By Peter D. Feaver
An intriguing article
in today's New York Times addresses a
favorite Beltway party game: Where is Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on
important policies? This game, which was temporarily suspended for a weekend so
insiders could play another game ("What is the best Nobel Peace Prize joke you
have heard?"), really matters and, if the NYT piece can be believed, it may
prove dispositive in determining President Obama's Afghanistan decision.
Secretary Clinton has largely sailed under the radar and
contented herself with high-profile actions on low-profile issues like trips
focusing on women in Africa and efforts to promote peace in Northern
Ireland. She has won some oddly
effusive plaudits, but few people not directly on her payroll would credit
her as a driving force in President Obama's foreign policy thus far. Indeed, the pattern has been unmistakable: The
more important the issue, the less prominent the activity and voice of
Secretary Clinton.
The thesis of today's NYT story is that this pattern may
obscure her real influence. Secretary
Clinton's power may come by way of serving as an amen corner for Secretary
Gates, the most powerful member of President Obama's cabinet. By endorsing Gates's view on Afghanistan,
Iran, Iraq, and other issues, Secretary Clinton guarantees that the issue will
not be framed internally as an us vs. him issue, where the "us" is Team Obama
and the "him" is the holdover appointee from the Bush administration. She has thus played a crucial role in forging
the most important, if most often misunderstood (cf. the curious convergence of
views between former Vice President Dick Cheney and the Nobel Peace Prize
Committee) fact about President Obama's national security policy thus far: its
dramatic continuity with President Bush's national-security policy.
Ironically, however, that continuity may have played out its
course. As the NYT story also suggests,
Clinton and Gates appear to be teaming up to do something that Bush did not do:
Stick with an incremental policy rather than embrace a surge. The reporters seem confident that Clinton and
Gates favor a middle course between Biden's abrupt shift in mission and
McChrystal's Iraq-like (Bush-like) surge in military and civilian resources.
Even without Clinton and Gates recommending it, most
observers probably would bet that President Obama is going to split the
difference in this fashion. The politics
of the Afghanistan decision are such that a split-the-difference option is
almost inescapable. Having the two most
important cabinet principals endorsing it would make it virtually a foregone
conclusion.
It would also do one more thing, which thus far has not
happened: It would put Secretary Clinton's imprimatur on an important policy. The
war in Afghanistan has already become President Obama's war. If he adopts Secretary Clinton's
recommendation, it will also become her war. What comes of that war may well determine a key part of how history
rates both of these political leaders in the foreign-policy arena.
TIM SLOAN/AFP/Getty Images
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