EFTA00978951.pdf

From: Office of Terje Rod-Larsen < MIII=I> Subject: December 10 update Date: Wed, 11 Dec 2013 21:51:15 +0000 10 December, 2013 Article 1. Foreign Affairs After the Iran Deal, the United States and Israel Will Cooperate, Not Clash Brent E. Sasley Article 2. The Washington Post Imbalance in Israel Richard Cohen Article 3. Associated Press Abbas aide lambasts US push for framework deal Karin Laub Article 4. The Financial Times The west is losing faith in its own future Gideon Rachman Article 5. Politico Was Hillary Clinton a Good Secretary of State? Susan B. Glasser Article 6. NYT Thinking for the Future David Brooks Article 7. NYT Why Machiavelli Still Matters John Scott and Robert Zaretsky \nick I Foreign Affairs After the Iran Deal, the United States and Israel Will Cooperate, Not Clash EFTA00978951 Brent E. Sasley December 9, 2013 -- Most depictions of how Israel sees the recent nuclear accord with Iran are consistently shallow. When explaining what the deal means for Israel, Western analysts and journalists tend to focus on the differences between close political allies of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who denounced it as a "historic mistake," and the Israeli security establishment (that is, serving and retired officials from the military and intelligence agencies), which is generally more tolerant of the deal. But it is misleading to think of Israeli policymaking just as a tug of war between those two camps, because disagreements between civilian and security leaders are normal, and because the public rhetoric on which such assumptions rest doesn't allow for a consideration of wider trends and changes. Such a view leads to needlessly alarmist predictions about a coming split between Israel and the United States. The tendency of Western, and particularly American, observers to describe Israel in one-dimensional terms, however, is not new. U.S. commentators have long viewed the country and the region through a prism of American politics and priorities. They assume that recent electoral and coalition politics in Israel are about Iran -- which is certainly on the minds of American foreign policy specialists and journalists -- when they have actually been more about domestic politicking and crude power struggles. Such assumptions miss the deeper processes at work in Israeli foreign and security policymaking, which suggest that U.S.-Israeli relations are not in grave danger since there are still, in fact, enough common policy concerns keeping the two countries together. Those include maintaining strict sanctions on Iran during negotiations and ensuring close ties with Egypt in the post—Hosni Mubarak era. THE BEST DEFENSE IS A GOOD OFFENSE In Israel, military and security officials have long played an important role in the civilian decision-making process: an old quip is that the Defense Ministry makes foreign policy while the Foreign Ministry sells it. That is, in part, related to the circumstances of Israel's birth and the security strategy it pursued thereafter. In Israel's early years, it tried to deal with all threats preemptively or, failing that, through military retaliation. The purpose was not to defeat EFTA00978952 Israel's enemies -- the country didn't have the means to do that -- but to degrade their capabilities and keep them from amassing so many sophisticated weapons that they could pose an existential threat. Wars and armed hostilities were seen as regular rounds of violence to contain continuous threats rather than as conflict-ending battles. For example, Israel's 1956 invasion of Egypt's Sinai Peninsula (part of a larger British- French operation to regain control of the Suez Canal and topple Gamal Abdel Nasser); the 1967 war with Egypt, Jordan, and Syria; intermittent battles with the Palestine Liberation Organization from the 1950s to the 1970s; and confrontations with Hamas in 2008-2009 and 2012 all fit into this strategy. Such tactics also informed Israel's policy on nuclear proliferation, with strikes on Iraq and Syria's nuclear facilities in 1981 and 2007, respectively. For the country to survive -- and preemptively deal with all the threats it faced -- the Israel Defense Forces and the Defense Ministry had to develop effective decision-making structures early on. As they did so, they gained dominance in the policymaking process. Although the IDF and Defense Ministry remain dominant in policymaking, their thinking on tactics has begun to shift. In conversations with members of the security establishment, what becomes clear is how Israel's security agencies are adapting to a series of changes in regional politics, within the United States, and in expectations among the Israeli public. They recognize that Israel is increasingly integrated in international organizations and programs, primarily in various agencies and committees within the United Nations, which have reduced its sense of isolation and impunity. In the past, Israel could attack its enemies to set back their military programs without much concern for what the rest of the world thought. But the international community tolerates Israel's use of force far less, complicating Israel's ability to argue as frequently as it has in the past that force is the best policy. For Israel's security establishment, this does not mean that diplomacy has replaced war. Rather, it must be more flexible than it used to be, even as it continues to view military action as a necessary component of foreign policy. The shift first became obvious in the aftermath of the 1993 Oslo accords, the landmark agreement between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization that was supposed to lead to a negotiated, two-state solution. EFTA00978953 At first, many in the security establishment opposed the agreement on the grounds that it would hinder Israel's ability to monitor and detain terrorists. But once they were brought into the negotiations to contribute to its implementation, they accepted the underlying logic of the process -- namely, that military force alone would not end the conflict. And they continued to advocate for a political resolution to the conflict with the Palestinians even after the Oslo process was derailed. Security officials spoke of similar concerns during and after the 2010 military effort to stop an international flotilla from reaching Gaza, which ended with the deaths of nine Turkish individuals on the Mavi Marmara. Former National Security Council officials told me that they were surprised that the government did not pay more attention to the diplomatic consequences of the use of force on relations with Turkey and on Israel's international position. The very purpose of Israel's National Security Council, established in 1999, was to avoid omitting such considerations from decision-making. The lesson from these developments is that the security establishment is not just aware of the political and other consequences of military action but that it believes that the government, too, should account for such possibilities in formulating its foreign policy. NOT JUST NETANYAHU The Iranian nuclear program is among the most urgent issues for Israel's security establishment. And yet, for a long time, Israeli security officials have adopted a patient attitude to monitor Iranian enrichment facilities and breakthroughs over Netanyahu's hard-line position to strike now, or else. In 2010, many officials outright refused to comply with Netanyahu's order to prepare for an immediate strike on Iran. Their attitude toward the recent interim deal with Iran reflects this same position. The former head of Military Intelligence, Amos Yadlin, recently wrote that the agreement "can be lived with -- for six months" since "for the first time in years, the time it could take Iran to break out to nuclear weapons -- which is the leading parameter for measuring the danger of the Iranian program -- will be lengthened, rather than shortened." Sharp analysts, such as Emily Landau and Ehud Yaari, and currently serving security officials alike have urged the government to accept that the deal is done, but emphasize that it is only an interim one: the task remains to transform it into a better final agreement. Maintaining the threat of war and EFTA00978954 heavy sanctions will be part of that task, but negotiations remain the primary vehicle. Netanyahu has a reputation for making bombastic public statements on a range of issues, including Iran, the Arab uprisings, and Islamist movements. The resulting Western focus on his public position on Iran is, therefore, only natural; leaders are expected to speak for their states and are presumed to be authoritative decision-makers. But Netanyahu's public rhetoric masks the deeper changes in Israel's position in the world. Those shifts not only need to be better understood in the United States -- they need to be encouraged. Indeed, in his remarks after a meeting with Secretary of State John Kerry last week, Netanyahu appeared to come around to the security establishment's consensus view: rather than criticize the interim deal, the prime minister focused on what might go into a final agreement. One way to start is to recognize that, despite the personal antipathy between Netanyahu and President Barack Obama and a clear difference in global versus regional perspectives regarding Iran, Israel's relationship with the United States isn't about to collapse. American public opinion is solidly in favor of a close relationship, and American politicians are not going to go against that grain. Military and security cooperation remains strong. And Netanyahu aside, Israeli policymakers and security officials have demonstrated great flexibility. The United States can work with and build on that flexibility to strengthen the relationship, which remains a priority for both countries. None of this is to say that everything has changed in the conduct of Israeli policy. Prime ministers still retain tight control over foreign and security policy, and in recent decades, especially, they have privileged small groups of political advisors over the defense and intelligence community. Nor is it to say that Israeli security chiefs won't decide that a military strike on Iran is necessary. But such trends within Israel's domestic decision-making structures need to be acknowledged and incorporated by Western, and especially American, observers. U.S. policymakers should understand the pressure points in the Israel's domestic decision-making system; analysts should have a better grasp of the cause and likely direction of Israeli foreign policy. These shifts EFTA00978955 matter for outsiders, so that they stop seeing Israel as a caricature and instead as a real, politically complex place. BRENT E. SASLEY is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Texas at Arlington. Article 2. The Washington Post Imbalance in Israel Richard Cohen December 9, 2013 -- In "My Promised Land," Ari Shavit's anguished book about Israel, there is plenty about the mistreatment of Palestinians — today, yesterday and always. Some of it is just plain sickening, reminiscent of the ethnic cleansing attempted in the Balkans. And then, seemingly out of nowhere, a passage pierces the gloom like the sun breaking through the fog. Shavit is walking in the Galillee with Palestinian-Israeli attorney Mohammed Dahla when the lawyer's phone rings. The family of an accused terrorist is asking Dahla to represent him. From a hilltop, the lawyer calls the Jerusalem police to find his client and declare his interest in the case. Then he and Shavit resume their walk. Justice was served. Does the alacrity, the efficiency, the very existence of the Israeli justice system outweigh or negate the occupation of the West Bank? No. Does it matter that in the nearby Arab states, justice is the word for the outcome the government wants? No. Does any of that compensate for what the Palestinians have suffered? No. The answer is always no. But the immense virtue of Shavit's book is its insistent use of the concept of "and." It is not so much said as implied, and it is actually the theme of the book. Much of Israel's history is about parallelism. Things happen and at the same time other things happen. Palestinians are oppressed and they are given legal representation. Israel conquers the Gaza Strip and then withdraws. The blogger's handy word "but" is of no use here. Nothing balances. Everything exists at the same time. Take the ethnic cleansing of Lydda during Israel's War of Independence in 1948. "Lydda is our black box," Shavit writes. "In it lies the dark secret of EFTA00978956 Zionism. The truth is that Zionism could not bear Lydda." And yet the truth is also that the emerging state needed to control the Jerusalem-Tel Aviv road. A civil war was underway, and victory required atrocity. Some 50,000 to 70,000 Palestinians were evicted from the area. The innocent were murdered. Terrible things happened. Shavit provides first-person accounts, but Israeli historians, particularly Benny Morris in his book " 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War ," have not ignored the ethnic cleansing that produced what the Arabs call "the Nakba," the catastrophe. Israel is more than an open society. It is an open wound. Israel today is 20 percent Arab. This is because the country was not ethnically cleansed. Israel did not follow what in 1945 through 1948 was standard behavior — the population transfers approved by the victors of World War II. Europe was ethnically reorganized — no Germans in Poland; no Germans in Czechoslovakia, either. And, lest we forget, the British approved the plan to swap Muslims and Hindus in the creation of Pakistan. All over the world, millions died — at least 500,000 ethnic Germans alone. Shavit is an Israeli aristocrat, if such a thing exists. He is fourth-generation Israeli, a columnist for the robustly left-of-center newspaper Haaretz, and so he knows many of the people who run the country. Unfortunately, it is precisely people like him who could be affected by various academic organizations that want to boycott Israel. One of them, the National Council of the American Studies Association, just passed such a resolution, but from the evidence it could sorely benefit from listening to Israeli academics. The Americans know so much, yet understand so little. A virtue of Shavit's virtuous book is that it exhumes the dream of Zionism — and also its success. This was a movement that saved countless lives, that was fueled by the ovens of Auschwitz, that became imbued with the appealing dreaminess of socialism and whose leaders often espoused tolerance and respect for the Palestinians. ("I am certain that the world will judge the Jewish state by what it will do with the Arabs," Israel's first president, Chaim Weizmann, wrote before taking office.) These Zionists never lost sight of the right thing. Sometimes, though, they just couldn't do it. Shavit has nothing in common with the religiously zealous West Bank settlers. He wants them all — religious, nationalist, secular, whatever — EFTA00978957 gone. This is what I want, too. But when Israel pulled out of the Gaza Strip, it got a daily barrage of rockets by way of thanks. What if the West Bank becomes, like Gaza, a Hamas state? In Israel, nothing is easy, which is why the subtitle of Shavit's book is "The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel." One does not balance the other — and both are true. Article 3 Associated Press Abbas aide lambasts US push for framework d_W Karin Laub Dec. 9, 2013 -- Ramallah, West Bank (AP) — A senior Palestinian official on Monday railed against U.S. attempts to broker a broad outline of an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal, saying Secretary of State John Kerry is breaking a promise to try to negotiate a final agreement in the current round of talks. The Palestinian leadership is concerned that such a framework deal will accommodate very specific Israeli security demands, while offering only vague promises to the Palestinians, said Yasser Abed Rabbo, a top aide to President Mahmoud Abbas. "This contradicts completely what we were promised by the American secretary of state at the beginning of this peace process ... to avoid any partial or interim agreements," he told the Voice of Palestine radio station. Both Kerry and President Barack Obama said over the weekend that the U.S. is pursuing a framework agreement, but did not provide details. Obama said it's possible to reach such an outline over the next few months. State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said Monday that the U.S. is not focused on an interim deal, but is focused on a final deal. She also said that there will be a process for getting to a final deal, but did not elaborate. She said Obama and Kerry both referred last weekend to a "framework." "I think some thought — took that to mean interim," Psaki said. "It does not mean interim. We still remain focused on a final status agreement." EFTA00978958 Security arrangements between Israel and a future Palestine would be central to such a framework. Kerry has argued that progress in negotiations is only possible if Israeli security concerns are addressed first. Last week, Kerry presented a new U.S. security plan to Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, including arrangements for the border between Jordan and a state of Palestine. Under the plan, Israel would have final say at that border for at least 10 years and would also have a military presence in the strip of land next to it, the West Bank's Jordan Valley, according to two Palestinian officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the details of the negotiations. Israeli officials have said they fear militants and weapons could be smuggled into a future Palestine if Israel gives up control over the West Bank-Jordan border. Abbas has said he is willing to accept an international presence there, but not Israeli forces. Psaki said that Kerry met on Monday in Washington with Israeli negotiator Tzipi Livni and Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat. She also announced that Kerry would be leaving Washington on Wednesday to return to the region for more talks with Netanyahu in Jerusalem and Abbas in Ramallah. The Palestinians want a state in the West Bank, Gaza and east Jerusalem, lands Israel captured in 1967, but are willing to accept minor land swaps in drawing the final border to accommodate some of the settlements Israel has built on war-won land. Netanyahu has refused to commit to what the Palestinians and most of the international community considers a basic ground rule — that border negotiations use the 1967 lines as a starting point. The two Palestinian officials who were briefed on the Kerry-Abbas meeting said the secretary is aiming for a framework agreement by the end of January. Obama, meanwhile, said in his weekend remarks to a Washington think tank that neither Israel nor the Palestinians have signed on to the U.S. security plan. "We are going to have to see whether the Israelis agree and whether President Abbas is willing to understand that this transition period requires some restraint on the part of the Palestinians as well," he said. EFTA00978959 "They don't get everything that they want on day one," Obama said, referring to the Palestinians. "And that creates some political problems for President Abbas as well." It's not clear what the other components of a framework deal would be, and if Kerry could obtain Netanyahu's commitment to the 1967 frontier as a baseline. Obama noted that "we know what the outlines of a potential agreement might look like," an apparent reference to earlier parameters for a deal presented by then-President Bill Clinton more than a decade ago. The Palestinian officials, meanwhile, said Kerry asked them to accept a change in the timetable of upcoming releases of Palestinian prisoners by Israel. In all, Israel has agreed to release 104 veteran Palestinian prisoners in four stages during the current negotiations, which began in late July and are to conclude in April. Israel has so far released two groups of prisoners. Kerry wants the last two releases to be combined and be carried out in late January, instead of being done in two installments, the Palestinian officials said. Abed Rabbo did not refer to the details of Kerry's purported request, but said the Palestinians insist that the next group of prisoners be released at the end of December. "Our brothers, the prisoners, should know that they are being used and their cause is being used for extortion, and they are the first to reject such extortion," he said. Psaki would not comment on reports that the U.S. is pushing to delay the prisoners' release. Associated Press writers Deb Riechmann in It'cishington and Mohammed Daraghmeh in Doha contributed reporting. AnIcic 4 The Financial Times The west is losing faith in its own future Gideon Rachman EFTA00978960 December 9, 2013 -- What defines the west? American and European politicians like to talk about values and institutions. But for billions of people around the world, the crucial point is simpler and easier to grasp. The west is the part of the world where even ordinary people live comfortably. That is the dream that makes illegal immigrants risk their lives, trying to get into Europe or the US. Yet, even though the lure of the west remains intense, the western world itself is losing faith in its future. Last week Barack Obama gave one of the bleakest speeches of his presidency. In unsparing terms, the US president chronicled the increasing inequality and declining social mobility that, he says, "pose a fundamental threat to the American dream, our way of life and what we stand for around the world". A Pew Research Center opinion survey, conducted in 39 countries this spring, asked: "Will children in your country be better off than their parents?" Only 33 per cent of Americans believed their children would live better, while 62 per cent said they would live worse. Europeans were even gloomier. Just 28 per cent of Germans, 17 per cent of Brits, 14 per cent of Italians and 9 per cent of French thought their children would be better off than previous generations. This western pessimism contrasts strongly with optimism in the developing world: 82 per cent of Chinese, 59 per cent of Indians and 65 per cent of Nigerians believe in a more prosperous future. It would be nice to believe that talk of a decline in western living standards is simply hype. But, unfortunately, the numbers suggest that the public are on to something. According to researchers at the Brookings Institution, the wages of working-age men in the US — adjusted for inflation — have fallen by 19 per cent since 1970. Joe Average — once the epitome of the American dream — has fallen back, even as gains for the top 5 per cent of incomes have soared. Even conservative politicians are worried. Senator Marco Rubio, a contender for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016, points out that his parents were able to "make it into the middle class" from relatively humble jobs, as a bartender and a maid. These days, he acknowledges, that would no longer be possible. The sense of gloom and insecurity in Europe is also grounded in reality — in particular the knowledge that welfare and retirement benefits are likely to be less generous in future. The pressure on prosperity is most intense in EFTA00978961 countries that have suffered worst in the debt-crisis — places such as Greece and Portugal have seen actual cuts in wages and pensions. But living standards are even under pressure in European countries that have done relatively well. Research by the Financial Times has shown that Britons born in 1985 are the first cohort for 100 years not to be experiencing better living standards than those born 10 years previously. Even in Germany, often lauded as the most successful big economy in the western world, the benefits of the "Merkel miracle" have been felt mainly at the top end of the wage scale. The economic reforms that laid the basis for Germany's current export boom involved holding down wages, cutting social benefits and employing many more temporary workers. There is a connection between the rising optimism in the developing world and the rising pessimism in the west. In his speech last week, Mr Obama remarked that "starting in the late 1970s, the social contract began to unravel". Perhaps not coincidentally, it was also in the late 1970s that China began to open up. Even defenders of globalisation now usually acknowledge that the emergence of a global labour force has helped hold down wages in the west. Some European friends of mine daydream that protectionism — or even a war in Asia — could send more well-paid jobs back to the west. But in reality, globalisation seems unlikely ever really to go into reverse, given the technological, economic and political forces pushing it forwards. It would certainly be morally dubious to attempt to bolster western living standards by undermining an economic trend that has dragged hundreds of millions of people out of poverty in the developing world. Even if the western nations did close their markets, western employees — including white-collar workers — would increasingly find that many jobs could be done cheaper by computers or robots. Indeed the march of the robots will also soon pose a threat to assembly-line workers in China. If the erosion of living standards continues, how will western voters react? There are already signs of political radicalisation — with the populist right on the rise in both the US and Europe. But, as yet, there is no real sign that the Tea Party in America or nationalist movements in Europe have a realistic shot at controlling the central government in a large nation. The consensus around globalisation also seems to be holding. Indeed this EFTA00978962 weekend the World Trade Organisation apparently made a breakthrough in the search for a new global trade deal. But while new political movements are not yet ready to smash the established parties in the west, mainstream politicians are having to react to the new economic climate. Rising inequality is increasing the pressure for more redistributive taxes and higher minimum wages on both sides of the Atlantic. Another decade of western economic malaise — or, God forbid, another financial crisis — is likely to see more radical solutions and politicians emerging. Article 5 Politico Was Hillary Clinton a Good Secretary of State? And does it matter? Susan B. Glasser December 08, 2013 -- Not so long ago, Hillary Clinton was being lauded as an exemplary secretary of state. After four years and nearly a million miles logged as America's top diplomat, she stepped down to a torrent of praise. "The most consequential secretary of state since Dean Acheson," enthused Google's Eric Schmidt. "Stellar," pronounced Bloomberg's Margaret Carlson. Even Republican Sen. John McCain, while criticizing her response to the killing of U.S. officials in Benghazi, went out of his way to compliment her "outstanding" State Department tenure. That was then. When the Atlantic published an admiring 10,000-word profile of Secretary of State John Kerry the other day, the surprise was not so much that the author, two-time Pulitzer Prize winner David Rohde, found himself impressed by the headlong diplomatic forays of the peripatetic Kerry, but the downbeat assessment of Kerry's much more reserved predecessor. The headline? "How John Kerry Could End Up Outdoing Hillary Clinton." A few days later, the New York Times chimed in with an article on the "tough comparisons with Kerry" Clinton is now facing, summing up the debate as one over whether she was anything more than a "pantsuit-wearing globe- trotter" in her years as secretary. EFTA00978963 All of which yields the question: Was Hillary Clinton in fact a good secretary of state, and will her record as a diplomat matter if, as expected, she runs for president in 2016? As Bill Clinton might have said, it depends on what the meaning of good is. Certainly, even many of her most ardent defenders recognize Hillary Clinton had no signal accomplishment at the State Department to her name, no indelible peace sealed with her handshake, no war averted, no nuclear crisis defused. There are few Eric Schmidts out there still willing to make the case for her as an enormously consequential figure in the history of Foggy Bottom. Where the debate tends to rage is over why that is so, especially now that Kerry is taking on diplomatic challenges that Clinton either couldn't or wouldn't—from negotiating a potentially historic nuclear deal with Iran to seeking a revived Mideast peace process—and political rivals in both parties return to thinking of Clinton in the hypercharged American political context and not so much as the tireless, Blackberry-wielding face of global glad-handing. I asked an array of smart foreign policy thinkers in both parties to weigh in, and they pretty much all agreed that Clinton was both more cautious and more constrained than Kerry. Their argument is over whether and to what extent that was a consequence of Clinton herself, the limits placed on her by a suspicious and eager-to-make-its-mark first-term White House, or simply it being a very different moment in world politics. Here's Aaron David Miller, who negotiated Middle East peace for five presidents and is now a scholar at the Wilson Center, making the case for cautious Clinton: "Hillary was risk-averse; Kerry isn't. He's risk-ready." Of course, Miller argues, 2016 politics "explains partly why she didn't own a single issue of consequence." The other reason is President Obama himself, "the most controlling foreign policy president since Nixon." Miller's bottom line: "She was a fine secstate but not consequential." As for 2016, "It won't hurt her other than the Republican obsession with Benghazi, but it won't help her that much either." An array of foreign policy thinkers all agree that Clinton was a more cautious and more constrained secretary of state than Kerry. I Reuters EFTA00978964 What does that Republican take look like? For sure, there will be a focus on Benghazi, where the GOP has questioned whether Clinton and other administration officials were activist enough—and truthful enough—about responding to the attack in Libya on Sept. 11, 2012, that led to the deaths of the U.S. ambassador and three other American personnel; a case summed up by the American Enterprise's Institute's Danielle Pletka as "unwillingness to take risks, unwillingness to lead, willingness to stab a lot of people in the back. And dead people." Pletka's broader view of Clinton's record is a harsher version of what I hear from many Democrats: "the Washington consensus," Pletka says, "is that she was enormously ineffective ... [though] no one was quite sure whether she was ineffective because she wanted to avoid controversy or because she wasn't trusted by the president to do anything." Not quite so harsh is David Gordon, who ran the State Department's storied policy-planning shop under George W. Bush. He calls Clinton "good not great" in the job, agrees that her "great weakness was avoiding serious diplomacy," gives her plaudits for outlining the strategic "pivot" to Asia whose future is now uncertain, and attributes much to "her future political considerations": It is hard to avoid the conclusion that for Clinton, the SecState role was substantially about positioning her to run for president, especially in terms of looking `tough' on some of the big issues: Iran sanctions, reassuring Asian allies. ... Not taking on the big diplomatic challenges made that toughness easier to maintain even as she devoted so much of her actual time in office to `soft' issues like education, women's empowerment, etc. As for the Democrats, Clinton's advocates tend to come in several camps, which can be broadly summed up as The Timing Just Wasn't Right group; the Blame the White Housers; and the Asia Pivot Was a Really Big Deal crowd ("her major accomplishment," the Brookings Institution's Michael O'Hanlon told me, and "too often underappreciated"). Howard Berman, a strong Clinton backer who chaired the House Foreign Affairs Committee during her tenure, offered me a great example of the first line of reasoning: You don't pick your moments, but deal with the world as you find it. "I don't believe Secretary Clinton was constrained by future political considerations," he wrote to me. "Let's look at the issues EFTA00978965 Kerry is working on and it is clear that Clinton, for rather obvious reasons, couldn't have replicated what he has done because those issues weren't ripe then. ... It's about a different time." Blaming the White House, of course, is a common theme in any critique of a foreign policy record, and that's especially so when it comes to the question of Clinton's dealings with the White House of the president she ran against in 2008. Throughout her tenure as secretary of state, Washington wondered over the extent of Clinton's actual influence in foreign policy decision-making ("she's really the principal implementer," Obama adviser Denis McDonough told me, when I asked about the division of labor between Obama's White House and Clinton's State Department for a Foreign Policy article last year). And it was by all accounts Obama himself who was reluctant to take on some of the challenges, like Middle East peace talks or a more activist stance toward the civil war unfolding in Syria, that Clinton is now dinged for avoiding. That was the argument from Dennis Ross, and he is certainly well positioned to know: Ross worked as the top White House aide on Iran and the Middle East on Obama's National Security Council before leaving last year. The new conventional wisdom on Politically Cautious Hillary is "misguided," he says. "She was operating in a different world and with an administration at a different place." And those White House realities very much shaped what she could and couldn't do. To start, Ross notes, Clinton was "in a place where she felt the need to prove her loyalty to the president and demonstrate she was a member of the team," and besides, Obama himself was very personally engaged in his various diplomatic initiatives. By later in Obama's first term, deciding what to do about dumping America's longtime ally Hosni Mubarak in Egypt (she was wary) and whether to intervene more actively in Syria (she pushed to do so) became "issues where I think she was not in the same place as the president and was thus less able to shape what we did." Timing, fate and the White House may have all conspired in it, but the truth is that Hillary Clinton never did find a way to turn Foggy Bottom into her ticket to history. Steve Sestanovich, a professor at Columbia University and veteran of Bill Clinton's State Department, thinks the blame lies in part with another White House—George W. Bush's. Hillary Clinton, Sestanovich concedes, EFTA00978966 "was reluctant to over-invest in high-visibility initiatives that didn't have much chance of success." But, he says, that's because "the top priority of the president—and hers too—was to deal with inherited difficulties and wind them down," whether the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq or restoring luster to an American global reputation tarred by the aggressive decade- long prosecution of its "war on terror." Sestanovich adds: "It's true that her record as secretary included few accomplishments if you mean by that peace agreements solving some big problem. If you measure her tenure by success in rebuilding America's power position, it looks a lot better. She wasn't just foisting better cookstoves on African women." In some ways, though, that is exactly the argument I encountered from her most passionate defender among those I surveyed. Anne-Marie Slaughter, Clinton's first policy-planning chief at the State Department and now head of the New America Foundation, is still an unwavering believer in the cookstoves and all of Clinton's other untraditional causes, many of which focused on global advocacy for women and girls. "I continue to think that people will look back and see that she was the first secretary of state really to grasp the ways global politics and hence foreign policy have changed in the 21st century," Slaughter says. Her case for Clinton, in fact, is explicitly about politics—and Clinton's willingness to integrate them into the traditionally stodgy, big man-to-big man diplomacy long favored at the State Department (and arguably now being resurrected by Kerry). "Foreign policy has always been the furthest thing from retail politics; she brought them much closer together and institutionalized as much of her approach as possible in the very bones of the State Department. ... Hillary took diplomacy directly to the people in ways that cannot produce a treaty or negotiated agreement, but that are essential to advancing America's interests over the longer term," Slaughter argues. "What she should be remembered for in a 2016 campaign is proving that she could represent the American people day in and day out in the long, hard slog of regular politics, in between the rare shining moments of success. She was and is beloved around the world, as an inspiration, as an example of an America in which a woman could run for president, nearly win her party's primary, lose with grace and then prove that adversaries can work together for the sake of their country." *** EFTA00978967 Near the end of her tenure, I traveled with Clinton to China in the midst of what turned out to be a frenetic several days of negotiations over the fate of Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng, who had taken refuge at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing at exactly the moment Clinton was arriving for a summit. In the end, Clinton walked away with a deal that allowed Chen to fly to the United States a few weeks later. It was, I wrote at the time, "the most intense high-stakes diplomacy of her tenure as secretary of state." "Can this really be true? Was the Chen negotiation as good as it will get for Clinton?" asked Washington Post columnist David Ignatius. "I fear the answer is yes." At the time, he dinged Clinton for not finding "a way to get more done in her role as the president's diplomatic emissary, broker, and fixer." And never mind all the hundreds of thousands of miles logged, the endless "townterviews" and back-stage arm-twisting—it remains a pretty fair critique. Timing, fate and the White House may have all conspired in it, but the truth is that Hillary Clinton never did find a way to turn Foggy Bottom into her ticket to history. And perhaps that's exactly the reason why American politicians tend to become secretary of state after they've run for president and lost; it just might be a better consolation prize than it is steppingstone to higher office. Susan B. Glasser is editor of Politico Magazine. NYT Thinking for the Future David Brooks December 9, 2013 -- We're living in an era of mechanized intelligence, an age in which you're probably going to find yourself in a workplace with diagnostic systems, different algorithms and computer-driven data analysis. If you want to thrive in this era, you probably want to be good at working with intelligent machines. As Tyler Cowen puts it in his relentlessly provocative recent book, "Average Is Over," "If you and your skills are a complement to the computer, your wage and labor market prospects are EFTA00978968 likely to be cheery. If your skills do not complement the computer, you may want to address that mismatch." So our challenge for the day is to think of exactly which mental abilities complement mechanized intelligence. Off the top of my head, I can think of a few mental types that will probably thrive in the years ahead. Freestylers. As Cowen notes, there's a style of chess in which people don't play against the computer but with the computer. They let the computer program make most of the moves, but, occasionally, they overrule it. They understand the strengths and weaknesses of the program and the strengths and weaknesses of their own intuition, and, ideally, they grab the best of both. This skill requires humility (most of the time) and self-confidence (rarely). It's the kind of skill you use to overrule your GPS system when you're driving in a familiar neighborhood but defer to it in strange surroundings. It is the sort of skill a doctor uses when deferring to or overruling a diagnostic test. It's the skill of knowing when an individual case is following predictable patterns and when there are signs it is diverging from them. Synthesizers. The computerized world presents us with a surplus of information. The synthesizer has the capacity to surf through vast amounts of online data and crystallize a generalized pattern or story. Humanizers. People evolved to relate to people. Humanizers take the interplay between man and machine and make it feel more natural. Steve Jobs did this by making each Apple product feel like nontechnological artifact. Someday a genius is going to take customer service phone trees and make them more human. Someday a retail genius is going to figure out where customers probably want automated checkout (the drugstore) and where they want the longer human interaction (the grocery store). Conceptual engineers. Google presents prospective employees with challenges like the following: How many times in a day do a clock's hands overlap? Or: Figure out the highest floor of a 100-story building you can drop an egg from without it breaking. How many drops do you need to figure this out? You can break two eggs in the process. They are looking for the ability to come up with creative methods to think about unexpected problems. EFTA00978969 Motivators. Millions of people begin online courses, but very few actually finish them. I suspect that's because most students are not motivated to impress a computer the way they may be motivated to impress a human professor. Managers who can motivate supreme effort in a machine- dominated environment are going to be valuable. Moralizers. Mechanical intelligence wants to be efficient. It will occasionally undervalue essential moral traits, like loyalty. Soon, performance metrics will increasingly score individual employees. A moralizing manager will insist that human beings can't be reduced to the statistical line. A company without a self-conscious moralizer will reduce human interaction to the cash nexus and end up destroying morale and social capital. Greeters. An economy that is based on mechanized intelligence is likely to be a wildly unequal economy, even if the government tries to combat that inequality. Cowen estimates that perhaps 15 percent of workers will thrive, with plenty of disposable income. There will be intense competition for these people's attention. They will favor restaurants, hotels, law firms, foundations and financial institutions where they are greeted by someone who knows their name. People with this capacity for high-end service, and flattery, will find work. Economizers. The bottom 85 percent is likely to be made up of people with less marketable workplace skills. Some of these people may struggle financially but not socially or intellectually. That is, they may not make much running a food truck, but they can lead rich lives, using the free bounty of the Internet. They could use a class of advisers on how to preserve rich lives on a small income. Weavers. Many of the people who struggle economically will lack the self-motivation to build rich inner lives for themselves. Many are already dropping out of the labor force in record numbers and drifting into disorganized, disaffected lifestyles. Public and private institutions are going to hire more people to fight this social disintegration. There will be jobs for people who combat the dangerous inegalitarian tendencies of this new world. Anicic 7. NYT EFTA00978970 Why Machiavelli Still Matters John Scott and Robert Zaretsky December 9, 2013 -- FIVE hundred years ago, on Dec. 10, 1513, Niccolo Machiavelli sent a letter to his friend Francesco Vettori, describing his day spent haggling with local farmers and setting bird traps for his evening meal. A typical day for the atypical letter writer, who had changed from his mud-splattered clothes to the robes he once wore as a high official in the Florentine republic. Toward the end of the letter Machiavelli mentions for the first time a "little work" he was writing on politics. This little work was, of course, "The Prince." One of the remarkable things about "The Prince" is not just what Machiavelli wrote, but that he was able to write at all. Just 10 months earlier, he endured the "strappado": Hands tied behind his back, he was strung to a prison ceiling and repeatedly plunged to the floor. Having at the time just been given the task of overseeing the foreign policy and defense of his native city, he was thrown out of his office when the Medici family returned to power. The new rulers suspected him of plotting against them and wanted to hear what he had to say. Machiavelli pridcd himself on not uttering a word. He may well have saved his words for "The Prince," dedicated to a member of the family who ordered his torture: Lorenzo de Medici. With the book, Machiavelli sought to persuade Lorenzo that he was a friend whose experience in politics and knowledge of the ancients made him an invaluable adviser. History does not tell us if Lorenzo bothered to read the book. But if he did, he would have learned from his would-be friend that there are, in fact, no friends in politics. "The Prince" is a manual for those who wish to win and keep power. The Renaissance was awash in such how-to guides, but Machiavelli's was different. To be sure, he counsels a prince on how to act toward his enemies, using force and fraud in war. But his true novelty resides in how we should think about our friends. It is at the book's heart, in the chapter devoted to this issue, that Machiavelli proclaims his originality. EFTA00978971 Set aside what you would like to imagine about politics, Machiavelli writes, and instead go straight to the truth of how things really work, or what he calls the "effectual truth." You will see that allies in politics, whether at home or abroad, are not friends. Perhaps others had been deluded about the distinction because the same word in Italian — "amici" — is used for both concepts. Whoever imagines allies are friends, Machiavelli warns, ensures his ruin rather than his preservation. There may be no students more in need of this insight, yet less likely to accept it, than contemporary Americans, both in and outside the government. Like the political moralizers Machiavelli aims to subvert, we still believe a leader should be virtuous: generous and merciful, honest and faithful. Yet Machiavelli teaches that in a world where so many are not good, you must learn to be able to not be good. The virtues taught in our secular and religious schools are incompatible with the virtues one must practice to safeguard those same institutions. The power of the lion and the cleverness of the fox: These are the qualities a leader must harness to preserve the republic. For such a leader, allies are friends when it is in their interest to be. (We can, with difficulty, accept this lesson when embodied by a Charles de Gaulle; we have even greater difficulty when it is taught by, say, Hamid Karzai.) What's more, Machiavelli says, leaders must at times inspire fear not only in their foes but even in their allies — and even in their own ministers. What would Machiavelli have thought when President Obama apologized for the fiasco of his health care rollout? Far from earning respect, he would say, all he received was contempt. As one of Machiavelli's favorite exemplars, Cesare Borgia, grasped, heads must sometimes roll. (Though in Borgia's case, he meant it quite literally, though he preferred slicing bodies in half and leaving them in a public square.) Machiavelli has long been called a teacher of