Hillary Agonistes

At the risk of making predictions which may not come true it seems to me that Hillary, being in the business only of promoting Hillary, immediately will seek to rise into the Pantheon of great Secretaries of State. It's clear she can't get there through a modern day version of the Marshall Plan: the U.S. is broke and it's other countries bailing us out these days, not the other way around. Nor can she roll back a world-wide threat of Communism. She could embrace the unglamorous task of wrapping up our wars of choice but it's hard to see how she could claim full credit. No, what Hillary needs is a new crisis and, I predict, if she can't find one she'll invent one.

Darfur — egged on by the almost equally ambitious Samantha Power — seems a likely prospect. As might Somali pirates except that husband Bill has already had an unfortunate adventure in Mogadishu. Pakistan is probably on the short list too, though it may well explode on its own without the Hillary touch. I would guess that she may be tempted to provoke Russia and/or China, though I doubt she has the nerve for an all-out brawl with them. So, well, we'll see. But if she doesn't cook up something all her own I'll eat my hat. [Illustration by Philip Burke, for fair use.]