Hillary Clinton and the Rise of Smart Power

Libya

Doesn’t much look like a rousing red, white and blue win when you see it at street level. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton disembarked from her C-17 Globemaster III in Tripoli on Oct. 18 and was greeted by a ragtag honor guard of victorious rebels in mismatched uniforms who then trailed her through empty, trash-strewn streets, swerving in and out of her motorcade, pointing their AK-47s into the air. At raucous, fly-infested meetings, Clinton pushed rebel leaders to round up the thousands of missing shoulder-launched missiles that pose a lethal threat to every passenger plane in the region. Even the conflict’s finale, which came two days later with the bloody, lawless shooting of the fallen dictator Muammar Gaddafi in his hometown of Sirt, suggested that vengeful chaos may rule, at least for a while, in Libya.

But this may just be what an American victory looks like in the 21st century. Not brass bands and treaties on parchment but unruly insurgents and a promise (fingers crossed) to hold elections. It’s fitting that the U.S.-led intervention has yielded a messy and uncertain result; from the start, the mission was as much about the limits of American power as about its expanse. To build support for allied attacks on Gaddafi’s troops last March, Clinton had to get Arab leaders behind the mission, convince Congress that other countries would bear most of the cost and placate the Pentagon by arranging for a quick handover of military command to NATO. While in public Clinton was buoyantly optimistic about Libya’s future during her visit, in private she was darker. At dusk at the end of her long day in Libya, she spoke at the new U.S. embassy in Tripoli–the previous one was ransacked by pro-Gaddafi forces–and as she talked, there was celebratory gunfire in the background. With a smile, she said, “Someone should tell them not to waste ammunition.”

If conserving one’s power is on Clinton’s mind these days, it is partly because the seven-month Libyan war is a potent metaphor for her broader agenda: creating a 21st century statecraft for a world where social media and instant communication have empowered people relative to their rulers, a world where U.S. influence is limited not only by the rise of loosely networked individuals like al-Qaeda and fast-rising states like China but also by America’s economic challenges and the public’s lukewarm interest in foreign adventures. Yet a new era of diffuse threats abroad and weak central governments everywhere offers opportunities as well as obstacles for the U.S. to advance its interests. Through a smart combination of its still dominant military hard power and its subtler soft power in economics, development and technology, American influence is being remade in the 21st century. “All power has limits,” Clinton told Time as she flew to Afghanistan the day after her Tripoli visit. “In a much more networked and multipolar world,” she said, “we can’t wave a magic wand and say to China or Brazil or India, ‘Quit growing. Quit using your economies to assert power’ … It’s up to us to figure out how we position ourselves to be as effective as possible at different times in the face of different threats and opportunities.”

Foreign policy traditionalists say it’s naive to think that new techniques like using social media or mobilizing nongovernmental actors could ever compare to great-power relations in steering the events of our time. They point to the messes in Afghanistan and Pakistan, deteriorating Arab-Israeli relations and the failure to corral Iran and ask how Twitter will solve them. But Clinton is something of an expert in coming up with creative ways to maximize limited power. She has succeeded in her public career thanks to her unorthodox approach to the office of the First Lady and despite the constraints imposed by a White House run by her former political rival Barack Obama. As she heads into what is almost certain to be her last year at State, Clinton is pushing ahead with a combination of record-setting travel (punctuated by catnaps on the sofa bed in her plane), new partnerships with private organizations and an effort to immerse everyone from entry-level foreign-service officers to newly appointed ambassadors in social media.

Strength in Numbers

Two days after Clinton left Libya, her longtime aide Huma Abedin handed her a BlackBerry with the news that the rebels had captured Gaddafi in his hometown of Sirt. Clinton’s initial reaction was a blunt update of Julius Caesar’s famous expression of hard power. “We came. We saw. He died,” she said to her staff.

Clinton takes a lot of pride in the fact that the U.S. did not go into Libya to conquer it. Instead, she led the behind-the-scenes effort that ended in Gaddafi’s death, pushing wary neighbors to assist the rebels in their revolt. On March 12, the Arab League asked the U.N. to impose a no-fly zone, knowing that only the U.S. could lead such an operation. Clinton told the Arabs a U.S.-led no-fly zone alone wouldn’t protect the civilians it was designed to help and instead worked to persuade the Qataris, Emiratis and Jordanians to join with the U.S. in striking Gaddafi’s forces on the ground.

Success at that gave Clinton a shot at overcoming Russia’s traditional reflexive veto of any U.N. resolution authorizing U.S.-led military intervention. Though Russia has its own restive minorities and fears broadly used American military might, Clinton told Obama she thought she could turn Russia around, with Arab countries asking for help and joining the fight. “Let’s test that,” Obama replied. And so, while traveling in Tunisia in March, Clinton placed a 15-minute call to Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and persuaded him to abstain on a U.N. resolution authorizing direct strikes against Gaddafi’s forces. “C’mon Sergei, this is important, and the Arab League and the Arab countries are behind us,” Clinton recalls telling Lavrov during the call. Lavrov’s O.K. cleared the way for Obama to launch more than 200 Tomahawk missiles against Libyan positions and provide the command and control for French, British and a handful of Arab fighters.

The behind-the-scenes work intensified after Gaddafi fled Tripoli. A little after noon on Sept. 22, Clinton arrived at the offices of the Qatari mission to the U.N. overlooking New York City’s East River for a meeting with the Qatari Emir, Sheik Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani. Al-Thani, the burly, independent-minded patron of al-Jazeera who ousted his father in a 1995 coup, is a crucial Arab representative in the coalition Clinton assembled to go to war in Libya. He is also a deeply influential backer of several of the Libyan rebel figures who ousted Gaddafi from Tripoli. Clinton, worried that rebels would turn on one another and push Libya into chaos, urged al-Thani to encourage the rebel militias to unify.

Al-Thani said he’d do his best. But he worried that other allies’ support for the struggling rebel leadership might flag with Tripoli having fallen–and that Gaddafi might launch a counterattack. He asked Clinton to convene the allies later in the day for an emergency meeting. By 5:30 p.m., Clinton’s staff had brought representatives of the U.K., France, Italy, Qatar, Jordan and other countries together in her suite on the 34th floor of the Waldorf-Astoria hotel a few blocks away. Clinton, who purposefully mixes a politician’s cheerful warmth with a lawyer’s face-the-facts arguments, harangued them to step up to the plate. The situation in Libya “could spin out of control very quickly,” she told the diplomats, who wound up pledging continued attacks against loyalist forces and renewed support for the rebel leadership.

Clinton sees this “convening power” as the key to rebuilding U.S. influence overseas. “One of the big questions that I certainly faced becoming Secretary of State is, O.K., we’re ready to lead. Are there others ready to be there on whatever agenda we are seeking? There was a lot of broken pottery, so to speak, in our relationships.” Libya, Clinton says, gave her a chance to demonstrate that the U.S. could form coalitions with new allies as well as the ones we all know from history books. That convening power is in turn part of what Clinton calls smart power: the use of everything from public diplomacy and new media to development aid and public-private collaboration to protect and advance U.S. interests abroad in ways America’s military power cannot.

Clinton has also pushed State to collaborate with nongovernment groups, which is something of a departure from past practice. She has formed joint ventures with countless organizations, funding 67 programs dedicated to the rights of women, which offer a new flank against traditional forms of repression overseas and a cost-effective way to promote both security and development. The guiding national-security principle of the early George W. Bush Administration was that too much international cooperation weakens America, but Clinton has supporters in both parties who say boosting cooperation has produced results.

At a July 2010 meeting in Hanoi of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, which the U.S. had just joined, Clinton bluntly pushed back against China’s newly expansionist rhetoric about the oil- and gas-rich South China Sea, over objections from senior aides like the late Richard Holbrooke. The result, say China experts, has been a newly energized coalition against Chinese territorial aims in the region.

Constraints at Home

In some respects, America’s limited power abroad mirrors Clinton’s predicament as the 67th Secretary of State. Though Obama practically begged her to become his top diplomat after the 2008 campaign, the job came with many strings attached. The White House handpicked her deputy and quietly vetoed other appointments she wanted to make. While Clinton worked to build a relationship with her former adversary in the West Wing, her chief of staff, Cheryl Mills, played bad cop, having “tough conversations,” according to one official, with Deputy National Security Adviser Denis McDonough over appointments and locking horns with the Treasury Department. Tension between the State Department and the National Security Council (NSC) continues.

On policy, Clinton spoke out at key meetings, but on some big decisions, such as abandoning the push to close Guantnamo Bay, limiting the size of the Afghanistan troop surge and demanding that Israel stop settlement activity, Obama made the final call without her. Clinton’s voice is heard: she meets weekly with Obama one on one and also weekly with his National Security Adviser and Secretary of Defense. And in daily, formal NSC meetings, she makes her arguments. But the final debates in this Administration are held in small rooms among Obama’s closest White House aides. Which Clinton, with her famously tight inner circle, might appreciate.

Clinton has sought other avenues of influence, working to bolster her department’s clout, expanding control over U.S. foreign aid strategy and finding new sources of funding for it in the Pentagon’s deep pockets. She also lashed her bureaucracy to more-powerful ones, boosting the number of her political advisers at the Defense Department from 15 to 100 in an attempt to steer Pentagon policy to State’s benefit. In both instances, it helped that in former Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Clinton had a partner in trying to build up State’s role in national security. The two found common cause on the size and duration of the Afghanistan surge and on not releasing photos of the dead Osama bin Laden. She is still working to establish the kind of close collaboration she had with Gates with his successor, Leon Panetta, who became Bill Clinton’s chief of staff in July 1994.

Abroad, Clinton has worked to broker the marriage of diplomacy and technology. She boosted State’s budget to pay for computer training and surveillance-evading software for dissidents, some of it top secret, from $15 million to $45 million. State claims the Syrian revolution has continued in part because of a sanctions waiver for surveillance-evading software Clinton sought and won despite resistance from other agencies in 2009. In Libya last July, the rebels had salvaged telecommunications equipment from retreating Gaddafi forces in the eastern part of the country but could make only local calls and had no Internet access. State quietly helped restore full services beyond Gaddafi’s control and got access to fiber-optic-cable networks that didn’t run through Tripoli, allowing the rebels to gin up cash from abroad.

Whereas U.S. envoys once filed secret cables to Washington late at night, Clinton has pushed her ambassadors to expand the use of Twitter and Facebook–State now has 192 Twitter feeds and 288 Facebook accounts–and her daughter Chelsea calls her TechnoMom. “We are in the age of participation,” Clinton said at her husband’s charity event in New York City in September, “and the challenge … is to figure out how to be responsive, to help catalyze, unleash, channel the kind of participatory eagerness that is there.”

Clinton is trying to ensure these changes are permanent: she requires every diplomat who rotates through the foreign-service institute to get training in social media. But most of her novel initiatives are run out of her office, giving them clout now but leaving their survival to the discretion of her successor. Most of these offices have little–or no–independent budget, and some are long on jargon and short on deliverables. Her senior adviser for innovation, Alec Ross, 39, says things like “We’re reorienting the foreign-service exam to emphasize dynamic problem-solving skills that help respond to edge-of-network challenges,” while the office of her special representative to Muslim communities, Farah Pandith, talks up outreach programs but then admits they have a budget of $0.00. (That’s zero.)

Clinton has touted development as a tool of national strategy, spending $8 billion last year on global health and boosting public diplomacy funds for the U.S. embassy in Pakistan from $2 million to $50 million to get recognition for the billions in aid the U.S. has spent there. But foreign aid successes in places like Afghanistan are mixed at best. Though he is a vocal supporter of Clinton, Vermont Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy, who chairs the Appropriations Subcommittee on Foreign Operations, says, “Development projects have been launched on a scale that cannot possibly be sustained … They have had to continually adjust goals and revise strategy and redefine what success is.” And crisis management eats up a lot of the department’s energy: Clinton’s deputy for management, Tom Nides, says his primary assignment is trying to prepare the State Department to run the mission in Iraq come Jan. 1, 2012, when U.S. troops pull out. Though security assistance will be State’s job, an audit released in late October by the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction found the department had no full assessment of the needs of Iraq’s large police force, no benchmarks for progress and no way to track costs. “This audit raises serious questions regarding the [police-training program’s] long-term viability,” the report concluded.

Paradoxically, Clinton gets high marks on her traditional diplomacy. For her improving of relations with Russia, which yielded support for Iran sanctions and the abstention during the Libya vote, and her measured resistance on China, she has gained a private cheering section within the centrist wing that dominated the foreign policy of George H.W. Bush. “She’s been a good Secretary of State,” says the dean of American diplomacy, Brent Scowcroft, the first President Bush’s National Security Adviser. “She is confident but not arrogant in her confidence, and quite agile,” Scowcroft says.

What’s Next?

Clinton’s endurance is legendary. She maintained a punishing 18-plus-hour-a-day schedule on her weeklong swing from Libya to Central and South Asia. At the end of her day in New York City last September, with its endless one-on-one meetings, public appearances and forums, Clinton sat down in a closed session with the 27 E.U. Foreign Ministers and listened as each aired opinions on U.S. foreign policy. Even as glazed looks settled over her staff, Clinton retained an easy and relaxed demeanor, speaking off the cuff and calmly responding to bitter criticism of the U.S.’s veto threat against a vote on Palestinian statehood.

Clinton says she intends to leave the Administration after one term–a respectable four-year run. Her relationship with the White House is professional. The public still finds Clinton, who turned 64 on Oct. 26, fascinating–and a potential Commander in Chief. A TIME poll in early October of 838 likely voters found that Clinton does far better than Obama in head-to-head matchups against potential 2012 opponents, beating Mitt Romney by 17 percentage points and Rick Perry by 26. That has led to speculation that she might run for President again in 2016, something her closest staff dismiss. Nearing the start of her eighth decade might not seem an ideal moment for a presidential campaign, but Clinton learned long ago that conditions are rarely ideal for anything, in politics or diplomacy.

“As we look at how we manage the Arab Spring,” Clinton told TIME, “we are trying to influence the direction, with full recognition that we don’t have ownership and we don’t have control. And there’s a lot that’s going to happen that is unpredictable. But we want to lead by our values and our interests in ways that, regardless of the trajectory over the next decade, people will know the United States was on the side of democracy, on the side of the rule of law … And that will, I hope, be a strong antidote to the voices of either fatalism or extremism.”

That is not exactly a realist’s view of the changing 21st century world, nor an idealist’s. But Hillary Clinton is betting her legacy that it is a powerfully American one.