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She is, to some extent, succeeding herself. Bush in 1988, Hillary Clinton as the former secretary of state has substantial authorship of the policies she inherits. And unlike the last such example, George H. Of course, a president who takes over from an incumbent of the same party normally promises continuity rather than a decisive break. She accepts that states have intrinsically incompatible interests, which, as Dennis Ross, her former aide on Iran, put it to me last year, “means recognizing the reality of power relationships and the need to use power in defense of your interests.” She comes to the White House pre-chastened. What’s more, Obama was taken by surprise by the resurgence of great-power competition, which violated his intuitive faith that adversaries could be brought to recognize mutual interests. What he achieved, in both cases, was far more modest than he had hoped.
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In his first year in office, Barack Obama promised to work toward a world without nuclear weapons and to forge a “new beginning” in the Middle East, without offering any notable change in American policy there beyond his own voice and story. Bush promised in his second inaugural address to foster democracy with “the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.” He did not succeed, of course, and could not have. At the very least, I wrote, she is a “cautious figure who distrusts grandiose rhetorical formulations, is deeply grounded in the harsh realities of politics, and prefers small steps to large ones.”Ī President Hillary Clinton might not achieve more than her predecessors, but since she would raise fewer expectations, she might provoke fewer disappointments. In a long article about Clinton in Foreign Policy last fall, I wrote that while she did, indeed, have an old-fashioned faith in American power, Clinton was far more distrustful of other states and expected less from them than did Obama and his team. But she is also, and above all, more pragmatic, more transactional, than either Obama or Bush. She is more persuaded of the value of force than Obama, more shaped by political convention than Obama, more conscious of the zero-sum calculus of rival powers than Obama. In her memoir Hard Choices, Clinton often depicts herself as a skeptical realist who expected far less from Iran, from Russia, from Israel, or from the Arab Spring than did the starry-eyed youngsters around Obama.Įach of these views offers a plausible account of Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state and thus of her likely role as president. New York Times columnist Ross Douthat views her as the living incarnation of the Washington consensus. Robert Kagan has described her as a Democratic neocon, an interventionist who embraces the transformative potential of American power. This is my preferred metaphor for a figure who has tried on so many identities over the years that she has become a vector of colliding meanings. Perhaps the time has come for something more prosaic. But Americans have had quite enough of magical presidents. Her matter-of-fact habits of mind have made her a leaden candidate. Hillary Clinton does not believe in magic. Barack Obama believed in the magic of his message.