It is not the first time that the Secretariat of State has gone to frustrated presidential ambitions. Hillary Clinton falls into the category, defeated in the 2008 primaries, and then called by Obama, pledge and symbol of the alliance with Bill, as well as with herself, protagonist in her own right. To stay only in the last century, William Jennings Bryan, the great populist leader, called by Wilson in 1913. Edmund Muskie, in the final round of Carter, 80-81. And now John Kerry, Democratic candidate defeated by Bush Jr. in 2004.
There have been strong Secretaries, and the name that immediately jumps out is that of Henry Kissinger, in the mid-70s. It may have been his capacity for vision, diplomatic and negotiating skills, coldness of action, but his stature owes much to the fact that for the central phase of his mandate he found himself alongside an inevitably weak president, an excellent person but who arrived after the Watergate by constitutional succession and did not vote, Speaker of the House Gerald Ford.
Since the Roosevelt years, most Secretaries of State have handled diplomacy, and enforced decisions made in the White House, sometimes even in their absence. Kerry, 69, arrives after a lasting presence in the Senate, like Hillary Clinton indeed. It can boast a dense network of international relations that Obama has already used often, with Kerry a discreet negotiator and itinerant shadow ambassador.
Above all Kerry does not have, unlike Hillary, particular family and personal legacies to defend and will be able to devote himself better to an urgent task: redefining American foreign policy interests and priorities, adapt them to a new and more difficult world, to an America with less financial resources, at least at the moment. And he will be able to explain everything to a decidedly disoriented public opinion in foreign policy. Torn between the desire to quickly resolve knots that are not always military but only with surgical interventions and brief military presences, and the opposite desire to redefine national interests in a reductive way so that there is no longer a need for military interventions, unless someone doesn't attack Guam or Puerto Rico or sink a US aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf.
“What looks like planning is often the projection into the future of what is familiar today,” Kissinger wrote in the third edition of his American Foreign Policymiscellaneous of various interventions. Kerry takes office while the familiar contours of American foreign policy, and the reference is to that which already incorporated the great post-USSR and post-Chinese boom changes of 20-15 years ago, are increasingly blurred. If Hillary Clinton could handle the existing focus on Asia and America's great creditor, China, Kerry needs to go further. And in the Senate confirmation hearing on January 24, you made it clear. Focusing on link between domestic policy and foreign policy, the second function of the first, and on the crux of the economy.
“More than ever – he told his former colleagues in the Foreign Affairs Commission – foreign policy is economic policy”, adding that “in many respects the riskiest challenge to American foreign policy will be in your hands rather than mine”. It will therefore be in the credibility of American public finances, in the solidity of the financial system and in the strength of the production system even before the professionalism and ability of diplomacy. After all, already almost three years ago the then Chief of Defense Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, had indicated public finances and finance in general as the point of greatest concern for national security. In short, in the credibility of America.
Asia and the Persian Gulf will be central. But the long-neglected relationship with Russia also needs attention.
Europe? After half America and three-quarters of Wall Street cheered for the end of the euro, perhaps an old traveler on all the old consular roads, chaussées, landstrassen and carreteras of Europe, fluent in French which is not necessarily a plus, will have something new to say.
