The Secretary (30 page)

The South Koreans would sleep better tonight. Their big, powerful friend was there,
its reassuring presence and soothing words giving them strength in the face of their
belligerent northern cousins and their Chinese protector. It looked like it was all
just a show, but there was an imperceptible yet definite shift under way in the region.

*   *   *

From Afghanistan and Pakistan to South Korea, we were now moving on to Vietnam. Our
trip was a tour of America’s wars, past and present. The Obama administration saw
America’s future very much tied to the Pacific area. For Clinton, there were also
lessons to be drawn from the past.

“We saw South Korea struggle to become a functioning democracy—huge amounts of instability,
coups, corruption, scandal, you name it,” Clinton said.

“I think it’s good to remind ourselves that the United States has stood with countries
that went through a lot of ups and downs for a lot longer than eight years, and it
is important to recognize what’s at stake … in Afghanistan. This is a country that
we left before, much to our dismay, and we can’t do it again.”

Hillary had a keen eye and memory for detail, but she always tried to look at the
bigger picture. Success can be elusive for decades, but eventually, with careful work,
she believed things would fall into place. A country once as hostile to the United
States as it could have been, Vietnam now welcomed Clinton to celebrate fifteen years
of friendship with the United States. The past seemed to weigh much less on Southeast
Asia than it did on Pakistan or the Middle East.

*   *   *

Clinton was also in Vietnam for another serving of alphabet soup. ASEAN and TAC were
back. As promised in February 2009, she had signed the Treaty of Amity and Cooperation
and attended several Asian summits already; goodwill toward the United States was
on the rise in a region where symbolic gestures meant a lot. Almost simultaneously,
countries were also coming closer to the United States because a giant was awakening
in their region.

For decades, China has sparred with neighbors around the South China Sea over the
Spratly and Paracel island chains. Chinese forces seized the western Paracels from
Vietnam in 1974 and sank three Vietnamese naval vessels in a sea battle in 1988. China
had recently announced plans to develop the islands for tourism. Vietnam was furious
because it had never recognized China’s control over the Paracels. The South China
Sea provided rich fishing grounds and was believed to have large oil and natural gas
reserves. Busy sea-lanes were also a crucial conduit for resources feeding China’s
economy. In March, the Chinese government had told American officials at the White
House to stay out of the South China Sea. They would solve any dispute with individual
countries. At the S&ED in May, Hillary had heard the same message. The Chinese were
elevating the South China Sea to a key national interest, at the same level as Taiwan
and Tibet, and they were starting to serve notice to other countries to back off.

Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, and others were looking for help and for strength
in numbers, and the United States saw an opportunity to push back against China. Hillary,
Kurt, and Jake worked with all the Asian representatives to choreograph carefully
their approach to the Chinese during one of the meetings. The Asian countries would
speak first. Clinton would go last. One after the other, the Asian ministers voiced
their anger and concern about China’s aggressive behavior on the high seas. The Chinese
foreign minister Yang Jiechi was taken aback. As the session progressed, he got angrier.
By the time Clinton spoke, he was furious. When it was his turn to speak, Yang Jiechi
was still fuming at the temerity of the small countries that had brought up the South
China Sea, twelve in all. “China is a big country and other countries are small countries
and that is just a fact,” said Yang, staring at his counterparts.

Chinese maps dating to before the Communist revolution appeared to place most of the
South China Sea under Chinese sovereignty, and China was ready to reclaim its territory.
Over the last couple of years, China’s swagger had grown. Beijing may not have wanted
to be a superpower, but it was becoming more assertive. After initially fawning over
the new American president and working to make the transition of ties successful,
the Chinese government had sized up the Obama administration, its conciliatory tone,
its attempts to reach out to foes, Hillary’s apparent soft-pedaling on human rights,
and, most of all, the financial crisis of 2008. Weighing all of this, it concluded
it could push America around. There had been much debate among ruling officials in
Beijing about American decline and many of them believed it was indeed happening.
The coordinated move during a diplomatic meeting behind closed doors took the Chinese
by surprise.

“The United States, like every nation, has a national interest in freedom of navigation,
open access to Asia’s maritime commons, and respect for international law in the South
China Sea,” Clinton said a bit later during a press conference at the end of the summit.
She was only getting started.

“The United States supports a collaborative diplomatic process for all claimants to
resolve the various territorial disputes without coercion,” she went on. “We encourage
the parties to reach agreement on a full code of conduct. The U.S. is prepared to
facilitate initiatives and confidence building measures consistent with the [2002
joint China-ASEAN] declaration.”

The United States? Facilitate initiatives? The Chinese were livid. Not only was the
United States carrying out naval exercises with South Korea in China’s own backyard,
but now America was wading into an Asian family dispute. Washington was supposed to
be retreating from the world, not sailing into the Pacific. Something had gone terribly
wrong.

Suddenly, China the rising Asian giant looked very lonely. Though it shared borders
with fourteen countries, when it looked around, China saw no real allies, no one it
really shared values with, no one it could count on. China was standing in a crowded
room and was utterly lonely. Over the last century, China had been at war with India,
Russia, and Japan. None of these countries really liked or trusted each other. Sure,
Pakistan was a friend, but it was a heap of problems. And North Korea and Burma were
in a whole different category.

China’s ruling Communist Party was obsessed first and foremost with its own survival.
Its leaders needed to keep 1.3 billion people fed, housed, and happy enough so that
they wouldn’t threaten the stability of the regime. Nationalism was frequently used
to dismiss criticism of the current system as part of a historic conspiracy by foreigners
to denigrate China. The bellicose behavior on the South China Sea fed into that narrative,
helping the party’s quest to look powerful and to stay in power. Chinese officials
seemed unwilling or unable to make conciliatory gestures toward their neighbors to
calm their fears. Suddenly, America seemed a much more appealing superpower to China’s
neighbors, and China lost an opportunity to take the lead in the region. Instead of
becoming an Asian giant that could challenge Western hegemony, China remained a scary
ogre.

*   *   *

America’s careful diplomacy combined with China’s missteps meant that Asia was a bright
spot in the Obama administration’s foreign policy, but the good news made few headlines.
There never seemed to be much room for optimism on front pages covered with stories
about the dismal state of the world. Even administration officials who worked on other
regions and hot spots were unable to recognize the nascent success in Asia, a policy
that would become known as the “Asia pivot.”

The news back at home wasn’t great, either.

11

MAKING THE CUT

Yellow leaves were starting to fall, and the mood in Washington was grim as the end
of 2010 approached. The newspapers were full of stories about people losing their
homes, towns trying to balance their budgets, and industries struggling to stay alive
while Wall Street executives got paid million-dollar bonuses.

A government town, Washington suffered much less than the rest of the country; restaurants
were full and new ones continued to open, new residential buildings were under construction,
and international institutions brought a steady stream of visitors into the city.
But the District was not immune to the pervasive nationwide malaise about where America
was heading. My American friends worried not just about their jobs but about the future
of their country. What was America really about these days? It didn’t feel like the
land of opportunity to them, so what did it represent? The contrarian, radical-right
Tea Party movement looked like it was sweeping the country. America’s first black
president was not uniting or transforming the country. In fact, the United States
felt more divided than before, politics as partisan as ever. Unemployment stagnated
around 9 percent—a nagging reminder that Obama’s efforts to revive the economy were
still failing. The extent of the financial crisis that had hit the United States—and
much of the world—in 2008 was more extensive than anyone had first realized. It would
take patient, diligent work to unravel years of damage, but unemployed and frustrated
people could not wait any longer.

In November, Americans voted in the midterm elections for Congress and showed their
lack of patience on the home front. Americans often seemed to dole out time like accountants:
the minute something didn’t work, they gave up and tried something else. Two years
after electing change, they voted for change again. The Democrats lost sixty-two seats
and their majority in Congress. They still had a tiny majority in the Senate. Obama
had only barely managed to get his health care reform plan through Congress in March,
even with a Democratic majority in both houses. The next two years were looking exceedingly
difficult.

Around the globe, it appeared that chaos had broken out too. World news was never
an orderly event, and wars, economic meltdowns, and earthquakes didn’t politely wait
their turn, but somehow, during this time, the globe felt rudderless.

I headed out after work one day in mid-November to meet a high-level official for
an informal conversation about American diplomacy; such conversations were a staple
of life for journalists in Washington. A lot of the conversations were had on the
phone or by e-mail when you needed a quick comment or one quote for a story, but whenever
possible breakfasts, coffees, lunches, drinks, and dinners were arranged. Quality
face time was important to develop a level of trust that enabled officials to part
with some of their more interesting information, beyond the talking points issued
in statements. If you were a reporter for a top national American media outlet, your
access was almost guaranteed. Others, especially foreigners, had to work a bit harder.
It was naturally in the interest of officials to talk to the press, so they could
put their mark on the stories that were published. Sometimes they called you because
they wanted something out there—all sources have an agenda. As a journalist, your
responsibility was to read between the lines and corroborate the facts. In a country
like Lebanon or Pakistan, the task was even harder as it involved determining whether
officials were giving you facts or outright lying and rumormongering. There was often
a remarkable openness to what American officials said in private, a tangible connection
to the heart of the decision-making machine. On the plane, Hillary spoke to us often,
off the record, which meant we could not use the information, but it added context
to the knowledge we had about a developing story. Robert Gates did the same with reporters
on his plane.

The briefings we got regularly by lower-ranking administration officials allowed us
to understand what they were thinking, what they were trying to do, and, sometimes,
what they were trying to hide. Even when European or Arab diplomats took on a confidential
tone and said, “Let’s talk off the record,” what followed was often just a repetition
of what they had said in public. Occasionally, briefings by U.S. officials were utterly
useless: when negotiations were in a delicate phase or they had nothing to show for
their efforts or, as in any government, if they simply didn’t want to share sensitive
information. President Obama gave regular interviews and answered questions often,
either alone or in press conferences with visiting foreign leaders. Reporters did
not get to speak to the president as often as they did with Clinton or Gates, but
White House reporters would be able to question someone very senior who was in the
room with him when a key decision was taken, for example. American officials—from
cabinet secretaries to the CIA chief and the top military brass—were regularly grilled
in Congress, in lengthy testimonies that were televised for all to see.

In relatively closed countries like China, journalists’ access to officials with real
power is close to nonexistent; barely anyone knows what is going on at the top of
the leadership. Journalists may be able to speak to lower-level bureaucrats or foreign
officials who have met senior leaders like we did after every trip to China, but sitting
down with Councilor Dai Bingguo or President Hu Jintao or Zhou Yongkang, China’s security
chief, was impossible. Of the nine members of the Politburo Standing Committee, the
body that governs China, only the prime minister Wen Jiabao occasionally spoke to
the foreign press and held a regular press conference—once a year.

A cold wind was blowing when I sat down over a cup of coffee in a Starbucks with the
high-level official. The gloom from the midterm elections had permeated deep into
the foreign policy–making machine at the State Department and the White House.

“We’re holding things together with chewing gum and rubber bands,” said the official.
“It’s bad, really bad.”