever be an issue. And I doubt if she made it to a general election not to be completely throw this back into 2016. I doubt this is going to be an issue that's going to decide her future presidential ambitions.
- [14:43]
Dorothy Wickenden
Okay, thank you both very much. Ryan Lizza and John Cassidy are staff writers, and John blogs frequently about politics on newyorker.com this has been the political scene from the New Yorker. I'm Dorothy Wickenden.
- [14:55]
Ryan Lizza
You can subscribe to this and other free New Yorker podcasts in the itunes store. The weekly audio edition of the magazine is available at audible.com Subscribers can read the magazine online at new yorker.com and also in the tablet at edition on the iPad and the Kindle Fire.
- [15:18]
John Cassidy
I'm Katie Drummond.
- [15:19]
Ryan Lizza
I'm Wired's global editorial director. I'm Michael Colori, Wired's Director of Consumer Tech and Culture.
- [15:24]
Dorothy Wickenden
And I'm Lauren Good. I'm a senior correspondent at Wired. And our show Uncanny Valley is all about the people, power and influence of Silicon Valley.
- [15:34]
John Cassidy
At Wired, we're constantly reporting on how technology is changing every aspect of our lives.
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Ryan Lizza
So each week on the show, we.
- [15:40]
John Cassidy
Get together to talk about one of the biggest stories in tech.
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Ryan Lizza
Right? So whether we're talking about privacy, AI, social media, or a major tech figure, we will always explain the Silicon Valley forces behind these stories and how they affect you.
- [15:54]
John Cassidy
Make sure you're following Uncanny Valley in your podcast app of choice so you.
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Ryan Lizza
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