DIPLOMATS need to be precise, just as surgeons or five-star chefs do. Sprinkle too much salt on your creation and you ruin the dish; plunge your scalpel into the wrong organs and you may lose the patient. Accordingly, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is learning that the nation’s top diplomat must not only be fastidious in what she does say, but also sure-footed in knowing what not to say.
Lately, Clinton has said some of the wrong things, in the wrong way, to the wrong people. Causing the most consternation was a remark she made at a televised town hall meeting in Bangkok about Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons. “If the US extends a defense umbrella over the region, if we do even more to support the military capacity of those in the Gulf,’’ she said, “it’s unlikely that Iran will be any stronger or safer, because they won’t be able to intimidate and dominate, as they apparently believe they can, once they have a nuclear weapon.’’
Aides had to explain she did not mean to imply that the Obama administration has given up hope of persuading Iran not to become a nuclear power. In this case, their explanation is convincing. She surely did not wish to suggest that the administration was scrapping a policy of prevention in favor of a policy of deterrence.
Clinton made the mistake of discussing a hypothetical, and doing it with a lack of verbal precision. She wanted to describe consequences Iran’s policy makers should keep in mind as they make decisions about their nuclear program. But she set off predictable alarm bells by invoking the prospect of America extending its nuclear umbrella - long committed to European and Asian allies - to Iran’s neighbors. Even if such a measure is under discussion in the administration, Clinton should not have broached it in public. And she only made things worse with phrasing that made it seem she accepted Iran’s acquisition of a nuclear weapon as inevitable.
Her public blunders on Burma and North Korea may be less consequential, but they too required backtracking by her entourage. She was in effect making new policy on her own when she declared in Thailand that US investment sanctions on Burma - which President Obama recently renewed - would be lifted if the ruling junta released Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi. She also had to retract her call for the Association of Southeast Asian Nations to expel Burma if the junta does not change its thuggish ways. And she made a dangerous situation worse when she referred to North Korea’s leaders as “unruly teenagers.’’
Clinton has always been a quick study and will no doubt learn her new craft. But meanwhile she is proving that diplomacy is not as easy as it may look from the outside.
