In a column at The Week in
December, I argued that the endlessly aggressive foreign policy Republican
hawks advocate lets President Obama get away with murder.
When neoconservatives elements in
the GOP go out of their way to insist that Obama—now the president who has kept
America at war the longest—is
basically a pacifist, they make it easy for the president to pass himself off
as a foreign policy moderate:
[W]ith a debate framed by
Republican hawks’ incessant griping over the president’s supposed weakness,
Obama is able to present his foreign policy as eminently reasonable — even
restrained.
“The measure of strength
internationally is not simply by how many countries we’re occupying, or how
many missiles we’re firing,” Obama said in
early November, “but the strength of our diplomacy and the strength of our
commitment to human rights and our belief that we’ve got to cooperate with
other countries together to solve massive problems like terrorism but also like
climate change.”
But it’s only in contrast to
the GOP hawks’ “bomb everything, everywhere, all the time” agenda that Obama’s actual foreign policy can be convincingly
presented as strength through diplomacy, human rights, and cooperation.
War in
three countries (Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria) and varying degrees of military
intervention in at least four more (Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Libya) are not
the marks of an isolationist president.
The same thing is happening on the
campaign trail, too, as Donald Trump’s over-the-top aggression paves the way
for uber-hawk Hillary Clinton to pretend she’s the reasonable foreign policy
choice.
Of course, Trump sometimes hits the
right notes on foreign policy. As Rare’s Jack Hunter points out,
Trump has challenged foreign policy orthodoxy in several valuable ways.
Unfortunately, he doesn’t stop
there.
In fact, the bulk of Trump’s foreign
policy is beyond the
pale, straying into territory where even the most unrepentant neocons (well,
perhaps excepting Tom Cotton)
fear to tread.
As Jack summarizes,
“Every shrewd criticism out of Trump mouths is accompanied by an avalanche of
horrible, undesirable and morally indefensible positions.”
The upshot of this is a yuuuuge
boon to one Hillary Clinton.
You see, Clinton—as Trump himself
has rightly observed—has
an appalling foreign policy record, hawkish and reckless at every turn. She has
actually done a lot of the terrible things Donald Trump wants to do.
But with the cover of Trump’s
endlessly aggressive rhetoric, Clinton, like Obama, is able to pass herself off
as a foreign policy moderate.
Here’s a piece from the Washington Post this morning
which offers a preview of what the general election debates in a Trump vs.
Clinton race will be like:
Clinton has begun making that
argument more forcefully as her long primary battle grinds to a close.
She will
deliver what her campaign calls a major foreign policy address in California on
Thursday, focused both on her ideas and leadership credentials and on what she
will describe as the threat Trump poses to national security.
“Clinton will rebuke the
fear, bigotry and misplaced defeatism that Trump has been selling to the
American people,” an aide said.
“She will make the affirmative case for the
exceptional role America has played and must continue to play in order to keep
our country safe and our economy growing.” […]
In an election where Clinton should
(and, perhaps were she running against another candidate, would)
be getting skewered day and night for her support for the invasion of Iraq
and orchestration of the intervention in Libya, she will be applauded for
offering voters an option of supposed restraint.
That’s a serious tragedy for the
American foreign policy conversation.
As Trump has said,
Clinton “talks about me being dangerous [but] she’s killed hundreds of
thousands of people with her stupidity.”
True enough—but in the face
of rhetoric like Trump’s, Clinton will be able to easily—though
falsely—play the voice of reason.
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