Hillary Clinton Hates Russian, And Other Geopolitical Quandries

Just kidding. But watch her mangle “Medvedev,” like a ninth grader on “Meet the Press”:

Does this mean anything? Not really. But given that both Clinton and Obama admitted to knowing nothing about the man they all recognize Vladimir Putin has hand-picked as his successor, perhaps the routine barbs about George Dubya Bush—like when he flubbed Musharraf’s name when asked who the President of Pakistan was—should be revived? Their browbeating doesn’t bode well, either—Blake Hounshell is right that Russia not only doesn’t care what the U.S. thinks, it positively relishes doing the exact opposite.

Alas. Things won’t improve with Bush in charge, especially when he appoints family friends over actual diplomats to handle issues in the Caspian. It appears things won’t improve much without Bush in charge, either.

But is any of this a fair criticism? I thought it was unfair to demand Bush II know biographical details of five randomly selected heads of state a year before his election was even in full swing in 1999. Jeb Koogler makes the compelling argument that, in fact, memorizing world leader stats like a fantasy football league is unrelated to the job one will do as President. He thinks potential Presidents should be grilled about the “big picture idea of countries’ histories and political trends.”

I’ll take it one step further: the insistence on knowing State leaders’ biographical effluvia—placed in the broader context of the truly unfair requirement for moral, educational, geopolitical, mathematical, phonetic, and biographical perfection from Presidential candidates—actually distracts from otherwise useful questions about a candidate’s grasp of the issues surrounding a given country. I would have loved to see Tim Russert ask Clinton’s and Obama’s (and McCain’s, for that matter) thoughts on Russia’s slow devolution into a proto-Soviet authoritarianism, or their aggressive use of their energy assets not just to bully west-leaning neighbors but to squeeze out western oil companies from the Caspian Basin.

Or Afghanistan. In the great foreign policy discussions of this most terrible of election seasons, there remains precious little time spent on the country that turned Osama bin Laden into a global power. (Which is one of the reasons I am such a broken record on the place.) Koogler is absolutely right: a President shouldn’t be required to be an expert in everything; they should have the judgment to be able to weigh competing sets of information and arrive at reasonable, justifiable conclusions with input from subject experts. Quizzing them on names is just more fluff for the empty political talk shows that are as much choreography as anything else.

This post was written by...

Joshua Foust – author of 1771 posts on Registan.net.

Joshua Foust is a Fellow at the American Security Project and the author of Afghanistan Journal: Selections from Registan.net. His research focuses primarily on Central and South Asia. Joshua is a correspondent for The Atlantic and a columnist for PBS Need to Know. Joshua appears regularly on the BBC World News, Aljazeera, and international public radio. Joshua is also a regular contributor to Foreign Policy’s AfPak Channel, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Reuters, and the Christian Science Monitor. Follow him on twitter: @joshuafoust