Clinton has her own problems

By Peter J Brown Aug 31, '09

Much has happened since United States Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made her first trip to Asia in February. She has demonstrated that she is a capable partner with President Barack Obama, and that she can excel as a strong team player in his cabinet. Clinton is riding a wave of popularity that grows with each successive trip she takes, and abundant optimism surrounds her.

As Clinton reacts to changing realities abroad, the US Department of State itself warrants her immediate attention. In the process, she will have to wear many hats, including a few that may not fit too comfortably as she addresses problems involving staffing, security and strategic communications.

When she presented her department's 2009 budget to the US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations earlier this year, Clinton frankly admitted that far too many key staff positions overseas remained vacant, "for the simple reason that we don't have enough personnel". In Beijing, 18% of US Embassy positions are open. In Mumbai, she estimated that it was 20%, and in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, it's 29%.

The immediate objective is to recruit 740 new US Foreign Service personnel as part of a long-term expansion of the US Foreign Service by 25%. Over at the United States Agency for International Development, which oversees an annual foreign assistance budget of over US$13 billion, the situation is "more severe", said Clinton.

As a result, one might think that recruitment is a top priority at the State Department, but as summer comes to a close, Clinton confronts a sticky security problem that apparently prevented many young interns from coming in the door in 2009.

Obtaining first-time, entry-level security clearances has become an unpredictable process. Well-qualified young Americans with linguistic skills and a strong interest in global commerce and international affairs might find that getting a job in China is easier than getting an internship at the State Department.

The scope of the problem at the department is hard to gauge. In his August article on this troubling situation, for example, National Journal reporter David Herbert found that most of his sources "asked to remain anonymous because they feared damaging their career prospects at the State Department down the line". He also raised questions about possible discriminatory practices during the applicant screening process.

Keep in mind that this situation came to light months after Clinton declared that in order for the Obama administration to meet its ambitious goal of doubling foreign assistance by 2015, "We need more people manning the decks." And it may be just the tip of the iceberg.

Besides the procedures surrounding the issuance of clearances, other security-related concerns stare Clinton in the face.

As pressure mounts on her to quickly deploy more civilians in Afghanistan, she must also determine what is fact and what is fiction when it comes to the true scope of Xe - formerly Blackwater - covert missions and activities with other government agencies well outside the domain of State Department security operations.

Whether or not Clinton believes that Xe suffers from an image problem, Xe remains a vital player on the State Department's security team via a multi-million dollar contract. But because so many in the Islamic world are critical of Xe’s prior track record in Iraq, the State Department must figure out how to cope with this widespread perception. Timing is everything, and right now the State Department is keen to send the right message to millions of people in the Islamic world as part of the reinvention of the department's ambitious strategic communications campaign in the region.

The revelations surrounding Xe also serve as a reminder that maintaining transparency is often a very delicate proposition indeed, and Clinton has already been counseled about the need for her team to embrace greater transparency for a number of reasons.

"Obama administration officials have been engaged in international talks on enormous budgetary commitments that could go well beyond the $53.9 billion that we are considering today," said the committee's ranking minority member, Senator Richard Lugar, at the senate budget hearing. "The administration chose not to include its $108 billion request for the International Monetary Fund as part of the regular 2010 budget, [and although] the IMF [International Monetary Fund] is essential to shoring up the international financial system, [this has] encumbered the public transparency of the administration's proposal, which is critical to building broad support for the US commitment to the IMF - not just this week, but looking forward in the months and years to come."

This call for greater transparency is something that Clinton cannot overlook, especially when many people are wondering about the roster of top players that surround her. Very powerful personalities like special envoy Richard Holbrooke and Robert Hormats, the State Department's new under secretary for economic, energy and agricultural affairs, advise Clinton.

As expected, she will keep some State Department matters well out of sight. At the same time, however, she cannot allow this to become the rule rather than the exception, and she may find this hard to do.

She is getting high marks now, and that matters. Right after her first trip to Asia in late February, for example, Victor Cha, director of Asian Studies at Georgetown University wrote in The Chosun Ilbo, "Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's first trip to Asia demonstrated well the Obama administration's commitment to the region. Her stops in Japan, Indonesia, Korea and China displayed her ability to handle a brief quite well. Her mastery of the material was clear, and she demonstrated an understanding of the nuances in the region like an experienced Asia hand."

In late August, however, warning lights began flashing. Last week, Senator Jim Webb of Virginia, chairman of the East Asia and Pacific Affairs sub-committee of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee told PBS Newshour viewers in the US that,

"The most important thing, actually, right now is that we have an opportunity here to try to construct a new formula, and it's vital for the interests of the US in SE Asia that we re-engage across the SE Asian mainland," said Senator Webb, who is just back from his two-week, five-nation tour of Southeast Asia. "We are in real danger of losing our position, with the expansion of China, with this whole series of countries that I visited."

While Clinton already acknowledged that the US position regarding Myanmar was not working, Webb, and his sub-committee, which includes Clinton's replacement from New York State, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand - an Asian studies major in college who is the only US senator proficient in Mandarin - is perhaps prodding Clinton and the State Department to move more quickly on a number of important matters related to all Southeast Asian nations and not just Myanmar.

Professor Peter Dutton of the China Maritime Studies Institute at the US Naval War College testified at a hearing a few weeks ago entitled, "Maritime Disputes and Sovereignty Issues in East Asia" which addressed, "current challenges of the disputed territories in the region, including the Senkaku Islands, Spratly Islands, and Paracel Islands". He stated that the US needs "to reassert our position as the global advocate for access-oriented approaches to international law of the sea".

"The federal government would benefit from a comprehensive national oceans policy, and flowing from that policy, a comprehensive strategic communications plan to explain the benefits and strengths of the American perspectives on the oceans," said Dutton, who also pointed out, "Today, however, there is not even complete unity of perspective across the various federal agencies that have a hand in oceans policy."

Even if she wants to move more quickly as Webb and Dutton recommend, Clinton cannot dictate how things will unfold inside Washington in terms of interdepartmental relations. And all the talk of a "comprehensive strategic communications plan" raises the important issue of how Clinton is going to select the fires she intends to fight as well as how she goes about putting them out, especially situations involving close interaction with the US Department of Defense.

Despite the fact that Holbrooke has observed that the US is losing the information war in Afghanistan, which he contends must be waged at the same time as counter-insurgency efforts - the US is now launching another $150-plus million "strategic communications campaign" there, too - chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Michael Mullen, on the other hand, is saying the opposite - enough is enough.

Mullen's view is that this sort of intensive US public relations activity abroad is tantamount to a waste of time, and this puts him on a collision course with Clinton.

"To put it simply, we need to worry a lot less about how to communicate our actions and much more about what our actions communicate," said Mullen. "Because what we are after in the end - or should be after - are actions that speak for themselves, that speak for us. What we need more than anything is credibility. And we can't get that in a talking point."

The State Department is listening, but is no doubt baffled at the same time by the actions of the Defense Department's new African command, AFRICOM, which are running counter to Mullein's comments. Somehow, AFRICOM ended up with a strategic communications budget in Somalia estimated to be perhaps 20 times larger than what the State Department has been allocated for the same purposes.

Strategic communications headaches aside, Africa is already a source of many sleepless nights in the State Department. Morale and managerial performance may be improving there, but Africa must now be seen in the context of someone else's rapidly expanding sphere of influence. Because China is becoming hyperactive in so many African countries, the US must be more responsive and ready to execute programs more quickly.

Clinton's advisors are watching China as it maneuvers its way through Africa and Latin America, knowing that she has gone to great lengths to be cautious in her statements about China, both here and in Beijing earlier this year. With each passing day, however, Clinton is exposed to many valid and meaningful viewpoints, which serve to pull her in different directions simultaneously. For example, in his August Pacific Forum CSIS paper, "Obama and East Asia: No Room for Complacency" Professor Gerald Curtis of Columbia University wrote:

The Obama administration went overboard in treating China as a kind of peer partner during the US-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue held in Washington in July 2009. President Obama's statement that the US-China relationship "will shape the 21st century" implies much greater Chinese power to influence global affairs than it actually possesses or is likely to possess for many years to come ... It is one thing to seek closer US-China relations - and continued Chinese purchases of US Treasury notes - but quite another to suggest that China in its relationship with the United States has the power to "shape the 21st century" or that it is in the US national interest to encourage it to think that it has.

In addition, Curtis urged Clinton to pay closer attention to East Asia because, "President Obama and Secretary Clinton might find themselves treating East Asia with a kind of benign neglect, camouflaged with ritualistic rhetorical affirmation of East Asia's importance to the United States. Inattention and complacency, however, would leave the administration in a position of constantly having to catch up with developments in East Asia rather than do what it should do, which is to design a strategy that can help shape those developments."

Such statements along with the signals being sent by Webb and his sub-committee must drive Clinton's staff crazy. After all, she is not a figurehead or someone who is content to sit on the sidelines.

Yukio Hatoyama, leader of the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) and likely the next prime minister, is not making things any easier for Clinton. His recent article entitled, "My Political Philosophy" in the September issue of the monthly Japanese journal Voice is, in effect, an attempt to prod Japan into abandoning globalization and establishing a new sense of East Asian community.

"The East Asian region, which is showing increasing vitality in its economic growth and even closer mutual ties, must be recognized as Japan's basic sphere of being. Therefore, we must continue to make efforts to build frameworks for stable economic cooperation and national security across the region," wrote Hatoyama. "As a result of the failure of the Iraq war and the financial crisis, the era of US-led globalism is coming to an end and we are moving away from a unipolar world toward an era of multipolarity."

It is not clear how Clinton will respond. She may elect to immediately send someone to convince the DPJ's senior advisors that Japan stands to win more than it might lose by maintaining its strong support for globalization. Or perhaps, she will prefer to do nothing, at least for the next month or so.

New US ambassadors have just arrived in Beijing and Tokyo. And while Hatoyama sounds like a radical, he makes it clear that "the Japan-US security pact will continue to be the cornerstone of Japanese diplomatic policy". He goes on to state, "China, which has by far the world's largest population, will become one of the world's leading economic nations, while also continuing to expand its military power."

Perhaps this is merely an attempt to catch Clinton's attention, especially now that China has established itself as Japan's largest trading partner. The DPJ's upset victory, and the toned down mood of North Korea might allow Clinton a bit of time to reflect and reset in East Asia.

Unfortunately, she has little time to spare thanks to the deteriorating situation in Pakistan, and the fact that President Hamid Karzai may emerge the winner in a rigged election in Afghanistan just after he insulted Clinton with his support for a measure which will compel women in Afghanistan to forget their dreams of living free in the 21st century.

With all this swirling around her, there is still no question that Clinton is firmly at the wheel of the US State Department. She must constantly check all the dials to ensure that the engine is running smoothly as she hurtles down the highway - hoping to avoid any roadside bombs around the turn.

Peter J Brown is a freelance writer from the US state of Maine.

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