Hard Choices

Hillary Rodham Clinton “Hard Choices” Simon & Schuster, 2014, 600 pgs

With this book, Hillary certainly solidifies her credentials as a serious and well qualified presidential candidate in 2016—in which I have no doubt she will be a contestant.  She is one hard-working woman with valuable personal contacts throughout the world’s leaderships.  However, this book carefully avoids most controversy and never criticizes the present commander-in-chief; nevertheless, it does establish that should she be elected to the post, no on-the-job training would be required.

My Notes:

Pg. 26:  The Secretary of State is responsible for managing the seventy thousand employees that comprise the State Department as well as the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the vast majority of whom are career professionals who serve continuously over several administrations.  That’s far fewer than the more than 3 million working for the Defense Department. 

Pg. 42:  In 2007 trade between the US and China surpassed $387 billion; in 2013, it reached $562 billion (only $122 billion of that was exports from the US).  Our trade between us and India in 2012 was nearly $100 billion ($22 billion of this was US exports).  Hillary neglected this distinction between exports and imports—I had to look it up).

Pg. 246:  The Americas is the destination for more than 40 percent of all US exports. China accounts for just 7 percent; the European Union accounts for 21 percent.  Two of the largest single destinations are Canada and Mexico.

Pg. 60:  Many critics suggest that China’s rise and its mix of authoritarianism and state capitalism, offered an attractive example to other Asian leaders as democracy might work well elsewhere in the world but it wasn’t at home in Asia.  There are plenty of counterexamples to disprove this: Japan, Malaysia, South Korea, Indonesia, and Taiwan are all democratic societies that had delivered tremendous economic benefits to their people.

Pg. 149:  Afghanistan by the time Hillary left the State Dept:  Infant mortality declined by 22 percent.  Under the Taliban only 900,000 boys and no girls had been enrolled in schools.  By 2010, 7.1 million students were enrolled, and nearly 40 percent of them were girls.  Afghan women received more than 100,000 small personal loans that allowed them to start businesses and enter the formal economy.  Hundreds of thousands of farmers were trained and equipped with new seeds and techniques.

Pg. 229:  Since 2000, Russia has been the fourth most dangerous place in the world to be a journalist—not as bad as Iraq but worse than Somalia or Pakistan.  Between 2000 and 2009 nearly twenty journalists were killed in Russia, and in only one case was the killer convicted.

Pg. 269:  Africa: the legacy of history hangs heavy, many of the continent’s conflicts and challenges stem from colonial-era decisions that drew borders without regard for ethnic, tribal, or religious differences.  (Does Hillary mean ‘like the US’?).  Poor governance and faulty economic theories in the postcolonial era perpetuated divisions and promoted corruption.  Rebel leaders, as is often the case everywhere, knew how to fight but not govern.  The Cold War made much of Africa an ideological and sometimes real battleground between forces backed by the West and those backed by the Soviet Union.  Of course there is also the ‘resource curse’ in many of these areas where squandering their potential windfalls due to corruption and poor governance.  Leaders have lined their own pockets at the expense of long-term sustainability.  (Note: Botswana is an exception: its leaders set up a national trust fund that invests diamond revenues in the country’s people and infrastructure.)

Pg. 338:  The Arab Spring began in Tunisia with a dispute when a vendor was denied the right to sell goods from his fruit cart and he ultimately set himself on fire in protest.  Thanks to satellite television and social media, young people across the Middle East and North Africa had a front-row seat to the popular uprising that toppled Ben Ali in Tunisia.  The protests in Tunisia prove contagious.

Pg. 383:  All told, terrorists have killed sixty-six American diplomatic personnel since the 1970s and more than a hundred contractors and locally employed staff.  Four US Ambassadors were murdered by terrorist attacks between 1973 and 1979 alone.  Since 2001 there have been more than one hundred assaults on US diplomatic facilities around the world and nearly two dozen direct attacks on diplomatic personnel. 

Pg. 493:  During the Cold War, Secretaries of State could focus nearly exclusively on traditional issues of war and peace, such as nuclear arms control.  In the 21^st century we’ve also had to pay attention to the emerging global challenges that affect everyone in our interdependent world: pandemic diseases, financial contagion, international terrorism, transnational criminal networks, human and wildlife trafficking—and, of course, climate change.

Pg. 497:  It is estimated that global sea levels rose by 6.7 inches over the course of the 20^th century. 

Pg. 550:  In 2009, more than 55 million Americans were immigrants or the children of immigrants.  These first- or second-generation Americans are valuable links back to their home countries.  Immigration helped keep the US population young and dynamic at a time when many of our partners and competitors are aging.  Russia and China (one child policy in China) are headed for a demographic crisis. 

Pg. 566:  An example of how US support for human rights advances our strategic interests comes from the 1970s, when the US signed the Helsinki Accords with the Soviet Union.  After this, activists and dissidents behind the Iron Curtain felt empowered to begin working for change because the Helsinki Accords gave them cover to talk about human rights.  Helsinki proved to be a Trojan horse that contributed to the fall of Communism.