RUTHFULLY YOURS

Hillary Rodham Clinton was the best secretary of state in U.S. history—if the amount of travel abroad is the criterion by which we judge the success of America’s top diplomat. Mrs. Clinton logged a million miles flying around the world during President Barack Obama‘s first term. It’s a remarkable number: The Earth is 25,000 miles in circumference, so the secretary circled the globe 40 times in four years. Even more remarkable is that one can’t think of a signature accomplishment from all this on-the-go diplomacy.

As the BBC’s State Department correspondent, Kim Ghattas accompanied Mrs. Clinton on some 300,000 of those miles and interviewed her at least 15 times. In “The Secretary: A Journey With Hillary Clinton From Beirut to the Heart of American Power,” Ms. Ghattas wants to paint an intimate, on-the-job portrait of her subject during a period that began with broad outreach by Washington to old and new enemies, that encompassed many setbacks, including the fracturing of the American order in the Middle East, and that ended with an ambassador’s murder in Benghazi, Libya.The material has world-historical heft, yet the treatment rarely carries weight. Ms. Ghattas clearly enjoys the access that her job entails and deems no detail of life in the State Department press corps too insignificant to share. There are seemingly endless anecdotes about the “chewy chocolate chip cookies” at the air bases that service the secretary of state’s plane; the chicken-salad dinners aboard the plane; the press packets handed out by the U.S. Embassy in Beijing; the “Bulgari hand fresheners” inside the Saudi king’s tent. Did you know that one time Mrs. Clinton’s plane almost took off without “Arshad Mohammed from Reuters, who had overslept”?

Ms. Ghattas adds to this banal reportage her reflections on the meaning and purpose of America’s superpower status. The author, who is of Dutch-Lebanese origin and who grew up in Beirut in the 1980s during Lebanon’s civil war, says that she wrote the book in part to “come to terms with my personal misgivings about American power.” Her pro-Western family was dismayed when, in 1984, the Reagan administration, having resolved to stop Lebanon’s sectarian bloodletting, withdrew American forces in the wake of Hezbollah’s terror campaign against peacekeepers. Her own political awakening came as a teenager in 1990, when President George H.W. Bush greenlighted Syrian domination of Lebanon in return for Hafez al-Assad’s participation in the first Gulf War against Iraq.

The lesson of these experiences—that America’s friends pay a steep price when the indispensable nation fails to engage morally—isn’t lost on Ms. Ghattas. Yet it rarely impels her to question Mrs. Clinton’s lukewarm, often cynical, responses to the plight of dissidents and democrats from Iran to Russia to East Asia. Ms. Ghattas takes it for granted that “the world had become allergic to U.S. leadership by the end of the Bush administration” and that, therefore, Mrs. Clinton’s job was to “restore America’s lost face in the world.” Such assumptions lead her to frame age-old wisdom as the revolutionary innovations of the Obama administration. “In the twenty-first century America could no longer walk into a room and make demands; it had to build connections first,” she writes at one point—as if the notion would have shocked, say, Dean Acheson or Thomas Jefferson.

In practice, the administration’s “nuanced diplomacy” meant downgrading the promotion of freedom and human rights, viewed suspiciously as Mr. Bush’s policy rather than a long-standing bipartisan commitment. On her first trip to China as secretary of state in February 2009, Mrs. Clinton said that criticism of Beijing’s abhorrent rights record can’t be allowed to “interfere with the global economic crisis, the global climate change crisis and the security crises.” To Ms. Ghattas, the fact that the secretary’s statement drew widespread outrage at the time was merely proof that “the world was not ready for her new style of diplomacy.”

The author also approves of Mrs. Clinton’s many apologies for the actions of the previous American administration. One particularly distasteful episode the author recounts came during an October 2009 “town hall” with Pakistani journalists in Islamabad. Mrs. Clinton answered a question regarding U.S. support for Pakistani strongman Pervez Musharraf by saying: “Musharraf and Bush are gone. I’m very happy about Bush being gone. You’re apparently happy about Musharraf being gone.” Such statements, the author says, “went a long way to buy goodwill.”

Actually they didn’t. As a June 2012 Pew poll revealed, in much of the Muslim world, where the administration’s humble posture was supposed to have had its greatest effect, U.S. popularity generally declined during Mr. Obama’s first term. (Only 12% of Pakistanis, for example, held a favorable view of the U.S., down from 19% at the end of Mr. Bush’s presidency.) Meanwhile, the administration’s obsession with multilateralism and the hectoring of traditional allies like Israel have yielded few concrete gains. But Ms. Ghattas plays down or elides the Obama team’s most serious foreign-policy setbacks. The now-forgotten Russian “reset” and the administration’s ludicrous faith in Bashar al-Assad’s reformist potential get far less attention here than Mrs. Clinton’s willingness to acknowledge “American excesses of power abroad,” which, the author claims, has made the U.S. a “palatable” presence around the world.

Ms. Ghattas’s narrative comes to a close before al Qaeda terrorists targeted the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, killing Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three staffers. This is a glaring omission and a nonsensical one as she continued in her role as BBC correspondent and could have told the full story of Mrs. Clinton’s secretaryship. Benghazi is discussed in passing in the book’s conclusion, with Ms. Ghattas correctly noting that, “ever the politician, Clinton managed to dodge most of the acrimonious attacks” stemming from the incident’s political fallout. The partisan rancor surrounding Benghazi, the author is happy to report, didn’t derail the Obama-Clinton approach to diplomacy and their use of “soft power,” which really means pleasing Ms. Ghattas and other members of the global journalistic class. What it means for American interests is a different matter.

Mr. Ahmari is an assistant books editor at the Journal.

A version of this article appeared March 7, 2013, on page A15 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Nowhere Left To Fly To.