Super (Sub) Secretaries
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
NYT
It is way too soon to say what policy breakthroughs Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will be known for at the State Department. But she has already left her mark bureaucratically. She has invented new diplomatic positions that say a great deal about the state of foreign policy in these messy times. I would call them “The Super Sub-Secretaries of State.”
Mrs. Clinton has appointed three Super Sub-Secretaries — George Mitchell to handle Arab-Israel negotiations, Richard Holbrooke to manage Afghanistan-Pakistan affairs and Dennis Ross to coordinate Iran policy. The Obama team seems to have concluded that these three problems are so intractable that they require almost full-time secretary of state-quality attention. So you need officials who have more weight and more time — more weight than the normal assistant secretary of state so they will be taken seriously in their respective regions and will have a chance to move the bureaucracy, and more time to work on each of these discrete, Gordian problems than a secretary of state can devote in a week.
Some scoff that this approach is a sign of weakness on Mrs. Clinton’s part. I’d hold off on that. If she can manage this diplomatic A-team, Mrs. Clinton’s experiment could make a lot of sense. It is a much more disorderly world out there.
After the 1973 Arab-Israel war, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger set the gold standard for mediation by negotiating the disengagement agreements between Israel and Egypt and Israel and Syria — the first real peace accords ever struck between those parties. But Mr. Kissinger had it easy. He basically needed to forge an agreement between one pharaoh (Anwar Sadat), one military dictator (Hafez Assad) and one overwhelmingly powerful prime minister (Golda Meir), whose Labor Party then totally dominated Israel. All three of Kissinger’s interlocutors could speak for their people and deliver and sustain any agreements.
(More here.)
NYT
It is way too soon to say what policy breakthroughs Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will be known for at the State Department. But she has already left her mark bureaucratically. She has invented new diplomatic positions that say a great deal about the state of foreign policy in these messy times. I would call them “The Super Sub-Secretaries of State.”
Mrs. Clinton has appointed three Super Sub-Secretaries — George Mitchell to handle Arab-Israel negotiations, Richard Holbrooke to manage Afghanistan-Pakistan affairs and Dennis Ross to coordinate Iran policy. The Obama team seems to have concluded that these three problems are so intractable that they require almost full-time secretary of state-quality attention. So you need officials who have more weight and more time — more weight than the normal assistant secretary of state so they will be taken seriously in their respective regions and will have a chance to move the bureaucracy, and more time to work on each of these discrete, Gordian problems than a secretary of state can devote in a week.
Some scoff that this approach is a sign of weakness on Mrs. Clinton’s part. I’d hold off on that. If she can manage this diplomatic A-team, Mrs. Clinton’s experiment could make a lot of sense. It is a much more disorderly world out there.
After the 1973 Arab-Israel war, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger set the gold standard for mediation by negotiating the disengagement agreements between Israel and Egypt and Israel and Syria — the first real peace accords ever struck between those parties. But Mr. Kissinger had it easy. He basically needed to forge an agreement between one pharaoh (Anwar Sadat), one military dictator (Hafez Assad) and one overwhelmingly powerful prime minister (Golda Meir), whose Labor Party then totally dominated Israel. All three of Kissinger’s interlocutors could speak for their people and deliver and sustain any agreements.
(More here.)
Powered by Blogger
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home