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more in line with what you’re trying to achieve over time,'” she
recalls. “And I said, ‘I don’t know how you do one without the
other.’”
Hillary has already had some successes, most conspicuously her use
of American diplomatic leverage in the U.N. Security Council to get
China and especially Russia to help isolate Iran and North Korea. She
and the president have convinced the Russians that proffering
military hardware to Iran isn’t in their national-security interest—a
tough sell. And ever since Obama bollixed up his relations with
Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in 2010, Hillary has
worked overtime to soothe Bibi. “She’s indispensable—the only one
trusted on all sides [of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict],” says Sandy
Berger, who served as Bill Clinton’s National Security Council
adviser.
Most conspicuously, Hillary has championed what has come to be
known as “civil society.” In practice that means moving beyond the
usual contacts between the United States and foreign governments to
forge ties with the non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that are
essential to stability and development. Like her husband, she’s
deployed her international stature for “convening power,” bringing
together governments and NGOs on a dizzying array of significant
projects that would otherwise lack support.
Always a generalist, Hillary thinks concentrating too much on one
area is hazardous. “We’ve got a big world out there, and [if] you
ignore some part of it, it comes back to bite you,” she tells me. So she
has tried to strike a balance between hot spots and the more mundane
management decisions that she thinks are necessary to elevate
diplomacy and development to the level of defense. That way, the
United States would have a more sophisticated, “3-D” foreign policy,
looking short-term and long-term, top-down and people-up. Hillary

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