By Christian Brose
I'm coming a day late to this, and but I can't pass up a few words on this from Hillary Clinton's opening statement:
We must use what has been called “smart power,” the full range of tools
at our disposal -- diplomatic, economic, military, political, legal,
and cultural -- picking the right tool, or combination of tools, for
each situation. With smart power, diplomacy will be the vanguard of
foreign policy.
Now, America needs many things right now, but another contribution to the foreign policy lexicon is not one of them. The whole hard power/soft power thing always seemed too much like a
Cialis commercial to me. And smart power isn't much of an improvement. True, as Laura helpfully reminds us, "smart power" is not Hillary Clinton's creation. It was born on the pages of that other foreign policy magazine. And there it should have stayed.
Yes, every secretary of state needs to put her own unique rhetorical brand on the foreign policy she will be practicing. I get that. Heck, I've even been complicit in it (and not just once). But smart power? Come on. The thing that bothers me about it is that it's a description of means, process. It has nothing to say about what the purposes of our foreign policy should be. I'm all for phrases and brands. But they should offer more than just a vague recipe for how we mix together our various kinds of power -- hard, soft, happy, grumpy, sneezy, whatever.
I liked the idea of "a world of liberty under law" that Anne-Marie Slaughter's Princeton Project came up with. Slaughter, so we hear, will be Clinton's policy planning director, so maybe there's still hope for better phrasing to come. But for now we have smart power: an unclear phrase that's all about process and void of strategic direction. The bureaucracy is going to love this.
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