Hillary Clinton’s Empathy Deficit

Hillary Clinton is being pilloried by pundits on the right for saying, at a recent speech at Georgetown, that America’s leaders should “empathize” with America’s enemies. But what’s so wrong about that?

“This is what we call smart power,” she said, using the phrase that was supposed to define her tenure as secretary of state. “Using every possible tool and partner to advance peace and security. Leaving no one side on the sidelines. Showing respect even for one’s enemies. Trying to understand, in so far as psychologically possible, [and] empathize with their perspective and point of view.”

As a matter of politics, “empathize” was a lousy word choice, a reminder that Mrs. Clinton is as tin-eared as she is ambitious: Expect a GOP political attack ad if and when she runs for president.

But empathy isn’t sympathy. Understanding an enemy’s point of view does not mean taking their side. Respect is not solidarity. “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles,” Sun Tzu teaches in “The Art of War.” “If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”

It’s good advice. Mrs. Clinton isn’t wrong to adopt it. Her problem is that she appears to be a singularly lousy empathizer.

In April 2005 Vladimir Putin said the collapse of the Soviet Union was “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.” In 2006 a Russian dissident in London was poisoned by polonium—a nuclear attack in miniature—leading to a breakdown in relations between London and Moscow. In 2008 Russia invaded Georgia. That same year, educational manuals for Russian social-studies teachers took the view that Joseph Stalin was “the most successful Soviet leader ever.”

What about the Great Terror of the 1930s, in which millions of Soviet citizens were killed by Stalin’s henchmen? That, according to the manual, happened because Stalin “did not know who would deal the next blow, and for that reason he attacked every known group and movement.” Commenting on the Terror, Mr. Putin allowed that the killing was terrible “but in other countries worse things happened.”

Such was the man Mrs. Clinton had every reason to “understand” when she arrived at the State Department in 2009. What conclusions was she supposed to draw about someone whose core ambition was to restore the reputation, and the former borders, of the old Soviet Union? That the time had come to clink glasses and announce a reset?

Or take Iran. In her most recent memoir, Mrs. Clinton asks: “If Iran had a nuclear weapon tomorrow, would that create even one more job for a country where millions of young people are out of work? Would it send one more Iranian to college or rebuild the roads and ports still crumbling from the war with Iraq a generation ago? When Iranians look abroad, would they rather end up like North Korea or South Korea?”

These are the kinds of questions that often confound Americans who too easily assume that the things democratic politicians want for their people are the same things dictators want for themselves. South or North Korea? That’s easy: Tehran’s ties to Pyongyang run deep because both capitals see themselves resisting American imperialism. Nuclear weapons or a better economy? That’s easy, too, since the former allow you to bully your neighbors and dominate the region, while the latter merely create a growing middle class demanding greater civic and political freedoms.

If Mrs. Clinton made a serious effort to see things from the ayatollahs’ point of view, maybe she’d get this. If she had real respect for them, she wouldn’t suppose that they are merely too stupid, or blinded by prejudice, or stuck in the past, to understand their own values and self-interest. Why do liberals who celebrate diversity seem to think that, deep down, all people want the same things?

Here’s another question: If Mrs. Clinton is at least prepared to attempt a show of empathy for the Putins and Khameneis of the world, why so little empathy for American allies? In March 2010 a minor Israeli official announced the approval of some additional construction in a Jerusalem neighborhood, mischaracterized as a “settlement,” when Vice President Joe Biden was in the country. It was an ordinary bureaucratic bungle by the Israeli government.

So what did Mrs. Clinton do? She called Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu to yell at him. “I told the Prime Minister that President Obama had viewed the news about East Jerusalem as ‘a personal insult to him, the Vice President, and the United States,’ ” as she recounts in her memoir.

Such has been the pattern of the Obama administration, whose foreign policy record Mrs. Clinton cannot escape or finesse: misplaced understanding toward our adversaries, shrill lectures for our friends. The next president needs to make it the other way around.

Write to bstephens@wsj.com