What role — if any — did Hillary play in the few foreign policy successes of the Clinton administration…?

Hillary Clinton’s entire campaign has been based on the claim that she has more experience than Barack Obama, but that claim is open to serious question. Nowhere is this clearer than on foreign policy, where it is clear from any objective examination of the record shows that Hillary has little hands-on experience in actually making foreign policy, as opposed to being an auxiliary to her husband when he was president. That is the conclusion of the Chicago Tribune, which examined the record and found it slim, to say the least.

“…while Hillary Clinton represented the U.S. on the world stage at important moments while she was first lady, there is scant evidence that she played a pivotal role in major foreign policy decisions or in managing global crises,” Mike Dorning and Christi Parsons wrote in the March 7 issue of the Tribune.

Dorning and Parsons note that Hillary has claimed that she “helped to bring peace” to Northern Ireland and negotiated with Macedonia to open up its border to refugees from Kosovo, as well as “standing up” to the Chinese government on women’s rights, as well as mentioning a one-day visit she made to Bosnia following the Dayton peace accords. The Tribune’s Washington bureau correspondents also cite the claim made by Bill as well as Hillary Clinton that she had advocated on behalf of a U.S. military intervention in Rwanda to stop the genocide there.

But the Tribune reporters quote the lead U.S. negotiator in the Northern Ireland peace talks as describing Hillary’s role as “helpful” but essentially “ancillary” to the peace process there.

And Dorning and Parsons note that “The Macedonian government opened its border to refugees the day before Clinton arrived to meet with government leaders,” while “her mission to Bosnia was a one-day visit in which she was accompanied by performers Sheryl Crow and Sinbad, as well as her daughter, Chelsea, according to the commanding general who hosted her.”

The Tribune reporters also note that there was no evidence that the Clinton administration every seriously considered military intervention in Rwanda. The truth is that the Clinton White House knew that genocide was taking place in Rwanda but refused to act to end it, even though it was in their power to do so. It is easy for Hillary now to claim that she privately urged U.S. military intervention, but there is no evidence to support that claim.

As for Hillary’s speech in Beijing, there is no evidence that it had any discernible impact on Chinese policy on women’s issues, much less human rights more generally.

Up until this week, it was difficult to assess the extent of Hillary’s involvement in foreign policy making in the Clinton administration, since the Clintons had refused to make their White House papers public. But, under pressure from the Obama campaign, the Clintons finally relented, and this week, the National Archives and the William J. Clinton Presidential Library released 11,000 pages of Hillary’s schedule from her eight years as First Lady, which the Washington Post describes as having “opened a window into the shifting patterns of her eight years in the White House and provided fresh fodder for the debate over the scope of her experience.”

“Her trips without him, judged by the schedules, were for the most part classic first-lady fare,” write Peter Baker and Karen DeYoung in today’s Post. “The documents contribute little to resolving the matter” of the extent of Hillary’s participation in the Northern Ireland peace talks, Baker and DeYoung add, noting simply that the schedules do document that the First Lady gave a speech in Belfast in May 1999 promoting the peace process.

“The documents offer no support for her assertions on the campaign trail that she helped negotiate the Irish peace accords or facilitated the flow of refugees in the Balkans, but neither do they disprove them,” writes John H. Broder in the New York Times. “The documents also show that Mrs. Clinton helped her husband sell the North America Free Trade Agreement, a trade pact she now says needs to be strengthened or scrapped,” Broder adds. “She spoke at a confidential White House briefing on Nafta in November 1993, days before Congress approved it at the strong urging of Mr. Clinton.” To the extent that the First Lady played any role in the debate over NAFTA, then, it would seem to have been as a cheerleader for that trade agreement — in direct contradiction to claims that she has made on the campaign trail in Ohio and Pennsylvania.

As Broder notes, the documents’ release on Wednesday came in response to a Freedom of Information Act request filed in January 2006 by Don Van Natta Jr., and Jeff Gerth, two reporters who researched and wrote a 2007 biography of Hillary Clinton entitled, “Her Way.” It is unfortunate indeed that the Clintons would release important documents only in response to a Freedom of Information Act request, but such is the Bush/Cheney-like culture of secrecy that prevails at the Clinton Library and in the Clinton campaign.

In any case, short of reading all 11,000 pages of documents myself, I am going to have to rely on the assessments of others, including Broder, Baker and DeYoung, and it would seem that the New York Times and Washington Post reporters have found in those papers no evidence that Hillary Clinton as First Lady played a substantive role in the foreign policy making of the Clinton administration; if she did, then it would seem to me that the onus would be on her to document that role.