Hillary Clinton’s Power Outage

Abstract

Looking for a way to give substance to her signature idea of Smart Power, as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton commissioned a massive study known as the Quadrennial Diplomacy and Defense Review (QDDR), which she considered to be among her major achievements in office. Mostly the product of a turf battle between the State Department and its development arm, USAID, the QDDR failed to address the State Department’s failures in Iraq and Afghanistan, and it embraced the discredited concept of nation-building at a time when the White House and the Defense Department were rejecting it along with the country at large. Written under the aegis of an academic, with little or no involvement by the Foreign Service, it promoted the notion of the withering away of the sovereignty of other states.