Get the lady out of town -- Thoughts (among others) on ex-SecState Clinton

When Barack Obama selected Hillary Clinton -- with her limited experience in foreign affairs, far more limited than her knowledge of the sad affairs of her marital (martial?) heart -- a thought immediately came to my overly cynical mind, formed by the over twenty years that I had the privilege, at taxpayers' expense, to serve in the U.S. Foreign Service.

 "It's Barack's way to getting her out of town," I immediately reacted.

It turns out that Hillary, who many (including, doubtless, herself) expected to be president in 2001, has more than fulfilled the president's wish to keep her far away as possible from the White House. Think about it, if you were Barack: No pushy Hillary at WH/National Security Council meetings.

But Hillary's peregrinations, while delighting (relieving is perhaps a better word) the president, were not really breaking a precedent.

In her many miles jetting around, at enormous expense to the taxpayer, in her souped-up Boing and chewing on red peppers, Hillary was (unknowingly?) following, by her endless pilgrimages, the example of her predecessor who, so far as I know, was the first SecState to publicize, on the U.S. Department of State website, how many miles she had to go before she slept (well, ok, she did sleep on her plane).

I am referring to the good "Dr." Condoleezza Rice, an intellectual fraud if there ever was one, for whom distance covered (as if diplomacy were a football game) was a sign of "diplomatic" success or, as she pretentiously coined it, "transformational diplomacy." She, of course, was considered as an NFL commisioner, doubtless the culmination of her PR career.

But to get slightly more serious:

Motion rather than solution. Is that the 21st century agenda for our American Secretaries of State?

Think about it. One false way to convince "people" the world over (including in our very own USA) that you're "doing something" when you actually have nothing to do/decide upon, is to be "on the move," with the complacent media, eager for any story, "reporting" on your "new initiative." Make sure to have "town hall meetings" with respectful, carefully chosen natives in furren lands -- "public diplomacy" at its most superficial -- without dealing in depth with substantive issues, a sine qua non, I would argue, of effective diplomatic  negotiations -- a painstaking process few in die USA homeland (or, for that matter, among foreign "public opinion") want to be bothered about.

So just smile for the camera and look "sincere." It works PR wonders! (Whatever these wonders may be, except to those producing them.)

A rarity among pundits who have understood this end-of-serious-diplomacy episode is the wise "old-world" New York Times columnist Roger Cohen, who confesses that "Much as I love America, my love does not extend to its football":

Diplomacy is dead.

Effective diplomacy — the kind that produced Nixon’s breakthrough with China, an end to the Cold War on American terms, or the Dayton peace accord in Bosnia — requires patience, persistence, empathy, discretion, boldness and a willingness to talk to the enemy.

This is an age of impatience, changeableness, palaver, small-mindedness and an unwillingness to talk to bad guys.

Of course, with all due respect to Mr. Cohen, the fact that "diplomacy is dead" existed from the very beginning of "diplomacy." So nothing in life, including being dead, is really new.

And face it, Mr. Cohen, we "Americans" love, just love, our American football, no matter how many concussions it may cause and how incomprehensible it may be to the rest of the world, especially in its glorification of so-called "safe" violence.

I live in Washington, and I think that the shameless exploitation of R.G., Griffin III, the injured  and pure-athlete (he really belongs in the original Greek Olympics) Washington Redskins' quarterback (I love the Americana: in a city nearly 50% black, its team is called the Redskins, an near-exterminated "native people") doesn't exactly tell "America's story to the world."

Full disclosure: I was the press guy at the U.S. Embassy in Belgrade during the Dayton Peace Process (cited above by Cohen) and the joke then (mid-90s) was:

What's the most dangerous place in the Balkans? Between Dick Holbrooke and a TV camera.

But there's an important caveat: When diplomacy becomes a total media circus (1) -- e.g., the twitter under-140-characters communications regime promulgated by State Department social media guru Alec Ross, who genuflects like a Virgin-Mary infatuated altar boy before Madam Clinton (“The secretary is the one who unleashed us ... She’s the godmother of 21st-century statecraft”) --  diplomacy becomes yet another sad illustration of -- to cite the words of the Bard centuries ago -- an activity reduced to being "full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.'"

(1) See the important book by Kenneth Osgood, which documents in detail that propaganda replaced diplomacy during the Eisenhower administration -- a period when the USIA (United States Information Agency) was established (1953) and the CIA was involved in clandestinely supporting "informational/cultural" activities abroad.

Above image from; below image from