I’ve heard a lot of talk from some quarters that Hillary Clinton is a neoconservative who will pursue Republican foreign policies if elected, and that Sanders is better qualified to be Commander in Chief because he opposed the Iraq War and she supported it. I feel like these talking points still prevent us from really having the discussions we need to have about goals and capabilities and to lay out the plans the next President will need to confront global challenges to American leadership on several fronts.
What can the next President do militarily against ISIL?
Hillary was the architect of much Obama’s foreign policy as his Secretary of State, she supported the Iran deal, she is arguably to his left on the issue of world trade (and has been in both primaries), and she will likely continue the strategies we are pursuing militarily.
Here is another newsflash-so would President Sanders and so would nearly every President Republican once they got into office. There is just no real appetite for a third full scale ground invasion of Iraq in as many decades, short of that, the strategy against ISIL will involve a sustained bombing effort and special forces. No President has the luxury of pulling out completely since there is a risk of a terror attack happening on their watch, no President will have the support of the American public to wage a full scale ground invasion. So we will get something in the middle, it’ll just be in what shades and variations.
Between the Democrats I am far more comfortable with the detailed plan that Hillary laid out to get more hawkish than Obama on internet recruitment, cutting off funding, and bringing in more special forces and support for friendlies like the Kurds. By contrast, Sanders thought ISIL was in Afghanistan and the Taliban was in Iraq at the last debate. A level of ignorance we would never tolerate and openly mock in a Republican. And we don’t even need to dignify their lunacy with a response.
What can the next President do, diplomatically?
On the diplomatic front there is a lot of damage a Republican can do, from shredding the Iran agreement to the international accord on climate change to pulling out of human rights conventions. Not to mention doubling down on failed strategies like torture and extraordinary renditions. Cruz is completely amoral when it comes to questions of Middle Eastern human rights, which, so am I when it comes to enforcing our values via the sword but it would be nice if we stopped funding the Saudi’s who do nothing for us in the region and are the cause of most of it’s instability, let alone are terrible pariahs whose brazen disregard for women and the rule of law would make an Ayatollah blush with envy. Time to stop underwriting their armed forces and buying their bullshit. Bernie actually thinks they will beat ISIL for us, with the King of Jordan, another autocrat he is praising. Not with Iranian troops on the ground they won’t, both of those powers benefit from the quagmire in Iraq and Syria since it bogs down Iran.
Hillary or Bernie? The burden of proof rests with Bernie.
The days of American hegemony are over, and it’s unlikely that Hillary can pursue the drive by bombing humanitarian hawkishness of her husband nor the saber rattling world altering crusade of the second Bush administration. I strongly believe out of all the candidates she is the only one who has the depth of experience and the key contacts with existing world leaders to quickly spring into action and sail the ship of state through these perilous times. There are still lapses of judgment that persist and associations that concern me (the Kagans, Kenneth Pollack, and other Iraq architects), but at the end of the day Bernie isn’t even bothering to present us with an alternative.
As a declared voter of his in the Massachusetts primary, I strongly wish he did. Hillary’s flaws on foreign policy share many of the same origins and problematic associations as her issues with Wall Street he has so successfully hammered her on. Yet a single vote 15 years ago does not foreign policy leadership make, even if he was right and she was wrong. He really needs to outline not only how he would be different but how he would be better equipped to deal with these challenges. And he has to do this now.
TheBestDefense says
Jeffery Sachs is one of my three favorite economist (along with Simon Johnson and Paul Krugman). He is also one of my two favorite thinkers on international sustainable development, along with Pavan Suhkdev. His article this week was a punch in the gut about HRC
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeffrey-sachs/hillary-is-the-candidate_b_9168938.html
johntmay says
Will not be a factor in this election.
Christopher says
Last I checked we still had significant items on our foreign policy agenda such as Iran and ISIS.
johntmay says
Foreign policy is what a politician talks about to instill fear into certain demographics. In a large voter turnout, foreign policy is a small percentage of the electorate. As the man said, “It’s the economy, stupid”.
If my job is not paying enough to meet the mortgage payments, my wife just got laid off from her job, our kid needed braces, and the washing machine is on the fritz, ISIS is not on my radar.
TheBestDefense says
Foreign policy seems to be much of the GOP assault on Obama/Democrats. ISIS/Daesh and brown skinned immigrants are used to scare the electorate.
Unemployment keeps dropping (alas, most people don’t measure the inequality gap on a yearly basis but they know when their standard of living is sliding). The GOP idiots cannot figure how to address the mixed bag of our economy so Daesh, Iran and the DPRK are their choice of election targets.
centralmassdad says
Because it has been something of a glaring defeciency in the present administration. The only reason it isnt a complete Democratic deal killer is because (1) It was still better than Bush, and (2) it is hard to argue that Clinton will be as naive as Obama has been.
TheBestDefense says
I am fifty percent with you. Obama was naive and f-ed up our foreign policy from the moment he announced he would ramp up the assault in Afghanistan when he was not yet President.
But it is better than Bush, as you wrote.
I do hope you take a look at Sachs’ piece. It is provocative.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeffrey-sachs/hillary-is-the-candidate_b_9168938.html
jconway says
I agree with Sachs analysis here and respect him as an economist. I’d add Stiglitz to your top three as well. Andrew Bacevich is a favorite IR thinker of mine and would largely agree with a center left or in his mind, paleocon critique of the shared Bush-Obama legacy on middle eastern entanglement.
Where I step off the train is that you can’t beat somebody with nobody, and his record and lack of interest or advisors on this subject gives me great pause. It’s not enough to be not Hillary, he has to lay out his own agenda. He has done a fantastic job of doing so on domestic issues, but I just don’t see it here. As a supporter I’m hopeful he gets there as this race takes shape.
TheBestDefense says
Bacevich is a former political ally and a generous man, none better, so my sense of decorum says I cannot promote a friend here without full disclosure. Stiglitz is fabulous too, but let’s not use this space to name drop.
centralmassdad says
I think that guy lays it on a little thick, to put it mildly.
I was thinking in particular of Syria: we stated out loud that we wanted Assad deposed, and then did nothing about it, at all. Then we said that chemical weapons was a “red line” and then did nothing about that, at all. There wasn’t necessarily anything wrong with staying on the sidelines, but if that was the plan then why did we say otherwise? Now you have Russian military intervention, about which we looked uncomfortably at our shoes, and Assad is winning. It would have been better to shut up in the first place, and Assad would have re-established himself in a few months, and few hundred thousand people wouldn’t be dead, and Homs and Aleppo might still exist, and Europe wouldn’t have a huge and destabilizing refugee problem.
Same thing with Libya– about which Clinton should be having problems now and about which she most certainly will have problems in September. We want Khadafy out, so we will support the opposition, but not really, but maybe, but can’t we talk about something else now?
The problem with Afghanistan wasn’t necessarily withdrawing or not withdrawing, it was dicking around for 18 months while waiting for a consensus on something that was not going to get a consensus. The result was we want to withdraw, but we’re not, but we will a little, but maybe not.
The ONE thing that Bush had going for him was that they always made a decision, and then went with it. Of course, they always made the wrong decision. But the proper “anti-Bush” presidency was to make some RIGHT decisions, not to make no decisions.
Obama has been quite weak on this stuff. which comprises the lion’s share of the president’s job description. The only legitimate “win” they have pulled off is the Iran deal, but the gains there are being sqandered by the re-emergence of the de facto alliance among Russia, Iran and Syria. This is both a strength of Clinton’s, because Bill’s was the last preseidency to be good at this stuff, and a weakness, because Libya.
Christopher says
…that on balance Syria and Libya worked out pretty well for us.
TheBestDefense says
are you kidding, christopher?
Christopher says
Qadaffi is gone and Assad is on notice.
TheBestDefense says
The UN estimates 250,000 dead in Syria with 4 million refugees and 6.6 million IDPs according to WorldVision. This is your definition of “worked out pretty well for us?” And Daesh has relocated its major operations to a shattered Libya where it will continue to spread its carnage.
I could insult you for this grossly inhuman response on your part. I could mock your lack of knowledge on the subject. I could re-ask the question “are you kidding?”
Instead I will repeat the old adage “Other than that Mrs Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?”
Christopher says
…or maybe for once you are trying to mind your manners:)
TheBestDefense says
I am still waiting for your explanation of your grossly offensive words about the value of human life in Syria and Libya. Yeah, I know, your status on the most frequent writer on BMG is more important.
TheBestDefense says
And Assad is NOT on notice. The growing consensus among decision makers is that Assad is there for the long run. Putin will make certain of that and the NATO/US coalition cannot fight Russia, even while Assad’s forces have cut off the last supply line for Syrians in the rebel controlled portions of Aleppo, Syria’s largest city.
You might consider reading a reputable publication on Syria, like Foreign Policy or the Guardian (London), hell even the NYTimes, before you make these big and gross pronouncements.
centralmassdad says
This is awfully similar to the post-hoc rationalization of why invading Iraq was a good thing, even though it turned out that there were no WMDs.
Khadafy was replaced by chaos, and Assad is winning.
Also:
TheBestDefense says
Oops, christopher, new numbers were released today. It seems that 11.5% of the population of Syria has been killed or injured since the war started a few years ago. If that happened in the US, the corresponding figure would be close to 40 million Americans and the nearly complete destruction of our heritage even back past the Native Americans. Nice, Christopher, nice.
The Syrian Centre for Policy Research says 470,000 deaths is twice UN’s figure with ‘human development ruined’ after 45% of population is displaced according to an article in The Guardian today.
Do you still think
…that on balance Syria and Libya worked out pretty well for us.. I can understand if you still hold that position if you will just say it. After all, the victims are almost entirely Muslims, the US had nothing to gain when Obama drew his mythical line in the sand and you again jumped on the war bandwagon. Hey, they are just dead Arabs, right?
Christopher says
I just seemed to remember being relieved by the coverage of getting results without getting us into another war. Of course I am aware of the refugee crisis and believe that we should do all we can to alleviate it, including taking in as many as possible ourselves. I do wish that when we draw red lines in the sand we honor them. I’m not responsible for this policy so I just gave an opinion. No need to come back with multiple comments bullying me into submission or response.
centralmassdad says
But here is some more for the pile.
TheBestDefense says
How easy it is to write that you “don’t recall all the details” the same day your wrote that “on balance Syria and Libya worked out pretty well for us.”
Hey, it is only ten million or so Muslims who died, were injured, or lost their homes and country, egged on by Americans who are drinking the Obama Kool-Aid of a “red line in the sand.”
I am an internationalist who believes in smart intervention, not always militarily, when it is needed. US policy on Syria has been has been incredibly stupid and you think “that on balance Syria and Libya worked out pretty well for us.”
TheBestDefense says
Obama also got climate change right, including his agreement with China in 2014 and COP 21 in Paris in November. I count those as his bet foreign policy initiatives.
centralmassdad says
I am not sure how much that helps anyone in November (maybe November of 2050), but yep.
Christopher says
…that Obama has been the least bit naive in foreign policy. You don’t kill bin Laden by being naive.
SomervilleTom says
I view the killing of Osama bin Laden as more show than substance, not very different from the “triumph” of executing Saddam Hussein.
Our foreign policy in the Middle East has been a disaster for generations. The illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003 made an already terrible and unstable situation many times worse. Our actions in the aftermath of that invasion have compounded the harm (although, in fairness, there were NO good options available to us).
Any action we might have taken in Libya or Syria to support the “moderates” — most especially by increasing their military strength — would have meant arming and supplying “terrorist organizations” dedicated to the destruction of Israel. The reason we have propped up so many tyrannical despots in the region (such as in Saudi Arabia) is that those have been our only option given the religious and political realities of the past three decades.
The still unfolding disaster in the Middle East was NOT the fault of any “evil” person — not Ali Khamenei in 1980, not Muammar Gaddafi in 1988, not Saddam Hussein in 2003, not OBL in 2001, not Assad in 2016.
All these people were evil, yes. They are, however, not the cause of the terrible events of that region — killing them does not solve any problem, and often creates more.
Whatever the “right” foreign policy was in the Middle East, killing OBL had very little to do with it.
Killing OBL was, in my view, a shallow publicity stunt more than any legitimate foreign policy objective.
jconway says
Had Bush not been distracted by Iraq in 2003 we might’ve killed both OBL, his lieutenants, and Mullah Omar at Tora Bora. And had we succeeded and pulled out of that graveyard of empires and not invaded Iraq, it would’ve been a fine success up to that point. It would have been one of our quickest and least casualty inflicting wars.
The harder part to understand is how we continually fall into the nation building trap. From the ‘hearts and minds’ of Vietnam to the ‘counter insurgency’ of the two wars we have fought in the last decade and a half overseas. I remember a 60 Minutes special as a kid where they follow all the medal of honor recipients from Hamburger Hill and we see how many ended up homeless or mentally disabled because of that experience. And it’s a hill we took, lost to the VC, and retook time and time again. It was their villages, their homes, and frankly their war not ours.
Same in Afghanistan. The experience my friend and soon to be roommate who served over there confirmed that the mission was a waste. Sending soldiers trained to fight a conventional war into villages where they don’t know the culture, speak the language, or have a sense of what the villagers wanted.
He was building expensive bridges over there while ours were falling apart, he was a trained first responder unable to help his home community out during the Marathon bombing because he was busy putting out fires on bases in the middle of nowhere after a mortor ambush during the fighting season. Any gains his unit made were lost by the next year. He is one of the most gung ho hawks I know, and even he conceded we have no business being there anymore. Other than honor and pride.
merrimackguy says
when Bush said “I’m not in favor of nation-building.”
That fact that he embraced it to the tune of trillions has made me skeptical of anything any politician says in a debate again.
centralmassdad says
that the Obama mistake– granting that this particular baton was passed to him in very poor condition– has always been saying “The policy of the USA is XYZ” and then really doing nothing, and especially not XYZ.
He could have easily said– “There are no good options in Syria. There is no faction that we can support that, in our view, will improve the situation for Syrians or for the USA. We urge the parties to abandon violence, and will stand by to offer whatever resources might be requested in orderto achieve a peaceful solution.”
That rebellion would have fizzled quickly and returned to status quo ante. Homs would exist, ISIL would not (at least in its metastasized form), and Russia wouldn’t be conducting a successful military intervention on behalf of a client state in a strategic reason, and would not be finding itself aligned with Iran.
The problem has always been the very public chin stroking.
jconway says
And with a Republican do nothing congress going nowhere next fall, it’s far more likely the next Democratic president will have the greater impact on foreign rather than domestic policy.