Confirmation

Steve Walt has an interesting take on the Clinton confirmation hearings. I tend to go on about how a major difference between partisan policies nowadays is ultimately not whether we exert too much power or too little, but who's exerting it. Hence a Democratic administration that speaks not of "soft power" but of "smart power." Now, while many progressives have cheered the latter as an effective re-branding of the former, Clinton explicitly states it will involve a mix of both military and diplomatic means - "the full range of tools at our disposal. With 'smart power,' diplomacy will be the vanguard of foreign policy." Which all sounds well and good, but what really differentiates it from, say, the second term of the Bush administration? Or many other recent Presidencies? Clinton, as Walt points out, seem to think that if we can just not be the Bush administration, it will be the beloved 1990s again. Americans, remembering the other Clinton, may be inclined to agree. But we're not going back to the 1990s and we can't try acting like we did in the 1990s and expect it to work very well. But clearly, the overriding message throughout most Democratic candidates has never been to claim the exertion of power is wrong, but that power has been squandered or misused. The fundamental insight that we seem to be lacking is that we are becoming less powerful relative to other countries and certainly less powerful relative to our objectives. It is not a matter of "smart power," it is a matter of smart policy to guide that power.

Walt's enumeration of Hillary's unmanageably and impossibly large list of "priorities" is perhaps too kind. Delineating each distinct objective, there are maybe 37 priority items dealing with perhaps 70 or more countries, excluding the rest which would doubtlessly be involved given the profligacy of "global" objectives. Who can imagine what the secondary and tertiary goals of this Department would be? As Walt points out, Clinton's recognition that priorities must actually be prioritized and realistically evaluated does not seem to reflect in her list of primary goals. There seems to be little acknowledgement of what efforts will come at the expense of others, and what goals may prove to be contradictory. For example, the idea that America will have a foreign policy consistent with its democratic values and principles while promoting human rights everywhere possible without being ideological seems a bit dubious as a 'non-ideological' policy. To many in the rest of the world, our commitment to democracy and human rights appears very ideological, and thus pursuing these goals may not be compatible with say, winning the war on Afghanistan which will require the aid of Central Asian countries with some autocratic tendencies. Can we simultaneously engage and strengthen our alliances India and Pakistan in a productive manner? Strengthen NATO and pursue a pragmatic Russian policy? Our foreign policy seems to be not only that we can have our cake and eat it too, but also have NATO, the UN, the G8 bake us cakes that we can continue to both have and eat.

Don't worry, though. We'll sort it out with smart power.