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Loading... Alter Egos: Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and the Twilight Struggle Over American Powerby Mark Landler
   None No current Talk conversations about this book.  eri_kars | Jul 10, 2022 |  no reviews | add a review
Politics.
Nonfiction.
HTML: A deeply-reported, firsthand account of how Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have come to embody two competing visions for the role of the United States in the worldâ??and what that means for the 2016 presidential election. New York Times White House correspondent Mark Landler goes behind the speeches and press conferences, to the Situation Room debates and picnic-table lunches, where Obama and Clinton honed their two competing worldviews: his, cautious, inward-looking, suffused with a sense of limits; hers, muscular, optimistic, unabashedly old-fashioned. Alter Egos is about two ambitious political archrivals from very different backgrounds who became partners for a time, trailblazers who share a common sense of their historical destiny but who hold fundamentally different beliefs about how to project American power. With all the sweep of a grand history-and enlivened by an insider's access and plenty of news-Landler digs deep into the complex relationship between these two leaders and gives us a different way to think about Obama's legacy and Clinton's promise. No library descriptions found. |
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 Google Books — Loading...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)327.73009Social sciences Political Science International Relations North America United StatesLC ClassificationRatingAverage: (4)
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That said, it is instructive to look at their differences, which is what Landler does in this book. Landler's central thesis is that the central divide between Clinton and Obama on foreign policy is not so much a bias toward vs against war. Rather it's that Clinton sees American power as a force for international good and Obama sees it as at best risky. This includes military intervention but it also includes other more peaceful forms of intervention, some of which, the ones with a more humanitarian motivation, are generally considered good by many of the folks who consider the military interventions bad.
The strength of Landler's analysis is that he doesn't try to make this thesis carry more than it is able. He notes that both Clinton and Obama have regularly strayed from this summarized view during their years in the spotlight. Rather, his claim is that this view is more of a tendency that is altered by the specific circumstances.
After laying out this perspective, the bulk of the book goes into the major foreign policy initiatives that overlapped with Clinton's tenure as Obama's Secretary of State. These overviews provided support for Landler's thesis but overall were more summaries than insightful analysis of foreign policy during the Obama/Clinton era. Landler did include some interesting reflections on the foreign policy insularity of the White House which helped them sometimes modify conventional wisdom but also makes "business as usual" more likely when Obama leaves office, whoever his successor.
Overall, this book is likely worth reading if you're interested in the topic but don't follow foreign policy at more than a mass media level. (