A foreign policy panel at Harvard last month exemplified why President Trump finds favor with many Americans. The panel played perfectly to Trump’s narrative of elitist groupthink in the liberal foreign policy establishment.
The Harvard event was organized in celebration of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Moderated by a distinguished former U.S. diplomat and current Harvard professor, Nicholas Burns, the panel included former Obama administration officials Michele Flournoy and Anne Marie Slaughter, former Bush administration official Meghan O’Sullivan, and Washington Post columnist David Ignatius.
Burns began by making clear his political allegiances. “It is privilege for us all to be here with the most most extraordinary, most accomplished public servant that we have had in this country in a long, long time, Hillary Rodham Clinton.”
Hmmm.
Whatever one thinks of Clinton’s presidential campaign and character, it’s hard to see how her tenure as chief diplomat was “extraordinary.” That descriptor is best suited to former secretaries like John Quincy Adams, George Marshall, Dean Acheson, and Henry Kissinger.
Doubling down on the exaggerated deference was Anne Marie Slaughter, who served as the State Department’s senior strategist under Clinton. Slaughter quickly showed that she struggles to speak without emulating Obama-style moral preaching. She contended that the U.S. is now the “global hypocrite” and that we must persuade “young [Americans] of color” as to why the U.S. needs to be in the Middle East. Slaughter did not provide much reasoning as to why such persuasion is crucial to grand strategy, but at least it ticked the identity politics box. – READ MORE
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