Serious question: What were Hillary's chief accomplishments as Sec of State?

[TheDormouse]

President Obama has said his first secretary of state did an outstanding job.

If one were to list Hillary's top 5 accomplishments as secretary of state, what might they be?

[revbones]

1. Hmmm.

Millions to the Clinton Foundation
Disaster in Hounduras
Disaster in Libya
FBI investigation
Mishandling of classified information

[emsimon33]

15. I could second these as the top 5

[AgerolanAmerican]

24. I would object

The FBI investigation, obscene amounts collected by the Clinton Foundation, and mishandling of classified info all are part of the same accomplishment, which we can call "self-enrichment".

In their place we can add:

- Destroying Syria
- Destroying Ukraine

[emsimon33]

29. What about increasing global warming disaster thru her fracking initiative?

[AgerolanAmerican]

37. on global warming she makes a more direct contribution

the hot air she puts out could provide heat over a cold winter for a million refugees fleeing from a war she caused

[chknltl]

2. Resume padding? nt

[emsimon33]

19. Another good one!

[Else You Are Mad]

3. I'll just drop this video here...

... Since most of her SoS accomplishments involve war, drone strikes and assassinations.

[TheDormouse]

12. war, drone strikes, and assassinations? lol

[arcane1]

4. She increased the State Department's number of Facebook followers

[emsimon33]

20. I would not put in as one of the top five, top ten, perhaps!

[TheDormouse]

46. lol

[RufusTFirefly]

55. That was $630,000 of taxpayer money well spent!

Anyone with real experience in foreign policy knows that it all hinges on your number of "likes."

[geek tragedy]

5. 1. Lining up sanctions and diplomacy that lead to Iran nuclear deal

2. Negotiating and laying groundwork for various bilateral and multilateral climate deals

3. Doing the tough, unseen work on normalization of relations with Cuba

4. Concluding nuclear treaty with Russia

5. restoring our diplomatic reputation around the world after the Bush-Cheney years


A lot of those didn't show immediate fruits while in office, but they definitely made a huge difference.

[NWCorona]

8. Lol!

[TheDormouse]

14. number 2 totally undermined by her push for fracking around the world

[geek tragedy]

18. no, getting China to agree to massive limits

on its carbon emissions doesn't get outweighed by that.

fracking is bad, oil and coal are worse

[JDPriestly]

27. What agreement did she ge on the encforcementof the agreement with China?

Pretty words are worthless.

[karynnj]

33. She did not do that -- the US/China pact was in 2014 and it was at John Kerry's initiation

The fact is that the agreement at the end of the Copenhagen conference was largely face saving and the conference was a huge disappointment.

[geek tragedy]

34. Copenhagen was not great but it's not like the process stopped between then and fall 2014

http://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/ps/2012/05/189253.htm

[karynnj]

39. These are good things, but they are not the agreement that actually got the first ever commitments

These are a continuation of the ecopartnerships that actually got their start before HRC. Read the link. I believe they started after Bali.

Not to mention, the work between China and the US on the pact started in earnest in spring 2013, when Kerry told Obama that China was open to it.

[geek tragedy]

40. after Copenhagen, I'm glad they were talking to each other at all.

That was a train wreck.

In a way, she had the foreign policy equivalent to what Obama had to deal with domestically, in terms of cleaning up a whole lot of mess.

[emsimon33]

21. I agree & I question many of the others as truly attributible to her

Cuba, perhaps, because many US companies would like to get their fangs in there.

[TheDormouse]

48. yup, like Marriott & Verizon

[karynnj]

28. The first three were either completely or primarily done in the second term

1. It is true that she got the sanctions on Iran. Those in favor of sanctions, included not just those hoping for diplomacy, but people like Netanyahu aiming to hold Iran back by sanctions alone. There was little done on negotiations when she was Secretary of State. Add to that, it was Senator Kerry, who Obama sent first to develop the back door channel in Oman. In early discussions, she was not one of those arguing to open talks. It is true that Bill Burns and Jake Sullivan were involved in some of the early talks, but by 2012 when they ended- they had gone nowhere.

The big effort at negotiation started when Rouhani was elected and took office in August 2013. Burns and Sullivan, then reporting to Kerry and Biden respectively were involved in initial bilateral talks. At the end of September, Obama spoke to Rouhani and the US officially entered negotiations. John Kerry and Wendy Sherman were the ones involved with this multinational effort. If you look at HRC statements before and after the interim deal and before the framework -- she was very very hesitant to back what Obama and Kerry were doing. You might look up, Obama's statement when the deal was made and his press conference a few days later - he thanks a lot of people in each. Not on the list - HRC. Kerry spoke from Vienna and he thanked an even longer list of people - again - not HRC. Now, as the likely Democratic nominee, had her work on the negotiations been significant, they would have thanked her. (Kerry did on a Sunday talk show speak of her getting the sanctions.) Yes, I KNOW HRC claimed more .... but, in all the coverage , US and international, the credit is to the President for being willing to risk political capitol on something seen as unlikely and John Kerry, who worked with amazing persistence, skill and patience.

2. Copenhagen was seen as a failure, not a success. As to bilateral agreements -- not really and the situation was so bad, that in 2012, Kerry was told by the administration that diplomatic accomplishments on climate change, which he wanted as a signature issue, were unlikely. Kerry used his LONG relationships with the Chinese climate change people -- yes, the ones that HRC spoke of "hunting down" -- and worked with them to find common ground. The key was not hunting them down, but respecting them, listening to their concerns, even hosting them at his home in Boston. Kerry was the Secretary of State who deserves credit for that US/China pact, the agreement in Lima adding other countries and the Paris agreement. NONE of these accomplishments were remotely on the horizon when she left office.

3. The effort to normalize relations with Cuba also started in the second term. In fact, even the HRC people simply claim Obama did it because she advised him to at the end of her term in a letter. In fact, Obama spoke of wanting to do this in 2008. She really had no part in it. In fact, Pope Francis had a bigger role, as did Ben Rhodes and other national security people and John Kerry.


4. and 5. are things she legitimately can claim.


Hillary Clinton will likely be President; John Kerry will never be President. I resent that people attempting to pad Clinton's resume are willing to simply take his two biggest accomplishments on two issues he spent his career on. The Iran deal would not have happened without Kerry as SoS AND Obama as President. The Paris agreement, based more on the Bali conference in 2007 than Copenhagen 2010, would not have succeeded without John Kerry.

[geek tragedy]

38. 1. without the sanctions regime on Iran there was no nuclear deal to be cut with Iran.

Getting everyone on the same page with regard to sanctions--including China and Russia--was absolutely critical to keeping them on the same page for a negotiated deal.

2. I addressed in another post, there were confidence building measures that happened without getting a lot of press. Big breakthrough happened under Kerry, but it's not like he picked up a cold case there.

3. What you say on Cuba is really not accurate.

http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-12-18/hillary-clinton-secretly-pushed-cuba-deal-for-years

After the initial easing of the travel ban, the administration had prepared a second batch of measures to expand travel and trade licenses. But shortly before an expected announcement, the White House got cold feet and shelved the initiative, according to people briefed by the White House. Members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee had persuaded White House senior adviser Valerie Jarrett to intervene at the last moment. Clinton was displeased but undeterred.

“Cuba was on her mind. I know that she raised it a number of times. The White House wasn’t ready to move but she kept that in play,” said Clemons.

Arturo Valenzuela was assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs and Clinton’s point man on Cuba at the time. He worked with Ricardo Zuniga, who was the head of the department’s Office of Cuba Affairs, behind the scenes to meet with Cuban officials in 2009, 2010 and 2011 to explore ways to move forward.

“There was no question that there was strong support in the State Department for liberalizing some of the restrictions and Secretary Clinton was quite clear about that,” Valenzuela told me. “I asked Zuniga, with the secretary of state’s blessing, to draft some further liberalizations of the travel ban, and that led to a significant shift of the opening up of general licenses.”

Clinton also directed Valenzuela to talk personally with Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez in New York in October 2010, the highest-level diplomatic meeting of U.S. and Cuban officials ever. But one serious impediment to a grand bargain with the Cuban government remained: the Cubans refused to consider releasing Gross, whom they accused of spying.

Nevertheless, throughout 2011, Clinton and her team continued to press the White House to take further steps on Cuba. In early 2011, frustrated by what she saw as resistance from the Obama political advisers as well as the NSC staff, Clinton met personally with the president and nudged him to keep going.

“The pushback was coming from the White House staff. The issue was for Hillary to say to Obama, ‘Hey listen, your folks are going too slow on this and we need to move forward on this,’ ” said a former administration official who was involved in those discussions. “There was a lot of reluctance in the White House to do that at the time because of various kinds of domestic problems. If it hadn’t been for the State Department and her leadership, then these reforms might not have happened.”

Finally, in 2012, Clinton made one more big push for faster movement to overhaul the relationship. At the Summit of the Americas that April in Cartagena, Colombia, Clinton was repeatedly harangued by Latin Americans leaders about Washington’s insistence that Cuba not be allowed to participate. Clinton was blindsided by the unanimity of this criticism, including such staunch U.S. allies a Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos, who had personally pressed Obama on the issue.

“It’s evident to me that Cartagena was a wake-up call for then-Secretary Clinton,” said Julia Sweig, a Cuba scholar at the Council on Foreign Relations. “She had a head-snapping experience there and came to see the unanimity of the Latin American view such that recovery of American standing in the region really ran through Havana.”

After returning to Washington, Clinton directed her head of policy planning, Jake Sullivan, to work up several options to lay out a policy approach and present it to the president. The result was, in essence, what Obama announced Wednesday, a source close to the process said.

[karynnj]

42. I stand by what I wrote

1) I completely acknowledged that Clinton worked with her peers to get the sanctions. The fact is, that the sanctions, by many were seen as an end in and of themselves - just as the current sanctions on North Korea are. Where I disagreed is that she had much to do with the negotiations. It was Kerry who spent months of time and who developed the relationships with people like Zarif and who worked side by side with Secretary Moniz to develop a process both sides could agree to.

2) As to climate change, what I did not mention, is Kerry was more successful at the Bali conference (for which he was praised by the Bush team when they testified before the SFRC and a House committee) than HRC and her team were in Copenhagen. After Paris, Ban Ki Moon spoke of how the approach used in Paris had its roots there. The fact is that climate change was not a big issue for Clinton - at any point in her career. What she can claim is that she worked with US AID and was instrumental in providing people in places like India with cleaner cooking stoves. Here, I would bet her genuine interest in helping women and children made this something she fought for.

3) As to Cuba, many people wanted to reengage with Cuba, including Obama. She was not part of the effort that led to it happening and she was definitely not someone who improved our relations with South America.

[pangaia]

41. That sure is greek to me..

[Baobab]

6. The consensus seems to be that she didn't really have any. However, John Kerry is well respected and

has accomplishments.

The Clinton Library has lists of president Clinton's accomplishments but many of them are now ambiguous and not seen so much a good things. one of them, the WTO has been a very bad thing in some ways for its pushing for the privatization of public services 9such as health care insurance, education, water, housing, etc.) around the world, including here.

The WTO deals are bing used as models for the three pending non-WTO deals which should also be dumped.

Basically, the trade deals are one big lie after another.

[PufPuf23]

7. Hillary Clinton gloats. Comprehend people.

[FlatBaroque]

9. She has stated that she is most proud of having overthrown Quadafi.

Curiously, Obama considers Libya his biggest mistake.

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

10. Bringing the State Department to the attention of the FBI?

[emsimon33]

13. Good one!

[emsimon33]

11. Assassinations & further destabilizing the Middle East are 2

Assassinations of renowned Honduran environmental activist Berta Caceres and her fellow activist, Nelson Garcia.

http://www.democracynow.org/2016/3/11/before_her_assassination_berta_caceres_singled

Further destabilizing the Arab world

Remember her mentor is a person who should have been tried and jailed long ago as a war criminal, Henry Kissinger.

[emsimon33]

16. I forgot increasing global warming by pushing fracking internationally

She hired 80+ people in to the State Department just to push fracking down peoples' throats.

[Vinca]

22. Wasn't she also pro-Keystone pipeline until the primary season started and

she realized she'd have to flipflop or be skewered?

[awake]

23. Well there was that one speech that she gave in China

Oh wait Hillary had said in 2008 of Obama that all he could do was give a good speech, which should not count when he ran for Pres. so I guess we should not count Hillary's speech

[pdsimdars]

25. Think of all the problems she solved relating to overpopulation

[emsimon33]

31. Yes, good point. 100,000s have died as a direct result of her actions--most were innocents

[Gwhittey]

26. Is there any actually ligit things listed?

Because all I see are sarcastic ones. Odd not one positive thing is listed.

[emsimon33]

30. That's the point

We are not being sarcastic but realistic. It is difficult to assess the top 5 out of all the disasters that have resulted from her time as Secretary of State. Poor John Kerry has had his work cut out for him cleaning up her mess.

[Gwhittey]

32. Yea but could some Clinton Supporters at least come in

And give some bullshit reasons. Then at least I could take a small illusion them actually care about government and not just vote based on who is more famous.

[TheDormouse]

36. see post #5, from Geek Tragedy

[tex-wyo-dem]

43. Well, one positive thing is that...

She made the rounds on social media when she got a really cool pic of her taken in sunglasses checking her email residing on her unsecure private server with her unsecure BlackBerry...

...oh wait

[Autumn]

44. Syria? We came we saw he died? And she lobbied for the TPP, she promoted fracking.

That's an easy four, oh she hired a lot of FB followers for the State Dept ( it seems to me they still may vbe employed) so that could fall under creating jobs. I also think she has made sure future presidents will make sure SOS's don't use home grown servers in their basements.

[TheDormouse]

49. Um, what did she accomplish with regard to Syria?

[Autumn]

50. It looks like that country is kinda fucked so...

[TheDormouse]

53. yeah, I'd put Syria in the definitely-not-an-accomplishment column

[Autumn]

56. Some may consider her an accomplished SOS. I don't.

[HereSince1628]

45. My personal favorite is handing Ukrainian policy to a neocon

who accomplished civil war by backing a neo-nazi insurgency.

It really covers so much of the range of skills she claims as experience.

There's overthrow of government, civilian deaths including those of citizens of nations not engaged in the combat via air-line shoot downs, rioting, civil war, alienation of global powers, screwing with the availability and cost of natural gas in western Europe, arms sales... it just goes on and on.

What's not to love?

[Demsrule86]

47. Iran sanctions

This worked and took skill and finesse.

[4ricksren]

51. also: why did she leave after one term? nt

[TheDormouse]

54. so she could cash in & then run for POTUS duh

[Impedimentus]

52. Helped US industry export fracking equipment ? Started the "selfie" boom ?

FEEL THE BERN - 2016

[EndElectoral]

57. Don't forget Saudi Arabia, bombers and looking the other way on human rights...China as well

http://www.commondreams.org/views/2016/03/08/hillary-clintons-state-department-armed-saudi-arabia-teeth

http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/10/07/shameless-hillary-clinton-human-rights-and-china/

[Mike Nelson]

58. Her accomplishments are Obama's...

...as well as her weaknesses. The SoS works for the President. It's a shared agenda.. Obama appears very happy with her work. She and Kerry have done well, in my opinion... much better than the Bush team.

[TheDormouse]

59. Why don't Hillary surrogates ever get asked this question by tv interviewers?

You know, like how they asked Marco Rubio surrogates about his accomplishments in the Senate?