The Queen: The Epic Ambition of Hillary and the Coming of a Second "Clinton Era" (38 page)

HH: Well, you know, that’s interesting. We’re going to talk about Egypt and Russia, which I believe are major disasters, and sort of epic failures, like Iran for Jimmy Carter, that are unfolding in real time. And so I do think we’ve got a couple of epic disasters that are happening, and I’ve got to say about
HRC
, you chronicle them, Egypt less so than Russia. Russia actually, Philippe Reines, is never going to read
HRC
, he’s going to be so embarrassed by this book. Have you heard from him since it came out?

JA:
I have. I have.

HH: Is he a happy camper?

JA:
He’s alright with it, because he knew what was going to be in it. I mean, in terms of, we asked him the hard questions. We gave him the opportunity to present his side of things.

HH: Man, it’s tough.

JA:
So he wasn’t surprised by it.

HH: It’s tough. I’ll tell you about that.

[Coming back from commercial break, I play Allen a tape of MSNBC’s Joy-Ann Reid]

Joy-Ann Reid: Thank God she didn’t do what Kissinger and others did. We’ve had some secretaries of state who really messed things up in the world. I don’t think she did that.

HH: But what is anyone going to say about her? She was an abject failure?

JAR: Managed, she did what secretaries of state are charged with doing, which is manage the foreign policy priorities of the president she’s working for, which in the case of Hillary Clinton’s tenure, was the Arab Spring, keeping the United States from…

HH: Did she do a good job in Egypt?

JAR: Really? I think in Egypt, absolutely. We saw a change of regime in Egypt. Egypt is obviously a troubled country when you have a dictatorship for forty-something years. You’re not going to have any smooth transition. But I think the United States actually managed that pretty well. We managed to keep our troops out of there. We didn’t get involved on the ground in Libya or in Egypt. But that transition in terms of management.…

HH: But Joy, is Libya better off today than when Hillary took over?

JAR: What could we do? We’re still in… excuse me?

HH: Is Libya better off today than when Hillary took over? And is Egypt better off today? I mean, which Egypt do you like? The one with the Muslim Brotherhood or the one with General al-Sisi?

JAR: Excuse me, if you don’t think Libya is better off without Muammar Qaddafi in power, then maybe you want to revisit your views on Iraq.

HH: That was Joy Reid of MSNBC… And let’s go to Egypt, Jon. I love the fact that you point out the Clintons’ relationship with the Mubaraks dated back to April, 1993. You quote Hillary as saying “I consider President and Mrs. Mubarak to be friends of my family.” That’s another Sopranos quote right there. But you do leave out the kind of clown show that went on. They sent Frank Wisner over to Egypt, and then he made an announcement, and they pulled it back, and we ended up toppling Mubarak. And then we ended up being with the Brotherhood. And we got it so bollixed up that al-Sisi is now dealing with Putin. I mean, Egypt is a colossal failure, isn’t it?

JA:
Yeah, you need more than a scorecard to figure out how many teams the United States was on during all of that. I mean, it was embarrassing. It was a disaster in terms of our foreign policy, one of a series of things over the last few years that I think points out that American, the American ability to influence world events is somewhat less than certainly the President gives it credit for, and I think that most of the American people give it credit for. And so we sit there trying to figure out how to look like we’re on the winning side instead of doing something that actually promotes whoever is in our best interest, if we can figure out what that is. And you know, we have a scene in the book, I think this is one of my favorite scenes in the book. Mubarak goes out and speaks to the Egyptian people, and he says something, this is like early February of 2011, and he basically says I’m not going anywhere, and he says some pretty inflammatory things. And in the Situation Room, all of the big leaders—Obama, Clinton, Gates, they’ve all stopped, and they’re watching this on television together in the Situation Room. And Obama’s like this guy’s gotta go, like what he’s just said will inflame the Street. He’s going to be going anyway. Let’s get ahead of it, and let’s put out a statement that pushes him out. And so his speechwriter, Ben Rhodes, writes up a statement that basically says it’s
time for Mubarak to go. There needs to be a process immediately to like get that going. And Hillary Clinton and Bob Gates, two of the people who were much more hesitant to want to push Mubarak out, start editing the remarks on the table in the Situation Room. They’re hand-editing it. It’s like, if you saw that in a movie where the Cabinet secretaries are hand-editing a statement before the President gives it, you would think to yourself there is no way that happens like that.

HH: No way, yeah.

JA:
And American foreign policy was being made on the fly in the Situation Room, and not with like an unpredictable event. I mean, this was something that they could have prepared for. So they go out and they say it’s time for Mubarak to go. We push Mubarak out. The revolutionaries come in. Turns out we’re not real big fans of the Muslim Brotherhood leadership, and neither are the Egyptian people. And now we’ve got the military leadership there again. There were three possible factions. We picked two of them, and it was the third that ended up winning.

HH: Yeah, it’s shockingly amateuristic. And Hillary’s, of course, running State through the whole thing. On page 143, you write in
HRC
, along with Amie Parnes, “Within the State Department, some senior level foreign policy experts strongly believed at the time, and still do years later,” I made a note of that, “that Obama’s White House aides were a bunch of piker neophytes whose desire to keep a tight leash on foreign policy wasn’t nearly as limited as their real world experience. These are not your Kissingers or Brzezinskis, one miffed former State Department official said.” You know, Jonathan, Condi Rice, fluent in Russian, PhD in Russian studies, Colin Powell put his time at the NSC after the Pentagon. The guys who ran Bush’s NSC were extremely deep in their experiences. This really has been a clown show for the last five years when it comes to foreign affairs. And how does Hillary manage to deliver the message, which I think this State Department official is trying to say, it wasn’t our fault, those bozos at the White House don’t know what they’re doing?

JA:
I think that’s a real difficult message to deliver certainly herself. I think there will probably be people who try to put that message out on her behalf. I mean, I would ask you, Hugh, and you know, obviously it’s not my job to interview you, but I would ask you, what do you think it would have been like if Hillary Clinton wasn’t in the room from the foreign policy perspective of conservatives?

HH: It’s a great question, and you’re right. It’s not a debate. It’s an interview. But I do think that a powerful voice for strength in the world would have been, a realist would have been good. I actually think Hillary was as much of a neophyte as the White House staff. She isn’t anymore, but I think that that showed up time and time again, and that Gates, Gates’ memoir, and I interviewed the former Secretary of Defense, he was very gentle on Hillary for whom I think he likes. And I told, I called an old Clinton staffer yesterday before I interviewed you, and a pretty senior staffer, a very good friend of mine, I’ll tell you off air who it is, and I said boy, I put this book down, and she is tough, tough, tough. She is tough as leather. She is the toughest person I think in politics that I’ve ever come across other than my first boss, Richard Nixon. But that didn’t make her competent to run State. I mean, that’s what I think it comes down to. She didn’t really have a vision of the world. She had a vision of political rehab, Jon Allen.

JA:
Yeah, I mean, as you point out, she’s not somebody with the academic credentials in foreign policy. She’s not somebody who has spent years toiling at the National Security Council or the State Department or the Pentagon for that matter. Her knowledge of foreign policy is, you know, acquired and learned, is studied. And there’s nothing wrong with that, but I think you’re right. I mean, to the extent that she has experience, it’s coming out the door, not going in the door.

HH: Yeah, and in fact, you provide a nice catalogue of the failures of the “smart power doctrine.” She sent Ross and Cohen off to the Congo. They tried smart power. They came back empty. She sent them to Syria to threaten Assad. They came back empty. Egypt, empty, Libya, a fiasco. I mean, “smart power” sounds good, and I had Joe Nye in college, by the way, so I’ve been hearing this for like 40 years.

JA:
(laughing)

HH: But it doesn’t work. I mean, when we come back from break, my guest, Jon Allen and I will continue. Now we’re going to turn to Russia, which is the worst part of the Clinton legacy. And believe it or not,
HRC
:
State Secrets And the Rebirth Of Hillary Clinton
, is toughest on Russia, and on Hillary and her team’s absolute, complete bollixing up of Russia, which is why
HRC
is a book you ought to read. You ought to memorize it. It’s like oppo research for us going into 2016, even though conservatives, they refuse to believe that anything good can come out of Nazareth or Washington, DC. Well, this is good, and it came out of the Beltway.

HH: But now I come to, actually, it is painful to read, to me, “the reset button.” It’s the red button’s episode. It is so painful to go back over how Lavrov played her, and how Putin and Medvedev and Lavrov have played her and Obama. And you don’t spare the ink on this, Jon Allen. You’ve got the details here. This was ugly from the beginning.

JA:
It’s almost comic how they botched that from the beginning. And you know, we’re seeing, the reset button itself is a funny story. It’s a little bit of an alarming story, but it is also one of the things that I think sets the table
for what we’re seeing right now with the United States’ inability to influence events in Russia, with the United States’ inability to really assert itself.

HH: Philippe Reines is Hillary’s senior aide who comes up with the red button, the reset button that has the wrong translation. He tried to get it back. That’s the stuff I didn’t know about that’s in
HRC
. And the Russians won’t give it back. I think it’s on Putin’s desk. I think he looks at it every day and laughs as he invades Ukraine. Honest to God, I do, Jon.

JA:
(laughing) Yeah, I have no idea what actually became of that reset button, but you could certainly picture that. Maybe there’d be a good comic strip with that as the end, Putin laughing and looking at this reset button that says
overcharged
instead of
reset
. They put it through a couple of Russian speakers who were at the State Department, but not exactly the experts on that stuff. And it was just a last minute gambit that was intended to be warm and gracious, and instead was just a, kind of made the State Department look like a clown car.

HH: Now so tell me at the end of all this, before we turn to sort of the politics and the staffing in Hillaryland, which is the other fascinating part of this, the geography of Hillaryland is charted here. It’s like Captain Cook for the first time for me laying out the various players in Hillaryland. But we’ve been through Benghazi, Libya, Egypt, Russia, the failures in Congo, the failures at… you know, there’s just nothing there except Burma. So I want to give you like one minute to, you know, here, hey, let’s talk about Burma, because you know, we’ve got to give her her due, Burma.

JA:
Yeah, I mean, this is an issue that she brought to the President. The Burmese junta has been extremely repressive for many years, a lot of political prisoners. It’s an issue that people on the right and the left care about, the kind of thing that brings together Mitch McConnell and Nancy Pelosi, actually, and for years, we’ve been sanctioning the regime in Burma. And Hillary Clinton’s idea was if you give them an off-ramp, if you say to the Burmese military officials that we will release sanctions or will relax sanctions if you start moving toward democracy, we will bring businesses into Burma that wouldn’t otherwise be there, if you start relaxing your stranglehold on your people. And the Burmese actually listened to that. And by the way, Burma is within China’s sphere of influence. So even though it’s a country we don’t think about a whole lot in terms of geopolitics, it holds some significance to,
at least symbolically, in tearing a country away from China’s circle a little bit.

HH: Yeah, that’s interesting, although the downside is I just finished interviewing Robert Kaplan in reading
Asia’s Cauldron
, and China is pushing the Philippines islands around, they’re claiming the Japanese islands, they’re surging a blue water navy and an anti-navy navy out, and vis-à-vis China, we’ve got peeling off Burma a little bit, and she ran a successful Shanghai Expo. I mean, that’s it. China played her, too.

JA:
Well, and to me, the real story in the Shanghai Expo isn’t that it was a success, although that is a story. We were not going to have a pavilion at the World’s Fair. Congress had decided to cut off money for that some years back. The Chinese told her that they would take it as a great insult if we didn’t have something there. She raised a lot of money to get that to happen. But the real story to me is how she raised that money, which is she tapped a couple of long time Clinton fundraisers, and they went to the corporate friends of Bill Clinton who were big donors to the Clinton Foundation, and asked them for money. And so when you talk about potential conflicts of interest, when you talk about the ties that bind the Clinton operation to a whole lot of people in the world, you know, that was the way they went about it. It was this whole big deal about how Bill at CGI was going to step away from what she was doing at the State Department. Instead, the very first thing she does out of the box is get her fundraisers to start calling the people that he raises money from to get money for this World’s Fair…