DAVIS: Obama-Clinton: A great team of rivals

OPINION/ANALYSIS:

The positive media and bipartisan praise of Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s leadership at the State Department — she is called a “superstar” by the top Republican on the House panel that oversees State and has an approval rating of 80 percent — misses an important point: This is not about Mrs. Clinton alone. This is about powerful synergy between President Obama and Mrs. Clinton.

Together, with complementary views and approaches to foreign policy, they have already created a serious change in American foreign policy as compared with the Bush administration. And they almost certainly constitute the most powerful and effective POTUS-Secretary of State combination since Abraham Lincoln and William H. Seward.

With some danger of oversimplification, it is possible to divide American history before the Obama administration into two distinctive approaches to the outside world: the first in the late 18th and 19th century, the second in most of the 20th century up to George Bush, although the seeds of the third Obama-Clinton approach began in the 1990s under President Clinton.

For the first 112 years, from George Washington in 1788 to William McKinley in 1900, American foreign policy was essentially non-interventionist and even isolationist.

Then, beginning with Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson in the early 20th century, came a new moralistic, interventionist attitude - preaching the superiority of American democracy and values - and then virtually a straight line (except for the Clinton years) through World Wars I and II, the United Nations, the Cold War, the War in Vietnam, all the way through the “war of choice” in Iraq.

And now a “third way” is presented by the Obama-Clinton combination in the post-Bush era.

Of course, there are still important continuities, too: a commitment to a strong military; protection of U.S. security from the threats of terrorism; military intervention where necessary, such as in Afghanistan to defeat al Qaeda and the Taliban; and a clear American commitment to democratic values and human rights.

But the Obama-Clinton approach is fundamentally different from that of the Bush years and most prior administrations in at least two ways.

First, both Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton truly believe in discussion and engagement with foreign government leaders - friends and foes - and greater reliance on what Mrs. Clinton has described as “smart power” - less reliance on military force, but more reliance on diplomacy, international economic development (not just “foreign aid”), and, most importantly, listening more than preaching.

Ironically, this new approach of engagement has at times managed to alienate the left or the right - and often both. Examples include:

• Mrs. Clinton’s quiet modulation during her first foreign trip, to China, in raising the issue of human rights and democracy issues, at least in a nonpublic, nonconfrontational fashion;

• The policy of engagement and reconciliation pursued by Mr. Obama’s personal envoy to Sudan, Gen. Scott Gration, has been criticized by some humanitarian groups and a few officials within the Obama administration, who apparently prefer a policy of confrontation. However, Mr. Obama and Gen. Gration’s approach already has shown signs of progress on the ground in reducing the human suffering in Darfur. Gen. Gration will host a conference in Washington on Tuesday to facilitate implementation of the North-South 2005 peace agreement in Sudan that ended 50 years of bloody civil war;

• Most recently, Mr. Obama has pragmatically chosen to show restraint in speaking out too strongly regarding the street protests in Iran regarding the elections.

On Iran it is not correct to say that he has remained completely silent. Just this past Saturday, the president spoke up forcefully against the repression of the rights of expression and the government-sponsored violence against the protesters. But he still has been careful, despite congressional pressures from both sides of the aisle to be more forceful, while still not appearing to “take ownership” of this grass-roots movement. The last thing the opposition presidential candidate, Mir Hossein Mousavi, and his supporters would want is being accused of being “tools of American imperialism.”

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