A hawk in the roost?

• Last Updated: November 28. 2008 8:30AM UAE / November 28. 2008 4:30AM GMT

Meme of rivals: It is unclear whether Clinton has gained faith in Obama's approach to foreign policy, or whether Obama has lost faith in his own. Reuters

With Hillary Clinton set to become Secretary of State, Matthew Yglesias wonders if Barack Obama’s bold agenda will prevail.


A US presidential election leaves in its wake the awkward period in which we now find ourselves: “the transition” – a time for Americans to wonder what the incoming administration will actually do when it takes office in January and for Washington insiders to obsess over who will get which jobs. Even those of us not in line for a cabinet post have a serious stake in the outcome: the career prospects of hundreds of think-tankers and policy wonks hinge on decisions about who will head various departments. But even beyond self-interest, the torrent of gossip and nuggets of actual information that flow about personnel can provide an important window into the direction of policy, the priorities and tactics of a new administration.

For many of the liberals who formed the core base of Barack Obama’s support going back to the primaries, the appointments to their man’s team have been disappointing indeed, with nearly all the high-profile positions thus far going to moderates. Rahm Emanuel, who was a senior adviser to President Clinton and a decidedly centrist congressman, will be Obama’s chief of staff; former Clinton treasury secretary Larry Summers will chair the National Economic Council, with his protégé, Tim Geithner, at Treasury. The governor of Arizona, Janet Napolitano, is Obama’s Homeland Security nominee, and former Senate minority leader Tom Daschle has been put forward as head of Health and Human Services.

Prominent liberal commentators have bemoaned the absence of “a single, solitary, actual dyed-in-the-wool progressive,” as The Nation’s Christopher Hayes put it. But looking toward Obama’s domestic agenda, such concerns seem overblown. Both Daschle and Napolitano were politicians representing very conservative states (South Dakota and Arizona) and both clearly pushed the boundaries of what was possible in their jurisdictions. Summers has moved substantially to the left over the past several years, as can be seen in his Financial Times columns, and Geithner is a lifelong public servant who would be a welcome break from the revolving door between Wall Street and the Treasury Department.

But most important of all, the rollout of the domestic team has been accompanied by clear statements of policy determination. Emanuel, who’s often been an advocate of timidity as a member of the House Democratic Party leadership, has spoken of a desire to “throw long and deep” as a legislative strategy and he and Obama have both specifically recommitted themselves to both comprehensive health care reform and a dramatic transformation of the energy sector. Meanwhile, the Obama economic team is already preparing to roll out a proposal for hundreds of billions of dollars in economic stimulus spending.

Under the circumstances, appointing a cabinet full of figures viewed as moderates seems like a canny way to put a reassuring face on bold policymaking.

But what about foreign policy?

The same logic could apply. For a president looking to carry out some bold moves, putting a moderate face on the enterprise might help get the job done. Someone known and trusted by the Israeli government, for example, could have more leeway in conducting diplomacy with Iran.

But since Obama met with Hillary Clinton two weeks ago – and offered her a job as Secretary of State – the conversation has been dominated by speculation about her acceptance. Talk of Obama’s new national security team – now reported to include Robert Gates staying on as Secretary of Defense, and former General Jim Jones as National Security Advisor – has hardly touched on actual policy plans. Instead, we’ve been treated to endless treatments of the touching story of personal reconciliation between Clinton and Obama – with Bill, the devoted husband, willing to do whatever it takes to purge his own business dealings of any potential conflict of interest.

This story – while fascinating in its own right – is rather less important to the rest of the world than the question of what policy course the new administration intends to pursue. What has compounded the confusion is a tendency to rewrite the history of disagreements between Clinton and Obama to minimise the clear policy differences that emerged in the course of the Democratic primaries. A recap of Obama’s “strategic courtship” of Clinton in last week’s New York Times gave the decided impression – in the words of a senior Obama staffer – that “the reality at the end of the day was, whether it was Iran or health care or some of these other issues, we were always fighting big battles over small differences.”

Many of those differences were indeed small. But it’s important to recall that, though the dispute over direct high-level talks with Iran was the highest-profile difference between Clinton and Obama, it was far from the only one. Indeed, their related dispute over Cuba was in some ways more clear-cut, with Obama indicating a desire to break with the isolation policy that’s prevailed since John F Kennedy and Clinton indicating that, like her husband, she had no intention of challenging hard-line orthodoxy.

On Iran, they differed not only on direct talks, but also in that Obama explicitly envisioned negotiations as ideally leading to a grand bargain and a normalisation of relations. Obama firmly endorsed a call by a bipartisan group of eminent foreign policy hands for the United States to recommit itself to the goal of worldwide nuclear disarmament, while Clinton was equivocal. Obama supported US accession to the international treaty banning cluster bombs while Clinton did not. And Obama subtly but pointedly criticised the Clinton administration’s handling of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – promising not to make the push for peace into a last-minute lame-duck initiative.

None of these disputes involves a gaping, unbridgeable policy void. Indeed, it’s completely common for an administration’s national security team to represent a range of views, and these disputes are well within an acceptable margin of error.

Still, there is a clear pattern to these differences, one that becomes more dramatic when considered alongside the positions Clinton and Obama took back in 2002 on the merits of invading Iraq. Clinton is not only more hawkish than Obama – she’s also more politically risk-averse: disinclined to tackle entrenched interest groups or challenge conventional wisdom. Clinton represents a segment of the Democratic party that spent the years after September 11 fretting intensely over whether Democrats seemed sufficiently “tough” – worried about a replay of the 1970s, when Democratic anti-war sentiment scared off the public.

Obama and his younger supporters took a distinctly post-September 11 perspective, in which insufficient backbone in standing up to Bush’s reckless policies was the party’s primary sin. To many, this was the central appeal of Obama’s candidacy. This important distinction between the Clinton and Obama approaches was reflected in their campaigns: Obama staffers spoke explicitly to me and others about their desire to take advantage of the shift in public sentiment in the wake of the Iraq disaster to move beyond the politics of toughness and enact dramatic shifts in America’s relationship to the world.

For all the speculation about Obama’s offer to Clinton, there has been no real account of the rationale or motivations for his decision – at least not beyond vague, and endlessly repeated, references to Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book, Team of Rivals, a profile of the cabinet Abraham Lincoln assembled under wildly different circumstances. The transition team has done very little to outline the substantive agenda it expects a Clinton-led State Department to tackle, and indeed, perhaps the ongoing financial crisis will mean any bold new foreign initiatives will be put on the back-burner.

What is unclear at this point is whether Clinton joining the Obama team means that Clinton has gained faith in Obama’s approach, or that Obama has lost faith in his own. The very fact of Obama’s election would seem to tilt things in his direction: there was a consistent trajectory to their disagreements, and Obama was on the right side – a judgment vindicated by his victories over both Clinton and McCain. It’s not merely that he won, but that winning demonstrates his supposedly “risky” positions were not so risky after all.

Obama not only won the presidency while bucking the demands of the hardliners in the Cuban-American community, he won the very state of Florida, whose pursuit allegedly demands obeisance to decades of an idiotic embargo. He took 77 per cent of the Jewish vote – more than John Kerry. He was attacked by his Republican opponent as weak, naive and dangerous – and he prevailed. To be sure, he had a powerful assist from the economy and John McCain’s inept approach to the financial crisis. But if voters really believed that Obama was insufficiently “tough” to secure their personal safety, surely that would have trumped other considerations.

In other words, exactly as Obama bet, there was less out there in the world to fear, and less reason than Democrats had thought to trim their sails and embrace hawkish policies to out-tough the Republicans. Reconciliation between Obama and his former rival is all well and good, but in a world with big problems, one candidate embraced bold solutions. Let’s hope his administration will do the same.

Matthew Yglesias is the author of Heads in the Sand: How the Republicans Screw Up Foreign Policy and Foreign Policy Screws Up the Democrats.