A note about Hillary meeting with hostile leaders... [View All]

[Kurt_and_Hunter]

There's a minor irony because she will be the Secretary of State, not president.

The whole primary controversy (which was a lot of nothing on both sides, truth be told) was about the wisdom of committing to meeting without preconditions on the head of state level.

Had Hillary become President she would not have met directly with 'hostile' heads of state without preconditions. She would have limited initial meetings to people like... well, like her Secretary of State.

But as Obama's SoS she is exactly the sort of sub-presidential level person who she argued should be having such meetings, whether in the Obama administration or in her administration or John Edward's administration.

Ironically, Hillary's view ("I will not meet with them") will prevail precisely by her meeting with them. And that will be how it plays out... if anyone really high profile meets personally with Achmenijad for instance (A giant IF in any scenario) it would be her, not Obama. (Likelier is her meeting with her equivalent in the Iranian hierarchy, which would itself be a pretty big deal and much more useful than meeting with a guy with no real foreign policy powers.)

Obama is WAY to smart, cautious and protective of his credibility to step into the dark, exposing himself to international humiliation through quixotic media-frenzy meetings with no clear outcome.

The whole primary issue was symbolic, not practical... a marker of dedication to diplomacy, not actual WH event planning. It is wise to remember how hard both campaigns worked to invent foreign policy differences to argue about because there was never really a dimes worth of difference between them in policy terms going forward. (Obama always supported designating the Iranian Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization, for instance, yet somehow that point on which he and Hillary agreed was central to a pretend primary 'disagreement' because it was in BOTH candidates' interest to have that faux disagreement at the time.)