Questions about Clinton
— -- Amid the generally glowing reviews Hillary Rodham Clinton has received as secretary of State, experts on foreign policy pose three caveats:
Does perpetual motion equal progress? For all the time and energy she's invested in the job, Clinton has no major diplomatic accomplishment to call her own.
The Arab Spring remains a work in progress. Iran has yet to back down on its nuclear program. North Korea is as enigmatic as ever. Afghanistan's progress has been unsteady. And Middle East peace remains elusive.
"There really is not a singular defining achievement that history books will pay attention to," says Bruce Jentleson, a Duke University public policy professor who served as a senior adviser at the State Department in 2009-10.
Current and former State Department officials say the Israeli and Palestinian governments are to blame for the lack of progress in the Middle East. They note that Obama placed his first set of calls on the day he was inaugurated to Middle East leaders and that Clinton got involved in one-on-one talks between the two sides in the fall of 2010. Special envoy George Mitchell, who had brokered peace in Northern Ireland in 1998, resigned last May.
Few of Clinton's predecessors can claim one overarching achievement. "A secretary of State has not had 'one big thing' since James Baker and the reunification of Germany," says Anne-Marie Slaughter, Clinton's former director of policy planning.
"We don't have the luxury of just zeroing in on one, maybe two difficult areas or problems," Clinton said in an interview with USA TODAY. "We wake up every day worrying about nuclear proliferation and climate change."
Has the White House limited her? The president took charge of foreign policy early in his administration, giving major addresses on nuclear disarmament in Prague and Muslim relations in Cairo. Before his first year was out, he had won the Nobel Peace Prize. Clinton, ever the loyal soldier, has made his agenda her own.
Elliott Abrams, who served at the State Department and National Security Council during Republican administrations, says, "I don't think she ever found a project for herself … where she could really claim personal success."
"This is a very top-down administration," says former Democratic congresswoman Jane Harman, president of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Still, Harman says, "she has had more energy than all the men added up together. And she's won over all the skeptics, like Henry Kissinger."
Kissinger, Clinton said, "said he'd never seen a White House and a secretary of State work so well together. He said, 'I've never seen it before. We were always fighting.' "
Did she ditch the "freedom agenda"? Proponents of George W. Bush's efforts to promote freedom over tyranny say the Obama administration hasn't given sufficient voice to that cause. They point to efforts to negotiate with Iran and North Korea, "reset" relations with Russia and apologize for U.S. involvement in drug trafficking in Mexico.
Clinton's predecessor, Condoleezza Rice, questions whether the Obama administration is willing to put its imprimatur on the sweeping change taking place in the Middle East and North Africa. "As those shifts are taking place, will there be an American imprint?" she said in a recent Heritage Foundation address. The United States, she said, can't just be "one among many."
Obama and Clinton, in fact, have made it a priority to work with both traditional allies and emerging powers such as China, India, Brazil, Turkey and Indonesia.
"We don't want to take the responsibility for doing everything by ourselves," Clinton said. "We want a world in which both existing and rising powers are responsible stakeholders. So it is in our interest in a deep and profound way to build these alliances, networks, multilateral organizations."