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Clinton and Foreign Policy Experience

Obama's would-be Republican successors are preparing to attack his former Secretary of State with an argument that Obama used against her.
clinton

Byron York identifies the line of attack that the relatively inexperienced Republican field will use against Clinton on foreign policy:

As the race continues to change, look for Republicans to define the national security issue not as a contest of experience versus inexperience but of vision versus lack of vision. Yes, Hillary Clinton has tons of experience, they’ll say — but it’s experience being wrong. What good is that?

As many readers will notice right away, this was the exact line of attack that Obama used against Clinton during the 2008 primaries and McCain in the general election. Because Obama had virtually no foreign policy experience that he could point to, he emphasized that he had better judgment than the relatively more experienced (i.e., time-serving) opponents he faced. Obama’s line was useful in minimizing the liability that his inexperience might have normally been in a presidential election, and it allowed him to draw a clear contrast with his opponents on the main issue on which they differed most strongly, namely the Iraq war. It is more than a little comical that Obama’s would-be Republican successors are preparing to attack Obama’s former Secretary of State with an argument that Obama used against her, but it is questionable whether this attack can work unless they can make a credible claim to having better judgment on at least one major foreign policy issue. Based on what we have heard from the likely 2016 candidates so far, most of the Republican field will have great difficulty in doing this.

For one thing, very few of the likely 2016 candidates had much to say about foreign policy one way or the other while Clinton was Secretary of State, so they can hardly claim foresight on these issues. To the extent that most of them have spoken on these issues, they have done so towards the very end of Obama’s first term during the election year, or they have chimed in over the last two years since Obama’s re-election. The bigger problem is that almost none of the likely candidates took a position at any time on any major issue that would put him at odds with Clinton’s policy views. For example, one of Perry’s recurring criticisms is that the administration didn’t send enough military assistance to the Syrian opposition. That is also more or less Clinton’s view. Almost all likely 2016 candidates supported the Libyan war that Clinton was instrumental in starting, and insofar as most of them have faulted administration policy in Libya it is that they think it was insufficiently aggressive. In every internal debate inside the administration, Clinton was an advocate for the more hawkish option, so there is not much of an opening for hawkish Republican candidates there, either.

A more productive and interesting way to criticize Clinton on foreign policy wouldn’t just emphasize her reflexive hawkishness. It would also draw attention to the episodes where Clinton’s preferences prevailed with disastrous results (e.g., Libya), and it would distinguish those episodes from the rest of a foreign policy agenda that was mostly defined and run by the White House. The idea would be to hit Clinton for being too much of hawk and someone likely to commit the U.S. to unnecessary wars without thinking through the consequences, but it would also cast doubt on the significance of her tenure as Secretary of State. Because the administration’s foreign policy decision-making was so centralized in the White House (and for the most part continues to be), Clinton shouldn’t get much credit for any administration successes in the first term, but she can be partly blamed for the results of decisions in which she was directly involved. That would have the advantage of not falling into the obvious trap of trying to out-hawk Clinton, since that can only make the Republican candidates take irresponsible and reckless positions, and it would also help to negate whatever advantage Clinton’s four years at the State Department might seem to give her. Of course, there are hardly any likely candidates available that could credibly pull this off, so we probably won’t be hearing this attack on Clinton’s record anytime soon.

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