Hillary Clinton insists that she has yet to decide if she'll run for the presidency in 2016 but her campaign has been hard at work for months, raising money, hiring staff and building a supporters' network across the United States. Ready for Hillary, a political action committee that includes some of her closest advisers, raised more than $4 million last year and much of Barack Obama's political operation has already moved in behind her.
The publication of Hard Choices, a memoir of her four years at the US state department, has seen Clinton return to public visibility in recent weeks after more than a year in near seclusion that was only interrupted by brief appearances at glittering charity galas and paid speeches for a reported $200,000 each, often to investment banks and private equity firms. The book's roll-out and Clinton's nationwide US tour have not gone smoothly, with missteps such as her claim to have been "dead broke" on leaving the White House making Democrats squirm and delighting her many enemies on the right.
Hard Choices is part political memoir and part campaign book, with many of the deficiencies and few of the attractions of either genre. The liveliest political memoirs can, like former defence secretary Robert Gates's Duty, take the form of a tell-all, score-settling dishing of the dirt on former colleagues. Or, like Henry Kissinger's Diplomacy, they can use their own experience at the top as a starting point for elaborating a political doctrine. Political campaign books tend to draw on the author's personal story, seeking to make it fit the policy prescriptions they are promoting and to persuade voters that they have the right virtues for high office. Barack Obama's Dreams of My Father was not written as a campaign book but it served that purpose so perfectly that the candidate's biography and his political platform often seemed indistinguishable.
Clinton has already written one memoir – Living History, in 2003 – and an indiscreet account of her experience within the Obama administration was always out of the question. Instead, Hard Choices is above all an account of Clinton's travels – 122 countries, a million miles, 2,000 hours in the air – and her meetings with remarkable men and women. Mostly organised by country and region, it includes a few thematic chapters on issues such as climate change and human rights and a limp epilogue focused on domestic policy. Clinton is fearless in deploying cliches, promising to take her readers "from the shifting sands of the Middle East to the turbulent waters of the Pacific to the uncharted terrain of cyberspace". Northern Ireland appears in a chapter called 'Between Hope and History', Angela Merkel is possessed of 'steely determination', an indispensible quality, no doubt, for the woman who is "carrying Europe on her shoulders".
As a senator and as secretary of state, Clinton was exceptionally well briefed and Hard Choices sometimes reads like a primer on the major foreign policy issues of the day. (The section on Northern Ireland says nothing new about the political situation and is mostly a recital of her own history of engagement there, which is both real and commendable.)
Clinton plays down her personal clashes with others in the Obama administration, including her bitter feud with former national security advisor Jim Jones, but makes a point of revealing some of her policy differences with colleagues. In every case, she advocated the more hawkish option – on arming rebel forces in Syria, killing Osama Bin Laden or negotiating with Vladimir Putin. Clinton urged Obama against making a freeze on Israeli settlement building in the West Bank a precondition for talks with the Palestinians in 2009 and she wanted Washington to show more support for Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak's regime before it was toppled by a popular uprising in 2011. "It all may work out fine in 25 years, but I think the period between now and then will be quite rocky for the Egyptian people, for the region, and for us," she told Obama.
Among the most illuminating chapters in the book is her account of secret nuclear talks with Iran brokered by the Sultan of Oman which led to the formal negotiations in Geneva that started under her successor as secretary of state, John Kerry. During the 2008 Democratic primary campaign, Clinton had condemned Obama for saying that he would meet the leaders of Iran, Syria and other unfriendly states "without precondition". As secretary of state, she supported the president's diplomatic overtures to Tehran, although she remained sceptical that the Iranians will deliver a final, comprehensive agreement.
Clinton emerges from these pages as a hard-working, knowledgeable and highly competent secretary of state who saw her primary responsibility as restoring her country’s reputation abroad after the catastrophic errors of the Bush years. Unlike Kerry, who has staked much of his political capital on trying to broker a peace deal between Israelis and Palestinians, she took few risks and she admits to few mistakes (although she finally acknowledges that she was wrong to vote in favour of authorising the Iraq war in 2003).
A chapter on the 2012 killing of four Americans in Benghazi, including the US ambassador to Libya, offers a powerful defence against the Republican charge that she was negligent and condemns the staging of “a political slugfest on the backs of dead Americans”.
Although Clinton describes running in 2016 as a hard choice she has yet to make, she is taking all the necessary steps to position herself for the Democratic nomination and she is currently the choice of seven out of 10 registered Democrats. This book will reinforce the view held by more than half of Americans, according to a recent poll, that she is “knowledgeable and experienced enough to handle the presidency”. It will do nothing to generate the kind of excitement that drove Obama’s campaign in 2008 or Bill Clinton’s in 1992 or to regenerate her image after more than 30 years as a national public figure.
If she runs, Clinton is in danger of being viewed as the safe choice rather than the hard choice or the inspiring one. And as she found out in 2008, a sense of inevitability can be a leading candidate’s biggest risk.
