(Side note: I’m writing this diary as sort of an addendum to my previous post, as I don’t think I delved into foreign policy as much as I should have.)
An interesting theme recycled by the media during this election cycle is that Hillary is this pragmatic realist running against a starry eyed Leftist. And to a certain extent the latter half of that statement is true. Bernie has not shown the amount of policy depth you would like to see from a Presidential candidate. However, I couldn’t care less about him because he won’t become the Democratic nominee. Hillary will, and in reality she is no realist particularly on foreign policy, which is very concerning.
Paul Krugman recently wrote an extremely deluded blog post in which he explained away all of Hillary’s bad decisions by saying, “lots of evidence that she both thinks hard about issues and is willing to revise her views in the light of facts and experience.” Well Gosh! Let’s give her an A for effort! Seriously though, even the premise of his statement is wrong. Hillary voted for the Iraq war, and to be fair there was a lot of Democrats who made that mistake, although most in Congress didn’t. But most of those Democrats who did learned from their mistake. Hillary hasn’t. As secretary of state she pushed a skeptical Obama to bomb Libya,
Her conviction would be critical in persuading Mr. Obama to join allies in bombing Colonel Qaddafi’s forces. In fact, Mr. Obama’s defense secretary, Robert M. Gates, would later say that in a “51-49” decision, it was Mrs. Clinton’s support that put the ambivalent president over the line.
The consequences would be more far-reaching than anyone imagined, leaving Libya a failed state and a terrorist haven, a place where the direst answers to Mrs. Clinton’s questions have come to pass.
And later she again tried to push Obama to bomb Assad, but as Jeffrey Goldberg explains this time he ignored her advice,
Obama would say privately that the first task of an American president in the post-Bush international arena was “Don’t do stupid shit.” Obama’s reticence frustrated Power and others on his national-security team who had a preference for action. Hillary Clinton, when she was Obama’s secretary of state, argued for an early and assertive response to Assad’s violence. In 2014, after she left office, Clinton told me that “the failure to help build up a credible fighting force of the people who were the originators of the protests against Assad … left a big vacuum, which the jihadists have now filled.” When The Atlantic published this statement, and also published Clinton’s assessment that “great nations need organizing principles, and ‘Don’t do stupid stuff’ is not an organizing principle,” Obama became “rip-shit angry,” according to one of his senior advisers. The president did not understand how “Don’t do stupid shit” could be considered a controversial slogan. Ben Rhodes recalls that “the questions we were asking in the White House were ‘Who exactly is in the stupid-shit caucus? Who is pro–stupid shit?’ ” The Iraq invasion, Obama believed, should have taught Democratic interventionists like Clinton, who had voted for its authorization, the dangers of doing stupid shit. (Clinton quickly apologized to Obama for her comments, and a Clinton spokesman announced that the two would “hug it out” on Martha’s Vineyard when they crossed paths there later.)
[snip]
By 2013, Obama’s resentments were well developed. He resented military leaders who believed they could fix any problem if the commander in chief would simply give them what they wanted, and he resented the foreign-policy think-tank complex. A widely held sentiment inside the White House is that many of the most prominent foreign-policy think tanks in Washington are doing the bidding of their Arab and pro-Israel funders. I’ve heard one administration official refer to Massachusetts Avenue, the home of many of these think tanks, as “Arab-occupied territory.”
[snip]
For some foreign-policy experts, even within his own administration, Obama’s about-face on enforcing the red line was a dispiriting moment in which he displayed irresolution and naïveté, and did lasting damage to America’s standing in the world. “Once the commander in chief draws that red line,” Leon Panetta, who served as CIA director and then as secretary of defense in Obama’s first term, told me recently, “then I think the credibility of the commander in chief and this nation is at stake if he doesn’t enforce it.” Right after Obama’s reversal, Hillary Clinton said privately, “If you say you’re going to strike, you have to strike. There’s no choice.”
[snip]
But what sealed Obama’s fatalistic view was the failure of his administration’s intervention in Libya, in 2011. That intervention was meant to prevent the country’s then-dictator, Muammar Qaddafi, from slaughtering the people of Benghazi, as he was threatening to do. Obama did not want to join the fight; he was counseled by Joe Biden and his first-term secretary of defense Robert Gates, among others, to steer clear. But a strong faction within the national-security team—Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Susan Rice, who was then the ambassador to the United Nations, along with Samantha Power, Ben Rhodes, and Antony Blinken, who was then Biden’s national-security adviser—lobbied hard to protect Benghazi, and prevailed. (Biden, who is acerbic about Clinton’s foreign-policy judgment, has said privately, “Hillary just wants to be Golda Meir.”) American bombs fell, the people of Benghazi were spared from what may or may not have been a massacre, and Qaddafi was captured and executed. But Obama says today of the intervention, “It didn’t work.” The U.S., he believes, planned the Libya operation carefully—and yet the country is still a disaster...
As an aside I encourage everyone to read the entire Goldberg interview. Obama has revolutionized the way we approach foreign policy, and I think the article does a very good job documenting this shift.
Furthermore, she is once again pushing a crazy plan for a no fly zone over Syria. Hillary does not learn from her past mistakes. After Iraq then again in Libya, she is pushing the same failed policies. At some point Hillary’s defenders in the media need to realize she is not the level headed pragmatist she presents herself to be. And even after being proven wrong time and time again she wants to move America’s foreign policy to the right.
I think a lot of her defenders in the media have attempted to convince themselves into thinking that Hillary is a pragmatic progressive in the mold of Barack Obama. But the reason she has a foreign policy that borders on neoconservatism is not out of any realpolitik designs, but because she genuinely believes that a strong hawkish foreign policy is the correct posture to take. She is an ideologue. That’s why she keeps on doing what Obama would call “stupid shit.” She does not share Obama’s progressive outlook on the world. And in general she does not share Obama’s admirable ability to self reflect. Otherwise, she would have reversed this posture long ago. Thus, it would be hard to argue that a Clinton presidency would protect Obama’s legacy on foreign policy, a false assertion her proponents often make.
Now certainly her media defenders will try to argue this point on domestic policy, but as I explained in my previous post she is not likely to get anything done domestically as President for reasons beyond her control. So her defenders can wave around her white papers as much as they like, but about 10% of her domestic policy agenda will get implemented (if she is lucky). Additionally, despite the assertions that Hillary is being frank and level headed with the public (as Krugman and others would say) Hillary and her surrogates have engaged in lies and fear mongering, especially with regards to single payer. Her argument is not that single payer would be difficult to get through Congress, but that it is a bad policy that would hurt American families. This is absurd and should be offensive to any progressive. This is much worse than being merely hazy on details as Bernie has been. She is not making the good faith, level-headed arguments her media proponents say she does.
Anyhow, foreign policy is for the most part the only place where she will be able to make her mark as President because she won’t be able to get anything done on the domestic front. Thus, given her penchant for bombing Muslim countries this should be a terrifying prospect for any Progressive.
[Disclaimer: Now I’m not saying people should not vote for Hillary in November. In fact I encourage to vote for her. A Republican presidency would be astronomically more disastrous for this country than having someone like Hillary as President. Moreover, we have a two party system (unfortunately), so if you vote for a third party or stay home you are directly responsible for the outcome. The goal of my past two posts is to set the record straight on Hillary Clinton, so when she becomes President she is not given an inch on foreign policy by Progressives.]