Alter egos: Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and the twilight struggle over American power.

• Author: Fischer, Raymond L.
• Position: Book review

by Mark Landler Random House, New York 2016, 350 pages, $27.99

Having served The New York Times as bureau chief in Hong Kong and Frankfurt, Mark Landler began to cover U.S. foreign policy at the time of Barack Obama's 2009 inauguration, and he has served as the paper's White House correspondent since 2011. From his unique perspective, he took his research for Alter Egos beyond interviews with senior administration officials, foreign diplomats, and friends of Pres. Obama and Hillary Clinton to Oval Office "huddles" and South Lawn walks where the two "pressed their views."

Two exceptionally ambitious politicians, Obama and Clinton survived their evolving relationships: archrivals during the 2008 campaign, wary partners during Clinton's tenure as Secretary of State, her attempts to

disassociate herself from the Obama Administration, and finally Obama's enthusiastic support of Clinton's 2016 campaign. However, scars of early contention have remained just below the surface.

Obama chose nonintervention in places in which America's national interest were not directly at stake, places such as Syria and Ukraine, where the U.S. conducted a "negligible amount of trade." Obama's senior foreign policy specialists sanitized the President's brief, four-word policy description to "Don't do stupid stuff." To Obama's critics, the phrase summarized the president's "weak and dilatory" leadership that relinquished America's role as the ultimate "guarantor of world order."

Among the critics, Clinton positioned herself as rival, first lieutenant, and would-be successor. As Secretary of State, Clinton was involved in major foreign policy debates. However, once she left State, she deemphasized her role as defender of Obama's legacy and began to delineate her own views of the world. Like all breakouts, "It was not pretty." Clinton did not consider "Don't do stupid stuff" an organizing principle of a great nation. A loyal lieutenant when necessary, Clinton was a "general-in-waiting."

In the early days of rivalry-turned-partnership, concession sometimes failed. For instance, in June 2009 at the University of Cairo, Obama delivered a landmark speech to the Islamic world; Clinton flew overnight from Honduras to hear it. When then-White House Chief of Staff (and now Chicago mayor) Rahm Emanuel suggested the President fly to Jerusalem to show U.S. solidarity with allies in the region, Obama chose not to go. Emanuel asked Clinton to go as a surrogate, but she would have no...