ALTER EGOS
Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and the Twilight Struggle Over American Power
Mark Landler
Random House
406 pages; $28
Ever since she stepped down as secretary of state in 2013, Hillary Clinton has been positioning herself to the right of Barack Obama on foreign affairs. In her 2014 memoir, Hard Choices, Ms Clinton recalled her foreign policy differences with the president, stating that she had opposed demanding an Israeli settlements freeze in 2009 and warned about Russian President Vladimir Putin's malign intentions long before anyone else in the administration. But would Ms Clinton actually preside over a more robustly interventionist foreign policy than Mr Obama? Or is she simply adopting hawkish plumage to woo swing voters and to deflect criticism from the right during the general election?
In Alter Egos, his lively and informative study of the relationship between Mr Obama and Ms Clinton, Mark Landler, who is a White House correspondent for The New York Times, comes down emphatically on the side of an interventionist Ms Clinton. Mr Landler expertly quarries her recently released emails from her secret web server, and he has conducted numerous interviews with Obama administration officials (though Ms Clinton and Mr Obama both declined to be interviewed for this book). He depicts Mr Obama as an idealist who disdains the idea of American exceptionalism and Ms Clinton as an inveterate liberal interventionist who firmly believes that the mandate of America extends, to borrow the language of George W Bush, into "any dark corner of the world." Nonetheless, he does not demonstrate that there has ever been a profound clash of foreign policy visions between them.
There can be no doubting that tensions existed between the Obama and Clinton camps after the brutal 2008 primary campaign, when Clinton depicted Mr Obama as naïve about national security. Ms Clinton immediately surrounded herself with loyalists at the state department, and she had difficulties penetrating the Obama inner circle. In the early days of the administration, Mr Landler writes, "White House officials on the secretary's plane were sometimes viewed as spies."
The angriest Mr Obama became with Ms Clinton, Mr Landler says, concerned the Arab Spring and the uprising in Egypt's Tahrir Square. Mr Obama pushed for the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak, while Ms Clinton was more cautious about parting with a long-time ally and friend of the United States. But, Mr Landler also shows that after Islamic radicals attacked and murdered American diplomats in Benghazi, Mr Obama, who had been urged to intervene in Libya by Ms Clinton, drew closer to her personally. "For Obama," Mr Landler says, "Libya was less a loss of innocence than a confirmation of what he had always believed: that American interventions, more often than not, end in ashes."
Mr Landler also shows that Mr Obama and Ms Clinton rapidly altered their stances in responding to unpredictable developments: "From Egypt and Bahrain to Yemen and Libya, the president and his secretary of state struggled to reconcile values with interests, democratic hopes with geopolitical realities - often wrapping themselves around the axle in the process. Their struggle culminated in the horrors of Syria, where the United States ended up a bystander to the deadliest war of the 21st century."
In Mr Landler's view, Mr Obama and Ms Clinton "are more than just two of the most riveting political figures of our time. They are protagonists in a great debate over American power - one that will decide not only who sits in the Oval Office but the direction she or he will take a nation that faces a new twilight struggle against the forces of disorder."
This is unpersuasive. Any disputes between Mr Obama and Ms Clinton over dealing with issues like Iran, Syria or China are about tactics, not substance. At bottom they are both liberal internationalists. She wasn't calling for ground troops in West Asia, any more than he was. What's more, any conflicts between them pale into insignificance next to the battle over foreign policy in the Republican Party, which is pitting crusading neoconservatives against outright isolationists.
Mr Landler says Mr Obama became sceptical about American intentions during his childhood years in Indonesia and that "his Kenyan roots added another layer to this carapace of suspicion." But was it necessary to have lived in Indonesia and have a Kenyan father to arrive at these sensible views? A number of American presidents, including Dwight D Eisenhower, who grew up in Kansas, were apprehensive about becoming entangled in West Asia.
Mr Landler concludes that Mr Obama and Ms Clinton are "very different people with very different instincts about how to wield American power - like Truman and Acheson, the plain-spoken Missouri haberdasher and the aristocratic Connecticut Yankee, who together embodied the idealism and realism of America in the 20th century." But this comparison is dubious. There were no great frictions between Truman and Acheson. Both tried to work with Stalin's Soviet Union as late as 1946 before adopting a pragmatic containment policy toward it. Given Ms Clinton's own pragmatism, it would be surprising if once in office she tried to embark on a crusade for a new dawn of justice to replace the twilight struggle identified by Mr Landler. Despite Mr Landler's contention that Ms Clinton and Mr Obama exemplify a grand debate, his book inadvertently suggests the surprising thing isn't that they had occasional disputes. It's that they worked together as well as they did.
© 2016, The New York Times News Service
