Newly sworn-in Secretary of State John Kerry, formerly the senior senator from Massachusetts, faces a complex and dangerous landscape of international affairs, as he takes the helm. Many astute observers believe Sec. Hillary Rodham Clinton reinvented the job of Sec. of State, in many ways playing an official version of the role her husband enjoys, at Clinton Global Initiative, what some call serving as “president of the world”—not political leader, but deliberative issue leader on humanitarian and development issues.
Sec. Clinton oversaw a dramatic reorganization of development priorities. In many cases, her “3D Diplomacy”—Diplomacy, Development, Defense—constituted pioneering work, but much of that work was supposed to have been going on, in line with the United States’ pledges in relation to the UN’s Millennium Development Goals. What Clinton found, when she arrived at State, however, was that much of the MDG work the US had committed to had been stalled in the previous decade.
If Clinton became a kind of global humanitarian development executive, Kerry faces the challenge of filling her shoes and doing so without losing the spirit of the work. Sec. Clinton made daring efforts to advance the rights of women and girls, and to prioritize recognition of LGBT rights in developing nations. She traveled to militia-ridden eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, where women face possiblly the most grave and persistent danger of anywhere on Earth.
She did not shy away from combat zones or scenes of chronic endemic poverty, nor did she shy away from challenging authoritarian abuses directly and explicitly, whether in Burma, China or Sudan. Her tenure saw what many believe was covert structural support and communications facilitation for the activists that engineered and carried out the revolutions of the Arab Spring.
Sec. Kerry inherits a world that faces new and pervasive threats to political stability, with everyone expecting the Clinton ethic of 3D diplomacy. Among the most significant challenges Kerry will face:
- The urgent need to address human-caused climate destabilization now, before nations disappear, borders disintegrate and tens of millions flee their homes
- The potential for the rise of militant fundamentalists and violent extremists from the power vacuum left as dictatorships fall across the Arabic-speaking world
- The political and economic balancing act required to do business effectively with the EU, the G20, the BRIC nations, OPEC and the African Union, all at once
- The very real need to tie civil liberalization to development and military aid, to ensure the long-term democratic resiliency of military and development partners
- The increasingly urgent need to use diplomatic means to achieve an aggressive and sustainable technological transition away from fossil fuels, the world over
- The historic requirement that he succeed in further advancing the work of Pres. Obama and Sec. Clinton in starting toward “a world without nuclear weapons”
- Working with Vladimir Putin’s government to avoid a new round of global polarization of interests, to safeguard multilateral negotiations and advance shared security
- The problem of the apparently degenerating crisis involving the government of Israel and the Palestinian Authority
- The perilous security situation that may arise from the ultimate winding down of persistent military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan
- Failing or teetering states: Mali, Somalia, Yemen, Afghanistan, and possibly: Pakistan and Libya, where militants still seek power
All of that is happening, even as the global economy continues to grapple with the corrosive aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. European banks seem to hover on the brink; central banks are “doing acrobatics”, as some have said, to make capital available and rescue national economies; Greece and Spain have more than 25% unemployment, more than 50% among young adults.
There are questions about the sustainability of economic trend-lines that dominate the US-China relationship. The US-China fiscal relationship is also at a crossroads, with China’s leadership in a transitional phase, and precise future policy not yet certain, and Sec. Geithner—a student of Chinese cultural, political and economic history, who is fluent in Mandarin—about to step down from leadership at Treasury.
The global food supply—the base of economic activity everywhere—is under mounting threat from pervasive human-caused climate destabilization. In each of the last five years, as climate bands have been displaced and record heat waves and extreme weather have become more common, major crop failure on one or more continents has burdened the global agricultural economy in unprecedented ways.
Securing food supply relationships not just for the US, but for nations at risk for political destabilization, may be one of the most significant, if underreported tasks facing the Kerry team at State. Sec. Clinton’s untiring and innovative work at State can provide important guidance for Kerry and the Obama administration, going forward.
Specifically:
- Make sure development, human rights, education, sustainability, environmental justice and security are linked;
- Promote medium- to long-term political and economic stability by building mutually beneficial relationships among rivals;
- Privilege known-effective human-scale initiatives, like micro-lending, maternal and child-health and education funding;
- Gradually, strategically coordinate global withdrawal of support from regimes that do not democratize in measurable, verifiable ways;
- Challenge and incentivize China, Russia, Brazil and India to help lead multilateral efforts to oppose domestic political abuses (e.g. Syria, North Korea, Iran, Sudan);
- Work to restructure international financial institutions to focus on real-world experience, at the human scale (individual liberties, family opportunities, community safety).
If John Kerry remains in his post as Sec. of State for the four years of Barack Obama’s second term as president, deliberate significant advancement on each of these fronts must be the measure of whether his work is on the right track and bearing fruit. Come January 2017, we should see increased coordination among governments to oppose climate change, abandon fossil fuels, expand civil liberties, undermine extremism, universalize real educational opportunity, secure the food supply, and measurably reduce the number of nuclear weapons in existence.
Good luck to Sec. Kerry. His success on these tasks will benefit billions of people around the world.