Catching up on Clinton’s big speech

By Peter Feaver

Catching up on some reading after multiple trips, I have just waded through Secretary Clinton’s Big Speech — capital letters are warranted because of the breathless promotion that attended it before, during and after.

I found the speech more familiar than newsworthy. The section on priorities read like the table of contents to President Bush’s 2006 National Security Strategy: terrorism, regional peace efforts, trade, development, energy, supporting and encouraging democracy, etc. Even the caveats were familiar: democracy is more than elections (check), foreign policy must reflect the world as it is, not as it used to be (check), no nation can meet the world’s challenges alone (check), no challenge can be met without America (check). Her Five Pillars are also remarkably evocative of the goals laid out by both of the administrations immediately preceding Obama’s.

This is not a criticism of the speech. Indeed, as anyone who has worked on a top-level speech or document will understand, it is rather like pop music: there is a basic I-IV-V chord progression that is detectable in almost every “new” effort. Some do it better than others, to be sure, but it can’t really be hidden from the attuned ear.

It would be unfair to label Clinton’s speech a  “Heart and Soul” effort, but it would be a reach to credit it as transformative.

To me the best part was its frank acknowledgement that the core of the challenge of achieving better multilateralism was in overcoming collective action problems — a familiar insight to anyone who has taken an introductory international relations course, but one that is all-too-often ignored in the partisan commentary on foreign policy. While there were the now-ritualistic swipes at those boors in the Bush administration, the Secretary did not, in fact, pretend that the problem was simply Bush (or even American) arrogance. I would have liked to see more discussion of how, in fact, she will overcome those collective action problems, especially in achieving a global architecture that met these desiderata, which she summarized so pithily: “one in which states have clear incentives to cooperate and live up to their responsibilities, as well as strong disincentives to sit on the sidelines or sow discord and division.”

This has been a priority challenge since before the 9/11 attacks. Indeed, a colleague of mine at Duke, Bruce Jentleson, has repeatedly talked about the “September 10th agenda,” and uppermost on that was the mismatch between what the world asked of international institutions and what those  international institutions were capable of doing.

Coincidentally — or perhaps not — Bruce Jentleson is coming on board the State Department to serve as a senior advisor to Anne-Marie Slaughter, the Director of Policy Planning. With Slaughter, her deputy Derek Chollet, and now Bruce Jentleson, Secretary Clinton will have at her disposal an impressive cadre of experts who have thought long and hard about this mismatch. I am hoping that the Secretary’s speech was just the opening salvo and that in the coming months we will learn more about what her brain trust has in mind for addressing this serious problem. 

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