The Secretary (53 page)

Finally, the pieces of the puzzle were complete—it was Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng,
a blind civil rights activist known as the “barefoot lawyer,” who campaigned against
forced abortions by Chinese authorities trying to implement the one-child policy.
The authorities had jailed him from 2006 to 2010 and had placed him under house arrest
on and off since then. In 2007, Chen had won the Asian equivalent of the Nobel Prize—the
Ramon Magsaysay Award—while still in detention for “his irrepressible passion for
justice in leading ordinary Chinese citizens to assert their legitimate rights under
the law.”

Jake called Hillary. Boss, we have an issue, he told her. Stand by. When he updated
her later on a secure line from the State Department, Hillary’s first instinct was
to say “Yes,” we have to take this man in. But she wanted Jake and the rest of the
team to look at all the legal and political implications first. No one knew exactly
what Chen wanted and most assumed he was seeking asylum in the United States, a long
and difficult process with many political ramifications for U.S.-Chinese relations.
But the clock was ticking fast. Chen’s situation was precarious. He was thirty minutes
away from the embassy, a wanted man on the run who had escaped house arrest by jumping
over the wall surrounding his house and had traveled four hundred miles, driving and
walking for several days until he reached Beijing and met up with a contact. He was
waiting on the outskirts of the capital in the car of another human rights activist.
The Chinese police were in hot pursuit and would find him soon.

At the State Department, Jake and Kurt got on the phone to Beijing to get more details
and spoke to the department’s top officials, from the chief of staff and counselor
Cheryl Mills to legal advisors and the career foreign service diplomat Bill Burns.
The president was informed and the White House said it would go with Clinton’s decision.

Soon, the choices in front of those meeting at the State Department became clear—not
letting him into the embassy was just not an option. But how would he get there? If
they told Chen to make his own way to the embassy, without help, he would never make
it, and who knew what might happen to him. If the embassy staff picked him up, there
was a 95 percent chance he would be able to enter the premises of the embassy, but
the U.S. relationship with China might disintegrate. Clinton was getting on a plane
in just a few days to participate in another long-planned round of the annual Strategic
and Economic Dialogue.

For six intense hours, Jake and the others weighed American values and interests so
they could give Hillary as clear a reading as possible of what was at stake and how
it might play out. Much of their thinking was being done in a fog of incomplete information
and emotions as the hours passed and dawn approached. They instructed embassy staffers
in Beijing to start driving toward Chen so they would be ready to pick him up when
a decision was reached in Washington. The relationship between the world’s two biggest
economies, the two biggest world powers, hung in the balance. Around three in the
morning, when everybody had weighed in, some in favor, some against, Clinton and her
team reached a final decision: the embassy staff should pick up Chen and bring him
onto American territory.

On an emotional level, no one was ready to live with the stain of Chen’s death or
abuse on his or her conscience. On a policy level, the calculation was that the relationship
with China would survive, but if Chen was to perish in China the damage to the Obama
administration’s human rights record would be irreparable. If the relationship with
China was going to collapse over this, then it had been a house of cards and it was
time to find out.

The saga continued as Clinton arrived in Beijing on May 2. She had said nothing in
public about Chen yet and she avoided the traveling press corps while intense negotiations
continued with the Chinese. Kurt and Jake, along with the new U.S. ambassador to China,
Gary Locke, met with Chen for hours inside the embassy and hammered out details of
a deal with Chinese officials. Clinton intervened with State Councilor Dai to seal
the agreement. The Chinese promised that Chen and his family would be safe if he left
the embassy and that he could pursue legal studies in China. Chen said he was ready
to leave the embassy. He was taken to a hospital for treatment of the wounds he had
sustained during his escape, but the deal fell through when the Chinese reneged on
their promise to treat him and his family well. He was cut off from American officials
and his relatives back in his village were harassed. Meanwhile, despite the tensions
around Chen, the S&ED dialogue continued, unperturbed, as the two powers discussed
the issues that remained key to the relationship. Finally, on May 4, Clinton’s last
day in Beijing, she negotiated with Dai to allow the barefoot lawyer to leave China.
A few weeks later, he flew to New York City with his family.

For Clinton, the Chen Guangcheng affair and its resolution epitomized what she and
Obama had set out to achieve at the start of the administration. They had methodically
laid the groundwork for a solid, wide-ranging relationship with their rival, the kind
that should be able to sustain the blow of a crisis—and it did. The S&ED concluded
as planned and Beijing pursued its relationship with Washington almost as before,
except for a few expected strident comments.

For Hillary, the denouement was a vindication of the comment she made in Asia, in
February 2009, that had caused such consternation. Human rights were indeed one of
many issues on the agenda of global cooperation with Beijing but they could still
be forcefully defended, perhaps more so, because there was too much at stake for the
Chinese to storm off in anger. The administration had replicated this style of engagement
across the globe with all the big players on the global stage, from India to South
Africa and Brazil, and with smaller countries, such as Vietnam. The stakes of walking
away from a relationship with the United States were high for everyone; the damage
often outweighed the benefits of a relationship with America. Clinton saw this as
the real achievement of her years as secretary of state and of the Obama administration—working
with the United States had once again become desirable. There would still be clashes
of interest; Washington would continue to be criticized; its policies would still
frustrate and anger many—it is after all the fate of every superpower. But America
was once more a sought-after partner.

Clinton’s record as secretary of state will be judged by many in narrow terms—she
did not make peace in the Middle East, stop Iran from pursuing a nuclear program,
or set Afghanistan on a certain path to prosperity. But while these failings have
an impact on U.S. standing in the world and on American national interests, the narrow
prism can miss the wider scope of American influence today.

Perceptions of American power in the United States and around the world are lagging
behind the reality of the twenty-first century and the “rise of the rest” not because
American power is diminishing but because the nature of power has changed. American
power is bigger than the sum of the successes and setbacks on the issues that any
administration tackles. While the war in Iraq seemed to send the United States hurtling
down the road toward decline, it was indicative of a level of hubris that was out
of step with the changing world. The United States can no longer decide what the goal
is, how it will be achieved, and then take the lead and force others to follow. There
is no “You are with us or against us” anymore.

Clinton’s key contribution is therefore more intangible but, if pursued, longer lasting—repositioning
America as a leader in a changed world, a palatable global chairman of the board who
can help navigate the coming crises, from climate change, to further economic turmoil,
to demographic explosions. As part of the Obama administration’s effort to redefine
American leadership, Clinton became the first secretary of state to methodically implement
the concept of smart power. She institutionalized this approach in the Building: budgets
now include funds for gender issues, foreign service officers are embedded at the
Pentagon, economic statecraft is part of the diplomatic brief. Clinton was determined
to make sure her work would not be undone after her departure and planned to invest
a lot of her time following up and providing counsel to her successor.

Clinton was ready to glide out of her position as secretary of state with job approval
ratings nearing 70 percent, with rumors rife about her potential run for president
in 2016, despite her many denials. Then, on September 11, 2012, militants attacked
the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, killing Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans.
Clinton had nominated him for the post of ambassador to Libya and felt personally
responsible for his death. The attack unleashed a fury of partisan criticism of Obama
with Republicans predicting the unraveling of his foreign policy. But Obama stayed
the course. Despite the shock and pain surrounding Chris’s death and the clear security
failure, the administration understood this was the price to pay for expeditionary
diplomacy. Ever the politician, Clinton managed to dodge most of the acrimonious attacks.

By the time she left office, Clinton had traveled a million miles, rebuilding her
country’s image with her relentless public diplomacy and quietly reasserting American
leadership.

Obama and Clinton believed that for America to continue to lead it had to rebuild
a sound economic base at home, but early in their tenures the two former rivals differed
in tone when they spoke about American leadership. Obama didn’t fully embrace American
exceptionalism and hesitated to speak forcefully about American power. Over the course
of his presidency, he realized that he sounded too modest about what America was and
what it wanted to do. He was signaling that America was going home, and this opened
a gap that was now being filled by China or Turkey, countries that have a stake in
running the world but are still too focused on their own narrow, domestic needs and
problems to exercise global leadership.

By the time he gave his State of the Union address in 2012, Obama was on the same
page as Clinton.

“From the coalitions we’ve built to secure nuclear materials, to the missions we’ve
led against hunger and disease; from the blows we’ve dealt to our enemies, to the
enduring power of our moral example, America is back,” Obama said when he addressed
Congress in January 2012.

“Anyone who tells you otherwise, anyone who tells you that America is in decline or
that our influence has waned, doesn’t know what they’re talking about.”

The Obama administration has laid the groundwork for continued American leadership
into the twenty-first century. The foundations are still fragile and there are no
guarantees of success. But Clinton and Obama strongly believed that smart power was
the only way forward for America.

“This is truly the inflection point, because we now understand that America, as powerful
and strong as we are, cannot remake societies,” Clinton told me. “We can help liberate
them, like Libya, but we cannot remake them. That must come from within, and there
needs to be a reformation in thinking amongst people in countries that have been downtrodden,
oppressed, violence-ridden, and there needs to be higher expectations and demands
placed on leaders who should be reconcilers, not dividers.”

“The kind of help we need in the twenty-first century is for people themselves to
overcome the differences that still divide them,” Clinton told me during the interview
for the book.

As a superpower, America has been more willing than past empires to share the world
that it has made, and there’s something there to hold on to. The difference between
American power when I lived on the receiving end of it and today is that the gap between
what America says it’s doing and what it is doing is becoming narrower. The difference
between now and then is Tahrir Square, Twitter, the Syrian rebels, Chen Guangcheng,
Sherhbano Taseer, Mohamed Bouazizi, and all those who are no longer willing to be
taken for granted, not by the United States and not by their own rulers. Knee-jerk
reactions blaming every wrong on America are outdated and not very productive. There
are too many ways to effect change without the United States, or harness American
power to advance one’s cause.

I had reached the end of my own journey too. I still struggle to accept that the Syrian
invasion of Lebanon was one of those inconsistencies of American foreign policy. But
I have met the human beings at the heart of the American foreign policy machine and
I was willing to accept that they did not make decisions about war and peace blithely,
at least not anymore. And while the anger and sense of betrayal I felt as a young
teenager in Beirut are still with me, they are mitigated by my new understanding of
American might and its limits. I can now see America for what it is, not what I want
it to be or what was convenient for me to consider it. That perspective may be a more
challenging one to hold, but I believe it is truer to the realities of today’s world.
There is greater strength in that and a wider horizon of possibility.