Do not be fooled by Hillary Clinton’s attempt to rehabilitate her term as Secretary of State ahead of the 2016 presidential election. From 2009 to 2013, Clinton embodied U.S. foreign affairs even as President Obama’s avowed policy of self-effacement descended into listless, desultory abdication. Notwithstanding her recent critiques of Obama’s performance, Clinton’s failures as Secretary of State helped bring war to Europe, an arms race to Asia, and inferno to the Middle-East. The U.S. and its international standing are weaker for Clinton’s tenure as Secretary of State.
Clinton’s mistakes began early, with her contribution to the misconceived and poorly executed Russia Reset. President Obama campaigned on a sunshine foreign policy platform, and one of his first foreign policy priorities was to improve relations with Russia. Bilateral relations froze when Russia invaded Georgia in August, 2008, and President Bush deployed warships into the Black Sea and facilitated Georgia’s recall of its combat troops from Iraq. Secretary Clinton’s first major assignment was meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in Geneva in March, 2009. They drank, ate, talked, and posed for now-infamous photos in which the pair “pushed” a kitschy, red, plastic button mislabeled with the Russian word for “overcharge” instead of “reset.”
To give substance to the show, Clinton and Lavrov discussed the U.S.’s “flexibility” on plans made during the Bush administration to build installations housing missile defense interceptors in Eastern Europe. Russia vehemently opposes locating interceptors in Eastern Europe, and Poland and the Czech Republic incurred Russia’s wrath for agreeing to host the systems anyway. Six months after the Geneva meeting, the U.S. cancelled deployment of the systems, leaving Poland and the Czech Republic bereft of the economic and security benefits of the installations but still saddled with Russian anger.
In the first of what would become a pattern, the U.S. sacrificed allies’ interests to a rival in the fatuous hope that the rival would feel some sort of gratitude or obligation in return. The Wall Street Journal’s scathing editorial has proven prescient. TheJournal warned that bowing to Russian pressure would only encourage it to demand ever more concessions and that “[n]ext time, perhaps, the West can be seduced into trading away the pro-Western government of Georgia, or even Ukraine.” The Journal continued that “inclusion in NATO and EU was supposed to have [ended great power use of Eastern and Central Europe as bargaining chips], but Russia’s new assertiveness, including its willingness to cut off energy supplies in winter and invade Georgia last year, is reviving powerful fears.” The Journal and a litany of foreign policy commentators rightly predicted that Putin would take such gestures only as an invitation to aggression.