Clinton on Burma

It’s encouraging, though, that the new Administration has put aside the previous one’s moral fantasies without adopting new ones. Self-righteousness is not a foreign policy. Making ourselves feel good about ourselves should not be the goal of policy toward Burma or anywhere else. Our interest remains in a Burma that treats its people and its neighbors with increasing decency. How to get there is a much harder call, but at least the secretary of state understands that the world is a complicated place, and that the failure of one approach doesn’t mean the success of its opposite.

So concludes George Packer in a post on Burma and the failure of past US policy towards the appalling Burmese junta.

It just might be that Hillary Clinton is hard nosed enough to be an effective Secretary of State. Further, it is encouraging that Burma is on Clinton’s policy radar screen.

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