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TOPIC: Hillary Clinton Iran Sanctions (Esquire 4/22/10)

Jen the Michigander

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Date: Apr 23, 2010

Hillary Clinton Iran Sanctions (Esquire 4/22/10)	Permalink

http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/hillary-clinton-iran-sanctions I felt better about myself as an American after spending time with Hillary Clinton for the profile of her that appears in the May issue of Esquire. Seriously. It's not just the obvious — it's not just the fact that she never appears so quintessentially American, as simultaneously Daisy-Millerish and Tracy-Flickish, as when she stands smiling on a stage with a bunch of European guys with permanent five-o'clock shadows. It's not even that I wind up applauding my country for producing a woman whose genius is for a kind of can-do level-headedness that somehow manages to drive both enemies and admirers around the bend. No, it's that after traveling to Montreal, London, and Paris with the secretary of state — after listening to three of her speeches and attending at least a dozen diplomatic ceremonies and then interviewing her — I'm a little less concerned than I was about the problem of American power. And because of Hillary Clinton, we should all be a lot less concerned about the problem of a nuclear Iran (no matter the war games nor the cautious talk). But first, let's face it: The problem with American power is that there seems to be less of it these days. We're fighting wars we can't win and incurring debts we can't pay, and the upshot of all that is that we can't tell other countries what to do. "You have to approach this [diplomacy] with humility," Secretary Clinton told me. "Even if you think we're right — and in fact I do believe we're right about the major issues — you can't just assert it." Now, on the face of it that sounds like a pretty standard, Obama-era formulation, right down to the encoded reference to the Bush administration, whose policy of diplomacy-by-assertion only wound up making us look at once decisive and ineffectual — decisively ineffectual, if you will. But the thing that makes it also a classic Hillary formulation is the parenthetical insistence that she, and we, are right. She has never been given to apology, and while this has caused her some problems politically — think the Iraq war vote — it serves her well as President Obama's secretary of state. She does not give you the sense, as Obama sometimes does, that she's conducting foreign policy in expiation of the sins of the previous administration, or for that matter of the previous 234-odd years of American history. She's not guilty about anything, least of all American power, and standing next to her is like standing next to a Minuteman missile — you can have all sorts of opinions about her, but ultimately you're glad that she's one of ours. It was good to see the pageant of state power that accompanies Madam Secretary's trips abroad, good to see the urbane Continental smoothies that are her diplomatic counterparts stooping to kiss her ring, good to hear her say, in our interview, "I don't buy that [American] decline stuff at all. We have some work to do here at home — our deficit is a huge challenge to our international position that we've got to address — but we still have the reserve currency, people would rather invest here than anywhere else in the world, we have the instruments of power, all across the board, from hard to soft to where I like to land, in the middle, with 'smart'. So there's no doubt people want to see us, they can't get enough of us, they're constantly wondering what we think and what we're going to do." What she's saying is that the United States does have a coherent policy on Iran — and it's called Israel. What she's saying is that we are already using the "crazy little brother" strategy to get the Chinese to accept sanctions — Hey, it's not me you have to worry about, it's my crazy little brother. What she's saying is that sanctions are being pursued not simply to stop Iran from developing the Bomb, but also to stop Israel from bombing Iran. We are being primed to worry about the consequences of a nuclear Iran. But there is not going to be a nuclear Iran, because Israel is not going to allow it. And so what the world has to worry about is not so much the prospect of Iran having a bomb, but rather the aftermath of it not having one. Hillary Clinton knows this, and is preparing for it. The great prophets of American decline, on both the left and the right, portray us as a powerless power, without a card to play in our engagements with challenging nations. But spending time with Secretary Clinton makes you understand that not only do we have cards to play; she's already playing them. __________________ Nobody puts THIS baby in the corner!

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