The Secretary (22 page)

Hillary had come armed with Egyptian poetry and her deputy chief of staff who had
spent almost half her life in Saudi Arabia. Huma’s mother, Dr. Saleha Abedin, introduced
the secretary on stage, and Hillary paid tribute to her aide to wild applause from
the room. She spoke of the vitality and energy of the women lawyers and doctors she
had met before the town hall, and she praised the king’s effort to advance the education
of women.

“I, of course, believe that educating young women is not only morally right, but it
is also the most important investment any society can make in order to further and
advance the values and the interests of the people. The Egyptian poet Hafez Ibrahim
said, ‘A mother is a school. Empower her and you empower a great nation.’”

If there were any bitter memories left over from the encounter with Hughes four years
earlier, or any pent-up desire to pounce on another American leader who might be telling
them that they should drive, Hillary defused them quickly. She praised what had already
been achieved—no matter how little she may have thought it was—and combined it with
a culturally sensitive but firm appeal for more, and the women felt at ease. Hillary
had hoped to engage in a conversation about women’s rights, but somehow the students
did not pick up on any of her cues, instead sticking to standard subjects like Iran,
Israel, and her work as a secretary of state. One question in particular revealed
the image many in the region still have of America.

“Everyone knows that everything is almost perfect and strong in the U.S., when it
comes to politics and education system, economy. But why there is a big question mark
on the health care system in the United States, although President Obama promised
to change that. What have the government did so far?” asked one student in English.

A bit later, Hillary laughed when she was asked whether she would immigrate to Canada
or Russia if Sarah Palin, the former governor of Alaska, became president of the United
States. The rest of the world followed American politics closely, and these women
were no exception. The more a country felt its fate was affected by the United States,
the more detailed their knowledge was. Tribal leaders in Afghanistan and Palestinian
police officers knew the names of American congressmen because they had blocked or
approved aid bills that had a direct impact on their towns.

After the town hall wrapped up, Hillary was mobbed by women who wanted to take a picture
with her. Huma provided a guiding hand to the protocol. Some of the women had full-face
veils. Standing in a corner, away from the eyes of men, they lifted the black cloth
to show their faces for a picture with the American secretary of state.

*   *   *

Our five-day trip had come to an end. We arrived at the airport, drove onto the tarmac,
and kept going past SAM, stopping only outside the VIP terminal. Clinton may have
had a government plane at her disposal at all times, but America was a superpower
on a budget. The four aging planes of SAM’s fleet rotated between missions and repairs.
Congress would not approve the funds needed to upgrade the fleet, and every now and
then, the planes broke down. This was one of those times. The fuel valve was kaput.
General David Petraeus, the head of the U.S. Central Command leadership, was flying
back to Washington from Riyadh that evening. He could swing by Jeddah first to pick
up Clinton. Six hours later, the blue secretary of state seal was taken off SAM’s
door and attached to the new plane. The Velcro wouldn’t stick at first, but after
a few tries Clinton was on her way home.

The rest of us made our way back home on commercial flights, transiting through various
European capitals, wandering aimlessly for hours in airports waiting for connecting
flights to the United States until we finally made it home Wednesday in the early
afternoon. One of the comments Clinton had made during that trip was still ringing
in my ear: “We don’t have any magic wands that we can wave.”

Of course the United States didn’t have a magic wand, but there was something slightly
disarming about the candor of that remark by the secretary of state of the world’s
superpower. American leaders rarely if ever spoke of the limits of American power,
even if in fantastical terms. It was of a different nature still from Obama’s comment
about his peace efforts. This wasn’t an admission of failure but an attempt to close
the gap between the unrealistic expectations people had, even Americans themselves,
especially Americans themselves, of American power and reality. So many countries
still expected the United States to do their job for them, tell off their annoying
neighbors, or give them pocket money. And then there were countries that thought they
could do it all much better than America.

8

WHIRLING DERVISHES AND BRAZILIAN SAMBA

Ahmet Davuto
ğ
lu sat on a stage overlooking the packed conference room at the Washington office
of the Council on Foreign Relations, one of the many think tanks that held regular
events about international affairs. Turkey’s foreign minister was here to promote
his country’s style of diplomacy in front of an audience eager to hear more about
this fast-emerging power on the world stage. With more than three hundred think tanks
and research centers operating in the city, I often felt that living in Washington,
D.C., was like being on a big university campus with lecture halls where ideas were
tested and debated in front of a live audience of experts. I could learn to my heart’s
content if I wanted to, going from one event to another about subjects as diverse
as the future of the American health care system or Islamic Finance in the Central
Asia–Caucasus Region and everything in between.

Every world leader, political advisor, opposition figure, or wannabe leader, foreign
or American—everyone who had something to say and was in Washington for official or
informal meetings—sought to get onto that talking circuit. The more you advertised
your vision or theory about a specific issue, the more chances it could gain traction
with decision makers inside the administration. In Washington, unlike Paris or London
and especially Moscow or Beijing, there was a close connection between public discourse
and policy. The revolving door between government and think tanks means that today’s
China expert at the Brookings Institution could be tomorrow’s Asia policy chief at
the National Security Council.

Davuto
ğ
lu was a popular guest and often gave multiple talks during his visits, at different
think tanks around town, all of them oversubscribed. A short man with black hair,
rimless glasses, and a permanent smile lurking beneath his salt-and-pepper mustache,
Davuto
ğ
lu was an eternal optimist, and, like the country he represented, highly energetic,
always in motion.

The day before, on April 12, 2010, he had attended a Nuclear Security Summit in Washington.
Iran dominated much of the talk. The country upsetting America’s best-laid plans everywhere,
from Lebanon to Afghanistan, was busy enriching uranium in nuclear plants. Under the
Non-Proliferation Treaty, any country had the right to civilian nuclear energy, but
Iran’s centrifuges were spinning the uranium closer and closer to the level needed
to build a nuclear weapon. Tehran insisted that it merely wanted civilian energy for
power to light up people’s homes. But the West was suspicious: Iran had kept the full
extent of its nuclear program hidden for years until an exiled Iranian armed militant
group revealed the whereabouts of a major secret facility in 2002. The United Nations
had already punished Iran with three layers of sanctions for failing to abide by all
the rules, but Iran’s centrifuges kept spinning. The United States was now pushing
for another round of sanctions.

Turkey, Iran’s neighbor, saw an opportunity to play a role bridging the gap between
East and West. While Davuto
ğ
lu talked to Clinton at the summit, his prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdo
ğ
an had conferred with Obama in a trilateral meeting with Brazil’s president Luiz Inácio
Lula da Silva. Brazil and Turkey were both in a nonpermanent seat at the Security
Council, they both wanted to join the club of global powers—and they both had trade
ties with Tehran. They didn’t want Iran to have an atomic bomb, but they believed
that more talking could make a difference. For fifteen minutes, Lula and Erdo
ğ
an tried to convince Obama to give their type of diplomacy a chance. Though Obama
was not convinced, he didn’t categorically say no. His administration was all about
multilateral diplomacy, and he wanted to encourage other countries to do their bit
to keep peace in their part of the world, especially the rising powers.

Turkey was really the only or, at least, the most sustained success story of the wider
Middle East. Just ten years before, Turkey had been stagnating; military coups constantly
disrupted its politics, and one aging, uninspiring prime minister seemed to replace
the next. But the country had weathered the financial crisis of 2008, and its economy
was still growing at around 7 percent a year. Turkey was now the world’s seventeenth-largest
economy and turning into a vibrant Islamic democracy with a populist, forward-thinking
prime minister and an academic-turned-diplomat foreign minister. Both men tapped into
the Turkish national sense of pride and grandeur; the Turks, after all, were the heirs
of the Ottoman Empire, which had once stretched from the outskirts of Vienna to the
Horn of Africa.

Davuto
ğ
lu was a ball of energy. He was everywhere and had a plan for everything, his conversation
peppered with phrases such as “I’ve just visited,” or “Tomorrow, I’m going to,” transiting
through Shannon Airport in Ireland to refuel, flying into world capitals just before
or just after Clinton. Tehran was often on his schedule. Turkey’s government had a
small fleet of planes available for its top officials, and Davuto
ğ
lu seemed to live on one of them, constantly crisscrossing the world, trying to solve
crises from the Balkans to Israel, from Syria to Iran. With one foot in the East and
the other in the West, Turkey wanted to be a bridge, especially between the United
States and countries that, Davuto
ğ
lu liked to insist, America did not understand.

That day in Washington, he spoke at length about his favorite vision—the model partnership
between his country and the United States. Unlike previous global powers, he said,
America was disconnected not only historically but also geographically from the rest
of the world; this isolation gave America security but no strategic depth. Turkey
was a regional power, with six very diverse neighbors, a rich history and identity;
it was also predominantly Muslim—all of this added up to assets when it came to solving
problems, assets that the United States decidedly lacked. Strategic depth—Turkey had
so much of it in Davuto
ğ
lu’s eyes that these two words were the title of his six-hundred-page book on Turkey’s
uniqueness. He thought it was obvious: the United States needed Turkey.

The two countries had been allies since 1952. During the Cold War, the United States
and Turkey shared a fear of Soviet expansionism, and it had made sense then for Turkey
to defer to the United States. But though the relationship was strong, in a world
of rising regional powers like India and Brazil, Turkey wanted to shine and forge
its own path. The Turks had never been subservient to the United States, but now they
were even less willing to let Washington lead. And they were not afraid of irritating
the Americans, in ways big and small.

*   *   *

The Obama administration got an early taste of Turkish prickliness at a summit in
Strasbourg in April 2009 when Turkey opposed the appointment of the new secretary-general
of NATO, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, a former prime minister of Denmark. The Scandinavian
country was at the heart of a controversy that started in 2005 when a Danish newspaper
published cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, setting off demonstrations across the
Muslim world. The Turks were critical of Rasmussen’s handling of the crisis. They
also did not appreciate his tolerance for a television station run by the PKK, the
Kurdistan Workers Party, a separatist Kurdish party in Turkey that broadcast from
Denmark. The Turks could be tough negotiators: to get Erdo
ğ
an’s backing for Rasmussen, Obama had to promise that the new NATO chief would appoint
a Turk as his deputy.

Whenever we traveled with Clinton and a meeting with Erdo
ğ
an was on the agenda, his stern bodyguards, as unsmiling as nightclub bouncers, made
the secretary’s DS agents or the Secret Service look like start-up geeks. The Turks
frequently had dustups with other guards who stood in their way, once sending two
UN security officials to the hospital. Another time, they came close to a fistfight
with an American ambassador over access to a room where Clinton and Erdo
ğ
an were meeting. Turkish newspapers would then be full of accounts about how Turkey
had safeguarded its honor and stood up to the arrogant Americans. Turkey was pushing
back against America again, but this time, American national interest hung in the
balance.

For more than six months, Clinton had been working diligently to get the Chinese and
the Russians on board for a fourth round of hard-hitting UN sanctions against Iran,
which Brazil and Turkey were keen to avoid. Obama had gone from promising to meet
with America’s foes when he was a candidate to simply calling on those foes to unclench
their fists during his inaugural address. But hopes that his persona was enough to
transform the dynamics of international diplomacy quickly collided with realpolitik.
While pursuing engagement with Tehran, the administration was working to be sure they
were ready if diplomacy failed. The Russians didn’t necessarily like Iran and especially
didn’t care for its president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, but they shared with Iran a rejectionist
attitude toward the West. Moscow enjoyed making Washington’s life difficult, so it
often banded with Iran to needle the Americans. When Clinton last visited Moscow,
she had said there was growing international consensus for more sanctions on Iran.
Sitting next to her, Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, laconically said
he didn’t think there was any need for more sanctions. In the end, the Russians always
voted in favor of sanctions against Iran, but only after making everyone’s life difficult,
obstructing the process for months and softening the wording of drafts to the point
that the final text barely had any bite. The Russians were also helping Tehran build
a civilian nuclear reactor in Bushehr, on the Persian Gulf coast in southeast Iran.