Yet Another Pundit Spectacularly Misunderstanding Foreign Policy, Condescending to the Secretary of State All at the Same Time

Michael Hirsch has managed to be both infuriating and incredibly ineffective in one go. It’s not that his article’s main premise is wrong – that, essentially, foreign policy in the Middle East is a mess (though speaking as someone who lived and worked in the region, that statement can be applied to almost every administration in the last sixty years). But the reasoning for how Obama’s administration should get out of its funk is at best annoying and at worst misguided. The frustration in Washington has been mounting in the last few weeks as Obama hedges his bets in Afghanistan, which has resulted in a worrying trend among pundits and op-ed journalists. Several articles have demanded that Obama make a decision on Afghanistan, no matter what that decision is (Broder even went so far as to say the following: It is evident….that the perfect course of action does not exist. Given that reality, the urgent necessity is to make a decision – whether or not it is right.”). After eight years of rushing into disastrous decisions that have cost thousands of American lives, these journalists are essentially recommending that Obama do the exact same thing. 

Hirsch takes pretty much the same tack, quoting Franklin Delana Roosevelt when, speaking of the Great Depression, he said “Take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly, and try another. But by all means, try something.” Surely this was good advice. But the thing is, we did try the method of rushing into a war with no exit strategy. And it failed. Similarly, Congress rushed into passing the bailout. And though it may not have failed across the board as an economic stablizer (depending on who you ask), it certainly failed in putting a stop to the economic practices that brought on the so-called Great Recession in the first place – executives are still handing out bonuses like lollipops at a dentist’s office, and I don’t know about you, but my state’s unemployment rate is still at 9%. So why are so many pundits pressing for the kind of immediate, unmeasured action that got us into most of these messes in the first place?

Even more frustratingly, however, Hirsch straddles the obnoxious fence of both claiming that the continued hands-on involvement of Secretary Clinton is the only thing that can save Middle Eastern foreign policy, and blaming her for the fact that it has started to go off the rails. Certainly, no one can say Clinton hasn’t been pulling her weight as Secretary of State, and that is certainly not what Hirsch is arguing here. Instead, he suggests that she should stop delegating important talks with leaders such as newly reinaugurated Afghani President Hamid Karzai and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a mistake which he credits to her getting “sidetracked on women’s issues.” Yes, according to Hirsch, Clinton has been spending too much time on women’s issues, and not enough on the issues of actual importance. It’s not just the condescension here that is infuriating, or the double-speak (“Clinton is the only one with the gravitas to guide the Middle Eastern political process! You know, if she’d stop bothering her little head with all those silly women’s issues.”). It’s the fact that Hirsch clearly does not make the connection between Clinton’s focus on the advancement of women in developing countries and solid foreign policy. Lucky, Madame Secretary does not share that short-sightedness. Secretary Clinton has assured us from the beginning that “women are key to our being able to resolve all of those difficult conflicts,” and she has not strayed from that goal in the increasingly tough political environment. In a speech on November 6th, she reassured “There is nothing that has been more important to me over the course of my lifetime than advancing the rights of women and girls, and it is now a cornerstone of American foreign policy.” It’s very reassuring to know that despite the lack of vision of journalists like Hirsch, our Secretary of State recognizes and consistently acts on the fact that women’s rights are human rights, and the advancement of a society is impossible without the advancement of its women.