THE
H I L L A RY DOC T RINE Sex & American Foreign Policy
Valerie M. Hudson & Patricia Leidl
“The subjugation of women is a threat to the common security of our world and to the national security of our country.” -Hillary Clinton
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he premise that we are all harmed when women are precluded from making the world safer is a fundamental and profound idea. At first glance, the foreign policy link may not be obvious, even though we are reminded at every turn that public policy decisions affect our economic and physical security in ways both apparent and invisible. We buy T-shirts from Thailand and sell U.S. semiconductors in South Korea. We worry about wounded veterans of lengthy wars, desperate Central Americans who choose to send their children north alone, and extremists detonating bombs in Boston. But in this remarkably readable book, Valerie Hudson and Patricia Leidl push us—all of us—to think through the fundamental template for making decisions. In foreign policy parlance, if our leaders focus on socalled hard security issues (such as threats from nuclear pariah states or rogue fanatics) rather than on broader human security concerns, are we left less safe and prosperous than we could be? Or, to put these questions another way, the authors ask trenchantly whether Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was serious—and, if so, was she right—in setting out her doctrine that the subjugation of women around the world is a threat to the security of the United States. Critics see this idea merely as a rhetorical or cynical stance on the part of U.S. policy makers, including Clinton herself—a posture that can be ignored in a particular case if it would undermine “real” American national interests.
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Further, some suggest that it isn’t our business how other countries treat half their populations. Altruism aside, from the narrow perspective of our national interests, should Americans care? The answer, based on a wealth of evidence and the careful analysis of these scholars, is simple: yes, if we are determined not to repeat twentiethcentury wars and cataclysms. As things stand, we haven’t begun the new century very capably, despite enormous efforts. After more than a decade of fighting in Afghanistan, the United States is trying to disengage from the longest war in our history. Obviously, the casus belli was the 2001 terrorist attack launched on our homeland—although shortly after the invasion, policy makers and pundits began pointing out virtuously that a corollary benefit was the liberation of women from unimaginable oppression under Taliban rule. But Hudson and Leidl examine the idea that our engagement vis-àvis Afghanistan would have been altered if we had hewed to a different method of evaluating national threats prior to 9/11. No one claims that faithful action spurred by the Hillary Doctrine would resolve all conflicts. Clinton herself, often termed a hawk for the foreign policy decisions she has espoused, has never held out for some kind of peaceable kingdom. Instead, taking to its logical conclusion Clinton’s proposal to make the treatment of women a yardstick in decision making, the authors suggest that the United States and the international community would have moved against the Taliban sooner. Stopping the egregious abuses of women would not have been an afterthought, nor an excuse for an invasion already planned. What difference would that have made to Americans? Impossible to know, but—without minimizing the impact from military engagement anytime or anywhere—we can ponder whether that modified approach might have prevented the watershed tragedy of 9/11, which brought ensuing shocks within the global community and an incalculable cost to our population’s well-being. More fundamentally, and drawing on research from a variety of disciplines, the authors explore the idea that subjugating women deprives them not simply of their safety, but of agency—their ability to contribute to security. A country needs the option of using soft power (the traditionally feminine strengths of persuading and attracting) in addition to
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military force to exert its influence effectively. Hudson and Leidl make clear the direct link to enhanced stability in countries where women actively participate in public life. The landscapes surveyed are startlingly broad, ranging from discussions of developments in China, India, and Rwanda, among others, to the in-depth case studies of Afghanistan, Guatemala, and Saudi Arabia. (Here the term case study definitely isn’t code for boring analysis; the stories of real people on those pages bring tears.) For the policy maker, the academic or student, and also for the broader public searching for the “right” thing to do in Syria or another crisis area, a huge dilemma involves weighing the risks of action against those of inaction. Especially in the wake of the discredited intervention in Iraq—but balancing that against the world’s historically recent failures to prevent massacres in Rwanda or Bosnia—we’re conscious of the need for a moral frame of reference. This question has haunted me for more than twenty years because, as the American ambassador to neighboring Austria, I was implicated by impotence as the United States stood by and watched Serb military forces (and far less often, their opponents’ forces) slaughtering civilians in Croatia and Bosnia. The Dayton Agreement, heralded as a great success, but lacking even one woman among the negotiating teams, has been a political disaster. Scores of women I’ve interviewed have told me not only “this was not our war,” but also that if women had been at Dayton, they would have insisted on essential on-the-ground changes, such as the guaranteed detention of local indicted war criminals, whose dangerous presence prevented refugees from returning home and kept the country divided. And so I commend Professor Hudson and Ms. Leidl for offering evidence on why “not a single Arab Uprising country has become a better place for women,” despite the courage of women who risked everything to champion democratic transitions. Tragically, I have observed that conflict creates a power vacuum into which men rush while women are carefully deliberating their roles, but this is complicated further by male bonding over the subjugation of women, which the authors show is a typical occurrence both during and after violent conflicts. We need the most influential players in the world to effect a broadscale shift of the security paradigm. Full disclosure: Hillary Clinton has been my friend for more than twenty years; thus, the work of these authors
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holds special interest for me. Incidental to its purpose, the book offers illuminating insight into the thinking of an individual who—considering only her previous professional positions and the clout of the world’s sole remaining superpower—can be acknowledged by detractors and supporters alike as one of the most influential females who has ever lived. But this volume is important for anyone who wants to think seriously about the shape and purpose of foreign policy. At the end of a war that began just over one hundred years ago, President Woodrow Wilson unleashed consternation by proposing fourteen principles for sustainable peace, insisting they would further U.S. interests. Scholars have continued to debate the implications, initially calling him utopian but more recently acknowledging his realism. Without stretching the analogy, it is fair to say that Secretary Clinton’s declaration that women’s subjugation threatens our national interests has similarly been dismissed by many as mere idealism—yet it stems from a pragmatic approach and deep experience. Understanding what Hudson and Leidl reveal about the varying applications of the Hillary Doctrine strikes me as the start of wisdom. Ambassador Swanee Hunt Chair, The Institute for Inclusive Security
PR E FACE
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his book was born of an unlikely friendship between two women whose disparate paths crossed in 2009. At the time, one was working as a journalist in Kabul, Afghanistan and one as a university professor in Provo, Utah. Pat Leidl emailed Valerie Hudson late that November and asked for a Skype interview about Afghanistan’s sex ratios in connection with a policy analysis she was then writing for USAID. She had just finished Hudson’s co-authored book Bare Branches: The Security Implications of Asia’s Surplus Male Population, and felt she was witnessing the same linkage between sex ratios and violence play out in Central Asia that Hudson had observed in China and India. In many ways we couldn’t be more different, but we were both noticing the same thing: the insecurity of women was seriously undermining the security of the nation-states in which they lived. While Leidl was documenting this connection through careful fieldwork and interviews, Hudson was doing the same through collecting, scaling, and analyzing massive amounts of cross-national data. We felt that our voices could be stronger if we pooled our skills and experience, and so we did, beginning in 2010 with a co-authored piece appearing in Foreign Policy. The idea for the present volume came as we realized Hillary Clinton was determined to serve as U.S. Secretary of State for only one four-year term. She was (and is) the world’s most influential and eloquent exponent of the proposition that the situation of women and the destiny of nations
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are integrally linked. During her term as secretary, she pulled out all the stops to incorporate that vision within the foreign policy establishment of the most powerful state in the international system, the United States. No such alignment of the constellations had ever before taken place— and it would be over in the proverbial blink of an eye. We became determined that this unique moment in U.S. history— in world history—not disappear quietly into the slipstream of time. We wanted to document this window of time in which women became, at least rhetorically, a “cornerstone” of U.S. foreign policy.1 Surely there were important lessons to be learned from both the successes and the failures of such a serious effort to integrate women into the world of foreign and security policy, and to place their concerns on the agendas of top policy-making bodies. It is important our readers understand from the outset that this book is not, in the first place, about Hillary Clinton herself. Rather, it is the story of an idea—the story of the Hillary Doctrine, as we term it. This doctrine puts forward the revolutionary proposition that “the subjugation of women is a direct threat to the common security of the world and to the national security of the [United States].”2 The Hillary Doctrine: Sex and American Foreign Policy also details and assesses the intensive efforts within the United States to turn the ship of state in this direction of seeing and acting upon the importance of women to its national interests and foreign policy. In order to effect a comprehensive examination of the Hillary Doctrine, we marshal three complementary streams of analysis: history, fieldwork, and policy analysis. These correspond to the three parts of the volume. In part 1, we focus on the historical backdrop of the Hillary Doctrine. Using Hillary Clinton’s own journey as a springboard, we trace the earliest efforts within the U.S. foreign policy establishment to be more inclusive of women and their concerns, starting with the Carter administration’s signing of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). We examine key benchmarks, such as the Fourth World Conference on Women in 1995, where Hillary Clinton asserted that human rights are women’s rights, and then the unanimous approval in 2000 by the U.N. Security Council
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of Resolution 1325 mandating inclusion of women in peace negotiations and post-conflict reconstruction. We survey how the George W. Bush Administration implemented its own vision of the Hillary Doctrine following the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq in the wake of 9/11, and from there we move forward to explore what Hillary Clinton herself accomplished as U.S. secretary of state from 2009 to early 2013. In part 2, we offer the reader a series of insights gleaned from experience in the field in order to determine whether the foundational premise of the Hillary Doctrine is correct. Is there in fact a direct connection between the relative security or insecurity of women in a given society and that society’s level of stability, security, and resilience? We begin by surveying the existing literature and then going to ground to see for ourselves. This section of the volume contains two in-depth case studies, that of Guatemala and of Saudi Arabia and its neighbor Yemen. Through this more detailed and nuanced treatment, we are able to trace the causal processes leading from women’s insecurity to national and even international insecurity. It is also through this analysis that we come to understand otherwise mysterious phenomena, such as why contestations over political power often involve the strategic targeting of women and girls. In the final part of the book, part 3, we undertake a focused evaluation of attempts by the U.S. government to implement the Hillary Doctrine while Clinton was secretary of state during the first term of the Obama Administration. During her tenure, Clinton devised an impressive array of action plans, guidance, regulations, and programming, and assembled a dream team to oversee the coherence of the effort. If the Hillary Doctrine has merit, this should have been the ideal moment to observe it. What was the result? And what lessons can be learned from U.S. governmental efforts to implement the Hillary Doctrine? In a sense, then, this book serves a dual purpose: as a retrospective, yes, but also as a prospective exercise. Though at the time of this writing the spotlight does not shine as brightly as before, the Hillary Doctrine isn’t going anywhere—the evidence for its validity, as we shall see, is just too overwhelming. But many questions remain, important questions of how to transform entrenched mindsets not only abroad but also in Washington, DC, that view an emphasis on women in U.S. foreign policy as a distraction from more important matters of Realpolitik, or see gender
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programming as a box-ticking exercise catalyzed by an unconstrained ideology of political correctness. Worse yet, however, are intentional efforts to subvert carefully constructed implementation measures in the field. There are also deep and important questions of how and under what circumstances to communicate our commitment to the Hillary Doctrine to both enemies and friends, to set appropriate timelines and benchmarks, and to weigh the broader responsibility of the international community of nations to ensure the rights and security of one half of the world’s population. If there is to be a renewed commitment to the Hillary Doctrine in the future—and we anticipate there surely will be, sooner or later—these questions must be squarely faced. We offer this volume as an opening commentary in what we hope will be a larger and longer conversation about sex and American foreign policy.
“A sound study that carries an urgent message.” —KIRKUS REVIEWS (starred review)
“How has the exclusion of the female half of this country damaged U.S. foreign policy? Let me count the ways—from ignoring a North Vietnamese peace initiative because it was headed by a woman to excluding the violence against females that is the normalizer of all violence. This country is fighting poisonous growths, yet leaving their roots intact. From now on, no debate about national or global policy can proceed without reading The Hillary Doctrine. It is the first book about high-level efforts to create a foreign policy as if women mattered.”—GLORIA STEINEM “For fifty years, grassroots global feminism has urged policy makers to see women, to see that women are the first and worst affected by violence, poverty, wars, displacement, and other catastrophes— yet they are the least and last to be consulted about solutions. Yet consciousness is finally trickling up, and the centrality of women to global security for all is a most welcome leap forward in legitimizing the crucial need for major policy re-visioning. Ignore this book at your peril.” —ROBIN MORGAN, author of The Demon Lover: The Roots of Terrorism
“Through a combination of case studies, interviews, and meticulous research including perhaps the most exhaustive compilation of data ever assembled on the subject, Hudson and Leidl make the case that the equality of women is not simply an issue of fairness. It is fundamental to peace and prosperity globally. This book is required reading for policy makers and implementers as well as anyone concerned about where we are going as a nation and a world.” —RYAN CROCKER, former ambassador to Afghanistan and Iraq, and dean, Bush School of Government and Public Service, Texas A&M University
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