Hillary Clinton recently outlined sharp differences between the Obama Administration’s approach to foreign policy and what her own might look like.
What would a potential Hillary Clinton presidency look like? Well we got a glimpse at her approach to foreign policy last weekend after The Atlantic published a major interview of her conducted by veteran journalist Jeffrey Goldberg.
Kevin Drum highlighted the passage that everyone’s been parsing over the last few days with his own added emphasis:
HRC: Great nations need organizing principles, and “Don’t do stupid stuff” is not an organizing principle. It may be a necessary brake on the actions you might take in order to promote a vision.
….JG: What is your organizing principle, then?
HRC: Peace, progress, and prosperity. This worked for a very long time. Take prosperity. That’s a huge domestic challenge for us. If we don’t restore the American dream for Americans, then you can forget about any kind of continuing leadership in the world. Americans deserve to feel secure in their own lives, in their own middle-class aspirations, before you go to them and say,“We’re going to have to enforce navigable sea lanes in the South China Sea.”
A lot of analysis of this interview focuses on the idea that Clinton is distancing herself from Obama’s approach to foreign policy, as a political move. And to some degree I would agree with that. But at the same time Clinton is clearly criticizing Obama’s approach when she argues that Obama’s oft quoted phrase of “don’t do stupid stuff” doesn’t count as an “organizing principle” for foreign policy. And she goes on to explicitly criticize the Obama Administration’s decision not to arm various rebel factions in Syria’s ongoing civil war . In fact she blames this decision as a reason for the rise of extremist the group ISIS that is doing all sorts of awful things in Iraq right now. Goldberg summed it up this way:
Well, his [Obama’s] former secretary of state, Hillary Rodham Clinton, isn’t buying it. In an interview with me earlier this week, she used her sharpest language yet to describe the “failure” that resulted from the decision to keep the U.S. on the sidelines during the first phase of the Syrian uprising.
“The failure to help build up a credible fighting force of the people who were the originators of the protests against Assad—there were Islamists, there were secularists, there was everything in the middle—the failure to do that left a big vacuum, which the jihadists have now filled,” Clinton said.
The problem with this sort of analysis is that it’s not backed up by the America’s history of military intervention in foreign nations. Over at the Washington Posts’s blog The Monkey Cage, Marc Lynch wrote a great summation of the political science research about intervention in foreign civil wars that really debunks the idea that the only thing standing between the Syrian people and a liberal democracy is a few planeloads of American weapons. His argument covers a lot of ground but the conclusion is pretty striking:
Had the plan to arm Syria’s rebels been adopted back in 2012, the most likely scenario is that the war would still be raging and look much as it does today, except that the United States would be far more intimately and deeply involved. That’s a prospect that Clinton frankly acknowledged during her interview, but that somehow didn’t make it into the headline. As catastrophic as Syria’s war has been, and as alarming as the Islamic State has become, there has never been a plausible case to be made that more U.S. arms for Syrian rebels would have meaningfully altered their path.
I’d take the criticism even further. “Don’t do stupid stuff” strikes me as a pretty solid organizing principle for foreign policy. Indeed our problems in foreign affairs over the last decade and a half have largely been self-created. Clearly the main reason why ISIS rose to such power is that we invaded Iraq in the first place (and in the process destroyed all of Iraq’s military, economic, and political institutions). And clearly the reason that Iraq has been saddled for eight years with a brutal and incompetent thug like Nouri al-Maliki as Prime Minister is that we anointed him in the first place. Meanwhile the one country in the Middle East that has gone from being ruled by an autocratic strongman to a semi-functional democracy since the start of the so called Arab Spring is Tunisia. A country we haven’t invaded or otherwise tried to control. Indeed America didn’t have much to do with this transition at all.
In fact if you look back at the history of American foreign military intervention since the end of the Cold War, the list of interventions that end up with a positive outcome (former Yugoslavia) are greatly outnumbered by the ones that lead to no improvement or a debacle (Somalia, Haiti, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya). Indeed the Persian Gulf War, once the model for how to intervene well has lead to all sorts of problems down the road.
So what does this all mean? Well it’s hard to tell. It’s impossible to try and get into politicians’ heads so trying to parse what “Hillary really thinks” is pretty much a fool’s errand. And the media loves a good inner-party brawl so their coverage of this spat, and Goldberg’s reporting of the interview itself, are no doubt hamming it up to some degree. And of course one interview does not a foreign policy make, but even so there appears to be real disagreement here.
Obama of course is no peacenik, but he has said he opposes “dumb wars” and seems to be more concerned about the dangers of American action, like invading Iraq for no good reason and occupying it for nine years, more than the dangers of American inaction. Meanwhile Hillary voted to authorize the Iraq War and pushed both as a candidate and Secretary of State for a permanent American military presence in Iraq. In short there’s a reason why liberals like Ezra Klein are getting concerned.
There probably wouldn’t be much daylight between Obama’s record and a potential Clinton Administration when it comes to domestic policy. But on foreign affairs there could very well be a move away from Obama’s cautious and incremental approach to foreign affairs to one that could very well involve a more muscular approach, indeed it might even involve more foreign military adventures. Liberals who are concerned about foreign policy should pay attention, because the Democratic nominee is being picked as you read this.
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Ruh roh, I see the mod squad has hit again
And she goes on to explicitly criticize the Obama Administration’s decision not to arm various rebel factions in Syria’s ongoing civil war . In fact she blames this decision as a reason for the rise of extremist the group ISIS that is doing all sorts of awful things in Iraq right now. Goldberg summed it up this way: – See more at: https://goodmenproject.com/featured-content/jka-hillary-the-hawk/#sthash.Gai7aAae.dpuf isis would have done what theyre doing in iraq – and turfed out the moderates and would have control even larger portions of syria. the reality was/is, that assad remaining in power in syria, is the ‘least… Read more »
edit:
if assad had been removed from power.
isis would have done what theyre doing in iraq – and turfed out the moderates and would have control even larger portions of syria.
Hillary Clinton and other women in power have put to bed the goofy notion that the world would know peace, if only men would let them run things.
The world faces more peace when women run things besides men. And the blacks besides the whites. And the gays besides the straights. I mean, that is not a difficult thing to understand. More equality equals more peace and quality of life. Of course we will not face peace while psychopathic men and women rule the world, but that is another subject. By the way, it’s proven women in politics happen to be much less corrupt and less likely to tolerate corruption than men. But tell us more about how saying women also fail is the only thing that comes… Read more »
Does that include Janet Reno who was responsible for the deaths at Waco?
Hillary is just as much a sociopath as her husband. They both despise anything not under their control, and feel they know what is best for the “little people.”