Life is about making such choices. Our choices and how we handle them shape the people we become. For leaders and nations, they can mean the difference between war and peace, poverty and prosperity.
The President’s top advisors were divided. The intelligence were compelling, but far from definitive. The risks of failure were daunting. The stakes were significant for American’s national security, our battle against al Qaeda, and our relationship with Pakistan. Most of all, the lives of those brave SEALs and helicopter pilots hung in the balance. It was as crisp and courage a display of leadership as I’ve ever seen.
Talk of America’s decline has become commonplace, but my faith in our future has never been greater. While there are few problems in today’s world that the US can solve alone, there are even fewer that can be solved without the US. Everything that I have done and seen has convinced me that America remains the “indispensable nation.” I am just as convinced, however, that our leadership is not a birthright. It must be earned by every generation.
Despite our clashes over the past year, we had developed a respect for each other rooted in our shared experiences. Running for President is intellectually demanding, emotionally draining, and physically taxing. But crazy as a national campaign can be, it is our democracy in action, warts and all. Seeing that up close helped us appreciate each other for having gotten into “the arena,” as Roosevelt called it, and going all the way.
We had very different personal stories and experiences, but we shared the old-fashioned idea that public service is a noble endeavor, and we believed deeply in the basic bargain at the heart of the American Dream. No matter who you are or where you come from, if you work hard and play by the rules, you should have the opportunity to build a good life for yourself and your family.
But campaigns are based on highlighting differences, and ours was no exception.
That was a lot of freight for one speech to carry, and I didn’t have much time to get it right.
Jim Kennedy, an old friend with a magic touch for evocative language, had woken up in the middle of the night thinking about how the 18M people who had voted for me had each added a hole in the ultimate glass ceiling.
Although we weren’t able to shatter that highest, hardest glass ceiling this time, thanks to you, it’s got about 18M cracks in it. And the light is shining through like never before, filling us all with the hope and the sure knowledge that the path will be a little easier next time.
As hard as all this was for me, I learned a lot from losing. I had experienced my share of personal and public disappointments over the years, but until 2008 I had enjoyed an unusual run of electoral successes. The night of the Iowa caucuses, when I placed third, was excruciating.
Losing also would give me the chance to talk to leaders of other nations about how to accept difficult verdicts at home and move forward for the good of one’s country.
And so my deliberations continued. One hour I leaned toward accepting; the next I was making plans for legislation I would introduce in the new session of Congress. I didn’t know it then, but I later learned of the shenanigans my team and the President-elect’s were playing to make it tough for me to say no.
I quickly learned that being Secretary of State is really 3 jobs in one: the country’s chief diplomat, the President’s principal advisor on foreign policy, and the CEO of a sprawling Department.
Rahm was famous for his forceful personality and vivid language (that’s putting it politely), but he was also a creative thinker, an expert in the legislative process, and a great asset to the President.
Nonetheless I remained fundamentally optimistic about America’s future. My confidence was rooted in a lifetime of studying and experiencing the ups and downs of American history and a clear-eyed assessment of our comparative advantages relative to the rest of the world. Nations’ fortune rise and fall, and there will always be people predicting catastrophe just around the corner. But it’s never smart to be against the US. Every time we’ve faced a challenge, whether war or depression or global competition, Americans have risen to meet it, with hard work and creativity.
I thought these pessimistic analyses undervalued many of America’s strengths, including our capacity for resilience and reinvention. Our military was by far the most powerful in the world, our economy was still the biggest, our diplomatic influence was unrivaled, our universities set the global standard, and our values of freedom, equality, and opportunity still drew people from everywhere to our shores. When we needed to solve a problem anywhere in the world, we could call on dozens of friends and allies.
I believed that what happened to America was still largely up to Americans, as had always been the case.
As First Lady, I learned how important protocol is to diplomacy. Being a generous host and a gracious guest helps build relationships, while the alternative can result in unintended snubs. So I wanted to be sure we were at the top of our game.
But it was George Shultz who gave me the best gift of all: a teddy bear that sang “Don’t worry, be happy” when its paw was squeezed.
Foreign policy experts often refer to the system of institutions, alliances, and norms built up after WW2 as “architecture.” We still needed a rules-based global order that could manage interactions between states, protect fundamental freedoms, and mobilize common action. But it would have to be more flexible and inclusive than before. I came to liken the old architecture to the Parthenon in Greece, with clean lines and clear rules. The pillars holding it up — a handful of big institutions, alliances, and treaties — were remarkably sturdy. But time takes its toll, even on the greatest of edifices, and now we needed a new architecture for a new world, more in the spirit of Frank Gehry than formal Greek classicism. Where once a few strong columns could hold up the weight of the world, now a dynamic mix of materials, shapes, and structures was needed.
In the middle of the night we stopped to refuel at an Air Force base in Germany. Dave got off the plane and headed right to the base’s gym, where he worked out for an hour, and then we were off and flying again.
Over many years of travel I’ve developed the ability to sleep almost anywhere at any time — on planes, in cars, a quick power nap in a hotel room before a meeting. On the road I tried to grab sleep whenever possible since I was never sure when my next proper rest would be. When I had to stay awake during meetings or conference calls, I drank copious cups of coffee and tea, and sometimes dug the fingernails of one hand into the palm of the other.
In 1993, we could already see that America was regaining its economic strength. Japan, by contrast, faced a “Lost Decade” after its asset and credit bubble burst, leaving banks and other businesses loaded down with bad debt. Its economy, once feared by Americans, slowed to an anemic pace — which caused a whole different set of concerns for them and us.
I thought it was worth trying. The North Koreans had already gotten all the mileage they could from the incident, but they needed some reason to justify letting the women go home. Also, if we didn’t do something to try to resolve the matter, our efforts on everything else with North Korea would be suspended because of their imprisonment.
She and PM Singh explained how hard it had been to show restraint toward Pakistan after the coordinated terrorist bombings in Mumbai the prior November. They made it clear to me that there would not be such restraint in the event of a second attack.
Dai and I hit if off right away, and we talked often over the years. Sometimes I’d be subjected to long lectures about everything the US was doing wrong in Asia, laced with sarcasm but always delivered with a smile.
A career diplomat, Dai was close to President Hu and adept at maneuvering the internal politics of the Chinese power structure. He was proud of his reputation as a man from the provinces who had risen to prominence. Small and compact, he stayed vigorous and healthy despite his advancing years by doing regular exercise and taking long walks, which he highly recommended to me. He was comfortable discussing history and philosophy as well as current events. Henry Kissinger had told me how highly he valued his relationship with Dai, whom he found to be one of the most fascinating and open-minded Chinese officials he had ever encountered.
He rarely dropped his careful diplomatic persona, but I could occasionally glimpse the real person behind it. Once he told me that, as a child growing up in Shanghai, he sat in an unheated classroom, shivering, his hands too cold to hold a pen. His journey from the freezing schoolhouse all the way to the FM was a source of his great personal pride in China’s progress.
It was the first of at least a dozen encounters over the years. The senior leaders were more scripted than Dai or Yang and less comfortable in a freewheeling discussion. The higher you went up the chain, the higher the premium the Chinese put on predictability, formality, and respectful decorum. They didn’t want any surprises. Appearances mattered. With me, they were careful and polite, even a little wary. They were studying me, just as I was studying them.
He was the most powerful man in China, but he lacked the personal authority of predecessors such as Deng Xiaoping or Jiang Zemin. Hu seemed to me more like an aloof chairman of the board than a hands-on CEO. How in control he really was of the entire sprawling Communist Party apparatus was an open question, especially when it came to the military.
“Grandpa Wen,” as the Premier was called, worked hard to present a kindly, soft-spoken image to China and the world. But in private he could be quite pointed, especially when he was arguing that the US was responsible for the financial crisis or when he brushed aside criticism of China’s policies. He was never combative, but he was more cutting than his public persona might have suggested.
For decades, the guiding doctrine of Chinese foreign policy was “Cooly observe, calmly deal with things, hold your position, hide your capacities, bide your time, accomplish things where possible.”
By 2009, however, some officials in China, especially in the military, chafed at this posture of restraint. They thought that the US, long the most powerful nation in the Asia-Pacific, was receding from the region but still determined to block China’s rise as a greater power in its own right. It was, they thought, time for a more assertive approach. They were emboldened by the financial crisis of 2008 that weakened the US economy, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that sapped American attention and resources, and a rising current of nationalism among the Chinese people. And so China started making more aggressive moves in Asia, testing how hard it could push.
The confrontations in the South China Sea in the first 2 years of the Obama Administration reinforced my belief that our strategy in Asia must include a significant effort to upgrade the region’s multilateral institutions. The available venues just weren’t effective enough for resolving disputes between nations or mobilizing action. For the smaller nations, it could feel like the Wild West: a frontier without the rule of law, where the weak were at the mercy of the strong.
“Do you feel like we’ve done the right thing?” It was a reasonable question after so much high-stakes diplomacy and nerve-wracking twists and turns. I looked back at him and said, “There are a lot of decisions I make in this jobs that give me a pit in my stomach. I don’t have any of that here. This is a small price to pay to be the USA.”
The day they walked out of prison, the day the house arrest was ended, was not the end of the struggle. It was the beginning of a new phase. Overcoming the past, healing a wounded country, building a democracy, would require moving from icon to politician.
The most difficult time in any transition is when we think that success is in sight. Then we have to be very careful that we are not lured by a mirage of success.
Ford did break into a broad smile as he read the P.S. I had attached at the end: “If you can take this load and still smile, you are indeed a President.”
But within a few minutes, Kissinger found his voice. He expressed his concern that removing him as NSA could diminish his authority in international relations. He thought he would no longer be seen as a WH insider close to the President, and that it could look like he was being demoted. He made an impassioned plea that his deputy, Brent Scowcroft, be the one to replace him on the NSC to avoid that appearance.
The generals were savvy bureaucratic warriors, and, like characters in the Goldilocks story, they often would present 3 options in answer to any question, expecting that the middle one would end up being favored.
But I held out against using the word mistake. It wasn’t because of political expediency. I thought I had acted in good faith and made the best decision I could with the information I had. And I wasn’t alone in getting it wrong. But I still got it wrong. Plain and simple.
In our political culture, saying you made a mistake is often taken as weakness when in fact it can be a sign of strength and growth for people and nations.
If I rejected his suggestion, he would wait a few days, pretend it never happened, and then try again. Finally I would exclaim, “Richard, I’ve said no. Why do you keep asking me?” He would look at me innocently and reply, “I just assumed at some point you would recognize that you were wrong and I was right.” To be fair, sometimes that did happen. It was exactly this tenacity that made him the best choice for this urgent mission.
This whirlwind of activity came with some collateral damage. At the WH some saw this efforts to coordinate among various government agencies as encroaching on their turf. Younger WH aides rolled their eyes when he invoked lessons learned in Vietnam. Officials working on the military campaign didn’t understand or appreciate his focus on agriculture projects or cell phone towers. Holbrooke’s old-school style of diplomacy — that mix of improvisation, flattery, and bluster that had outmaneuvered Milosevic — was a bad fit in a WH intent on running an orderly policy process with as little drama as possible. It was painful to watch such an accomplished diplomat marginalized and undercut.
Talking to Karzai was often a frustrating exercise. He is charming, erudite, and passionate about his beliefs. He is also proud, stubborn, and quick to bristle at any perceived slight. There was, however, no way to avoid him or to take only those parts of him with which we agreed. Like it or not, Karzai was a linchpin of our mission in Afghanistan.
This was a President who had been elected in part because of his opposition to the war in Iraq and his pledge to end it. Now he was about to explain to the American people why he was escalating our involvement in another war in a far-off country.
On one difficult day during the peace talks hosted by the US, when Milosevic was refusing to give an inch, Richard walked him through a hangar full of warplanes, providing a visual reminder of American military power. The message was clear: Compromise or face the consequences.
History tells us that insurgencies rarely end with a surrender ceremony on the deck of a battleship. Instead they tend to run out of steam thanks to persistent diplomacy, steady improvements in quality of life for people on the ground, and unyielding perseverance by those who want peace.
The most important objective of the first meeting is to have a second meeting. Be diplomatic, clearly lay out the redlines authorized by the Secretary, and keep them negotiating.
But now Karzai insisted he wanted his own people in the room for any future meetings between the Taliban and us. From his perspective, we were changing the rules of the game.
Years of painstaking work by the intelligence community, followed by months of soul-searching debate at the highest levels of the Obama Administration, had brought us to this day. Now it all rested on the pilots of those state-of-the-art helicopters and the Navy SEALs they carried.
We had debated whether to inform Pakistan about the raid ahead of time in order to avoid this scenario and the complete breakdown in relations that could follow. After all, as Bob Gates often reminded us, Pakistani cooperation would continue to be needed to resupply our troops in Afghanistan and pursue other terrorists in the border region.
Pakistanis emphasized the human and financial costs they were bearing in the fight against terrorism, which many viewed as America’s war that had been unfairly imposed on them. Was it worth the lives of their 30K civilian and military victims? Couldn’t they just make a separate peace with the extremists and live in peace? “You had one 9/11, and we are having daily 9/11s in Pakistan.”
We were losing the communications battle to extremists living in caves.
Our relationship with Pakistan was strictly transactional, based on mutual interest, not trust. It would survive. I thought we should go for it.
After the final meeting the President took time to think it over. The team was still divided. It was a decision only he could make. Then he gave the order.
Kidnaping for ransom emerged as a top funding tool for al Qaeda affiliates in North Africa and around the world.
Hague brought to his job the understanding that diplomacy is slow and often boring but absolutely necessary.
Diplomatic victories are made up of a series of microscopic advantages: of a judicious suggestion here, of an opportune civility there, of a wise concession at one moment and a far-sighted persistence at another, of sleepless tact, immovable calmness, and patience that no folly, no provocation, no blunder can shake.
My admiration for Angela grew during my term as Secretary of State. She was decisive, astute, and straightforward, and she always told me exactly what was on her mind. She brought her curiosity about the world to every discussion, armed with questions about events, people, and ideas — a welcome change from some other world leaders who seemed to think they already knew everything worth knowing.
For the new Obama Administration, this presented an early test. We could stick to our old policy and refuse to lifting Cuba’s suspension because a dictatorship has no place in an association of democracies, but then we would likely alienate many of our neighbors and make the US look isolated in our own backyard. Or we could cave and admit that Cuba’s suspension was a Cold War anachronism, but that could make a mockery of the region’s hard-won democratic norms and create a firestorm back home. Neither option was at all appealing.
Given what President Obama had said about moving past the stale debates of the Cold War, it would be hypocritical of us to continue insisting that Cuba be kept out of the OAS for the reasons it was first suspended in 1962, ostensibly its adherence to “Marxism-Leninism” and alignment “with the communist bloc.” It would be more credible and accurate to focus on Cuba’s present-day human rights violations, which were incompatible with the OAS charter. What if we agreed to lift the suspension, but with the condition that Cuba be reseated as a member only if it made enough democratic reforms to bring it in line with the charter? And, to expose the Castro brothers’ contempt for the OAS itself, why not require Cuba to formally request readmittance?
I’m doing it and am in favor of Zelaya to be restored because of principles, Mrs. Clinton, not because I like these people. If we allow the de facto government to stay, the domino effect goes all around Latin America.
Rebel leaders, as is often the case everywhere, knew how to fight but not govern.
This problem was all too familiar in Africa: aging leaders, especially former heroes of national liberation movements who saw themselves as the fathers of their countries, refused to retire when the time came or allow their country to move forward into the future without them.
After a decade in the political wilderness following his defeat in the 1999 elections, Bibi had climbed his way back up to the top of Likud and was now posed to retake the PM’s office.
Because of higher birth rates among Palestinians and lower birth rates among Israelis, we were approaching the day when Palestinians would make up a majority of the combined population of Israel and the Palestinian territories, and most of those Palestinians would be relegated to second-class citizenship and unable to vote. As long as Israel insisted on holding on to the territories, it would become increasingly difficult and eventually impossible to maintain its status as both a democracy and a Jewish state. Sooner or later, Israel would have to choose one or the other or let the Palestinians have a state of their own.
Netanyahu, precisely because of his well-known hawkishness, had the credibility with the Israeli public to cut a deal, like Nixon’s going to China, if he were convinced it was in Israel’s security interests.
Northern Ireland had once been deemed as intractable as the Middle East and had been resolved through painstaking negotiations. “We had 700 days of failure and one day of success,” he often said.
A senior Israeli official once explained to me that for Israelis, the worst thing in the world is to be a freier, the Hebrew slang word for “sucker.” Israeli drivers would rather end up in the hospital than let someone cut them off on the highway, he told me. Bibi himself was once quoted as saying, “We are not freiers. We don’t give without receiving.”
One of the ironies of international diplomacy is that we often travel to places like Sharm or Bali or Hawaii but then have no time at all to enjoy them, or even venture outside the formal conference rooms. I sometimes felt like Tantalus, the hungry wretch of Greek mythology doomed to stare at delicious fruit and refreshing water for all eternity but never able to taste it.
Inside, I was frustrated that we weren’t making the kind of progress I knew would be needed to survive the end of the settlement freeze. But Michell, the veteran of the interminable Northern Ireland negotiations, offered some helpful perspective. “The negotiations there lasted for 22 months. And it was many, many months into the process before there was a single, serious, substantive discussion on the major issues that separated the parties.” Here we were already deep into the most difficult and sensitive issues of the conflict.
This was a dilemma that had confronted generations of American policymakers. It’s easy to give speeches and write books about standing up for democratic values, even when it may conflict with our security interests, but when confronted with the actual, real-world trade-offs, choices get a lot harder. Inevitably, making policy is a balancing act. Hopefully we get it more right than wrong. But there are always choices we regret, consequences we do not foresee, and alternate paths we wish we had taken.
We delved once more into questions that had bedeviled US policymakers for generations: How should we balance strategic interests against core values? Can we successfully influence the internal politics of other nations and nurture democracy where it has never flowered before, without incurring negative unintended consequences? What does it mean to be on the right side of history? These were debates we would have throughout the so-called Arab Spring.
Even if we did decide that was the right choice, it was far from clear how much influence we could actually have on events on the ground. Contrary to popular belief among many in the Middle East, the US has never been an all-powerful puppet master able to achieve any outcome we desire. What if we called for Mubarak to step down, but then he refused and managed to stay in power? What if he did step down and was succeeded by a lengthy period of dangerous disorder or by a successor government no more democratic and actively opposed to our interests and security? Either way, our relationship would never be the same and our influence in the region would erode. Other partners would see how we treated Mubarak and lose trust and confidence in their relationships with us.
Historically, transitions from dictatorship to democracy are fraught with challenges and can easily go terribly wrong.
I was curious to hear about their plans to move from protests to politics and how they planned to influence the writing of a new Constitution and contest the upcoming elections. I found a disorganized group not prepared to contest or influence anything. They had no experience in politics, no understanding about how to organize parties, run candidates, or conduct campaigns. They didn’t have platforms and showed little interest in forming them.
This was turning into a disaster. I had to fix it, fast. But how? There were not good options here. Our values and conscience demanded that the US condemn the violence against civilians we were seeing in Bahrain, full stop. After all, that was the very principle at play in Libya. But if we persisted, the carefully constructed international coalition to stop Qaddafi could collapse at the 11th hour, and we might fail to prevent a much larger abuse — a full-fledged massacre.
One that we heard often was: Why does America promote democracy one way in some countries and another way in others? In short, why do we call on Mubarak to give up power in Egypt and mobilize an international military coalition to stop Qaddafi in Libya, while retaining relations with Bahrain and other Gulf monarchies?
The answer, I said, began with a very practical point. Circumstances varied dramatically from country to country, and it would be foolish to take a one-size-fits-all approach and barrel forward regardless of circumstances on the ground. What was possible and made sense in one place might not be possible or wise in another. It was also true that America has many important national interests in the region, and they will not always align perfectly, despite our best efforts.
I tried to explain why America had worked with autocrats in the region for so long, from Ben Ali in Tunisia to Mubarak in Egypt to our partners in the Gulf. “You deal with the governments that are in place. Right now, we’re in a big argument with Russia and China because they won’t agree with the UNSC resolution to help the poor people in Syria. But we don’t stop dealing with Russia and China across a whole range of issues because we have serious disagreements with them. So I think part of it is to recognize the reality that governments have to deal with, and to look at the whole picture.”
But there is another part of the big picture that is often lost, a truth about America that is easy to miss amid the daily headlines of one crisis or another. The US has sacrificed enormous amount of blood and treasure to help other people around the world achieve their own freedom. We’ve made a lot of mistakes. But I think if you look at the entire historical record, the entire historical record shows we’ve been on the side of freedom, we’ve been on the side of human rights, we’ve been on the side of free markets and economic empowerment.
Too often, other countries were quick to demand action but then looked to America to shoulder all the burdens and take all the risks.
There is an informal belief that old colonial powers should take the lead in addressing crises in their former dominions.
Until late October, when the Agency publicly acknowledged its presence in Benghazi, the existence of the CIA station was a secret, so in the immediate aftermath of the attack these officers received no public recognition.
Critics have questioned why the world’s greatest military force could not get to Benghazi in time to defend our people. Part of the answer is that, despite having established US Africa Command in 2008, there just wasn’t much US military infrastructure in place in Africa. Additionally our military is not deployed globally with the mission of maintaining forces at the ready to defend diplomatic posts. Tethering our forces to more than 270 embassies and consulates worldwide is a mission our military leaders have testified the Pentagon is simply not equipped to handle.
Many Americans and even members of Congress were surprised to learn that there were no US Marines assigned to our Benghazi compound. In fact Marines are assigned to only a little over half of our diplomatic posts around the world, where their primary mission is the protection and, if necessary, the destruction of classified materials and equipment.
And some only showed up because of the cameras. They had skipped closed hearings when there wasn’t a chance of being on TV.
The country’s monarch, the Shah, owed his throne to a 1953 coup supported by the Eisenhower Administration against a democratically elected government thought to be sympathetic to Communism. It was a classic Cold War move for which many Iranians never forgave America.
As President Obama had promised during his campaign, we had tried to engage Iran. Now, he decided, it was time to ramp up the pressure and sharpen the choice facing Iran’s leaders. To impose real consequences, however, we would need the rest of the world to join us.
Under a new law signed by President Obama in December 2011, other countries had to demonstrate every 6 months that they were meaningfully reducing consumption of Iranian oil or face sanctions themselves.
In return the international community would provide several billion dollars in sanctions relief, mostly from previously frozen Iranian assets.
Putin claimed that he had no particular love for Assad, who was causing Moscow quite a headache, and he also professed to have no real leverage with Damascus. I think he personally identified with the challenges Assad faced from internal opposition, and he warned about the growing threat from extremists among the opposition and pointed to how messy transitions had become in Libya, Egypt, and Iraq.
The public portion of international meetings like this is typically scripted. Each country and organization states its position, and it can be rather boring. The action generally starts when the cameras leave.
It’s easy to get lost in the semantics, but words constitute much of a diplomat’s work, and I knew they would shape how the rest of the world received our agreement and how it was understood on the ground in Syria.
I was growing increasingly frustrated but kept at it. When we ran into the Russian-made brick wall at the UN, I kept pressing forward along non-UN tracks, holding more meetings of the Friends of the Syrian People, which by now had expanded to about 100 nations. The challenge was to convince all the parties — Assad and his Russian and Iranian backers on the one side, the rebels and the Arab states on the other — that a final decisive military victory was impossible and they should focus on reaching a diplomatic solution.
One of the prime worries about Syria — and one of the reasons it was a wicked problem — was the lack of any viable alternatives to Assad on the ground. He and his allies could plausibly argue, like Louis XV of France, “Apres moi, le deluge.” (After Assad, chaos.)
Despite high-level support from the NSC, some in the WH were skeptical. After all, the President had been elected in large part because of his opposition to the war in Iraq and his promise to bring the troops home. Getting entangled in any way in another sectarian civil war in the Middle East was not what he had in mind when coming into office.
Some commentators and members of Congress asked why the President cared so much about chemical weapons when Assad had been killing so many people with conventional weapons. Chemical weapons are in a category by themselves. They have been banned by the international community because they are gruesome, indiscriminate, and inhumane. As President Obama explained, “If we fail to act, the Assad regime will see no reason to stop using chemical weapons. As the ban against these weapons erodes, other tyrants will have no reason to think twice about acquiring poison gas, and using them. Over time, our troops would again face the prospect of chemical warfare on the battlefield. And it could be easier for terrorist organizations to obtain these weapons, and use them to attack civilians.”
A symbolic vote at the UN was unlikely to do much for the everyday life of Palestinians, but sticking it to Israel on the world stage and exposing its growing isolation would bolster Abbas and home — and, the Palestinians argued, might encourage Israel to make concessions.
Internationally, we had tough going. From the start I knew it would take creative and persistent diplomacy to build a network of global partners willing to tackle climate change together. Building this kind of coalition, especially when the policy choices involved are so difficult, is much harder than herding cats.
China was also the largest and most influential of a new group of regional and global powers, including Brazil, India, Indonesia, Turkey, and South Africa, who were gaining international clout more for their expanding economies than their military might. Their cooperation would be essential for any comprehensive agreement on climate change.
Taking steps to address climate change should be the responsibility of wealthy countries like the US, he declared, not emerging powers like India that had more pressing domestic challenges to worry about. In our private conversation, Ramesh reiterated that India’s per capita emissions were below that of developed countries, and he argued that there was no legitimate basis for international pressure being put on India in the run-up to Copenhagen.
Most of them were seeking to avoid a binding agreement that would limit their growth. On another side were the Europeans, still hoping to extend the Kyoto Accord that had placed big burdens on rich nations but essentially had given large developing countries like China and India a free pass.
The US was pushing for what we considered a realistic achievable outcome: a diplomatic agreement agreed to by leaders (rather than a legal treaty ratified by Parliaments and enforceable by courts), which would commit every nation, developed and developing alike, to take substantive steps to curb carbon emissions and report transparently on their progress — neither of which had ever happened before.
About 40% of all humankind lives within 60 miles of a coast.
When I met in Copenhagen with Ethiopian PM Meles Zenawi, who emerged as a spokesperson for some of the countries most vulnerable to the effects of climate change and least able to manage them, he told me that the world was expecting a lot from us, and that this was a moment for American leadership.
Despite all the high hopes leading up to this conference, and perhaps to a degree because of them, things went badly from the start. Interests collided, nerves frayed, and compromise appeared out of reach.
The Chinese weren’t giving an inch; neither were the Indians and Brazilians. Some of the Europeans were letting the perfect be the enemy of the good — and the possible. We emerged, frustrated and tired, sometime around 2am, still without an agreement. President Sarkozy of France could take no more. He rolled his eyes and with a look of extreme exasperation, he declared, in English, “I want to die!” We all knew what he meant.
China, too, is eager to gain influence in the region. It’s hungry for energy and excited by the prospects of new shipping routes that could cut the travel time between ports in Shanghai and Hong Kong and markets in Europe by thousands of miles. China has launched several Arctic research expeditions, built its own research center in Norway, expanded investments in Nordic countries, signed a trade agreement with Iceland, and gained observer status at the Arctic Council.
The recession may have helped cut our total emissions, but it also made it harder to mobilize the political will to drive more meaningful change. When the economy is hurting and people are looking for jobs, many other concerns fade into the background. And the old false choice between promoting the economy and protecting the environment surfaces once again.
Too often I had seen risk-averse US corporations avoid emerging or challenging markets, while Asian and European companies scooped up contracts and profits. State-owned or -controlled enterprises were especially difficult competitors because they played by their own rules, with unlimited resources and little compunction about violating international norms on bribery and corruption. With growth at home still too slow and unemployment still too high, we couldn’t afford to leave good opportunities on the table or put up with unfair competition.
When I became Secretary in 2009, I focused on 2 big questions about the global economy: Could we sustain and create good jobs at home and help speed our recovery by opening new markets and boosting exports? And were we going to let China and other relatively closed markets continue to rewrite the rules of the global economy in a way that would surely disadvantage our workers and companies? The answers would go a long way toward determining whether America would continue to lead the world’s economy and whether we would restore prosperity for our own people.
China had become the leading exponent of an economic model called “state capitalism,” in which state-owned or state-supported companies used public money to dominate markets and advance strategic interests. State capitalism, as well as a range of new forms of protectionism involving barriers behind borders — such as unfair regulations, discrimination against foreign companies, and forced technology transfers — posed a growing threat to the ability of American businesses to compete in key markets. These policies ran directly counter to the values and principles we had worked to embed in the global economy. We believed an open, free, transparent, and fair system with clear rules of the road would benefit everyone.
Though China was the largest offender when it came to new forms of protectionism and state capitalism, it was hardly alone. By 2011, sovereign wealth investment funds, which are owned and run by governments, often with revenue from exports of oil and natural gas, had grown to control roughly 12% of all investment worldwide.
After our efforts the Chinese informed FedEx that they had finally granted license, but only to 8 cities in China, and just 5 in for UPS.
I acknowledged the challenges faced by developing economies that still had to lift hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. China often argued that this imperative outweighed any obligation to play by established international rules for business, labor, and human rights practices. But I countered that China and other emerging economies had benefited greatly from the international system the US had helped create, including their membership in the WTO, and now they needed to take their share of responsibility for upholding it.
Some in Congress were actually arguing that, for the first time in history, we should refuse to pay our debts and let our country default, despite all the consequences for the global economy and for America’s credibility and leadership. From every continent, foreign leaders were expressing grave concerns. China, which had invested more than $1T in US government securities, was particularly nervous.
The full faith and credit of the US should never be in doubt, and the Secretary of State shouldn’t have to publicly reassure people in other nations that we’ll pay our debts. Period.
Lowering barriers to access for American companies was a big part of our efforts. So was raising standards in foreign markets on key issues like labor rights, environmental protection, the behavior of SOEs, and IP. Companies in the US already met these standards, but those of many other countries didn’t. We needed to level the playing field and improve a lot of lives around the world along the way. For too long we’d seen companies closing factories and leaving the US because they could do business more cheaply in foreign countries where they didn’t have to pay workers a living wage or abide by US rules on pollution.
The international relief effort was choking on the bottleneck of the airport. I proposed that the US military take over operations there as soon as possible so that aid could begin flowing. Preval wasn’t sure. Like all nations, Haiti prized its sovereignty. And even in an emergency, memories of previous US military interventions were not easily dismissed. I assured him that our troops would not be there to patrol the streets or replace the UN forces working to restore law and order. He recognized that Haiti needed all the help it could get, but he also understood that other countries and his political opponents would criticize him for “selling out” to the Americans. It was one of many painful decisions he would have to make in the days ahead.
For decades, there has been a philosophical tension in our approach to international development. Should foreign assistance be purely altruistic, to help alleviate suffering wherever the need is greatest, or is it intended as a part of our strategy to compete for hearts and minds in extended ideological struggles like the Cold War? Or to address the despair and alienation that fuel current radicalism and insurgency?
Aid workers in the field sometimes griped about the “10K-mile screw driver” with which officials back in Washington or various European capitals tried to micromanage development efforts. Plans that sounded good on the drawing board foundered when applied in the real world, and without local cooperation and buy-in they didn’t translate.
Aid chases need; investment chases opportunity.
In the international development business, it’s easy to get frustrated and fatalistic. But step back and look at the sweep of history, and you realize just how remarkable our country’s contributions have been.
When we traveled to sensitive places like Russia, we often received warnings from Department security officials to leave our Blackberry, laptops — anything that communicated with the outside world — on the plane, with their batteries removed to prevent foreign intelligence services from compromising them. Even in friendly settings we conducted business under strict security precautions, taking care where and how we read secret material and used our technology.
I fielded calls from frustrated CEOs complaining about aggressive theft of IP and trade secrets, even breaches of their home computers.
They told me there were powerful emerging technologies we could fund that would help dissidents circumvent government surveillance and censorship. Our investments could play a pivotal role in taking such tools to scale and making them accessible to the activists who needed them most. But there was a catch: Criminals and hackers could also use these tools to avoid detection.
We worked with designers to create new apps and devices, such as a panic button that a protester could press on a phone that would signal to friends that he or she was being arrested, while simultaneously erasing all of their personal contacts.
In Libya, Ambassador Gene Cretz’s searing reports on Qaddafi made him persona non grata in Tripoli. He was even threatened by some of Qaddafi’s thugs, prompting me to recall him to the US for his own safety.
Without security, liberty is fragile. Without liberty, security is oppressive. The challenge is finding the proper measure: enough security to safeguard our freedoms, but not so much (or so little) as to endanger them.
My parents were both people of faith, but they expressed it in different ways, and I sometimes struggled to reconcile my father’s insistence on self-reliance and my mother’s concerns about social justice.
The Nazis were able to pursue their crimes because they were able progressively to restrict the circle of those defined as humans. This cold, dark region of the human soul, where people withdraw first understanding, then empathy, and finally even the designation of personhood from another human being, was not unique to Nazi Germany. The impulse to dehumanize has reappeared throughout history, and it was precisely this impulse that the drafters of the Universal Declaration hoped to restrain.
Some commentators in the West dismissed the human rights provisions in the agreements as the height of idealist folly, not worth the paper they were printed on. The Soviets would obviously disregard them.
Then something unexpected happened. Behind the Iron Curtain activists and dissidents felt empowered to begin working for change because the Helsinki Accords gave them cover to talk about human rights. Communist officials were caught in a bind. They couldn’t condemn a document the Kremlin had signed, but if they enforced its provisions the entire authoritarian system would break down. Helsinki proved to be a Trojan horse that contributed to the fall of Communism.
I encountered this attitude all over the world. I can’t tell you how many times I sat across the table from some President or PM whose eyes glazed over whenever I raised the issue of women’s rights and opportunities in his country.
Gender issues are going to have to take a backseat to other priorities. There’s no way we can be successful if we maintain every special interest and pet project. All those pet rocks in our rucksack were taking us down.
A senior advisor to President Bush was once quoted disparaging what he called “the reality-based community” of people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality. That’s not the way the world works anymore. We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.”
Over time it had become a laughingstock as notorious human rights violators like Sudan and Zimbabwe were elected as members.
From now on, the US would take into account the LGBT human rights record of a country when appropriating foreign aid.
Unlike in 2008, this time I hadn’t been able to campaign for him. By law and tradition, Secretaries of State stay out of domestic politics.
Having a child is like letting “your heart go walking around outside your body.” It’s wonderful and terrifying all at the same time.