Ambassador Charles Hill, a career minister of the US Foreign Service who inspired generations of foreign policy practitioners and scholars through his work as a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and as the Brady-Johnson Distinguished Fellow at Yale University, died on Saturday, March 27, 2021. He was 84.
“Charlie was a one-of-a-kind diplomat, scholar, and teacher—cut from the same cloth as his decades-long colleague and dear friend George Shultz, who passed just six weeks before him. The generation of statesmen to which Charlie belonged has done so much for our country and for the world. Charlie never stopped trying to make an impact, whether it be on the international stage or in the classroom, where he taught until the very last days of his life. We at Hoover consider ourselves fortunate to have benefited from his wisdom and expertise and are blessed to have known him as a person. We extend our most sincere and deepest sympathies to his family for this great loss,” said Hoover Institution director Condoleezza Rice in a statement.
Ambassador Hill, along with Senior Fellow Russell Berman, cochaired Hoover’s Herbert and Jane Dwight Working Group on the Middle East and the Islamic World, which produces penetrating studies about the geopolitics of the region and insights on appropriate policy responses by the United States.
In a recent essay for the working group’s publication, The Caravan, Hill explored the historical concept of “human rights” that has been advanced by the western world. He explained how a “state” entity is necessary for defending the equal rights of all its citizens and added that the concept has been extended to describe proper justice in the international order. Human rights could not be universal unless all states representing citizens were seen as equal on the world stage, Hill maintained.
Hill concluded that these ideas are coming into conflict in a world where larger powers, such as the People’s Republic of China, are dominating particular “spheres of influence,” threatening sovereign nation-states, and challenging the international rules-based order. Furthermore, Hill believed Beijing is convinced of its superiority and seeks to delegitimize the United States’ standing as a defender of global human rights.
“The key to this global transformation will turn on ‘universal’ human rights,” Hill concluded. “These . . . are ‘an American thing’ and from Beijing’s point of view, alien and unsuited for present and future times. Xi Jinping’s ‘Socialism with Chinese Characteristics’; i.e. a world led by autocratic, undemocratic regimes, is the wave of the future, a wave that is on the edge of breaking on the shores of the West.”
In another recent essay for The Caravan, Hill argued that the global implications of the COVID-19 pandemic are epochal and present a unique opportunity for leaders to present a larger vision for American strategy, instead of relying on a standard agenda of alliance building, arms control, and other traditional foreign policy issues. He likened the current era to the “Axial Age” period from 800 to 200 BC, when the world transitioned from a fragmented vision of polytheism toward the monotheistic understanding that there is ultimately one world.
“Is this the time for a ‘Second Axial Age?’” Hill asked. “The answer is not only ‘yes’ but also that humanity already is in ‘Axial Age II, but has not yet fully grasped that transformation. . . . This new Axial Age II needs nations that recognize and champion it. This should be America’s response to the world’s current predicament.”
Hill authored major books about foreign policy, two of which were published by Hoover Institution Press. In Trial of a Thousand Years: World Order and Islamism (2011), Hill provides historical perspective on radical Islam’s refusal to accept the legitimacy of the nation-state system. In The Weaver’s Lost Art (2014), Hill argues that the United States must remain actively involved in the Middle East and marshal allies and partners to defeat actors whose goal is to disrupt order in the region.
Hill’s best-selling book Grand Strategies: Literature, Statecraft, and World Order (Yale University Press, 2010) examines foreign policy through the discussion of classical works spanning ancient to modern times, including those written by Homer, Thucydides, William Shakespeare, Mark Twain, and other literary icons. The book was inspired by Yale University’s rigorous yearlong grand strategy course founded by Hill and history professors John Lewis Gaddis and Paul Kennedy two decades ago.
“The great matters of high politics and grand strategy are essential to the human condition and so necessarily are within the purview of great literature,” wrote Hill in Grand Strategies.
In a 2010 episode of Uncommon Knowledge, Hill told host Peter Robinson that a key component of a nation’s grand strategy is ensuring that its policy makers receive a multidisciplinary education. Hill said that too often students will attend a prestigious university in the hopes that they will be prepared for a career in which they would work on big policy issues but in the end find themselves narrowed into a specialization.
“That’s not the way education was in the Victorian era or in the early part of the twentieth century,” Hill explained. “As American involvement in the world got larger and our concerns around the world became high politics, our education was shrinking.”
Hill received an AB from Brown University and a law degree and master’s degree in American studies from the University of Pennsylvania. Hill joined the US foreign service in 1963 and served for over thirty years in various missions, including high-profile diplomatic posts. In 1974, he participated in the Panama Canal negotiations, and in the following year, he became a member of the State Department’s policy planning staff and a speech writer for then secretary of state Henry Kissinger.
During the Reagan administration, Hill was the State Department director of Israel and Arab-Israeli affairs in 1981, and then deputy assistant secretary for the Middle East in 1982. From 1985 to 1989, he was executive aide to former US secretary of state George P. Shultz. From 1992 to 1996, Hill was a special consultant to UN secretary-general Boutros Boutros-Ghali.
Hill is the recipient of multiple diplomatic awards, including the Department of State’s Superior Honor Award (1973 and 1981), the Presidential Distinguished Service Award (1987 and 1989), and the Secretary of State’s Medal (1989).
Hill is survived by his wife Norma; daughter Catharine; and his two grandchildren. He was predeceased by his daughter, Emily.
