Hillary Clinton, International Woman of History, On China, The Doha Speech, and Fools' Errands

On Tuesday, May 10, I posted the April 7 Interview with Jeff Goldberg of The Atlantic that had just been released. Something in that interview caught my attention. It was a busy week for me, and I did not have time to address it immediately, but I want to take a step back and attend to it now.

QUESTION: Is there – a couple more things. The – I’m not a fan of coherence. We have this bias toward coherence. Everything has to be tied up neatly.

SECRETARY CLINTON: But everybody wants that.

QUESTION: Everybody wants coherence. Is there, however, some sort of coherent storyline that you can identify what’s happened since the poor vegetable seller –

SECRETARY CLINTON: Absolutely.

QUESTION: — self-immolated.

SECRETARY CLINTON: I mean, I’m now being blamed in some Arab capitals for having caused this with my speech in Doha, even though –

QUESTION: You get it coming and going.

SECRETARY CLINTON: I do, don’t I?

QUESTION: Yeah.

SECRETARY CLINTON: Even though the vegetable dealer actually –

QUESTION: That was before.

SECRETARY CLINTON: — set himself on fire.

QUESTION: But you were working on the speech, to your credit –

SECRETARY CLINTON: I was working on it and –

STAFF: Forgive me, to her credit –

SECRETARY CLINTON: To my credit.

STAFF: You’re the reporter, huh?

SECRETARY CLINTON: Yeah. Right.

QUESTION: To your credit. No, you – I mean, I know the speech was in – Jim was telling me –

SECRETARY CLINTON: That’s right.

QUESTION: — the speech was in motion.

SECRETARY CLINTON: That’s right. I mean, because what I saw happening was so clear to me that what was going on was just this movement below the surface that despite the leaders’ either refusal or blindness to see what was going on, it was moving. And we have just lost our breath over the last many years trying to get people that we worked with ahead of the curve. So I gave that speech in Doha, and it was fascinating, and I noticed it at the time. A lot of the government leaders were like, “No, didn’t want to hear it.” The business leaders, the NGOs, were on the edge of their seats. They were nodding at each other. They were poking each other in the arm. They –

QUESTION: You literally felt that.

SECRETARY CLINTON: I could see it. I could literally see it where I was sitting as I was delivering it, and then during the question-and-answer period.

So, I mean, the leaders might have chosen to be oblivious, but people in the society, not just the young people, but people of all walks of life, they knew that there was this beginning change. And it was, “Do they go with it? Are they afraid of it? Do they make it their own?” That was –

QUESTION: Stipulated that you get it coming and going on these questions, do you – and I just want to come to two final things on the Middle East peace process – but the – stipulate that and that you’re never going to get – somebody in Egypt is going to think of you as the best friend of Mubarak and somebody in the Gulf is going to think of you as sort of a wild-eyed Wolfowitz or something.

SECRETARY CLINTON: (Laughter.) I don’t know about that.

QUESTION: Yeah. No, I –

SECRETARY CLINTON: You can say I’m wild-eyed but don’t compare me to that. (Laughter.)

QUESTION: I just threw it out there, talking it out. No big deal.

No, but it’s interesting because you hear, not only here but in the White House also, people are saying, “Oh, you guys are so statist and you’re so slow on Yemen or so slow on this,” but you’re hearing – but you’re also hearing from not only Otto, but a lot of people accusing you of the sky is falling –

SECRETARY CLINTON: Well, I do have this – I mean, my doctrine is the Goldilocks Doctrine – not too hot, not too cold, just right.

QUESTION: I get that. But how do you – so how do you deal with the hypocrisy that is a necessity in diplomacy, meaning that you’re going to deal with a Qadhafi one way because you can and you’re going to deal with a Yemen in a different way? Or do you not see it as strategic hypocrisy or a kind of malleability or –

SECRETARY CLINTON: I don’t. I honestly believe that each place is different. There are trends, but I think following the fall of the Berlin Wall, how Germany responded and Poland responded, you couldn’t say that there was one template that fit all. I mean, you had the – you had –

I, too, saw a close relationship between that speech and the subsequent Arab Spring. In fact I reposted the speech on January 28 to point out that Hillary Clinton was more in touch with the stirrings of democracy beneath the surface in these countries than the leaders themselves were. Her comments above bear that out.

Two earmarks of Hillary Clinton's tenure at the State Department are her stalwart defense of internet freedom and her insistence upon packing outreaches to civil society into her already dizzying schedules on her travels. It is in these townterviews, meetings, and interviews that her (lovely) fingers fall on the pulse of the people providing her with insights that their own leaders perhaps fail to perceive. When she then alludes to these insights in a speech, people all over the world see and hear the speech and read her words.

Even in countries like China, which attempts to block access, people find her words. Today's technology cannot be stopped. Students know how to get around firewalls. They are on Facebook, Youtube, Twitter. They know we support them. They know our Secretary of State fights for them and view her as a hero (as do we, whom she represents).

So my hero, my Mme. Secretary, is being blamed for causing these revolutions with her Doha speech? To be sure she could see this coming, but only because she deigned to look into the eyes of the people, to speak with them, and to listen. What she heard were aspirations that all people have: to be able to make a decent living, educate children, live peacefully, have a voice. It was not Hillary Clinton who tempted people with these possibilities. It was their own leaders' denial of these rights that caused the Arab Spring.

When I see an exchange like the one below, from an earlier section of the same interview, I know that other oppressive regimes will try to blame her in the future, but as she herself points out, putting oneself in front of the steamroller of history is a fool's errand.

QUESTION: Which brings me to one of the contradictions, and they’re – everybody’s demanding of you and your Administration a kind of over-arching doctrine, and we’ll get to that in a second. But one of the obvious contradictions here is that while on the one hand you are pushing for democracy, democratic reform and achievement in Egypt and Tunisia, places like that, you’re also, in some ways, have gone into the monarchy business in the sense that we have a lot of allies – Jordan and Saudi Arabia, most notably – who are feeling pressure, are going to feel some pressure on the democratic front, and our direct interest is in supporting and keeping these guys on their thrones. I mean, is – does this contradiction bother you? I mean, a monarchy being sort of silly idea for Americans anyway.
SECRETARY CLINTON: Yeah. No. But I wouldn’t accept the premise. I mean, I think that we believe in the same values and principles full stop. We believe that countries should empower their people. We believe that people should have certain universal rights. We believe there are certain economic systems that work better for the vast majority of people than other subsystems.

So I think we’re very consistent. I think that’s been a cornerstone of American foreign policy for at least the last century. At the same time, we live in the real world. And there are lots of countries that we deal with because we have interests in common. We have certain security issues that we are both looking at. Obviously, in the Middle East, Iran is an overwhelming challenge to all of us. We do business with a lot of countries whose economic systems or political systems are not ones we would design or choose to live under. And we have encouraged consistently, both publicly and privately, reform and recognition and protection of human rights. But we don’t walk away from dealing with China because we think they have a deplorable human rights record. We don’t walk away from dealing with Saudi Arabia –

QUESTION: And they’re acting very scared right now, in fact.

SECRETARY CLINTON: Well, they are. They’re worried, and they are trying to stop history, which is a fool’s errand. They cannot do it. But they’re going to hold it off as long as possible. And they are –

QUESTION: Who would’ve thought that something that happened in Tunisia could –

SECRETARY CLINTON: Think about it. But that’s how –

QUESTION: (Inaudible) it’s amazing.

SECRETARY CLINTON: I mean, you think about historical events.

A final comment: There are references here to her doctrine and her administration. She states that she indeed has her own doctine. I would be gratified to see her have her own administration.