The Hillary Doctrine

Sex and American Foreign Policy

Valerie M. Hudson, Patricia Leidl

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN:
  9780231539104
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Historia de Norteamérica

Hillary Rodham Clinton was the first Secretary of State to declare the subjugation of women worldwide a serious threat to U.S. national security. Known as the Hillary Doctrine, her stance was the impetus behind the 2010 Quadrennial Diplomatic and Development Review of U.S. foreign policy, formally committing America to the proposition that the empowerment of women is a stabilizing force for domestic and international peace.

Blending history, fieldwork, theory, and policy analysis while incorporating perspectives from officials and activists on the front lines of implementation, this book is the first to thoroughly investigate the Hillary Doctrine in principle and practice. Does the insecurity of women make nations less secure? How has the doctrine changed the foreign policy of the United States and altered its relationship with other countries such as China and Saudi Arabia? With studies focusing on Guatemala, Afghanistan, and Yemen, this invaluable policy text closes the gap between rhetoric and reality, confronting head-on what the future of fighting such an entrenched enemy entails. The research reports directly on the work being done by U.S. government agencies, including the Office of Global Women's Issues, established by Clinton during her tenure at the State Department, and explores the complexity and pitfalls of attempting to improve the lives of women while safeguarding the national interest.

PART I

HISTORY AND EVOLUTION

1

HOW SEX CAME TO MATTER IN U.S. FOREIGN POLICY

The United States has made empowering women and girls a corner stone of our foreign policy because women’s equality is not just a moral issue, it’s not just a humanitarian issue, it is not just a fairness issue. It is a security issue, it is a prosperity issue, and it is a peace issue…. Give women equal rights and entire nations are more stable and secure. Deny women equal rights and the instability of nations is almost certain. The subjugation of women is therefore a threat to the common security of our world and to the national security of our country.

–HILLARY CLINTON¹

ON JANUARY 22, 2009, the entryway to “the Building” was jam-packed: More than one thousand people were sandwiched in there to see Hillary Rodham Clinton arrive on the job as U.S. secretary of state. The main floor and the overhead balcony were filled with people hoping to catch a glimpse of a true political star. As Clinton entered, enthusiastic applause erupted from the crowd, and she shook as many hands as she could on her way to the stairway, before ascending the first landing. The crowds trained their cameras and cell phones on her. The cheering and clapping reached a crescendo, and Clinton began to applaud as well. She offered a short speech to the assembled crowd, punctuated by yet more applause, urging the State Department’s employees to “Be of good cheer, and be of strong heart! And do not grow weary as we attempt to do good on behalf of our country and the world…. Now, let’s get to work!”²

Hillary Clinton was not the first female U.S. secretary of state, but she was the first to declare clearly that “the subjugation of women is a direct threat to the security of the United States.”³ This declaration has come to be known as the Hillary Doctrine, and it was formally incorporated into the first-ever Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review of U.S. foreign policy in 2010.⁴ For the first time in its history, the United States of America has committed itself to the proposition that the empowerment of women and girls is a stabilizing force for peace in the world, and should thus be a cornerstone of American foreign policy.

Now that Clinton is out of government—for the time being at least—this might be an opportune time to reflect on the origins and development of the Hillary Doctrine, the challenges and controversy it engendered while she was secretary of state, and how the doctrine has affected both the United States and the nations with which it interacts.

These reflections will help us answer important questions, such as whether U.S. foreign policy should continue to include a focus on women and girls. Is the Hillary Doctrine truly in the U.S. national interest? Is it in the interests of those countries beset by war and instability? To what extent does the rhetoric of the Hillary Doctrine match the reality of U.S. government policy and programming? Will it indeed help bring about a more stable future for the nations of the world as Clinton has articulated time and time again?

In order to speak of the future, however, it is necessary first to examine the past. While this book is not primarily a historical account, in this chapter we set the stage by offering a timeline—which is by no means comprehensive—of just how and why sex came to matter to U.S. foreign policy. Thus, while this book is about a foreign policy doctrine most famously enunciated by Hillary Clinton, it is not primarily about Clinton herself except as that doctrine pertains to her own journey of awakening.

SEX AND AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY

Many regard international affairs as primarily a male realm, a subject that speaks principally to men about political, economic, and strategic interests largely defined by a male perspective. The fact that international affairs also affect women and that women might have something valuable to contribute is one of those issues that feminists assert everyone knows yet refuses to Know; that is, people might sense this is true but do not (or even will not) acknowledge that truth, let alone act upon it.

For example, although there was ample evidence that the Nazis perpetrated sexual crimes during World War II, the Nuremberg judges refused to acknowledge or prosecute the perpetrators—ostensibly to spare the victims the trauma of testifying and to refrain from exposing the broader audience to such shocking testimony.⁵ It was not until fifty years later that researchers published the first accounts of these crimes—in addition to similar violations committed by the Red Army and even U.S. soldiers.⁶

In the Pacific theater, the situation was similar: Although atrocities against women were both widespread and horrific—the Rape of Nanjing, the fall of Hong Kong—the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal omitted these crimes from its deliberations and instead classified them under the generic term of “inhumane treatment.”⁷ Indeed, the case of the “comfort women”—women from Korea, the Philippines, Indonesia, and other occupied lands whom Japanese combatants kidnapped, raped, and forced into sex slavery—was not even acknowledged by the Japanese government until the 1990s, and even now that government refuses to pay reparations to the survivors. These crimes only came to light because a particularly dedicated male Japanese scholar undertook a painstaking search of the relevant archives to document what many still consider to be merely a footnote to the main conflict.⁸

Everyone knew, but no one Knew.

Like these cases of almost eighty years ago, violence against women and girls—and how it relates to national and international security—continues to be hidden in plain sight to this day. When the media do pay attention, their accounts invariably evoke a mixture of terror and titillation and include nebulous exhortations for someone—the United Nations, countries, nongovernmental organizations, someone—to do something about these terrible crimes. Nevertheless, even though gender-based violence represents an assault against one half of the human population and, we argue, affects everyone, rarely have sovereign states tackled the issue with any seriousness—certainly not in the hard-nosed fashion that characterizes multilateral sanctions imposed on other behaviors such as nuclear proliferation or chemical weapons.

Similarly, when Americans think of U.S. foreign policy and its many challenges, they tend to consider it much akin to a large, geostrategic game of chess involving relations with China or the byzantine politics and endless conflicts that characterize the Middle East. Although Americans may apprehend at least on some level that part of the reason these countries have so many difficulties is their treatment of women, the United States government nevertheless remains reluctant to broach the topic during dialogues with these nations.

For example, some Americans know that sex-selective abortion in China has resulted in an estimated 50 million “missing girls,” that Saudi women will not cast their first vote until 2015 (and then only in municipal elections), and that Pakistan has one of the largest literacy gaps between men and women in the world.⁹ Nevertheless, even though many Americans may lament these clear violations of the rights of women and girls, they tend to think of them as idiosyncratic national attributes, such as average local temperature, irrelevant to and untouchable by U.S. foreign policy.

“Oh, it is just their culture,” people say—although most Americans would likely never dream of dismissing genocide, for example, as an immutable way of life that is best not tampered with for fear of inflaming ethnic sensitivities. What Americans are only just beginning to understand—to Know—is that these so-called women’s issues are in fact central to the security and stability of nations and, indeed, to us all.

This realization, we argue, dawned during the twilight years of the past century. It came about as a result of a confluence of factors, including academic research concerning the role of women in national economic development combined with news reports from the rape camps in the Balkans; the dedication and fearlessness of individual women and men who spoke out about what others had previously refused to hear, even at great personal cost to themselves; and the new technologies of the late twentieth century that amplified their voices in a manner previously impossible. But amplification needs an amplifier, and Hillary Clinton, to her everlasting credit, chose to play that role on the world stage.

BEIJING: THE GAME CHANGER

In September 1995 on a sweltering day in Beijing, a petite woman in a light pink pantsuit and pearls mounted a stage. The event was the Fourth World Conference on Women. The woman was the then–first lady of the United States, Hillary Rodham Clinton. What she said on that day and at that place was nothing short of electrifying.¹⁰ Kate Grant vividly recalls Clinton’s performance:

After her name was announced, she graciously greeted the dignitaries on the stage, and the large auditorium fell into a hushed nervous silence, with a few awkward coughs in the audience as Hillary Clinton took over the podium …

After she thanked the hosts and participants, she gathered steam. While citing ways that women’s lives across cultures and continents had similar challenges, she then proceeded to address a litany of abuses, framing them each not simply as “women’s problems,” but as profound violations of human rights.

In the final moments of the speech, when she and her remarks became an unstoppable cadence to rally the world, she labeled domestic abuse, sex slavery and the lack of ability to plan and space children as the human rights abuses they are. She was dazzling. She was forceful. Most of all, she was brave. On display was the strength of an unwavering soul there to tell the world what she and the United States believed. In the capital of a brutal communist regime, known for too often turning a blind eye to female infanticide, forced abortions and other assaults on women’s rights, Hillary Clinton stood there and proclaimed eleven earth shaking words: “Women’s rights are human rights and human rights are women’s rights.” The normally staid crowd erupted in applause. That simple powerful phrase became the battle cry of a global movement.

As Clinton left the stage, the American delegation, where I was seated, overflowed with exuberant pride. There were high-fives. There were tears. There were hugs. I looked out over the audience with delegates representing virtually every nation on earth to hear a thunderous applause and many taking to their feet, a sea of women and men giving Hillary one big “you go, girl.” … This was about taking on arguably evil forces that oppress half of humanity. This was American power at its best.¹¹

Clinton’s speech at Beijing was a watershed event for the United States and arguably for the entire world.¹² To this day, women and girls from Cape Town to Cambridge can quote Clinton’s words verbatim.¹³ Something in the global zeitgeist changed with that speech and with that conference; suddenly, foreign affairs no longer belonged only to the grayhaired diplomats and decorated military leaders but also now rightly concerned the empowerment of women both young and old.

Theresa Loar, senior coordinator of women’s issues in the State Department at that time, noted, “I think the Beijing Conference had a huge effect in policy development…. That dialogue, all of that, was still around a year later in October of 1996 when the Taliban moved into the capital of Afghanistan and said that girls can’t be educated, and women can’t walk outside the home without being accompanied by a male…. I don’t think our government would have responded the way we did if we had not had this conference ahead of time.”¹⁴

Loar has a point, and the clearest way to see it is to contrast it with the Carter administration’s response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979. Gloria Steinem remembers attending a briefing of women’s organizations in a State Department auditorium toward the end of Carter’s tenure. Although the subject was an upcoming U.N. women’s conference and Afghanistan wasn’t mentioned, the Soviets had rolled into Kabul that very day.

Newspapers were full of articles about the mujahideen and their declaration of war against their own Soviet-supported government. Their leaders gave three reasons for why they wanted to drive the Soviets out: girls were permitted to go to school; girls and women could no longer be married off without their consent; and women were being invited to political meetings.

During the discussion that followed the meeting, Steinem stood up and posed an obvious question to her State Department hosts: Given what the mujahideen themselves had said that day, wasn’t the United States supporting the wrong side? Steinem remembers the question falling into that particular hush reserved for the ridiculous. She doesn’t remember the exact answer, but the State Department made it clear that the United States opposed anything that the Soviets supported—the government spokesman made no mention that the United States was arming violent, antidemocratic, misogynist religious extremists.

It was clear that matters of war and peace were about Realpolitik and oil pipelines—and not about honoring the human rights of the female half of the human race. And so it happened that the mujahideen waged their brutal war with weapons supplied by the United States and, of course, Saudi Arabia—the birthplace of the doctrinaire interpretation of Islam known as Wahhabism. Together, they gave birth to the Taliban, al-Qaeda, and other affiliated terror networks that now reach far beyond the borders of Afghanistan.

Steinem says she has never stopped regretting that she didn’t chain herself to the seats of that State Department auditorium in public protest.¹⁵ After Beijing in 1995, however, the U.S. government would never again be able to condemn Steinem’s question as ridiculous. (Whether the government would dismiss it as infeasible is a topic to which we will return in later chapters.)

Before we discuss why the mid-1990s brought about such a sea change, we must first step back and ask what brought Hillary Clinton to that moment in Beijing, for it is surely that occasion that led to the inception of the eponymous Hillary Doctrine fourteen years later. In a way, the journey of Hillary Clinton and the evolution of the Hillary Doctrine are intertwined.

CLINTON’S ROAD TO BEIJING

When Hillary Clinton became first lady of the United States in 1993, she had already developed a strong and abiding interest in the situation of women and their children. Born in Chicago as the eldest child and only daughter of a staunch Republican father and a mother with a strong social conscience, Clinton excelled intellectually but also faced discrimination owing to her sex. Her experiences were typical of the United States during the 1950s and 1960s; for example, in middle school, she set her sights on becoming an astronaut:

So I wrote a letter to NASA and asked them what [I had to] do to be an astronaut. I told them something about myself and they wrote back and said, “We are not accepting girls as astronauts.” Which was very infuriating…. I later realized that I couldn’t have been an astronaut, anyway, because I have such terrible eyesight. That somewhat placated me.¹⁶

Although attracted to liberal views through the worldview of her mother and her Methodist pastor in Illinois, when Clinton went off to Wellesley College in 1965, she nevertheless campaigned first for Barry Goldwater but then Hubert Humphrey, and ultimately supported Eugene McCarthy. Her political views were clearly changing, and after a short stint on the Nelson Rockefeller campaign, she exited the Republican Party for good soon after the 1968 convention.

In 1969, Clinton attracted national press attention as the first student commencement speaker at Wellesley. Former Wellesley president Ruth Adams recalled, “She was liberal in her attitudes, but she definitely was not a radical. She was, as a number of her generation were, interested in effecting change, but from within rather than outside the system. They were not a group that wanted to go out and riot and burn things. They wanted to go to law school, get good degrees and change from within.”¹⁷

And that is exactly what Clinton did: Yale...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents 
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Part I: History and Evolution
• Part II: Theory and Cases
• Part III: Policy and Implementation
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index