Unsated by Steampunk Palin, you want more buxom feisty American women transforming the world against evil men? Swing by this Guardian analysis by Madeleine Bunting of Hillary Clinton’s feminist foreign policy:

On countless occasions since arriving at the state department, Clinton has asserted that the rights of women and girls are now core to US foreign policy. It’s hard to imagine any British foreign secretary ever saying such a thing…

From the start Clinton left no one in any doubt where she stood: women’s rights are "the signature issue" of this administration’s foreign policy, she said. She mentioned women 450 times in speeches in the first five months in office. "Transformation of the role of women is the last great impediment to universal progress," she declared, and began to develop what is her standard line: women’s issues are integral to the achievement of every goal of US foreign policy.

H Clinton translates this into supposedly hard diplomatic action:

Her press entourage finds itself dragged around meetings with micro-credit groups, activists and politicians – all women. It’s strategic, she admitted in an interview – "It’s a constant effort to elevate people who, in their societies, may not even be known by their own leaders…"

When she visited South Africa, she spent twice as much time with a women’s housing project as she did with the president

This of course is somewhere between foolish and normal. On any overseas visit a senior Minister is likely to spend relatively little time with the host country’s President – Presidents selfishly ration their time with non-Presidents.

But even if this was not the case here, it sends a fatuous signal – someone with her supposed influence who really wants to help poor women should be using most of her precious time to lobby senior people in the country concerned who can take decisions which make a difference, not self-indulgently media cargo-culting down in the dusty townships.

Alas there are limits to this feministic policy:

It gets nowhere in the Middle East, while Afghanistan presents a big challenge – Clinton has insisted peace cannot come at the cost of women’s rights. But the signs aren’t good that she can hold this line.

Hmm. Why so little progress in the Middle East? Could it perhaps be that the Obama administration dares not get involved in anything which might seem to question, hem, stern precepts of Islam? Remember Obama’s strange Cairo speech and this:

In any case, what exactly makes a choice free for women in an Islamic society? Surely in many parts of the Islamic world (and some parts of the UK now) the Islamic religion works to reinforce ages-old social/cultural gender roles under which women are manifestly subservient, and dealt with via extreme violence precisely when they try to make their own choices.

If Hillary Clinton does not tackle that main global font of ideological oppression of women, the rest of her ‘agenda’ is largely predictable liberal social work writ large.

Her thinking of course arises from a bold radical feminist assertion that because women are something more than 50% of the globe’s population, "every issue is a feminist issue". But does that mean that every issue can best be treated by feministic methods? 

As an unabashed male, I think that that approach does not help much in mainstream foreign policy. Sure, it’s a marginally goodish thing if American taxpayers subsidise cleaner Third World cooking stoves and/or the UN cranks up more resolutions on the fate of women in conflict.

But the main effort of any foreign minister should be focused on stopping conflicts and creating democratic conditions in which women and men alike get to vote freely. The limp attitude of Western leaders generally in failing to have anything significant to say these days about undemocratic governments (especially in the so-called Islamic world) sets a lugubrious context in which Feminist Nanny Clintonism is presented as a serious policy tool for making a difference in hard places, when it just isn’t.

Would Angela Merkel make this sort of thing her main focus were she German foreign minister? I think not. There is almost no example I can think of where deliberate ‘bottom-up’ empowering of poor vulnerable people has made a significant political difference quickly, unless perhaps you include the capitalistic networking effects of giving poor people mobile telephones.

It all reminds me of this:

Hillary’s language draws directly on intellectual roots in pre-WW2 socialist/fascist collectivism and evinces creepy collectivist ambitions, eg where privacy and family life is concerned. Her “spiritual community that links us to a higher purpose” replaces the fist with the hug: “an unwanted embrace from which you cannot escape is just a nicer form of tyranny”.

Madeleine Bunting:

Her feminism has obviously been helpful for the Obama administration, which is anxious to redesign US foreign policy in the midst of two disastrous foreign wars. It could still reap dividends for women, but the question is: will it be quietly sidelined when no longer useful?

To which the answer is … Yes.

Long after Clinton has departed there will be legacy budget lines in State Department and other US (and EU) government programmes aimed at helping ‘women and girls’. But they will quietly shrivel over time and/or drift back to the development agencies as the issues seen as fashionable by the top leadership shift elsewhere.

In short, it is striking that on any hard issue which counts (Iran, North Korea, Middle East) there is no real sign of Clinton having a significant role – and significant policy or intellectual impact.

All in all, more faux feminism. A senior leftist Western woman politician takes up ‘women’s issues’ – and wins gushy praise from a woman writer in the Guardian! 

Sexist stereotyping anyone?