Student Affairs 1 Student Affairs Strategic Plan 2008-2009 Results &Amp: Fill & Download for Free

well india and austarlia have a long cordial relations,they are attached as geographically as well.The ties between Australia and India started immediately following European settlement of Australia in 1788. On the founding of the penal colony of New South Wales, all trade to and from the colony was controlled by the British East India Company, although this was widely flouted.[1]The Western Australian town of Australind (est. 1841) is a portmanteau word named after Australia and India.[2] Australian towns of Cervantes, Northampton and Madura (est. 1876) were used for breeding cavalry horses for the British Indian Army during the late 19th century. The horses were used in the North-West Frontier Province (now Pakistan). Madura's name is likely to have originated from the Tamil Nadu city of Madurai.After World War II, the Australian government of Ben Chifley supported the independence of India from the British Empire to act as a frontier against communism.[4] Later, under Robert Menzies, Australia supported the admission of India as a Republic to the Commonwealth Nations.As part of the Colombo Plan,many Indian students were sponsored to come and study in Australia in the 1950s and 1960s.TIME OF CRISIS-Issues regarding expatriatesIn 2007 Mohamed Haneef, an Indian citizen working in Australia, was detained and his visa was cancelled after it was found that he was the second cousin of two men arrested for involvement in terrorist attacks in the UK; one later died of injuries. The Australian Federal Court criticised the Australian Immigration Minister Kevin Andrews for his conduct. The Government of India and the Human Rights Commission were concerned about the treatment of Haneef and the Australian High Commissioner to India was summoned to Ministry of External Affairs in New Delhi.Haneef won both cases against the Government of Australia, his visa was restored and he was cleared of any alleged links to religious terrorism.2009–10 attacks on Indian studentsMain article: 2009 attacks on Indian students in AustraliaIn 2009 relations were strained between the two nations by attacks against Indian students, dubbed "curry bashings" by some sections of the media, in Australia.[Police had denied any racial motivation but this was viewed differently by the government in India and students in Australia, leading to high-level meetings with Australian officials.[14] As a result of this, the largest trade union in Bollywood placed a ban on filming in Australia until the Australian government took action.[15] There were also calls in the Indian community to apply a travel ban on Australia.[16] In India, the attacks contributed to stereotypes of a racist Australia.[17][18]In January 2010, Nitin Garg, an Indian graduate with permanent residence in Australia, was stabbed to death.[19] His attacker, a fifteen-year-old male, was sentenced to thirteen years in 2011. As the only Indian student to die violently in Australia since intense Indian media coverage of the violence started in May 2009, his death was immediately described as a "race attack" by Indian media,[20] sparking strong expressions of anger and anti-Australian sentiment in India. The motive for murder was later found to be the result of a spontaneous attempt to rob Garg of his mobile phone.[21][22]Indian External Affairs Minister S.M. Krishna described the murder as a "heinous crime on humanity" which was creating "deep anger" in India and "certainly will have some bearing on the bilateral ties between our two countries".[23]Australian Prime Minister Mr. Kevin Rudd said that "Australia valued its education system and International Students are valued more here in Australia." Mr. Rudd though said that his Govt. has ordered a thorough probe into the attacks and also condemned it in strongest possible terms, and whilst no significant break-through was achieved immediately, during recent years the attacks have been virtually eliminated by strong police enforcement and community involvement. Under the leadership of Prime Minister of Australia Julia Gillard the relations between both the nations have significantly improved on part due to her holistic approach in relationsPRESENT CONDITIONat present there is no such attacks reported by aus on indian personals,various aus premiere such as Kevin rudd,julia gilbert have made positive relationship with india.The recent visit by abbot has further boosted our ties .The India-Australia relationship has moved well beyond a mutual fondness for cricket. Freed from the ideological baggage of Cold War politics, India’s rising economic profile and two-way trade opportunities, the large Indian diaspora in Australia and India’s rising military strength and growing naval presence have facilitated the convergence of interests of the two biggest naval powers in the Indian Ocean region.It’s money that mattersRecent years have seen remarkable growth in the trading relationship between India and Australia. A decade ago, India wasn’t in the top ten destinations for Australian exports. Today India is Australia’s fifth-largest export partner. India accounts for $A11.4 billion or 3.6% of Australian exports.India is not only a trade destination for Australia, but it is also a source of investment in Australia – which has reached $11 billion. Indian companies such as Tata Consultancy, Infosys, Mahindra Aerospace and Adani’s mining venture have made significant investments in the Australian economy. Two-way trade has grown in value from A$5.1 billion in 2003 to A$15.2 billion in 2013.Abbott’s visit will address the ongoing Australia-India Comprehensive Economic Cooperation Agreement negotiations. According to a 2008 feasibility study, the agreement, if it had been adopted then, would have yielded a gain to Australia of $43 billion over the period 2010-20 (in 2008 net present value terms) and a gain to India’s real GDP of $46 billion.Once materialised, the free-trade agreement would broaden the base of merchandise trade and encourage two-way trade by lowering tariff barriers, bringing regulatory transparency, reducing border restrictions on trade in goods and services and enhancing investment protections. The surging Indian economy has an immense appetite for resources. Australia can fill this gap.The sale of uranium: on the top of the agendaAs widely speculated, the Abbott-Modi meeting is likely to seal the deal on negotiations for exporting uranium to India, which began under the Gillard Labor government.Reportedly, Indian officials have assured and convinced Australian officials that the uranium from Australia will be used only for civilian purposes. India’s energy mix contains 3-4% of nuclear energy. Nuclear energy could constitute around 20-25% of Indian energy by 2050.Thus this is a big market for Australia to tap. Australia has 40% of the world’s uranium reserves and the sale of uranium will not only help India’s energy security efforts, but will also strengthen the trust between the two countries.Defence and security issuesThe Modi-Abbott meeting will take further steps to bolster defence and security co-operation. There has been a convergence of views between the nations on traditional and non-traditional security threats, including protecting the global commons and the sea lanes of communication and preventing the spread of illiberal democracies and Islamic terrorism.Since the unfolding of a quadrilateral initiative followed by a naval exercise in the Bay of Bengal in 2007, Australia and India’s defence forces – particularly their naval forces – have increased the level of interactions.In November 2009, then-Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd and his Indian counterpart Manmohan Singh issued a joint statement on an agreement to upgrade bilateral relations to the level of a “strategic partnership”. This was followed by a Joint Declaration on Security Cooperation aimed at streamlining their joint efforts to maintain peace, stability and prosperity through closer cooperation on security challenges in the Asia-Pacific region.

Addendum: I can't emphasize this enough, but the collapse of the U.S. is NOT something I want to see happen. The effects would be disastrous, and not just for the American people. But as someone who has friends, family, and colleagues in the U.S. who are currently fearing for their families, their lives, their freedoms, and the fate of their country, I feel the need to speak out. I also feel personally involved since what happens in the U.S. affects people that I care about a great deal.I didn't write this to disparage the U.S. or get caught up in some partisan rhetoric-fueled argument. This is my honest appraisal as a historian, as a concerned individual, and as a futurist who's worried about the future. So please, do not take this personally, and if you have disagreements, please feel free to debate what I've said here with references.I hate to say it, but yes, I believe it is. At least, that's the prospect unless the U.S. undergoes a serious overhaul in terms of its policies, both domestic and foreign, and comes to terms with its history. However, given the fact that all attempts at reform in the past four decades have either been categorically rejected or only instituted halfway, it seems likely that collapse will happen.Just look at the progression… In every respect - economically, politically, socially, militarily, and ethically - the United States has been regressing since the late 1970s. What's worse, the fact of this decline has been falsely attributed to people and policies that had nothing to do with it, while the real causes have been concealed and dismissed.The problem has become so acute that people are actually willing to reject science, anything said by the "mainstream media," and dismiss anything that doesn't reinforce their prejudices and biases. And it seems like the only reason for any of this is that people can continue to pretend they are not wrong in their convictions or care more about partisan fighting than they do the state of the nation.As I said, this process began in earnest in the late 1970s can be discerned from five major symptoms, which include:Monetary and trade deficits and massive debtDeregulation hurting the U.S. economy and middle classA widening gap between the rich and the poorAn increasing percentage of citizens in jailUse of military force to enforce economic interestsThese are the classic moves made by empires in a state of decline. As Ronald Wright said in A Short History of Progress, where he described how the Mayan rulers responded to the decline of their civilization:As the crises gathered, the response of the rulers was not to seek a new course, to cut back on royal and military expenditures, to put effort into land reclamation through terracing, or encourage birth control (means of which the Maya may have known). No, they dug in their heels and carried on doing what they had always done, only more so. Their solution was higher pyramids, more power to the kings, harder work for the masses, more foreign wars. In modern terms, the Maya elite became extremists, or ultra-conservatives, squeezing the last drops of profit from nature and humanity.When I read this book back in 2005, I instantly thought of the Bush administration and his cabal of neo-cons. Their regressive policies, their glorification of the past, their foreign wars, power grabs, voodoo economics, and the way they demanded others suffer and die for their failures and lies - it all had the stink of imperialists trying to save the empire through senseless measures.In any case, here are the symptoms and how they are contributing to the U.S.' decline:1. Monetary and Trade Deficits:In terms of wealth, America's decline became highly evident during the late 1970s. At this time, America was at a crossroads. The Vietnam War had caused the Gross Public Debt (GPD) to go from over 360 hundred billion in 1960 to just over 1 trillion by 1978. The country's dependence on foreign oil had also been demonstrated by the OPEC Crisis of '73 and the Iranian Revolution of '79.U.S. National Deficit and Debt History with ChartsWatergate had a drastic impact on the confidence Americans had for their government institutions. The post-war boom was also coming to an end and economic growth became stagnant for the first time since the end of WWII. Effectively, America was going from being a creditor nation (one that everyone owed) to a debtor nation (one that owed everybody).In response, then-president Jimmy Carter addressed the nation and spoke of the "crisis of confidence" Americans were feeling. He spoke of the importance of curbing America's dependence on foreign oil, the need to develop synthetic fuels and renewable energy, the need for American's to curb their energy consumption, and the need for Americas leaders to once again lead.This speech came to be known as Carter's "malaise speech", even though he never used the term. While it led to sweeping reform that cut America's oil imports in half, spearheaded the development of alternative fuels and energy, and reduced domestic energy consumption, American's came to view the speech and the Carter administration with enmity.In 1980, when they went to the polls, they turned Carter into a one-term president and swept Ronald Reagan into power. As President, Reagan went to work undoing generations of consensus-building politics and laid the groundwork for a new conservative orthodoxy in government. One of his greatest measures was to cut taxes twice for the most wealthy citizens.He did this in 1981, where income taxes for the highest tax bracket were reduced from 70% to 50%. In 1986, he passed a second round of tax cuts, from 50% to 38.5%, but decreased them further to 28% in the following years. As a result, the budget deficit increased from $74 billion in 1980 to $221 billion in 1990. Corporate taxes were also cut under Reagan, going from 46% to 40% and then down to 34% between 1985–89.Reagan combined these revenue-cutting measures with boosted military spending on a number of programs, not the least of which was the Strategic Defense Initiative (the progenitor of Missile Defense). Apparently, Reagan loved the idea because it was nicknamed the "Star Wars" initiative, which is why research continued into the technology despite the fact that multiple assessments said it was unfeasible and prohibitively expensive.All of this had a noticeable effect on the U.S. economy and society. Between 1981 and 1989, the public debt almost tripled, going from $1.358 trillion to $3.666 trillion. The gap between the rich and the poor also widened considerably (more on that below), with the vast majority of gains made since the 1980s going to top 10% and 1% of earners.Things only got worse as time went on. Under George H.W. Bush, the debt increased by an additional $1.7 trillion, reaching a total of roughly $5.37 trillion by 1993. This tradition of deficit-spending continued until Clinton's presidency, who not only managed to preside over one of the longest periods of economic growth in U.S. history, but also turned the deficit into a $200 billion dollar surplus.However, that surplus was quickly turned back into deficit-spending under Clinton's successor, George W. Bush. Using the Reagan administration as a model, Bush combined high-spending with tax cuts that favored the wealthy and promised it would lead to economic growth. Instead, the U.S. economy did poorly under Bush and the GPD continued to climb, effectively doubling between 2001 and 2009 - $7.32 trillion to $14.59 trillion.Under Obama, the situation did not improve. While he too managed to turn the economy around on his watch, the GPD continued to climb, reaching above $21 trillion by 2017 when he left office. However, much of this is attributed to the tax cuts Republicans demanded for top earners in exchange for passing a budget. In addition, revenue declined sharply in part because the U.S. was experiencing its worst economic downturn since 1929.Today, the GPD debt stands at just under $24 trillion, and there is no end in site. Especially when you consider that one of the few pieces of legislation that the Trump administration has passed included a tax bill that slashed income taxes for the wealthy (again!) and is expected to balloon the deficit (not debt) by between $448 billion and $1 trillion over the next ten years.What Are the Costs of the Trump Tax Cuts to You?In terms of trade, the U.S. also began to accumulate a significant deficit. Beginning in the late 1970s, the U.S. began to run a small trade deficit, which reached a high of $18 billion by the mid-1989s. The problem diminished during the administrations of Bush Sr. and Clinton, but then was exasperated in the extreme during the administration of George W. Bush, reaching an imbalance of almost $70 billion by 2008.Since then, the situation has become better and worse. By 2010, with the end of the Great Recession, trade began to recover and the deficit dropped to slightly over $20 billion. However, as the U.S. economy began to experience a surge during Obama's second term in office, the deficit hovered around $40 billion before dipping down into the $50 to 60 billion range by the time Trump took office.2. Deregulation:Reagan also spearheaded a trend of deregulation, where the conventions established after WWII (such as the Bretton Woods Agreement) were targeted and removed. These included Nixon-era price controls that were put in place to prevent inflation, like controls on oil and gas, cable television, long-distance phone service, interstate bus services and ocean shipping.In 1982, Reagan deregulated banking with the passage of the Garn-St Germain Depository Institutions Act of 1982, which removed restrictions on loan-to-value ratios for savings and loan banks. Reagan also cut the budget and reduced the regulatory staff at the Federal Home Loan Bank Board. As a result, banks began investing in risky real estate ventures.All of this contributed to the 1987 stock market crash, which was the worst since 1929, and the "Savings and Loan" Crisis of 1989. The crisis ushered in the 1990 recession, from which the economy was slow to recover. This contributed to the ousting of George H.W. Bush to challenger Bill Clinton in the 1992 federal election.From 1993 to 1999, President Clinton presided over a period of economic recovery and impressive growth. However, in 1997, a Republican-led Congress passed the Taxpayer Relief Act, which slashed capital gains taxes and led to much higher levels of speculative investment. This led to the I.T. Bubble, which effectively burst in 2000 and led to another economic downturn.Things did not improve under the Bush Jr., who passed some of the largest tax cuts in U.S. history upon assuming office, which naturally favored the wealthy. Like Reagan, he also combined these with high-spending and deregulation, and the results were even worse. In 2007-08, after several years of slow economic recovery and sluggish job growth after 9/11, the U.S. experienced its worst crash and subsequent recession since the Great Depression.According to the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission's report (2010), the collapse was attributable to four major causes:Widespread failures in financial regulation, including the Federal Reserve's failure to stem the tide of toxic mortgages;Dramatic breakdowns in corporate governance including too many financial firms acting recklessly and taking on too much risk;An explosive mix of excessive borrowing and risk by households and Wall Street that put the financial system on a collision course with crisis;Key policymakers ill-prepared for the crisis, lacking a full understanding of the financial system they oversaw; and systemic breaches in accountability and ethics at all levelsFinancial Crisis Inquiry Commission - WikipediaAll of these could be traced to administrations stretching back to Reagan and included both Republican and Democratic lawmakers. However, the lion's share of responsibility fell squarely on the shoulders of the Republicans and Bush Jr. In particular, it was the way that sub-prime mortgages and the way the SEC in 2004 relaxed the net capital rule that caused the Real Estate Bubble and the massive accumulation of debts by investment banks - two major contributing factors.The Obama administration inherited this mess, and after four years of job losses (8 million since 2007), he managed to turn the economy around and added 10 million jobs. Once again, those gains are being threatened by a Republican successor (Trump) who is once again pushing tax cuts and deregulation.3. Widening Gap Between Rich and Poor:Another major shift by the 1980s was how Reagan threw out decades of bringing labor and industry under one roof - a tradition established with the New Deal. Reagan instead pushed the concept of "supply side economics," where industrialists, bankers and corporate CEOs were the ones who made economic policy and the government ensures that they get tax breaks and benefits as part of the package.The results speak for themselves. Beginning in the 1980s, household incomes of working- and middle-class families ceased keeping pace with GDP and became stagnant. Over the next few decades, the amount of wealth controlled by the top 10% of earners increased immensely, reaching over $70 trillion by 2007 (based on 2013 numbers).To break those numbers down, by 2007, 34.6% of the national wealth was concentrated in the hands of the top 1% of the population. Meanwhile, the next 4% controlled 27.3% of the wealth, while the next 5% controlled 11.2%. That's a total of 73% of the wealth controlled by the top 10% of the population.Meanwhile, the middle-class had the following breakdown of the wealth. While the upper-middle (20% of the U.S.) had control over 10.9% of the wealth, the rest of the middle-class (20% of the U.S.) controlled 4%. And then the bottom 40% of earners, the working-class and the poor, controlled just 0.2% of the wealth.However, those numbers become skewed even further when you consider that between 1982 and 1990, the number of billionaires went from 11 to 100. That trend has continued until today, with roughly 540 billionaires (0.000065% of the population) in the United States with a combined net worth of $2.399 trillion (2% of the wealth). Those numbers have only become worse as of 2014.4. Growing % of Population in Jail:Another ugly development was how the 1980s and 90s saw a significant rise in violent crime as the country's inner cities decayed and fell prey to drugs and gang violence. While crime had been steadily rising throughout the 60s and 70s, it experienced a sharp rise during the early 80s, then an even sharper rise again in the early 90s, coinciding with Reagan and George H.W. Bush's presidencies.The worst of it came in 1987 with the massive economic downturn that was part of the wider "Savings and Loans Crisis." After a rapid recovery from the recessions of the early 1980s, the market experienced a sudden and massive drop. The crisis continued into the 1990s and is generally attributed to the economic deregulation that took place under Reagan in the early 1980s.Narcotics arrests also rose predictably, peaking in 2006, with 1.9 million people arrested in a single year. This trend has continued well into the millennium, with a greater and greater percentage of Americans being placed in prisons that were becoming increasingly overcrowded. Rates peaked around 2010, with roughly 950 people being incarcerated per 100,000 people in the U.S.By the end 2016, it was estimated that about 2,298,300 people out of the total population of 324.2 million were currently behind bars - that works out to 0.7% of the population, which is the highest ranking in the world! The causes for this are varied, but generally have to do with the convergence of tougher economic conditions with tougher sentencing laws.What is especially stark about this is that incarcerations continued to rise at a time when violent crime has been in free fall. In fact, between when it peaked in the early 1990s and early 2000s, homicides and violent crime in general decreased by almost half. Since then, the trend has fluctuated, but the general trend is downward, going from 463 reported crimes per 100,000 of the population to just under 400.5. Military Misadventures:In the aftermath of the Vietnam War, the U.S. began to undergo a series of reforms in both its military and intelligence sectors. The Armed Forces were overhauled to create an all-volunteer fighting force, and the CIA (which had had a relatively free hand before and during the war) found its powers significantly curtailed.However, beginning with Reagan, a new tradition began, which was the use of military force in defiance of international law to enforce economic policy and/or demonstrate military supremacy. Examples of this include the invasion of Grenada in Oct of 1983 and the bombing of Libya in April of 1986.In the former case, the Reagan administration ordered in the troops ostensibly to protect "the 600 U.S. medical students on the island" and put down a Marxist-Leninist military junta that had been running the island since 1979. The U.N. General Assembly condemned the action as a violation of international law, and legal scholars agree with this assessment.Not only was there no basis for humanitarian intervention (since there was no reason to assume U.S. citizens were in any danger) there was no basis for asserting that the invasion was to ensure peace and security since there was no threat to the U.S. In reality, Reagan likely ordered in the Marines because he was afraid of another hostage crisis (like what took place in Iran in 1979) and knew that a Marxist junta would not support U.S. economic interests in the region.But most of all, it is likely he was looking to distract people from the Beirut barracks bombing, which took place just two days prior. This terrorist attack was the result of the Lebanese Civil War that was raging at the time, which led to the U.S. and France stationing peacekeeping forces there. All told, 241 U.S. military personnel, 58 French military personnel, and six civilians were killed, making this the most deadly single-day for U.S. forces since Vietnam or WWII.The bombing of Libya in 1986 was not much different. For years, Qaddafi had been seen as a threat to U.S. and Israeli interests, was suspected of starting a nuclear program, and was accused of supporting terrorist organizations (echoes of the Iraq War in 2003). Though to be fair, Qaddafi was supporting terrorist acts and the U.S. had documentation that backed this up.1986 United States bombing of Libya - WikipediaNevertheless, Reagan responded to a terrorist bombing in West Berlin by ordering a massive airstrike against Libya. Once again, they did so despite the objections of the U.N. and even NATO allies. In total, some 60 - 75 people were killed, 15 to 45 of whom were civilians, and it did not have the desired effect. Qaddafi's support of terrorism continued and included the hijacking of Pan Am Flight 73 (which resulted in the deaths of 20 people).During the Bush Sr. administration, things did not fare much better. In some respects, the military operations taking place were clean-up operations from the Reagan administration. In 1989, the U.S. invaded Panama in order to seize Manuel Noriega, the man who had taken power in Panama between 1981 and 83 with U.S. help.For several years, he was the U.S.' largest ally in Latin America because he supported the U.S. "War on Drugs" (despite amassing millions from drug trafficking) and facilitating the transfer of illicit weapons, military equipment and cash to counter-insurgency groups in South and Central America.However, after years of criminal behavior and his decision to nationalize the Panama Canal, Bush had to order in the troops because he was becoming a liability. Again, the legality of this was dubious at best, since it involved invading another country and abducting the head of state so they could be tried in a U.S. court.In 1991, Bush was forced to deal with another Reagan-era mess after Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein (another former U.S. ally) decided to invade Kuwait. In 1980, Hussein had chosen to invade Iran, hoping to take advantage of the fact that the country was unstable after the 1979 Revolution. As the war began to go south on him, the Reagan administrations sent Iraq billions in economic aid, "dual-use technology," military intelligence, special operations training, and weapons.The weapons included the chemical and biological precursors for botulism, anthrax, and nerve gas, which Saddam proceeded to bombard Iranian cities with and even his own people (the northern Kurds). After months of mobilization, the war to liberate Kuwait lasted only 100 hours and was followed by massive celebrations as troops were brought home and the government declared that the U.S. had overcome the legacy of Vietnam.The reality, however, was anything but pleasant. Over 200,000 Iraqis were killed, captured or wounded, the U.S. was facing sharp criticism over the death of civilians (such as the "Highway of Death" incident) and the Bush administration had concluded a hastily put-together treaty with Hussein that allowed him to remain in power and keep vital military assets (like his attack choppers).This meant that all the northern Kurds and southern Shias that had been encouraged to revolt against Saddam were now vulnerable to reprisal. And reprisals came as Saddam's choppers began attacking north and south and people were murdered en masse. This required the imposition of a "No-Fly Zone" to the north and south of the country and a ten-year embargo that effectively crippled the Iraqi economy and led to many deaths by starvation and lack of proper medical care.Speaking of which, it was the U.S. decision to mobilize to Saudi Arabia to liberate Kuwait (and the Saudi's decision to allow for permanent U.S. bases there) that turned another Reagan-era ally into a liability. This was Osama bin Laden, a Saudi national who traveled to Afghanistan in 1979 to take part in the war against the Soviets. During his time there, he benefited from the money and weapons shipments arranged by the U.S. government.In 1988, Reagan's final year as president, he formed Al-Qaeda for the purposes of waging jihad against what he saw as Islam's other enemies (which included the U.S.). After Operation Desert Storm, Osama declared war on the U.S. and began spending the next 20 years waging a terrorist campaign against U.S. embassies, U.S. military forces, and U.S. civilians (the most notorious example being 9/11).This terrorist attack, which cost the lives of over 3000 people, was used as pretext by the Bush administration to Iraq for the second time. This was one of two deployments that took place post-9/11, and given the number of troops deployed - 16,000 to Afghanistan, 150,000 to Iraq - it was clear where the administration's priorities lay.To call the Iraq War a misadventure would be an understatement in the extreme. First, there was the issue of international law, where it is entirely illegal for a state to invade a country on the basis of improving conditions for its people. That same argument was used as a pretext to launch all colonial wars on up to the 1930s (i.e., "we're civilizing the people"), hence why the international law expressly forbids it.Knowing this, the Bush and Blair administrations attempted to fabricate a case based on security, claiming Iraq had restarted its nuclear program, was continuing to develop chemical and biological weapons, had ties to Al-Qaeda, and even helped plan 9/11. These were categorically false claims, and many were debunked during the lead-up to the invasion. In particular, the claim that Saddam had sought a vast quantity of yellowcake uranium from Niger and that Iraqi officials met with Al-Qaeda in Prague before 9/11.These claims were based entirely on the testimony of two questionable foreign sources who were in the habit of selling information for money. Claims about the restarted nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons research were based on testimony provided by Ahmed Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress - an organization of ex-pats who had lost their properties and fortunes when Saddam took over.Most of these people had even been back to their country in over a decade and their group had an obvious agenda. The U.S. even installed Chalabi after the invasion to oversee the country's oil wealth, which mainly involved approving contracts for companies with financial ties to Bush' cabinet.More importantly, testimony and documents provided by former NSA director Richard Clarke III and former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neil (as well as multiple Washington insiders) indicated that the Bush administration was planning an invasion of Iraq months before 9/11 even occurred. Also, the documents provided by O'Neil included plans to divvy up the countries oil wealth to specific corporations - again, who had financial ties to the Bush admin. In short, 9/11 was used a pretext to conduct an invasion that was already planned out.Far worse than the false pretext were the disastrous results. Between 2003 and 2011, an estimated 461,000 people were killed as a result of the invasion, post-war rioting and looting, the insurgency, the civil war, and shortages of food, water and medicine. The invasion also led to the creation of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, the emergence of ISIS, and the still-raging civil war in Syria. The cost of the Iraq war itself is now estimated at between $2 and $3 trillion, which was so high in part because of the huge interest costs since the war was financed with borrowed money.During the occupation, crimes of war were committed by U.S. and coalition forces, particularly in the town of Fallujah. It began with U.S. troops opening fire on a crowd of protesters who were upset over the closing of the local high school. This led to the insurgency in the north, which U.S. forces responded to by dropping white phosphorous on the city, killing and burning many civilians. The scenes from Abu Ghraib and Samara also detail the extensive use of torture and humiliation in order to extract confessions.It is important to note that this was merely one country specified in the "Axis of Evil" speech, which claimed that Iraq, Iran and North Korea were all complicit in financing "global terrorism." However, within the context of the neo-conservative movement in general and the Bush administration in particular, the real intent was clear: eliminate all rogue states and secure overseas sources of oil to make the U.S. unassailable.Much the same is true when it came to "Missile Defense," which claimed to about protecting the U.S. and its allies against rogue states like Iran and North Korea. But anyone could see from their deployment that it was all about countering Russian nuclear missiles - should the need arise. This had a terrible effect on relations with Russia and encouraged Putin to step up his bullying and intimidation of neighboring states.This was the driving force behind neo-con think tanks like Project for the New American Century (PNAC) since the 1990s. PNAC and others like it emerged in response to the fall of the Soviet Union, the rise of China, and emboldened by their revisionist history regarding Ronald Reagan. PNAC played a crucial role in the election of George W. Bush, and many of its signatory members - Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Lewis Libby, Dan Quayle, and Jeb Bush- were prominent Republicans and members of the Bush administration.At home, the situation was not much better. Using 9/11 as a pretext, the Bush administration began conducting regular surveillance on U.S. citizens (which include cyber espionage and warrantless wiretaps) under the Patriot Act. They also legalized torture under the guise of "enhanced interrogation techniques." These measures eliminated the clause of Habeas Corpus from U.S. law and turned Guantanamo Bay into a notorious torture center, much like Abu Ghraib.Fortunately, thanks to the severe failures of the Bush Administration - the disastrous post-war situation in Iraq, Hurricane Katrina, the Great Recession - Bush was considered a "lame duck" president during his second term and could not start any more wars (not for lack of trying though). However, despite the Democratic victories in 2006 and 2008, little changed with Obama as president and Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State. While the "war on terror" motif was dropped from the foreign policy lexicon, military force continued to be used as an instrument of policy.For example, while Obama pulled troops from Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. has since re-stationed troops in both nations because the situation failed to resolve itself. The Obama administration also continued a protracted air war against Al-Qaeda and affiliates in western Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, and Somalia using drone strikes. These airstrikes caused an untold number of civilian casualties, did nothing to eliminate terrorist organizations, or improve the situation in those countries. In addition, domestic surveillance did not stop under Obama but expanded in the form of the NSA's PRISM program.And now, with Trump as president, all bets are off. Owing to his erratic and unhinged nature, the U.S. could find itself deployed to any number of fronts. But what is interesting is the fact that Trump revoked the Obama administration's policy of reporting casualties from drone strikes (aka. the Drone Law). A small measure of transparency passed by Obama is therefore gone.If further misadventures happen, it is likely they will take place in Iran or North Korea, or possibly Venezuela. However, at this juncture, it looks like the U.S. is too overstretched and too broke to finance any more wars.Bonus - Tolerance of Corruption:I felt like throwing this in considering how relevant it is to today's political situation. Right now, the U.S. has a sitting president who got into office by (allegedly) conspiring with a foreign (and hostile) nation. Despite what some might think, this is something of a tradition among ruthless, right-wing presidential hopefuls.The first to do this was Ronald Reagan, the only president that has been accused of committing what was essentially high treason during his presidency. This was known as the "Iran-Contra Affair," which took place between 1985 and 1987 and involved the Reagan administration orchestrating secret weapons sales to Iran (which was under an arms embargo) and using that money to fund the Contra militants in Nicaragua.The Reagan administration tried to excuse the weapons sales by claiming it was for the release of hostages, but Congressional investigation revealed that the arms sales went back to 1981, before the people in question had been taken hostage. The funding of the Contras, a right-wing terrorist group accused of running drugs and killing civilians, was blamed on Col. Oliver North of the National Security Council.Then you have what Nixon did in 1968. At the time, he passed messages to the South Vietnamese president, Nguyen Van Thieu, telling him to stall on the peace talks. The reason was that Nixon knew that if Johnson got a peace deal from North Vietnam, he'd win the upcoming election. Johnson knew about this, but could do nothing about it since he only learned of the phone call from an illegal wiretap the U.S. had installed in Thieu's office. Because of this, the plan succeeded, Thieu stalled on the peace talks, and Nixon the election.Much has been said about the Reagan years and this man's accomplishments and failures, but the over-riding positive claims made by old-school Republicans is that he "made them feel good to be American again." And it's certainly true. Reagan's charm and charismatic personality did give a lot of people a warm, fuzzy feeling deep down. But behind that veneer, he was setting trends in motion that would set the stage for men like George W. and Donald Trump.In 1988, Americans once again went to the voting booths and chose to continue this trend by electing George H.W. Bush as the 41st president of the U.S. In many ways, the Bush administration was plagued by the mistakes of his predecessor – in terms of the nation's economy as well as its foreign and domestic policy. For this reason, Bush became a one-term president and lost to Clinton in 1992.However, eight years later, the U.S. once again fell beneath the specter of corrupt GOP leadership. In 2001, George W. Bush became president amid one of the most contested elections in U.S. history. The so-called "voting irregularities" that took place in Florida were the result of widespread suppression, misinformation and voter fraud on behalf of then-Governor Jeb Bush.This was compounded by the fact that the recount was overseen by Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, who was also serving as co-chair of George W. Bush's election efforts in Florid. The final touch was the way the U.S. Supreme Court, which was stacked with Republican judges at the time, chose to overrule the Florida Supreme Court's decision calling for a manual recount, effectively making Bush the winner.A massive act of partisan-fueled corruption not only went unpunished but was rewarded. Eight months later, 9/11 happened and the majority of American people swallowed the narrative that Bush was "doing a good job since 9/11" or that questioning the president now would be "unpatriotic." People willingly buried their critical thinking and rational faculties and for the sake of national loyalty.It wasn't until 2005, after the 9/11 Commission revealed Bush had been repeatedly warned over the previous 8 months about an impending attack but did nothing, that the lies about WMDs and ties to Al-Qaeda were exposed, and Hurricane Katrina flooded New Orleans – that Americans felt safe criticizing him again. And yet, he was not impeached for his crimes and lasted another two years, adding the Great Recession to his long list of massive failures.And in the latest and worst example of corruption being tolerated at the highest levels, the American people went to the polls in 2016 and elected a man notorious for sexually assaulting women, swapping out his wives for younger women, sexualizing his own daughter, committing fraud, saying incredibly stupid, racist, hurtful, ugly, bigoted things, and praising Vladimir Putin and other enemy despots. It also became clear that Russia - the source of the DNC hack and the Podesta email leak - was aiding his campaign and that Trump's team might even be colluding with them.Worse than that, it became immediately apparent after the election that Trump was doing all he could to cover evidence of this collusion up. This including ordering FBI director James Comey to drop the investigation into Michael Flynn, firing Comey because he wouldn't, witness tampering, trying to discredit the Mueller investigation, trying to have Mueller fired, appointing a loyal Attorney-General to suppress the report, and ordering his staff not to cooperate with House and Senate investigations into the report.He has literally been a disaster as president and has been under investigation for multiple crimes since day one. And yet, 40% of the population continues to support him, going as far as to declare all news and information regarding his criminal acts as "fake news" and the result of some clandestine conspiracy.There are even those Americans who said they would assassinate Clinton if she won, that they will murder for Trump if he's impeached, that they support him turning the U.S. into a dictatorship, would approve of him making identical statements to Hitler (as long as it came from him and not Hitler), and that they prefer a president who colludes with Russia than one who's a Democrat.What to make of all this?Conclusion:In short, it is clear that for the past 40 years, America has been governed by a cabal of increasingly conservative leaders who want to turn the clock back on history. Their goals, though they may seem a bit muddled and confused, are actually quite clear: They want to erase the legacy of the 60s and the 1930s, which includes the civil rights movement, the peace movement, the feminist movement, and the New Deal.This entails throwing out things like organized labor, workers' rights, women's rights, guaranteed health care, multiculturalism, minority rights, and human rights and usher in a new era that looks exactly like the 19th century. In this world, the super-rich control everything, people born into poverty will die off, and all government institutions (including the military) exist as an instrument of their policy.And after forty years, this has culminated in the conservative movement becoming so brazenly right-wing and driven by ignorance and bigotry that the result was Donald Trump becoming president. The U.S. was founded as a nation built on the ideal of the rule of law, individual liberty, constitutional rights, equality before the law, and social mobility.Today, all of these tenets have been sacrificed repeatedly for the sake of protecting the office of the president, or have been tolerated because the people doing it claimed it was for the "good of the nation." Meanwhile, the U.S. is engaging in increasingly imperialistic behavior overseas, employing police-state tactics at home, and using any and all means to squeeze more wealth from its people and environment.What can be said about a country whose citizens allow for this to happen?As if that wasn't bad enough, the U.S. is now in a situation where it is being run by a man whose campaign was built on race-baiting, bigotry, and hatred of liberals and the educated. But even worse, he colluded with a hostile foreign nation to secure power and then made an enemy of the American press, his own intelligence services, and is advocating for violence and civil war just to hang onto power.What can be said about a country where almost half the people claim that they are okay with this, who have chosen to reject reality, and declare that they are okay with the treason and the U.S. becoming a dictatorship, so long as it's "their guy" that is running things?Can a country in this state be saved? More importantly, doesn't it even deserve to be? Personally, I don't care if it does, rarely does anyone get what they deserve. The point is, the collapse would be horrible and felt all around the world. So the process needs to be stopped now and reversed before it is too late.Sources5 facts about crime in the U.S.Affluence in the United States - WikipediaU.S. National Deficit and Debt History with ChartsWealth inequality in the United States - WikipediaViolent crime is up some, but still well off historical highHow President Reagan Ended the 1980s Recession

Q. Which Secretary of State Office has the highest Google reviews rating in the US?A. Not a Google reviews rating.The Harry S. Truman Building located at 2201 C Street, NW in the Foggy Bottom neighborhood of Washington, D.C. It is the headquarters of the United States Department of State.The Ten Best Secretaries Of State (to 1981)Best US Secretaries of State (ranker.com)The post-Cold War secretaries of state, rankedWas Hillary Clinton a Good Secretary of State? (Polotico.com)Rescuing George Shultz, the Best Secretary of State You’ve Never Heard OfThe Ten Best Secretaries Of State… The EditorsDecember 1981 Volume 33 Issue 1When the first Secretary of State, Thomas Jefferson, took office in 1790, his entire staff consisted of just six people, including himself and a part-time translator. The current Secretary presides over almost fifteen thousand employees scattered around the globe. During the intervening years, of course, the challenges facing Jefferson’s successors have changed dramatically as the infant republic has grown into a world power.David L. Porter, associate professor of history at William Penn College in Oskaloosa, Iowa sent questionnaires to fifty of the nation’s leading diplomatic historians, asking each to nominate his candidates for the ten best—and five worst- Secretaries of State. All fifty-six secretaries from Jefferson to Edmund Muskie were eligible. Each nominee was to be assessed solely on his record in that office. Among the suggested criteria: success in defining and achieving his diplomatic goals; political and moral leadership he exerted on foreign affairs; impact of his actions on the course of American history. More than half the historians responded.1. John Quincy Adams, who served (1817-25) under President James Monroe, was the first choice of over 80 per cent of the respondents. Stern, cerebral, conscientious, and articulate, he negotiated the acquisition of Florida from Spain in 1819 and collaborated with the President in formulating the Monroe Doctrine.John Quincy Adams, 6th President of the United States.2. William H. Seward served (1861-69) Presidents Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson. He helped keep France and Britain from recognizing the Confederacy during the Civil War, persuaded France to withdraw her troops from Mexico after that war ended, and successfully engineered the purchase of Alaska from Russia in 1867.William H. Seward, 24th United States Secretary of State3. Hamilton Fish served (1869-77) President Ulysses S. Grant. Calm, judicious, and untainted by the corruption that permeated the Grant administration, he helped settle the thorny Alabama Claims controversy with Britain in 1871, directed negotiations that settled American claims against Spain, and signed a commercial reciprocity treaty with Hawaii in 1875, helping to pave the way for later annexation.Hamilton Fish, 26th United States Secretary of State4. Charles Evans Hughes served (1921-25) Presidents Harding and Coolidge. He presided over the Washington Conference for Limitation of Armament (1921-22) that froze for a decade naval armament among the United States, Britain, and France, and he brought about the 1922 Nine Power Treaty, which called upon its signatories to maintain an Open Door policy toward China and respect her independence.Charles Evans Hughes,11th Chief Justice of the United States, 44th United States Secretary of State5. George Marshall served (1947-49) President Harry Truman. The first professional soldier ever to become Secretary—and the man who held the post for the shortest time among the top ten—he helped establish the postwar policy of containment. He promulgated the Truman Doctrine that provided military aid for Greece and Turkey, developed the Marshall Plan for rebuilding postwar Europe, and helped foster the Organization of American States and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.George Marshall, 50th United States Secretary of State, 3rd United States Secretary of Defense6. Dean Acheson, Marshall’s successor, also served (1949-53) President Truman. He helped create NATO, brought West Germany into the European defense system, and implemented a policy of armed intervention in Korea.Dean Acheson, 51st United States Secretary of State7. Henry Kissinger, our only foreign-born Secretary of State, served (1973-77) under Presidents Nixon and Ford. After four enormously influential years as Nixon’s special adviser on national security affairs, he sought, as Secretary, to relax tensions and promote trade with China and the Soviet Union and pioneered the art of “shuttle diplomacy,” traveling 560,000 miles in search of peace.Henry Kissinger, 56th United States Secretary of State8. Daniel Webster, one of only two Secretaries of State to hold non-consecutive terms, served under three Presidents: William Henry Harrison and John Tyler (1841-43) and Millard Fillmore (1850-52). He negotiated the Webster-Ashburton Treaty of 1842, averting war with Britain over Maine’s boundary, and asserted America’s right to recognize republican Hungary and other popular governments in Europe.Daniel Webster, 14th and 19th United States Secretary of State9. Thomas Jefferson served (1790-93) President George Washington. As our first Secretary of State he established a host of diplomatic and administrative precedents and, when war broke out between France and Britain in 1793, subsumed his own sympathy for the French Revolution to successfully administer a policy of strict neutrality.Thomas Jefferson, 3rd president of the United States, 2nd vice president of the United States, 1st United States Secretary of State10. John Hay (1898-1905) Presidents McKinley and Roosevelt. An expansionist, he urged annexation of the Philippines, called for an Open Door policy toward China, helped prevent partition of that country after the Boxer Rebellion, and negotiated the 1903 treaty with Panama granting the Canal Zone to the United States.John Hay, 37th United States Secretary of StateHoliday Room US State DepartmentBest US Secretaries of State (ranker.com)Left out Alexander Haig (1971–1982), George P. Shultz (1982–1989), James Baker (1989–1992), Lawrence Eagleburger (1992–1993),Warren Christopher (1993–1997), Madeleine Albright (1997–2001), Colin Powell (2001–2005), Condoleezza Rice (2005–2009), Hillary Clinton (2009–2013), John Kerry (2013–2016), and Rex Tillerson (2016-present).The post-Cold War secretaries of state, rankedFrom left, former secretaries of state Henry Kissinger, James Baker, Madeleine Albright, Colin Powell and Hillary Clinton attend the reception before the groundbreaking ceremony for the U.S. Diplomacy Center at the State Department in Washington in 2014. (Michael Reynolds/European Pressphoto Agency)Daniel W. Drezner July 27, 2016Daniel W. Drezner is a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and a regular contributor to PostEverything.In considering foreign policy, the external environment matters a lot. So does the degree of interest and control that a president exercises over American foreign policy. To use an example, James Baker is widely acknowledged to be one of the greatest secretaries of state of all time. His diplomacy helped ensure a peaceful end to the Cold War and a unified, multilateral coalition for the first Gulf War. But Baker had the wind at his back: a fading Soviet Union and a president who was keenly interested and engaged in international relations. Baker deserves credit, but not all the credit, if you know what I mean.So, with that in mind, here’s my ranking, from worst to first, of the six post-Cold War secretaries of state. I will preface this by saying that Baker towers over this lot, but I’m not including him in the post-Cold War set. Indeed, the Cold War secretaries of state (George C. Marshall, Dean Acheson, John Foster Dulles, Dean Rusk and George P. Shultz) are on average of a much higher caliber than the ones discussed below.6) Warren Christopher. The “Cars 2” of the post-1992 secretaries of state, “Chris” got a bad beat. His president did not care a flying fig about foreign policy for at least the first two years of his presidency, and Christopher felt constrained by that fact. Nonetheless, Christopher’s preternatural caution generally let bad situations (Somalia, Bosnia) deteriorate on his watch. There isn’t a single account of the Bill Clinton administration’s foreign policy record in which Christopher comes out looking good — and that includes his own memoirs. Given the favorable geopolitical situation the United States inherited when he took office, it’s a lackluster performance.Warren Christopher, 63rd United States Secretary of State5) Colin Powell. Powell was badly hamstrung by the lack of trust between him and President George W. Bush. Bush overruled Powell on diplomacy with North Korea in March 2001, and things went downhill from there. Powell’s constant bureaucratic battles with Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld proved problematic for his tenure, as it kept him in Washington when he needed to try to make America’s case to allies and partners. The biggest mistakes of Bush’s first term were not Powell’s, but he failed to stop most of these catastrophes, and his performance did little to compensate for them.Colin Powell, 65th United States Secretary of State4) John Kerry. This ranking is probably unfair — he still has six months left, and history will offer a better perspective. Kerry gets major points for the Iran deal, a significant feat of diplomacy that was more him than President Obama. The Paris climate change agreement is also significant. The problem comes with trying to list things after that. It is to Kerry’s credit that he has invested in tough tasks, like Iran or an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal. It is to Kerry’s debit that some of those investments did not pay off. The opportunity cost of them is Kerry looking flat-footed and underinvested in other trouble-spots, such as Eastern Europe.John Kerry, 68th United States Secretary of State, Chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee3) Madeleine Albright. The first female secretary of state, Albright benefited greatly from a president who was more comfortable and more engaged in international relations than he was in his first term. But Albright was also willing to take more risks than Christopher, a trait that paid off in the case of Kosovo. The biggest criticism of Albright would be her absence from the most significant foreign policy crisis of Clinton’s second term — the Asian financial crisis.Madeleine Albright, 64th United States Secretary of State2) Condoleezza Rice. Well, this will be the second-most controversial ranking. Rice’s disastrous tenure as national security adviser will color most people’s perceptions of her time at Foggy Bottom. The parlous state of American foreign affairs in January 2009 will also lead many to pooh-pooh Rice’s performance as secretary of state. But it requires some willful amnesia to forget the situation that Rice inherited when she took the job, and the skillful ways in which she was able to outmaneuver Rumsfeld and Cheney. Her close relationship with the president allowed Rice to pivot American foreign policy away from the excesses of Bush’s first term to something akin to competency in her second term. It was a thankless task, and Rice’s legacy will always be tarnished by her NSC stint. Nevertheless, she did a good job in a tough time.Condoleezza Rice, 66th United States Secretary of State1) Hillary Clinton. Here’s the dirty little secret of trying to evaluate Clinton’s record as secretary of state: The Obama White House centralized foreign policy control almost as much as Richard Nixon. Which means that it’s tough to credit or blame Clinton for what happened during her four years in office. Nonetheless, she played a significant role in restoring America’s standing abroad. She was nimble in handling some thorny diplomatic kerfuffles with China (Google “Wang Lijun” or “Chen Guangcheng” to see what I mean). She helped put together formidable economic sanctions against Iran. Even on Libya, Clinton deserves credit for her ability to get NATO, the Arab League and the U.N. Security Council to endorse action; the post-Libya fiasco has less to do with Clinton and more to do with her boss. And one can argue that the Paris climate change accord only happened because of Clinton and Obama’s actions in Copenhagen.In a decade, this ranking might change, particularly for Kerry. And ranking Clinton as the best of the lot means saying that she was the best of a mediocre group, all of whom would fall below the Cold War list of names mentioned above. But it is interesting to note that the ladies on this list outperformed the men.Hillary Clinton, 67th United States Secretary of State, United States Senatorfrom New YorkWas Hillary Clinton a Good Secretary of State? (Polotico.com)Not so long ago, Hillary Clinton was being lauded as an exemplary secretary of state. After four years and nearly a million miles logged as America’s top diplomat, she stepped down to a torrent of praise. “The most consequential secretary of state since Dean Acheson,” enthused Google’s Eric Schmidt. “Stellar,” pronounced Bloomberg’s Margaret Carlson. Even Republican Sen. John McCain, while criticizing her response to the killing of U.S. officials in Benghazi, went out of his way to compliment her “ outstanding” State Department tenure.That was then.When the Atlantic published an admiring 10,000-word profile of Secretary of State John Kerry the other day, the surprise was not so much that the author, two-time Pulitzer Prize winner David Rohde, found himself impressed by the headlong diplomatic forays of the peripatetic Kerry, but the downbeat assessment of Kerry’s much more reserved predecessor. The headline? “How John Kerry Could End Up Outdoing Hillary Clinton.” A few days later, the New York Times chimed in with an article on the “tough comparisons with Kerry” Clinton is now facing, summing up the debate as one over whether she was anything more than a “pantsuit-wearing globe-trotter” in her years as secretary.All of which yields the question: Was Hillary Clinton in fact a good secretary of state, and will her record as a diplomat matter if, as expected, she runs for president in 2016?As Bill Clinton might have said, it depends on what the meaning of good is. Certainly, even many of her most ardent defenders recognize Hillary Clinton had no signal accomplishment at the State Department to her name, no indelible peace sealed with her handshake, no war averted, no nuclear crisis defused. There are few Eric Schmidts out there still willing to make the case for her as an enormously consequential figure in the history of Foggy Bottom.Where the debate tends to rage is over why that is so, especially now that Kerry is taking on diplomatic challenges that Clinton either couldn’t or wouldn’t—from negotiating a potentially historic nuclear deal with Iran to seeking a revived Mideast peace process—and political rivals in both parties return to thinking of Clinton in the hypercharged American political context and not so much as the tireless, Blackberry-wielding face of global glad-handing.I asked an array of smart foreign policy thinkers in both parties to weigh in, and they pretty much all agreed that Clinton was both more cautious and more constrained than Kerry. Their argument is over whether and to what extent that was a consequence of Clinton herself, the limits placed on her by a suspicious and eager-to-make-its-mark first-term White House, or simply it being a very different moment in world politics.Here’s Aaron David Miller, who negotiated Middle East peace for five presidents and is now a scholar at the Wilson Center, making the case for cautious Clinton: “Hillary was risk-averse; Kerry isn’t. He’s risk-ready.” Of course, Miller argues, 2016 politics “explains partly why she didn’t own a single issue of consequence.” The other reason is President Obama himself, “the most controlling foreign policy president since Nixon.” Miller’s bottom line: “She was a fine sec state but not consequential.” As for 2016, “It won’t hurt her other than the Republican obsession with Benghazi, but it won’t help her that much either.”An array of foreign policy thinkers all agree that Clinton was a more cautious and more constrained secretary of state than Kerry. | ReutersWhat does that Republican take look like? For sure, there will be a focus on Benghazi, where the GOP has questioned whether Clinton and other administration officials were activist enough—and truthful enough—about responding to the attack in Libya on Sept. 11, 2012, that led to the deaths of the U.S. ambassador and three other American personnel; a case summed up by the American Enterprise’s Institute’s Danielle Pletka as “unwillingness to take risks, unwillingness to lead, willingness to stab a lot of people in the back. And dead people.” Pletka’s broader view of Clinton’s record is a harsher version of what I hear from many Democrats: “the Washington consensus,” Pletka says, “is that she was enormously ineffective … [though] no one was quite sure whether she was ineffective because she wanted to avoid controversy or because she wasn’t trusted by the president to do anything.”Not quite so harsh is David Gordon, who ran the State Department’s storied policy-planning shop under George W. Bush. He calls Clinton “good not great” in the job, agrees that her “great weakness was avoiding serious diplomacy,” gives her plaudits for outlining the strategic “pivot” to Asia whose future is now uncertain, and attributes much to “her future political considerations”:It is hard to avoid the conclusion that for Clinton, the SecState role was substantially about positioning her to run for president, especially in terms of looking ‘tough’ on some of the big issues: Iran sanctions, reassuring Asian allies. … Not taking on the big diplomatic challenges made that toughness easier to maintain even as she devoted so much of her actual time in office to ‘soft’ issues like education, women’s empowerment, etc.As for the Democrats, Clinton’s advocates tend to come in several camps, which can be broadly summed up as The Timing Just Wasn’t Right group; the Blame the White Housers; and the Asia Pivot Was a Really Big Deal crowd (“her major accomplishment,” the Brookings Institution’s Michael O’Hanlon told me, and “too often underappreciated”).Howard Berman, a strong Clinton backer who chaired the House Foreign Affairs Committee during her tenure, offered me a great example of the first line of reasoning: You don’t pick your moments, but deal with the world as you find it. “I don’t believe Secretary Clinton was constrained by future political considerations,” he wrote to me. “Let’s look at the issues Kerry is working on and it is clear that Clinton, for rather obvious reasons, couldn’t have replicated what he has done because those issues weren’t ripe then. … It’s about a different time.”Blaming the White House, of course, is a common theme in any critique of a foreign policy record, and that’s especially so when it comes to the question of Clinton’s dealings with the White House of the president she ran against in 2008. Throughout her tenure as secretary of state, Washington wondered over the extent of Clinton’s actual influence in foreign policy decision-making (“she’s really the principal implementer,” Obama adviser Denis McDonough told me, when I asked about the division of labor between Obama’s White House and Clinton’s State Department for a Foreign Policy article last year). And it was by all accounts Obama himself who was reluctant to take on some of the challenges, like Middle East peace talks or a more activist stance toward the civil war unfolding in Syria, that Clinton is now dinged for avoiding.That was the argument from Dennis Ross, and he is certainly well positioned to know: Ross worked as the top White House aide on Iran and the Middle East on Obama’s National Security Council before leaving last year. The new conventional wisdom on Politically Cautious Hillary is “misguided,” he says. “She was operating in a different world and with an administration at a different place.” And those White House realities very much shaped what she could and couldn’t do. To start, Ross notes, Clinton was “in a place where she felt the need to prove her loyalty to the president and demonstrate she was a member of the team,” and besides, Obama himself was very personally engaged in his various diplomatic initiatives. By later in Obama’s first term, deciding what to do about dumping America’s longtime ally Hosni Mubarak in Egypt (she was wary) and whether to intervene more actively in Syria (she pushed to do so) became “issues where I think she was not in the same place as the president and was thus less able to shape what we did.”Timing, fate and the White House may have all conspired in it, but the truth is that Hillary Clinton never did find a way to turn Foggy Bottom into her ticket to history.Steve Sestanovich, a professor at Columbia University and veteran of Bill Clinton’s State Department, thinks the blame lies in part with another White House—George W. Bush’s. Hillary Clinton, Sestanovich concedes, “ was reluctant to over-invest in high-visibility initiatives that didn’t have much chance of success.” But, he says, that’s because “the top priority of the president—and hers too—was to deal with inherited difficulties and wind them down,” whether the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq or restoring luster to an American global reputation tarred by the aggressive decade-long prosecution of its “war on terror.” Sestanovich adds: “It’s true that her record as secretary included few accomplishments if you mean by that peace agreements solving some big problem. If you measure her tenure by success in rebuilding America’s power position, it looks a lot better. She wasn’t just foisting better cookstoves on African women.”In some ways, though, that is exactly the argument I encountered from her most passionate defender among those I surveyed. Anne-Marie Slaughter, Clinton’s first policy-planning chief at the State Department and now head of the New America Foundation, is still an unwavering believer in the cookstoves and all of Clinton’s other untraditional causes, many of which focused on global advocacy for women and girls. “I continue to think that people will look back and see that she was the first secretary of state really to grasp the ways global politics and hence foreign policy have changed in the 21st century,” Slaughter says.Her case for Clinton, in fact, is explicitly about politics—and Clinton’s willingness to integrate them into the traditionally stodgy, big man-to-big man diplomacy long favored at the State Department (and arguably now being resurrected by Kerry). “Foreign policy has always been the furthest thing from retail politics; she brought them much closer together and institutionalized as much of her approach as possible in the very bones of the State Department. … Hillary took diplomacy directly to the people in ways that cannot produce a treaty or negotiated agreement, but that are essential to advancing America’s interests over the longer term,” Slaughter argues. “What she should be remembered for in a 2016 campaign is proving that she could represent the American people day in and day out in the long, hard slog of regular politics, in between the rare shining moments of success. She was and is beloved around the world, as an inspiration, as an example of an America in which a woman could run for president, nearly win her party’s primary, lose with grace and then prove that adversaries can work together for the sake of their country.”***Near the end of her tenure, I traveled with Clinton to China in the midst of what turned out to be a frenetic several days of negotiations over the fate of Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng, who had taken refuge at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing at exactly the moment Clinton was arriving for a summit. In the end, Clinton walked away with a deal that allowed Chen to fly to the United States a few weeks later. It was, I wrote at the time, “the most intense high-stakes diplomacy of her tenure as secretary of state.”“Can this really be true? Was the Chen negotiation as good as it will get for Clinton?” asked Washington Post columnist David Ignatius. “I fear the answer is yes.” At the time, he dinged Clinton for not finding “a way to get more done in her role as the president’s diplomatic emissary, broker, and fixer.” And never mind all the hundreds of thousands of miles logged, the endless “townterviews” and back-stage arm-twisting—it remains a pretty fair critique. Timing, fate and the White House may have all conspired in it, but the truth is that Hillary Clinton never did find a way to turn Foggy Bottom into her ticket to history.And perhaps that’s exactly the reason why American politicians tend to become secretary of state after they’ve run for president and lost; it just might be a better consolation prize than it is steppingstone to higher office.Susan B. Glasser is editor of Politico Magazine.Rescuing George Shultz, the Best Secretary of State You’ve Never Heard OfBY WILL INBODENWhat if America had a remarkably effective secretary of state, yet almost 95 percent of international relations professors didn’t know it?That may sound like the lead-in to a bad joke, or an academic perversion of the “what if a tree falls in a forest but no one hears it” puzzle — and I wish that’s all it were. But instead it is a depressing revelation from a new survey of 1,615 international relations (IR) scholars from 1,375 American colleges and universities. The annual Ivory Tower survey of the Teaching, Research, and International Politics (TRIP) project, in partnership with Foreign Policy, is a comprehensive and useful assessment of the views of American IR scholars on a range of topics in the field, including the leading programs, the most influential scholars, and the most serious problems facing the world. (I was one of the 1,615 respondents).One of the survey questions is “Who was the most effective U.S. Secretary of State of the last 50 years?” Henry Kissinger handily took the top spot, with 32.21 percent. This is a plausible but debatable choice, especially since Kissinger was arguably more effective during his time as National Security Advisor than as secretary of state. Kissinger didn’t take over at Foggy Bottom until September 1973, after many notable achievements such as the opening to China, the Paris Peace Accords, and the SALT negotiations. I suspect that part of the reason for Kissinger’s runaway win stems from his high visibility and prolific writing in the almost 40 years since he left office, which can be mentally conflated with an assessment of his time as secretary of State. And the survey answer that has generated some headlines is that poor John Kerry finished dead last with only 0.31 percent (yes, you read that decimal point right). While I agree that thus far Kerry has been ineffective, it strikes me as unfair and methodologically unsound to have included him in the survey because his time in office is ongoing and we don’t yet know how effective he will be in his remaining two years.But the stunning — and appalling — result is that only 5.65 percent picked George Shultz, ranking him barely ahead of Dean Rusk, and far behind Madeline Albright (8.7 percent), Hillary Clinton (8.7 percent), and “I Don’t Know” (18.32 percent — itself a troubling figure when you consider that the respondents are scholars who study this stuff for a living, yet almost one fifth of them can’t render a verdict on secretaries of state).*Shultz’s relatively low ranking is baffling. Many foreign policy practitioners and diplomatic historians regard Shultz in the same pantheon as Acheson and Marshall, a giant in the annals of 20th century American diplomacy whose seven years at Foggy Bottom played an indispensable role in negotiating a peaceful end to the Cold War. Foreign Service Officers (FSO) who served under Shultz almost uniformly believe him to be the greatest secretary of state of the last 50 years. During my time working at the State Department, a standard question I would ask almost every senior FSO I worked with is “who is the best secretary you ever worked under,” and invariably the answer would be George Shultz – regardless of whether the FSO was a Democrat or Republican. Shultz’s broad acclaim among those who worked for him and those who have studied him comes from his rare ability to master two vital yet often conflicting tasks: the management of the department and the conduct of statecraft. Some secretaries excel at the former (e.g., Colin Powell and Hillary Clinton), others excel at the latter (e.g., Henry Kissinger and James Baker), but Shultz is singular in having excelled at both. [Disclosure: Shultz is one of five current or former cabinet secretaries on the Statecraft Board of Reference for the Clements Center at the University of Texas, where I serve as Executive Director.]Now I imagine that some of my academic colleagues reading this who filled out the TRIP survey and didn’t pick Shultz are thinking “Enough whining, Inboden — I picked [insert another secretary of state name here] because in my expertise I think he/she is just better than Shultz.” While each of these individual choices may have their justifications, taken together Shultz’s paltry ranking seems to reveal a “collective ignorance” problem in academia. In the aggregate, IR scholars just don’t seem capable of rendering credible judgments on what makes an effective secretary of state.So how is it that policy professionals and diplomatic historians hold Shultz in such high regard, yet IR scholars — who are overwhelmingly political scientists — would be so unaware of Shultz’s excellence?I don’t have a definitive answer, but would speculate there are three possible reasons, perhaps overlapping. The first is that younger IR scholars are not being taught diplomatic history in graduate school. It is commonplace now for political science doctoral students to take numerous math and statistics classes, but not a single class on American diplomatic history or the Cold War. With this lack of historical awareness, someone like George Shultz appears as distant and unknown as Robert Lansing, and he can’t fit into a regression analysis of a large n data set (for a thoughtful reflection on this malady, see this essay by Frank Gavin). The second reason I suspect is ideological bias against the Reagan administration. Older IR scholars may have taken history classes in graduate school, and having lived through the Reagan years know who Shultz is, but they are overwhelmingly left of center and probably share academia’s general disdain for the Reagan administration. (Though as I noted here, some scholars are beginning to assess Reagan’s national security legacy much more positively. And this particular survey result doesn’t evince an anti-Republican bias, since the top two names are Kissinger and Baker — probably illustrating the large cohort of realists among IR scholars). The third possible reason, perhaps represented by the 18.32 percent of “I Don’t Knows,” is that IR theory emphasizes structural factors over individual leadership and policymaking. In this view, secretaries of state matter little in the shadow of the tectonic plates of the international system.But for those scholars who believe that individual leaders do matter — and I am one of them — Shultz’s remarkable statecraft deserves a closer look, and a higher ranking.*Yes, I was one of the 5.65 percent who picked Shultz.”