The Secretary (44 page)

“This is important to the United States, it’s important to the president, and it’s
important to me personally,” Clinton told them.
34
The following day the Qatari Mirage jets and Emirati F16s appeared over Libya’s skies.
She had attended four meetings of the Friends of Libya group, with dozens of other
foreign ministers and the Libyan opposition, focused on putting together a vision
for a post-Gaddafi Libya. Hillary was struggling with buyer’s remorse. She had weighed
heavily in favor of intervention, and the Obama administration had publicly and repeatedly
said the campaign would last weeks and not months. But more than four months later,
there was no end in sight.

In the region, opinions and editorials were divided as usual: some deplored the fact
that America wasn’t deploying all its firepower to finish the job; others were furious
about American military intervention. Despite the very public Libyan plea for intervention—as
well as a wider Arab call—many Arab citizens and pundits believed the United States
had engineered the conflict to get its hands on Libya’s oil, that it was yet another
ploy by the neocolonial imperial power to take over the region’s riches, using U.S.
regional allies like Qatar and Saudi Arabia to give the campaign legitimacy. Much
had changed in the region, but much remained the same.

Back in Beirut, I found myself on my friend Rania’s
35
couch in an affluent Christian neighborhood, chatting about her daughter, common
friends, new restaurants in the city. The conversation inevitably turned to politics.

“I think there’s something weird about all these revolutions, don’t you?” she asked.
“It’s just strange how all of a sudden people in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Syria, they
all woke up and started a revolution. I mean—what got into them?”

“Well, you know, this was boiling under the surface for a long time,” I ventured,
uncertain about where she was going with the conversation. “No one predicted it would
explode like this, all at once, but there had been warnings for a long time that the
situation in the region was unsustainable. You know, dictators, poverty, demographic
explosion, unemployment, it’s a very combustible combination. Then one guy killed
himself, and it started a revolution that spread across the region. I think the region
was ripe.”

“I don’t know,” she replied. “I think it’s strange. I guess the Americans decided
all these dictators had outlived their usefulness or something. But I don’t know what
their plan is exactly.”

Plan? I thought of Jeffrey Feltman, the former ambassador to Beirut now sitting in
Washington, shuttling endlessly to the Arab world, trying to keep track of which leader
was about to fall, had fallen, or was ruthlessly trying to hold on to power. He was
exhausted and selfishly hoping that amid their awakening, the Arabs would take a nap
so he could catch his breath. American officials and their Arab counterparts barely
bothered to pretend that the peace process was still alive. Some American officials
were asking me what I thought was going to happen in Syria. Others expressed their
frustration with Yemen’s Ali Abdullah Saleh, who couldn’t sign an agreement and stick
with it, or with the Bahrainis, who refused to rein in their security forces, or with
the Saudis, who were still upset because the United States had let down Mubarak. Everybody
was making America’s life difficult, and unless chaos was actually the plan, I failed
to see how the United States was pulling any of the strings here. There were no doubt
many layers of the American foreign policy machine that were hidden to me, but it
was hard to believe that everyone in the State Department and the White House was
in on the ploy to look unprepared and scrambling to cope.

A bit later that afternoon, I went shopping in downtown Beirut. A close friend of
mine, Randa,
36
was a fashion designer, and I loved picking a few items from her collection to show
off everywhere I traveled, my own tiny effort to advertise Lebanon. I always arrived
too late in the season to buy anything, as rich women from the Gulf had usually bought
up all the good stuff. I walked into the shop; the racks were full. The rich women
had stayed at home that summer since there was so much uncertainty in the region.
No one was buying.

“So what do you think is going to happen to Lebanon? What are you hearing in Washington?”
Randa asked. I wasn’t hearing anything; for once, Lebanon was not high up on Washington’s
agenda. American officials kept an eye on it mostly because it was Syria’s neighbor
and home to Hezbollah. Instead, I offered my own prognosis about how this time Lebanon
would probably muddle through the turbulent times, and stay out of trouble.

“But what do you think they have planned, you know, for Lebanon, for Syria?” Randa
asked. I looked at her, eyebrows raised. “Plan? Randa, there is no plan. You know,
Americans are trying to figure this out day by day and manage it as best they can.”

A look of horror descended on her face. She raised her hands in the air.

“Kim, Kim! What are you saying? What do you mean there is no plan? If the Americans
don’t have a plan, then who the hell is in charge of everything?”

The idea that the United States wasn’t masterminding anything was too alien a concept
to my friends. It didn’t seem to matter that popular revolutions were sweeping the
region, that people were bringing down dictators and taking charge of their countries,
that all the headlines were about America being on the decline—again. The United States
somehow must have been behind everything. In one breath, people both praised their
own newfound power and accused the United States of bringing down their leaders. The
image of a plot being cooked up in an office in the United States, so popular for
all those decades, was so ingrained in people’s brains it was hard to dismiss.

In 2005, when Lebanon had gone through its own popular uprising after the assassination
of Rafic Hariri, the Bush administration gave it unequivocal support. Jeffrey Feltman,
who was still in Beirut at the time, was at a dinner with politicians from the pro-Western
camp when he casually mentioned that he was going on holiday for two weeks. The table
fell silent.

“But what will we do?” one of the politicians suddenly wailed. The anti-Western camp
often accused Jeff of being the real ruler of Lebanon and pulling all the strings.
This politician’s reaction seemed to reflect that belief—except that Jeff was frustrated
that none of these politicians actually ever seemed to listen to his advice.

So who was in charge? This was the paradox in much of the Arab world and beyond—the
U.S.-as-puppet-master provided a tidy explanation for the problems in the region,
though America also seemed to be expected to swoop in and fix everything. Despite
the fear and loathing of America, people still pinned their hopes on the United States
for answers or even support. Even as they excoriated Obama for not coming out early
enough to support their revolution, Egyptians had called on him to do more and faster
to precipitate the fall of Mubarak.

*   *   *

Many countries seemed to have a hard time letting go of their reliance on the United
States, which was, for now, the top superpower. America had long fed that dependence.
But now the Obama administration, trying to empower other countries to do some of
the heavy lifting, was finding that the world wasn’t catching on that quickly to the
idea. The phones were still ringing off the hook at the Near Eastern Affairs bureau
at the State Department. The Yemeni opposition was desperate for the United States
to come and remove Ali Abdullah Saleh. The Bahraini opposition wanted Washington to
force the authorities to accept their demands for better representation, but they
didn’t want to enter into a dialogue with the authorities themselves. The Libyan National
Transitional Council wanted all the African countries to turn their backs on Gaddafi,
but they didn’t want to do the asking themselves; could Washington please lobby on
their behalf? And although the United States had walked slowly and reluctantly down
the road to action in Libya, American military airpower had been crucial to delivering
crippling blows to Gaddafi’s forces in the first few days of the military campaign.
When the United States stepped back to allow others in the coalition to drive the
operation, the Obama administration was criticized for entering the war halfheartedly,
for failing the rebels who wanted more drone strikes and more intelligence. President
Obama was criticized for “leading from behind,” even though the United States had
played a key, albeit little-advertised, role in framing the debate about intervention
and ultimately shaping the platform that allowed it to happen.

The Libya war had been a new experiment for Europe. Though the United States and Europe
had waged war together through NATO before, America had always been the leader. Europe
would never have imagined leading a military campaign: in the past, they simply followed.
Libya was a more cooperative process. The Europeans were much more willing to work
with America when Washington wasn’t being a bully. But it was a steep learning curve,
and even the Americans seemed shocked to find out how much their own hardware was
still needed. Europe wanted to pedal on its own, but the United States still had to
supply the wheels and, in fact, the pedals themselves. The United States worried that
Europe would fall off the bike. It was a confidence- and trust-building exercise for
everybody.

Washington hoped that this approach would allow European countries to achieve a new
and much-needed maturity on the world stage. No one knew whether future wars would
be waged in the same way, but each party had learned how to pull off international
action in situations when America did not want to act unilaterally or could not foot
the entire bill.

*   *   *

The Arab Spring both inspired Obama and distracted him all at once. The slow economic
recovery and unemployment rate that still hovered around 9 percent were his real concerns.
The United States’ debt ceiling was about to be broken, and the United States could
default on its debt if it couldn’t borrow more money. The Treasury regularly adjusted
the limit but this required permission from Congress. For decades, it had been a routine
affair but with a Republican majority in Congress and the Tea Party movement angling
for a showdown, the process became opaque. Raising the ceiling automatically meant
more spending, but Congress wanted the ceiling to be raised only as part of a bigger
deal to cut government spending over the coming years. No one was willing to cave
in first.

The Lebanese media did a fair amount of coverage on the acrimonious bickering between
Democrats and Republicans, politicians and pundits, a sorry spectacle somewhat bizarrely
reminiscent of the partisan spats among Lebanese politicians with differing worldviews.
But we seemed to bicker on forever, in circular arguments, whereas others would eventually
find a resolution, however imperfect, to their dispute.

The debt crisis was unfolding right as Clinton was embarking on one of her craziest
trips yet—ten days, Greece, Turkey, India, Indonesia, Hong Kong, and China. Greece
was crumbling under its own debt crisis and being bailed out by France and Germany.
At each stop, Clinton was asked whether America would come to its senses and raise
its debt ceiling, or take the world down with it.

“Let me assure you we understand the stakes. We know how important this is for us
and how important it is for you,” she told an audience of business leaders—and through
these leaders the world—in Hong Kong on July 25. Acknowledging the other side’s concern
was a classic Hillary Clinton first step in calming fraying nerves. She had faith
in her country because she had seen it all before. America went through slumps, economic
and psychological, in cycles. She remembered the late 1970s, when oil prices had skyrocketed,
cars lined up at gas pumps, and unemployment was above 10 percent. She believed in
American innovation, ingenuity, and resilience, and she believed in the American political
system because she had seen it close to collapse before as well when she was at the
White House.

“These kinds of debates have been a constant in our political life throughout the
history of our republic. And sometimes, they are messy,” she told the audience of
anxious businessmen. “I well remember the government shutdown of the 1990s; I had
a front-row seat for that one. But this is how an open and democratic society ultimately
comes together to reach the right solutions.”

On July 31, the showdown in Washington was over. Congress and the White House came
to an agreement that raised the debt but also cut spending over ten years by an almost
equal amount.

From the island of Hong Kong, Clinton’s motorcade drove two hours across a bridge
toward the Special Economic Zone of Shenzhen in southern China. State Councilor Dai
Bingguo was waiting with a lavish lunch and army of staffers to make the American
delegation comfortable.

Over a four-hour meal in a government guesthouse, the two officials and their delegation
talked in detail about all the issues that mattered to both countries, in a smaller,
informal version of the Strategic and Economic Dialogue. Clinton’s ability to manage
a diplomatic conversation had matured, and she had learned to draw Dai out of the
formulaic conversations Chinese officials preferred. The discussion flowed more freely,
even though Hillary was the woman who had dared challenge the Chinese in their own
backyard about their behavior on the high seas. Worse, she had stated in an interview
with the
Atlantic
magazine a few months earlier that China’s system of rule and its attempts to stop
democracy from taking hold in the country were a fool’s errand. And yet here she was
talking about how to tackle global problems together.

The relationship itself was maturing, and the two rivals were learning to keep ties
steady even as crisis erupted. Although they now understood that Hillary and America
could not be pushed around, Chinese leaders still seized on every detail that appeared
to show their system was working and America’s wasn’t. The meltdown in Washington
was an appalling display of American decay in the eyes of a Communist Party that never
allowed the outside world to see its divisions.