Roger Kaplan: Hillary Clinton and the Burden of World Leadership

On the way home from an international conference on the situation in Syria, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made weekend stopovers in Algiers and Rabat to offer a few words of encouragement to our friends in the Maghreb, the Arab West or, if you wish, the African North. She may have reached home by now, or she may still be in Rabat, which is the capital of Morocco. She digs the king. So do most Moroccans, according to Palace sources. However, regional observers are still debating what she meant by that these quick visits. Shopping in a souk? Photo op with the local bigs? Courtesy call? Nod of approval for getting through the Arab spring -- if such it was -- unscathed? Or implicit criticism for something they did -- or did not do? It is a mysterious world out there, and the head of our diplomacy does not help make it less so with cryptic pronouncements about "partnership."

 

But maybe she was keeping busy to avoid the fact that no one knows what to do about Syria. And about the Middle East. And about Afghanistan. A fine mess you have got us into, as Oliver Hardy used to say to his sidekick Stan Laurel. Though who the you is in this story remains less easy to define than you might think. Does anyone recall how, or even why, we have got involved in, evidently, a series of savage wars of peace? The phrase comes from Kipling, and if you look it up, you will see he was in favor, but somewhat skeptical of the concomitant nation-building. Nation-building is scarcely an American invention. The Victorians were bullish on this. It was the responsibility that came with Empire. Kipling shared the ethos, but he knew too much about the lands of the Empire -- he grew up in India -- to think it was just a matter of a few well-designed USAID boondoggles, excuse me infrastructure development projects. Actually, Karl Marx credited the Raj with the only serious progress the subcontinent experienced in centuries, if not millennia: railroads, abolition (at least on paper) of suttee (burning widows), among other improvements, were not to be scoffed.

 

But what is our goal? Establish freedom of religion in Afghanistan and Iraq? It does not seem to be in the cards. How about clean government? Or the right to dispose of printed matter as you wish, so long as it is your own book or magazine. If the goal was to overthrow the Taliban on the grounds they were our enemies' friends, that happened 10 years ago and counting. If the goal was to cripple al Qaeda by decapitating its leadership, the war's over. Kipling indicates that virtue is its own reward and you might as well expect ingratitude. You have to admit that at this moment, both in Iraq and Afghanistan, it is difficult not to feel he was on to something there.

 

Ever the optimists, we Americans like to believe that we can do things differently, with different consequences, however messy the road from A to B. The historical record actually supports this view, but only if you adopt an end-justifies-the-means outlook, and take the means to mean a hell of a long time, sometimes...