“Where She Always Was”: Everyone Suddenly Remembers That Hillary Clinton Is A Foreign Policy Hawk
There are few things the political press loves more than an intra-party squabble, so it wasn’t surprising that when Hillary Clinton gave an interview to The Atlantic about foreign policy that offered something less than fulsome support for everything Barack Obama has done, it got characterized as a stinging rebuke. The Post’s Chris Cillizza described her “slamming” Obama. The New York Times said the “veneer of unity…shattered.” “Hillary slams Obama for ‘stupid’ foreign policy,” said an absurdly misleading New York Post headline (she never called anything Obama did “stupid”).
If you actually read the interview, you’ll see that Clinton actually didn’t “slam” Obama (even Jeffrey Goldberg, who conducted the interview, overstates the disagreement in his report on it). She was careful not to explicitly criticize the administration, even when she was articulating positions that differed from what Barack Obama might believe. But there were clear indications that Clinton will be staking out a more hawkish foreign policy than the president she served as Secretary of State, on issues like Iran and Syria.
That isn’t because of some cynical calculation, or because she wants to “distance” herself from a president whose popularity is currently mediocre at best. It’s because that’s what she sincerely believes. If people didn’t have such short memories, they wouldn’t be surprised by it. Hillary Clinton has always been a liberal on social and economic issues, but much more of a moderate (or even a conservative) when it comes to foreign policy.
From the moment Clinton began forging her own distinct political identity in her run for Senate in 2000, it was clear she was a hawk on foreign affairs and defense, placing herself in the right-leaning half of the Democratic party. She wasn’t looking to slash military spending or avoid foreign interventions. Look at how the National Journal ranked her on foreign affairs during her time in the Senate (the NJ rankings are idiosyncratic, but they have the benefit of examining foreign affairs distinct from other issues):
- 2001: 28th most liberal senator
- 2002: 28th most liberal
- 2003: 15th most liberal
- 2004: 42nd most liberal
- 2005: 30th most liberal
- 2006: 36th most liberal
- 2007: 19th most liberal
- 2008: 40th most liberal
When Clinton ran for president in 2008, the primary issue distinction between her and Barack Obama was that she had supported the Iraq War, while he had opposed it. There was no issue that made more of a difference in the primaries. Even as Secretary of State, while carrying out the President’s policies, in private she counseled more aggressive moves. As Michael Crowley wrote in January, “As Secretary of State, Clinton backed a bold escalation of the Afghanistan war. She pressed Obama to arm the Syrian rebels, and later endorsed air strikes against the Assad regime. She backed intervention in Libya, and her State Department helped enable Obama’s expansion of lethal drone strikes. In fact, Clinton may have been the administration’s most reliable advocate for military action.”
As we move toward the campaign, it’s likely that liberals are going to start finding reasons to be displeased with Clinton on foreign policy. In the Atlantic interview, for instance, they discuss the Gaza situation at some length, and she practically sounds like a spokesperson for the Netanyahu government, putting all the blame for the conflict and all the casualties squarely on Hamas, while refusing repeated opportunities to say Israel has done anything wrong at all.
Over the next two years there will probably be more situations in which Clinton winds up to the right of the median Democratic voter. That would be more of a political problem if she had a strong primary opponent positioned to her left who could provide a vehicle for whatever dissatisfaction the Democratic base might be feeling. But at the moment, there is no such opponent. Her dominance of the field may give her more latitude on foreign affairs — not to move to the right, but to be where she always was. Neither Democrats nor anyone else can say they didn’t see it coming.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect; The Plum Line, The Washington Post, August 12, 2014
“Obama And The World’s Ills”: The Republican Story Is: We Don’t Need To Bog Down In Details — Somehow, It’s All Obama’s Fault
It’s hard to recall a time when the world presented more crises with fewer easy solutions. And for the Republicans, all of these woes have a common genesis: American weakness projected by Barack Obama.
People in the Middle East, former Vice President Dick Cheney said recently, “are absolutely convinced that the American capacity to lead and influence in that part of the world has been dramatically reduced by this president.” He added, “We’ve got a problem with weakness, and it’s centered right in the White House.”
Really? It’s instructive to ask: What exactly would a Republican president advised by Cheney do in each of these crises? Let’s take them one at a time.
Iraq. It’s now clear that Cheney’s invasion of Iraq and its subsequent Shiite client state under Nouri al-Maliki only deepened sectarian strife and laid the groundwork for another brand of Islamist radicalism, this time in the form of ISIS, and more backlash against the U.S. for creating the mess. What’s the solution — a permanent U.S. military occupation of Iraq? Republican presidential candidates should try running on that one.
Syria. Obama took a lot of criticism for equivocating on where the bright line was when it came to Syrian use of chemical warfare. In fact, American military pressure and diplomacy has caused Syrian president Assad to get rid of chemical weapons. But the deeper Syrian civil war is another problem from hell. How about it, Republican candidates — More costly military supplies to moderate radicals, whoever the hell they are? A U.S invasion? See how that plays in the 2016 campaign.
Israel-Palestine. A two-state solution seems further away than ever, and time is not on the Israeli side. No American president has had the nerve to tell the Israeli government to stop building settlements on Arab lands, despite $3 billion a year on U.S. aid to Israel. What Would Jesus Do? (What would Cheney do?)
Putin and Ukraine. Russian President Putin’s fomenting of military adventures by ethnic Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine has created a needless crisis. But our European friends, who have trade deals with Russia, don’t want to make trouble. So, what will it be — a new U.S.-led Cold War without European support? A hot war?
Iran’s Nuclear Capacity. The policy of détente with Iran in exchange for controls on Iranian ability to weaponize enriched uranium is a gamble that could well pay off. The alternative course of bombing Iran, either ourselves or via a proxy Israeli strike, seems far more of a gamble. Who’s the realist here?
China’s New Muscle. The U.S., under Democratic and Republican presidents alike, has become pitifully dependent on borrowing from China. Our biggest corporations have put the attractions of cheap Chinese labor ahead of continuing production in the U.S.A., creating a chronic trade deficit that requires all that borrowing. Now, China is throwing around its economic weight everywhere from its own backyard in East Asia to Africa and South America. Our troubles with Putin have helped promote a closer alliance between Moscow and Beijing. Anyone have a nice silver bullet for this one?
Those Central American Kids. What do you think — failure of immigration policy or humanitarian refugee crisis? On the one hand, American law says that bona fide refugees can apply for asylum and that children who are being trafficked fall into the category of refugees. On the other hand America is never going to take all the world’s refugees. Border Patrol agents interviewing terrified nine-year-olds lack the capacity to determine who is a true candidate for asylum. If shutting down the border — ours or Mexico’s — were the easy solution, we would have done it decades ago.
And I haven’t even gotten to Afghanistan, or the problem of nuclear proliferation, or new Jihadist weapons that can evade airport detection systems, or the total failure of democracy to gain ground in the Middle East.
The Republican story seems to be: we don’t need to bog down in details — somehow, it’s all Obama’s fault.
Here’s what these crises have in common.
- They have no easy solutions, military or diplomatic, and U.S. leverage is limited.
- They are deeply rooted in regional geo-politics. U.S. projection of either bravado or prudence has little to do with how recent events have unfolded.
- Some of these crises were worsened by earlier U.S. policy mistakes, such as the Cheney-Bush invasion of Iraq, or the bipartisan indulgence of Israeli building of settlements, or the one-sided industrial deals with China, or 20th-century alliances with Middle Eastern despots to protect oil interests.
When I was growing up, there was a nice clean division between the good guys and the bad guys. Hitler was the ultimate bad guy. Or maybe it was Stalin. America won World War II, and we won the Cold War when the Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet Union collapsed.
Policy choices were easy only in retrospect. The neat world of good guys and bad guys started coming apart with the Vietnam War.
Today’s crises are nothing like the ones of that simple era. Who are the good guys and bad guys in Syria and in Iraq? In China’s diplomacy in South America? Among the murdered Israeli and Palestinian children and the children seeking refuge at our southern border?
To the extent that policy options are even partly military, the American public has no stomach for multiple invasions and occupations.
As Republican jingoists scapegoat President Obama for all the world’s ills and try to impose a simple story of weakness and strength on events of stupefying complexity, you have to hope that the American people have more of an attention span than usual.
By: Robert Kuttner, Co-Founder and Co-Editor, ‘The American Prospect’; The Huffington Post Blog, July 20, 2014
“Obama’s Understated Foreign Policy Gains”: Leadership, Painstaking Diplomacy And Understanding America’s Limitations
It’s been a pretty good couple of weeks for American foreign policy. No, seriously.
On June 23, the last of Syria’s chemical weapons stockpile was loaded onto a Danish freighter to be destroyed. The following day, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia asked his Parliament to rescind the permission that it had given him to send troops into Ukraine. Meanwhile, there is still cautious optimism that a nuclear deal with Iran is within reach.
What do these have in common? They were achieved without a single American bomb being dropped and they relied on a combination of diplomacy, economic sanctions and the coercive threat of military force. As policy makers and pundits remain focused on Iraq and the perennial but distracting discussion about the use of force, these modest but significant achievements have, perhaps predictably, been ignored. Yet they hold important lessons for how American power can be most effectively deployed today.
Nine months ago, President Obama eschewed military means to punish Syria for its use of chemical weapons and instead negotiated an agreement to remove them. Critics like Senator John McCain blasted it as a “loser” deal that would never work. By refusing to back up a stated “red line” with military force, Mr. Obama had supposedly weakened American credibility.
In Damascus, however, the threat of military engagement by the United States was taken more seriously. And when given the choice between American bombing or giving up his chemical weapons, President Bashar al-Assad of Syria chose the latter.
Four months ago, some pundits confidently declared that Mr. Putin had “won” in Crimea and would ignore a Western response of toothless sanctions. But Russia has paid a serious price for its actions in Ukraine: diplomatic isolation and an economic downturn spurred by capital outflows, declining foreign investment and international opprobrium.
Mr. Putin’s recent effort to tamp down tensions appears to be a response, in part, to the threat of further sanctions. In trying to operate outside the global system, Mr. Putin found that resistance to international norms came at an unacceptable cost.
While it is far too early to declare success on the nuclear talks in Vienna, that the United States and Iran are sitting down at the negotiating table is a historic diplomatic achievement. When Mr. Obama spoke during the 2008 election campaign of his willingness to talk with Iran’s leaders, it led to criticisms that he was naïve about global politics. But his efforts as president to extend an olive branch, even as Iran continued to pursue its nuclear ambitions, enabled America to build support for the multilateral economic sanctions that helped make the current negotiations possible.
While one should be careful in drawing expansive judgments from disparate examples like these, there are noteworthy commonalities. The most obvious is that military force is not as effective as its proponents would have Americans believe. Had the United States bombed Syria or hit Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, it would almost certainly not have been as successful as the nonmilitary approaches used.
Yet, at the outset of practically every international crisis, to bomb or not to bomb becomes the entire focus of debate. That false choice disregards the many other tools at America’s disposal. It doesn’t mean that force should never be considered, but that it should be the option of last resort. Force is a blunt instrument that produces unpredictable outcomes (for evidence, look no further than Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya).
What did work in these three situations was the patient diplomatic effort of building a global consensus. The success of international sanctions against Iran and Russia respectively relied on the support of both allies and rivals. Acting alone, the United States would never have achieved the same results.
It wasn’t just Americans who were outraged by the seizure of Crimea — so, too, were nations that had few interests in the region. The reason is simple: When countries invade their neighbors with impunity, it puts every country at risk. A similar global consensus against chemical and nuclear proliferation, backed by international treaties, also served as the foundation for American diplomacy toward Iran and Syria.
Critics will fairly argue that these outcomes hardly justify great celebration. Mr. Assad has relinquished his chemical weapons, but the bloody civil war in Syria continues. Mr. Putin has backed off in eastern Ukraine, but he’s keeping Crimea. Iran may agree to a nuclear deal, but it will remain a destabilizing power with the potential to upgrade its nuclear capacity.
This speaks to the limitations of American power. The United States cannot stop every conflict or change every nefarious regime. Any foreign policy predicated on such ambitions will consistently fail.
What the United States can do is set modest and realistic goals: upholding global norms and rules, limiting conflicts and seeking achievable diplomatic outcomes. With China flexing its muscles in the Far East, these lessons are more important than ever.
But they are not transferable to every international crisis. Sanctions don’t mean much, for example, to radical nonstate actors like the jihadists of the Islamic State. And unilateral pressure from the United States cannot, for example, bring about the political reforms in Iraq that are needed to stabilize the country. Sometimes, America has no good answer for disruptive events like these.
All too often, though, our foreign policy debates are defined by simplistic ideas: that force is a problem-solver, that America can go its own way and that mere application of American leadership brings positive results. But the results with Syria, Russia and Iran remind us that when American foreign policy is led by painstaking diplomacy, seeks multilateral consensus and acts with an understanding of its own limitations, it can produce positive results. More often than not, boring is better.
By: Michael A. Cohen, Op-Ed Contributor, The New York Times, July 9, 2014
“No Substitute For A Saudi-Iranian Dialogue”: Blame These Two Countries, Not The United States, For The Current Crisis In Iraq
There is plenty of blame to go around for the current mess in Iraq, but reprimanding Washington, Iraqi President Nouri Al-Maliki, or the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) will solve nothing. The real fault should be assigned to those actors who, despite having tremendous influence and real leverage over the majority of the Iraqi antagonists, have so far decided not to intervene politically. That’s Iran and Saudi Arabia.
A dialogue between the Iranians and the Saudis is desperately needed not just to stop Iraq’s bleeding and prevent another full-blown civil war, but to extinguish at least the major Sunni-Shi’ite fires throughout the Middle East that are fueling this violence and chaos.
This is not a naive call for putting an end to an old and fierce rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran and to an historic feud between the two biggest branches of Islam. That’s just not going to happen. Instead, this is a realistic invitation for two regional heavyweights who, for better or worse, speak for the majority of Sunnis and Shi’ites in the Middle East, to negotiate a path out of this catastrophic situation. Call it arms control, dialogue, or cooperation. The bottom line is that they need to sit down and talk about ways to manage or stabilize their regional competition by agreeing to hard rules that would benefit both, otherwise Arab League chief Amr Moussa’s nightmare scenario of the gates of hell opening in the Middle East will turn into a reality.
In Iraq, Al-Maliki is a big part of the problem, but he is a problem that the Iranians (along with the Americans) created and can easily solve. Saudi Arabia knows that Al-Maliki is Iran’s man in Baghdad, so the first item on the hypothetical Saudi-Iranian negotiating agenda is a new power-sharing arrangement in Iraq that removes Al-Maliki and reintegrates the Sunnis into political life. Because the Shi’ites are the majority in Iraq, the balance of power will always tilt in their favor, but this doesn’t have to translate into Sunni exclusion and Shi’ite domination (as it has been the case under Al-Maliki), and the Iranians and the Saudis can negotiate that.
In Bahrain, Yemen, and Lebanon, similar realistic bargains can take place. Iran should have no business fomenting unrest in Saudi Arabia’s backyard: in Bahrain by supporting radical segments of the opposition there, and in Yemen, where Iran is suspected of sending arms to the Houthi rebels. In Lebanon, while Iran will not instruct Hezbollah to relinquish its weapons (it’s much more complicated than that), it certainly can influence the powerful Shi’ite group’s future in ways that can help it address the concerns of Lebanon’s Sunni players (and Christians and Druze), the most relevant of whom are allied with Riyadh. And even inside the Saudi Kingdom, Iran should reassure Saudi Arabia that it has no intentions of stirring trouble in the Eastern Province, which is predominantly Shi’ite.
Syria will be the toughest nut to crack. The Saudi-Iranian differences there are most acute. Saudi Arabia has spent a vast amount of material resources to topple Syrian President Bashar al-Assad while Iran has had to incur even heavier costs to do the exact opposite. At present, Iran seems to have the upper hand in Syria, but the conflict is anything but stable and Saudi Arabia has not said its final word yet. Progress on the other regional issues could help pave the way for some sort of deal that cuts Saudi losses, caps Iranian gains, and preserves major Saudi and Iranian security interests in the country, including the defeat of extremist elements that are associated with ISIL and Al Qaeda.
As the United States mulls its options in Iraq, the smartest thing it can do is encourage, with the help of Britain, France, and Russia, the Iranians and the Saudis to announce a summit for high-level, comprehensive political talks between their leaders.
This is the most important conversation that should be happening today in the Middle East, and we are not too far from it. Today, there is an open invitation from Saudi Arabia to a dialogue with Iran, but Iran has yet to respond. Instead, it seems to be more interested in brokering deals with Washington in Vienna by offering security cooperation in Iraq. A potential U.S.-Iran meeting in Vienna could produce tactical gains but it is absolutely no substitute for a Saudi-Iranian strategic dialogue.
By: Bilal Y. Saab, Senior Fellow for Middle East Security at the Atlantic Council’s Brent Scowcroft Center on International Security: The New Republic, June 16, 2014
“Dick Cheney, Did You Really Want To Go There?”: He Was Wrong In Every Prediction He Made About The Iraq War
The infinitely valuable Yiddish word chutzpah is defined as “shameless audacity” or “impudence.”
It’s singularly appropriate for the astonishing op-ed from former vice president Dick Cheney and his daughter Liz that was published in the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday. It’s not every day that a leader of the previous administration suggests that the current president is a “fool” and accuses him of intentionally weakening the United States.
“President Obama seems determined to leave office ensuring he has taken America down a notch,” the Cheneys write. Are they charging our president with treason? “President Obama,” they write, “is on track to securing his legacy as the man who betrayed our past and squandered our freedom.”
Squandered our freedom?
“Only a fool,” they say, “would believe American policy in Iraq should be ceded to Iran, the world’s largest state sponsor of terror.” As if this is what Obama is doing — and as if it weren’t the invasion Cheney so passionately supported that vastly strengthened Iran’s hand long before Obama took office.
The Cheney polemic would be outrageous even if our former vice president’s record on Iraq had been one of absolute clairvoyance. As it happens, he was wrong in almost every prediction he made about the war.
On March 16, 2003, days before the war started, Cheney sat down with the late Tim Russert on NBC’s “Meet the Press” for what still stands as the most revealing of the prewar interviews. Cheney was adamant that “to suggest that we need several hundred thousand troops there after military operations cease, after the conflict ends, I don’t think is accurate. I think that’s an overstatement.”
“We will, in fact, be greeted as liberators,” he famously said and proceeded to play down the very sectarian divisions that are plaguing the country now. Russert asked: “And you are convinced the Kurds, the Sunnis, the Shiites will come together in a democracy?” Cheney replied quickly: “They have so far.” He went on:
“If you look at the opposition, they’ve come together, I think, very effectively, with representatives from Shia, Sunni and Kurdish elements in the population. They understand the importance of preserving and building on an Iraqi national identity. They don’t like to have the U.S., for example, come in and insist on dealing with people sort of on a hyphenated basis — the Iraqi-Shia, Iraqi-Sunni — but rather to focus on Iraq as a nation and all that it can accomplish as a nation, and we try to be sensitive to those concerns. I think the prospects of being able to achieve this kind of success, if you will, from a political standpoint, are probably better than they would be for virtually any other country and under similar circumstances in that part of the world.”
Ah yes, regime change would work out just fine — better than fine. “Extremists in the region would have to rethink their strategy of jihad,” Cheney had told the Veterans of Foreign Wars seven months earlier. “Moderates throughout the region would take heart.” Plus a bonus: “Our ability to advance the Israeli-Palestinian peace process would be enhanced.” This was the war that would cure all that ailed us.
Thanks to the Cheney op-ed, we can see how Obama’s hawkish critics are out to create a double standard. Whenever they are called out for how mistaken they were about Iraq in the first place, they piously lecture against “relitigating the past” and say we must instead look forward. At the same time, many of them feel perfectly free to trash the president in extreme and even vile terms.
I am all for looking forward and trying to find an approach that squares the many contradictions we face: of needing to defeat the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria while also pushing Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to stop pursuing anti-Sunni policies that are empowering the forces we need to turn back; of being on the same side as Iran in Iraq’s current emergency but on opposite sides over Syria; of wanting to avoid steps that will make things worse while not being paralyzed; and of not plunging into the middle of a Shiite-Sunni civil war while trying to stop the region’s descent into chaos.
Obama sees these contradictions and says he won’t act rashly. You don’t have to agree with Obama’s every move to prefer his prudence to the utter certainty that “we will be greeted as liberators” and to a habit of underestimating the costs of military action.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, June 18, 2014
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