Over the course of the next four months, the American people are destined to be reminded frequently that Hillary Clinton has an innate superiority in the area of foreign relations, arising from her experience as first lady, U.S. senator and, most recently, secretary of state.
Neither Sen. Sanders nor Donald Trump can offer similar experience, nor could Bill Clinton before his election in 1992. Yet it remains
to be seen how she would act on her own as president, if given the opportunity. In all three positions, she held views, advocated policy positions, and made recommendations.
Therefore, she can be judged on “past experience” as well as any proposed changes. Both Sanders and Trump have questioned the wisdom of her positions, but that is only one criterion by which she can be judged.
The American people can also legitimately question her experience, her future policy directions, her view of the world and America’s role in it, her understanding of recent foreign policy initiatives, her ability to learn from mistakes committed by recent administrations, her ability to listen to the changing views of her own people and of course her own moral fitness to lead the nation as its chief executive.
Thus far, Clinton has emerged as the defender of the status quo, or worse, of returning to failed policies of yore. Sanders and Trump, and the millions who supported them in the primaries, have denounced foreign policy engineered by the neo-conservatives. More voters supported them than those voting for Clinton.
Neither has surrounded himself with neo-conservative advisers, but Clinton has. She and her advisers show no sign of having learned from the failures of neo-con policy. It would be a mistake to assume that Clinton will follow President Obama’s foreign policy, though she was one of his more hawkish aides.
In her August 2014 interview with Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic, the former secretary of state criticized the president for his Syria policy and on the war on terror in general. She gave the impression that more disagreements with Obama’s policies would be forthcoming.
Her positions on “interventionism” and confrontation with Russia are yet to come. If Clinton is so superior in her grasp of foreign policy, why not make this seeming advantage more central to her presidential campaign? A look at her campaign’s website reveals that Clinton lists 112 reasons why she should be the next president. Only four of these 112 reasons at all relate to international relations. Two of the four
reasons refer to LGBT concerns: reason #79 says that she lobbied for the first-ever resolution on LGBT rights before the U.N. Human Rights Council; reason #80 says she made LGBT rights a priority of U.S. foreign policy.
For the other two reasons, #34 asserts that Clinton negotiated a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas “that ended the rain of rockets on Israel;” and reason #100 gives her the distinction of being the only candidate who has actually “built international coalitions” that
advanced American values and made the world safer, without giving any examples or details. These four are presented as her greatest foreign policy triumphs.
The election of Clinton would make yet another U.S. war in the Middle East a near certainty. Clinton shows little understanding of the serious forces in the region. Unlike the carefully-worded descriptions of the Obama administration, Clinton often speaks in dangerously sweeping terms in describing “Islamic terrorism.” She sees no distinction between ISIL and Hamas. She does not seem to have read many of her own diplomatic or intelligence reports, for she continues to make false statements, such as those in which she claimed that Hamas uses Gaza’s civilian population as human shields (there’s no evidence of that), or that Hamas is stage-managing world opinion to condemn Israeli excesses (a self-evident falsehood).
In her biography she takes all the credit for formulating tougher sanctions that ultimately brought the Iranians to the negotiating table. Based on the evidence, Clinton is bound to repeat the mistakes committed by previous administrations in Iraq, Libya, Syria and Palestine. Her overarching view of the region is based neither on proven U.S. interests nor salient facts. Her election would bring to the highest office in the land a person who celebrated publicly at the death of Libya’s head of state, announcing exultantly, “We came, we saw, he died.”
Dr. Fuad K. Suleiman holds a doctorate in International Law and Diplomacy from the Fletcher School, Tufts and Harvard Universities. He worked for over three decades on behalf of several U.S. Government agencies in sixteen Arab countries, most recently in Iraq.
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