Clinton Provides Template for Meeting New Challenges

Secy Clinton at the CFR 7/15/09, (AP/Manuel Balce Ceneta)

Looking around the internet, the blogs and some of the TV coverage of Secretary Clinton’s speech today at the CFR, I think it’s fair to say she got everybody’s attention and understandably so- it was was a fantastic speech, well executed and she demonstrated her own trademark style of articulating both fine policy details and giving a broad, over-arching outline of this administration’s diplomacy and national security goals. And as usual, she does a great job in the Q&A portion where she demonstrates her ability to speak to people one-to-one in an easygoing manner, no matter how serious the topic.

Speaking of national security and Clinton’s speech, in the comment section of my CFR/Speech post, Rachel pointed to a new article by Spencer Ackerman which provides an interesting analysis of Hillary’s speech and concludes that she is doing no less than transforming the State Department and that it is a much needed transformation and I tend to agree with him.

Here are some excerpts:

Over the last several days, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has quietly begun institutionalizing the Obama administration’s pledge to rebalance civilian and military elements of national security. Her speech to the Council on Foreign Relations Wednesday afternoon is her most visible attempt yet to make a case for transforming the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development’s place in the national-security pantheon in order to suit U.S. foreign policy goals.

[snip]

But the speech itself was less a policy address than a platform to explain how changes that Clinton has recently initiated to prepare the State Department and USAID to shoulder more of a national security burden match the administration’s objectives. On Friday and again on Monday, Clinton held townhall meetings with foreign-service officers and development workers to unveil a new project, called the Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review. Modeled on one of the Pentagon’s most prominent reports, Clinton’s announced effort is designed to match the department’s missions with its resources and identify shortfalls in capacity, and will presumably recommend necessary institutional changes.

[snip]

For years, the State Department has lacked even the basis for understanding how underresourced it is. In October, a report by the American Academy of Diplomacy, a diplomatic advocacy group, assessed that the Secretary of State “lacks the tools — people, competencies, authorities, programs and funding — to execute the President’s foreign policies.” State did not even compile documents or reports designed to link resources to foreign-policy missions. The result was “the ‘militarization of diplomacy’ is noticeably expanding,” the study found.

The QDDR is “an intelligent measure” to begin reversing the trend, said retired Amb. Ronald Neumann. Clinton’s “focus on resources is important and has been too often neglected by secretariess of state who focused only on policy,” said Neumann, a former ambassador to Algeria, Bahrain and Afghanistan. “She understood she’s not going to manage effectively with a busted institution.”

[snip]

Clinton’s focus on institutional reform is a welcome change, Neumann said, contributing to her emergence as a strong secretary of state. “Overall, it’s very hard to say she’s put a foot wrong anywhere in any significant way,” he said.[emphasis added]