Valerie Hudson is professor at the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University. Patricia Leidl is a Vancouver-based international communications adviser who is on the faculty of the Department of Advertising and Public Relations at Michigan State University. This article was adapted from their book The Hillary Doctrine, copyright 2015, and used by arrangement with Columbia University Press, all rights reserved.

Many leaders have had doctrines named after them—from the Monroe Doctrine to the Truman Doctrine to the Bush Doctrine—but so far there’s only that can be ascribed to a woman: the Hillary Doctrine. As Hillary Clinton herself defined it, “the subjugation of women [is] a threat to the common security of our world and to the national security of our country.”

But for proponents of this doctrine, perhaps no irony was crueler than seeing its namesake, then Secretary of State Clinton, smiling broadly in her trademark pantsuit as she walked the red carpet from her plane in Riyadh with the Saudi foreign minister, Prince Saud al-Faisal, in 2010. The moment brought to mind an incongruity no less extreme than if Frederick Douglass had been appointed ambassador to the Confederacy and found himself sipping tea and making small talk with Nathan Bedford Forrest. For, in Saudi Arabia, the subordination of women is as peculiar and pernicious an institution as was slavery in the antebellum South.


It wasn’t the last time Hillary Clinton was accused of brushing aside her own self-declared commitment to women’s rights, ostensibly in the name of the national interest. Most recently, as she prepares to launch her all-but-declared presidential campaign, reports have emerged concerning large donations to her family’s foundation from countries including Algeria, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and, of course, Saudi Arabia—a rogues’ gallery of governments with poor records on women’s issues. How could Clinton—she of “ women’s rights are human rights” fame, who by all indications will soon try again to break the “highest, hardest glass ceiling” of the White House—still be so cozy with a regime so at odds with one of her core, lifelong causes?

On the one hand, the doctrine that Clinton made a central part of her time at Foggy Bottom was revolutionary; never before had the cause of women been elevated to a priority of American foreign policy and labeled a key national security concern. But talking the talk is not the same as walking the walk, and as Clinton prepares for a presidential candidacy in which she will likely tout both her tenure at State and her potentially history-making role as America’s first woman president, it is only natural to examine whether the “Hillary Doctrine” really worked. Last week, amid the furor over her email server, Clinton was marking 20 years since her own groundbreaking 1995 speech in Beijing on women’s rights. But the anniversary also raised an important question: Two decades later, are the world’s women better off for Clinton’s efforts on their behalf—or were those efforts mostly for show?

Perhaps no other country offers a better test case than Saudi Arabia, a regime that openly denies women so many rights and yet appears to be chummy with both Clinton and her foundation. Asked last week specifically about Saudi Arabia’s donations to the Clinton Foundation, the former secretary of state, fresh off a speech about women’s rights at the United Nations and the release of a 50-page report on the status of women and girls in the world, responded, “There can’t be any mistake about my passion concerning women’s rights here at home and around the world. So I think that people who want to support the foundation know full well what it is we stand for and what we’re working on.”

Should we take Clinton at face value?

Some context is worth considering first: Saudi Arabia ranks 145th of 158 countries in the U.N. Development Program’s Gender Inequality Index, making it among the worst countries in which to be born female, despite its considerable oil wealth. Child marriage is not uncommon because there is no legal minimum age to wed. For the bride, consent isn’t even required, and indeed, a woman (or girl) need not even be present for her own marriage, as long as her male guardian and her groom agree.

In the past few years, however, women in Saudi Arabia have made modest gains. In 2011, Saudi women finally gained the right to vote and to run in municipal elections (though not until this year). Today, 20 percent of the King’s Consultative Council (Majlis as-Shura) is made up of women. In 2012, women were permitted to work as sales clerks in lingerie and cosmetics shops for the first time, and in October 2013, four Saudi women were licensed to become lawyers—a first in the history of the kingdom. Overall, the number of women in the workforce has increased nine-fold in the past five years, to 17.7 percent, compared to 74.1 percent of males.

Mobility is still one of the most vexing problems facing Saudi women. The government forbids them to drive ( apparently in deference to their ovaries, which must not be harmed). The mutaween (religious police) enforce a strict dress code that stipulates that women be covered top to bottom in the stifling black abaya and accompanied by a male guardian ( mahram) every time they stir outside the home. Women cannot wander about by themselves, ride a bike (unless in a park, in full abaya and with a male guardian present) or go on a picnic. They cannot travel outside the country nor marry a man of their choosing without the permission of the ubiquitous male guardian.

The watchful eyes of male relatives and the dreaded mutaween circumscribe women’s every movement—so much so that in a 2009 cable to U.S. diplomats, Wajeha al-Huwaider—a Saudi women’s rights activist who recently challenged the ban on female drivers—was quoted as calling the country as “the world’s largest women’s prison.”

It wasn’t always this way. Before extremist clerics, calling themselves the Ikhwan, or the Brotherhood, took control of the Grand Mosque at Mecca in 1979, women enjoyed a modest measure of autonomy. As one Saudi woman expressed it in Qanta Ahmed’s 2008 In the Land of Invisible Women, “I used to be free in Riyadh, walking around [with my hair uncovered]. … Can you believe … I used to walk alone in Riyadh: no man, no maid, just relaxed like in Paris?.”

Many argue that it was only after the Saudi military ended up laying siege to one of Islam’s holiest sites in order to oust the recalcitrant fanatics, resulting in three hundred deaths and hundreds of injuries during two tense weeks, that the status of Saudi women changed dramatically. The crisis convinced the monarchy that it needed the fundamentalist Wahhabi clergy more than ever to control the population and to subvert insurgency by playing to the most atavistic elements in Saudi society. Unfortunately, the price for appeasement was the increased subordination of women.

During this same time, the Saudis also embarked on an ambitious program of exporting their most extreme Wahhabi adherents through missionary work. In Yemen, Egypt and Libya and throughout the Middle East, North and West Africa, and Central and South Asia, increasingly virulent forms of Islam are severely curtailing the rights of women and, by extension, further destabilizing already fragile states. Lamentably, Islamic regions that previously espoused less draconian views about the role of women are turning toward the Saudi-inspired misogyny. As Kyrgyz academic Tcholpon Akhmatalieva asserted in an interview with us, the outward flow of Saudi money has not only produced “a mosque on every block” in Uzbekistan and south Kyrgyzstan, but “now even little schoolgirls are forced to wear the hijab, which had never ever happened in [our] history before. The [Saudi] missionaries tell the patriarchs that all their women must veil now.”

All this means that those who argue that our national interests in Saudi Arabia are much more important than how women are treated there are suffering from a severe case of short-sightedness. The export of political volatility and violence—and misogyny—throughout the international system is not in the interests of the United States of America. Hillary Clinton herself said it best, declaring in a 2013 speech: “The next time you hear someone say that the fate of women and girls is not a core national security issue, it’s not one of those hard issues that really smart people deal with, remind them: The extremists understand the stakes of this struggle. They know that when women are liberated, so are entire societies. We must understand this too. And not only understand it, but act on it.”

Why, then, was Clinton not more outspoken against the Saudi regime while she was secretary of state? And why, to this day, does her family’s foundation accept money from a government know to contradict her stated beliefs on women’s rights? Certainly she was not ignorant of the facts: In a 2009 Wikileaks document, top officials at the U.S. State Department proclaimed bluntly to its embassies in the region, “It has been an ongoing challenge to persuade Saudi officials to treat terrorist financing emanating from Saudi Arabia as a strategic priority. … Donors in Saudi Arabia constitute the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide.” Clinton knew then and knows now that the national interests of the United States and Saudi Arabia do not dovetail, whether on the issue of terrorist financing or on that of women’s rights.

Critics have been scathing in their appraisal of Clinton’s silence concerning Saudi Arabia’s treatment of women. For example, Rothna Begum at Human Rights Watch, told us, “Saudi Arabia is incredibly obstructive to women’s rights in their own kingdom, and that resonates around the world. The U.S. is a key ally of Saudi Arabia and that means the administration has said very little about its human rights record including women’s rights.” During the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings, Begum says there was “a real double standard,” as the United States was “very critical of the human rights records of some countries, but remained singularly silent about Saudi Arabia and its crackdown on human rights and its mistreatment of women.” The activist group Saudi Women for Driving was also unhappy with Clinton’s lack of public support for their cause, declaring in a 2011 statement: “For the United States’ top diplomat to make no public statement about such developments sends exactly the wrong message to the Saudi government and, more importantly, to the women of Saudi Arabia.”

One possible interpretation of Clinton’s loud silence is that the Hillary Doctrine is in fact merely a rhetorical stance on the part of U.S. foreign policy makers, including, apparently, Clinton herself—a position that may be jettisoned if its tenets would undermine “real” American national interests in any particular case. Asked about the seeming incongruity in the Saudi case in 2011, Clinton attempted to explain her position in greater detail: “We will continue in private and in public to urge all governments to address issues of discrimination and to ensure that women have the equal opportunity to fulfill their own God-given potential. But I want to, again, underscore and emphasize that this is not about the United States. It’s not about what any of us on the outside say. It is about the women themselves and their right to raise their concerns with their own government.”

The idea that Hillary Clinton simply doesn’t sincerely believe in her own doctrine just doesn’t tally with her rhetorical and substantive support for women and women’s rights across decades of public service. After all, this is the secretary of state who elevated the Office of Global Women’s Issues to the seventh floor of the State Department with a special “ambassador at large,” who mandated gender training for all new foreign-service officers and under whom USAID programming for women mushroomed. This is the secretary of state who traveled the world advocating for the use of cookstoves to improve women’s health and oversaw the creation of the U.S. National Action Plan on Women, Peace and Security. There’s very little, if any, personal political payoff for Clinton from these far-flung and outward-reaching initiatives; indeed, she was criticized for her attention to what some considered a “small-bore” issue.

Perhaps Clinton believes that pressing foreign leaders on their treatment of women should be left to private conversations undertaken at the highest level of diplomacy—to which the U.S. public is not privy. Perhaps she believes the Saudi monarchy is making steady progress for women—advances that would be imperiled by causing the House of Saud to lose face by through public chastisement. Before his death earlier this year, Saudi King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz Al Saud was seen by some as a “reformer” (though it is unclear whether the new king, Salman, will follow in his elder brother’s footsteps; some Saudi women fear the best they can hope for is no erosion of what Abdullah gave to them when he was alive).

It is surely a delicate balancing act for a figure like Clinton to encourage women activists while simultaneously offering a hand up—versus a slap down—for regimes that are progressing on women’s rights but whose pace of progress is very slow due to concerns over internal stability. As Rania Ibrahim, dean of students at the all-female Effat University in Saudi Arabia, told the Chronicle of Higher Education, “Upsetting the norms the community is used to—it’s a recipe for failure.” It’s probably also a formula for increasing agitation among anti-regime foes—enemies that have shown themselves even less favorably disposed to women than the monarchy.

Clinton might also calculate that regimes respond best to internal rather than external pressure, and there is a serious risk that high-profile foreign support for local groups will endanger the lives of activists. In a 2013 interview with us, former head of the Office of Global Women’s Issues Melanne Verveer noted, “There’s a whole history of U.S.-supported groups being thrown out, controversies being created, etc. And I said, ‘We don’t want to—in our effort to support you—to cause you greater problems,’ and that’s when we discussed things like using multilateral organizations under the aegis of the U.N., for example, to bring support targeted to women [in] ways that wouldn’t come back and provide those who were impeding their progress [with] additional ammunition.”

There is one more interpretation of Clinton’s silence that must also be considered: Perhaps Clinton wants the Saudi monarchy to fall. After all, from what research tells us about the link between the treatment of women and the fate of nations, the Saudis will never know peace or stability. Perhaps they deserve, as do all nations, to reap what they have sown regarding women.

It must be noted, though, that such a view ignores the consequences for women: Given the widespread nature of the Wahhabi belief system within the country, the fall of the Saudi monarchy would absolutely not result in an improved situation for women. On the contrary, what little gains Saudi women have made most certainly would be lost, as evidenced by the trajectory of the Islamic State-controlled Sunni “caliphate,” and indeed, the Arab world more generally. Far from hearkening in a brave new era of human rights, dignity and greater enfranchisement, the uprisings of more than three years ago have yielded not a single Arab country that has become a better place for women (though we are crossing our fingers for Tunisia).

Indeed, women in many of these “newly democratized” nations—most notably Iraq—might with ample justification yearn for a return to the autocracies of yore, so stunning has been the regress for women. While long-term autocratic rule might have no impact on the subordinate status of women (think Equatorial Guinea), in other cases, such autocrats prove to be the only force powerful enough to improve the status of women. Saudi Arabia “is on a trajectory of modernization,” James Smith, a former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia, told Foreign Affairs last year, pointing to “an emerging critical mass of daughters—on campuses and in jobs—who will make a difference.” Perhaps the Saudis should be given time, then, for Smith also noted, “The king issues decrees only when he can count on the agreement of two-thirds of the population.”

Ryan Crocker, former U.S. ambassador to numerous Middle Eastern countries, is more skeptical. “We’re not going to change [the Saudis],” he told us in an interview. “Besides, who would be their successors? ‘You don’t like us? Well, après moi, le deluge.’ And we are seeing how right that is [in Syria, Egypt, etc.].” Can it be believed that those who have the will and are gaining the capability to overthrow the House of Saud would appoint women to the highest Shura? Or build the largest, best-funded women’s university in the world? Or allow schoolgirls to play sports? These are questions worth pondering.

But before jumping on the autocracy-is-better-for-women bandwagon, those who seek to implement the Hillary Doctrine must contemplate one last troubling fact. Long-term autocracy is fertile ground for the growth of highly toxic, male-bonded nationalist opposition groups that would imperil every advance granted to women by the autocrat—as witnessed by the new Islamic State “caliphate.” Indeed, such groups would explicitly target precisely those advances as their first order of business when in power. The Saudis have played midwife to the birth of groups that will one day prove to be their destruction—and these same groups will almost certainly bond over an intensified subjugation of women. Remember, for all its comparative progressivism vis-à-vis the clerics, it was the Saudi royal family that embraced the misogynistic Wahhabi viper in the first place.

The case of Saudi Arabia, then, provides an important lesson about the tradeoffs involved with public advocacy of women’s rights in the international arena—for Hillary Clinton, her successors at State and whomever the next president is. Too much public advocacy breeds defensiveness and even backlash among those one is trying to influence; too little public advocacy—too much silence—suggests to the world that these issues are not important after all and leads to despair among those one is trying to empower.

Clinton is silent apparently because she does not want the Saudi kingdom to stall or reverse ongoing, if slow-moving, progress for Saudi women. That in many ways is a justified stance, especially since the royals’ fall would be a catastrophe for Saudi women. At the same time, the Saudis not only export terror; they also are spreading the message of misogyny wherever their money and influence go. Indonesia, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Syria—Saudi preaching of misogyny is making the lives of women across the Sunni world much harder. Effectively implementing the Hillary Doctrine, then, involves morally fraught decisions and unavoidable paradoxes. In the case of Saudi women, Clinton has chosen a course that appears to be penny-foolish, but is surely pound-wise. The problem is that Saudi women are not the only women affected by this choice. If the Clinton Foundation accepts Saudi donations, let’s hope they are used to offset that collateral damage.