Hillary Clinton’s Foreign Policy
Nothing Wagered, Nothing Learned
Pierre Tristam / Candide’s Notebooks, November 12, 2007
Hillary Clinton is not the most hawkish foreign policy Democrat among 2008 hopefuls. Barack Obama, who suffers from that Kennedy inferiority complex, is. At least that’s the conclusion one is forced to draw after reading their respective white papers in Foreign Affairs. Obama’s preceded Clinton’s by several months. Maybe Clinton is softening her image. She is all about adaptation, triangulation, obfuscation. And she gives few specifics. That said, her Foreign Affairs piece projects a more human, less bombastic Clinton foreign policy than we’re generally led to believe. But it also projects an astonishing reverence for the status quo and a fatal misunderstanding of how American power is perceived abroad: she makes no distinction between the way Americans want it perceived, and the way it actually is perceived. The question is not whether she can be trusted. It is whether she considers her education complete. If yes, we—the United States and the world—have not seen the end of their American-enabled troubles.
The usual presumptions are all there: “The world still looks to the United States for leadership. American leadership is wanting, but it is still wanted.” Who she means by “the world” isn’t clear: The 50-odd countries of the Arab and Muslim world want American leadership? The European Union wants American leadership? The 2 billion people of China, India and Indonesia want American leadership? What Clinton means is that 300 million Americans want the world to want American leadership, but that moment is past.
What the world wants, more likely, is a little less American leadership, which the world interprets as unilateral Father-Knows-Best Americanism, and more American responsibility: America, in other words, should do its part, from cutting its own nuclear weapons stockpiles to its own carbon emissions to its own arms exports to its own proclivities for meddling. Clinton is still hung up on “leadership,” a term increasingly locked and loaded. The proof is in Clinton’s kicker: “I will rebuild our power to ensure that the United States is committed to building a world we want, rather than simply defending against a world we fear.” A world we want? I have visions of a three year old at the dinner table commanding the spread before and beyond him: I want this, I want that, I want it all, and expecting the convicts around the table to jump at his every command. That, it seems, is how Clinton sees her world, with herself its 3-year-old head.
Clinton is right to note the obvious: the “next president will be the first to inherit two wars,” actually three, although she calls the “war on terror” by its more accurate name: “a long-term campaign against global terrorist networks.” That’s one of the more encouraging small details in her approach: there’s no mention of a “war on terror,” certainly no mention of Giuliani’s harebrained “War Against Us” or John McCain’s apocalyptic, and apoplectic, vision of a civilizational clash. But the open-endedness that Clinton gives her campaign, in time and targets, is no different than that of Giuliani or McCain, even if her overriding principle is not: “We must return to a pragmatic willingness to look at the facts on the ground and make decisions based on evidence rather than ideology.” Maybe we’ll be spared pre-emptive wars in a Clinton presidency. Here she is at her principled strongest:
Avoid false choices driven by ideology. The Bush administration has presented the American people with a series of false choices: force versus diplomacy, unilateralism versus multilateralism, hard power versus soft. Seeing these choices as mutually exclusive reflects an ideologically blinkered vision of the world that denies the United States the tools and the flexibility it needs to lead and succeed. There is a time for force and a time for diplomacy; when properly deployed, the two can reinforce each other. U.S. foreign policy must be guided by a preference for multilateralism, with unilateralism as an option when absolutely necessary to protect our security or avert an avoidable tragedy.
She cannot, however, resist the Rambo imagery every one of her rivals has embraced: “We cannot negotiate with individual terrorists; they must be hunted down and captured or killed.” Note the distinction between terrorist nations (which she deems Iran to be) and “individual terrorists.” She’ll negotiate with Iran, as we’ll see in a moment. She won’t negotiate with individual terrorists. Why the distinction, especially when she recognizes, as we all do, that individual terrorists have just as much power as states? Clinton (and all establishment candidates) are still hopelessly stuck in a rather childish mode of perceptions that seeks to appease public presumptions more than tackle international problems in earnest.
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http://www.pierretristam.com/Bobst/07/cn111207.htm
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