Clinton or Kerry? It is a question America’s foreign policy pundits have been devoting a surprising amount of thought to in recent weeks. With US Secretary of State John Kerry marking his first year in office and the expectation of a presidential bid by his predecessor, Hillary Clinton, reaching a kind of critical mass, this is an inevitable moment for comparisons between Washington’s present and immediate-past top diplomats.
Hillary’s political star power is one reason why. Among Democrats, she looks like a president-in-waiting. Republicans do not exactly say that they fear her, but their repeated attempts to keep Benghazi on the nation’s political agenda, even as they virtually ignore every other plausible Democratic candidate (and, yes, there are other plausible Democratic presidential candidates), tells a different story.
Kerry, meanwhile, is basking in a level of national attention he has not enjoyed since his narrowly-unsuccessful run for the presidency a decade ago. More importantly, perhaps, most of that attention is positive. Kerry’s diplomatic opening to Iran has its critics in the US, but is still widely seen as an impressive achievement. He has less to show for his efforts regarding Syria or the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, but has thrown himself into both with a doggedness that has impressed many sceptics.
Within the foreign policy community, the criticism of Hillary is that she could command the attention of a rock star, but left office with few real accomplishments to point to during her four-year tenure.
In an analysis published late last year Atlantic magazine called Kerry the “un-Hillary”, adding that “unlike his predecessor ... Kerry has always relished mediation in the world’s trouble spots — and the more troubled, the better”.
Foreign Policy, around the same time, called him “a patrician figure” who “looks more like a diplomat in the old model.”
When the New York Times asked a panel of foreign policy experts to assess Hillary’s tenure a few months after her return to private life the resulting headlines included: ‘Tough words don’t equal results’ and ‘Playing it safe rather than leading’. This is the core of the argument one still hears today inside the foreign policy establishment: Hillary may have been a compelling political and social figure, but after four years at the State Department, she left without any singular accomplishment to which she could point. One can argue that this is not an entirely fair view. Hillary arrived at the State Department at a moment when America’s reputation around the world was close to an all-time low. Undoing the damage done by the George W. Bush administration — particularly in the Middle East — was arguably a close-to-fulltime job during Hillary’s first two years in office. As Hillary travelled the world, she went out of her way to hold town halls and other gatherings with students and other young people in many of the countries she visited.
This is not part of the secretary of state’s normal job description, but, at the time, it was essential. Hillary’s heavy schedule of public diplomacy may have left less time for traditional behind-the-scenes talks, but without at least some global shift in attitudes, it was always going to be hard for the Obama administration to push forward with its foreign policies.
Which brings us to the second reason why one cannot really compare Hillary to Kerry: Their differing relationships to Barack Obama’s White House. By almost every measure, the Obama administration allowed Hillary’s State Department little latitude, reserving small decisions as well as large ones for itself. This should not be surprising. First-term presidents have an eye on re-election and no White House incumbent likes to be surprised, especially about anything related to foreign policy.
Hillary is not likely to have minded this. Even if she eventually decides not to run for president, it is obvious that she has been thinking about it. When she took the job as secretary of state, Hillary’s name — and her own political future — became inextricably linked to Obama’s political fortunes. It is Kerry’s blessing that he has nothing like that to worry about. Kerry clearly has no plans to run for office again. This is his final turn on the public stage. The fact that the president he serves cannot run for reelection surely frees both men to act both boldly and creatively in international affairs.
Does that fact make Kerry a better Secretary of State than his predecessor? The real answer is that it is still far too early to say. The opening to Iran that has, so far, marked Kerry’s time in office remains tentative. It could still be derailed by hard-liners on either side and still may not come together despite what appears a real desire on all sides to reach at some sort of long-term agreement.
Politics and diplomacy have presented Kerry and Hillary with different circumstances — and it has done so at different moments in each figure’s political journey. The time for assessment will come later when Kerry, too, is out of public life and the long-term successes and failures of both can be viewed with at least some detachment.
Gordon Robison, a longtime Middle East journalist and US political analyst, teaches Political Science at the University of Vermont.
