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Clinton’s “Non-Intervention” Pandering

Clinton is misleading her voters and trying to distract attention from her real foreign policy record.
hillary clinton bernie sanders

Michael Crowley reports on Hillary Clinton’s attempt to obscure her hawkish foreign policy record:

As she makes a closing pitch that emphasizes her foreign policy chops, Clinton tends to gloss over the more hawkish episodes from her past. Asked by an Iowa voter at Monday’s forum to place her interventionist instincts on a scale of 1 to 10, for instance, Clinton offered a long riff on her Iran and Gaza efforts.

Finally, Clinton came to the original frame of the question: “I want to make sure I stay as close as possible to non-intervention.”

I’m not surprised that Clinton doesn’t want to emphasize her consistent support for military intervention over the last twenty years. That doesn’t play well with the general public, and I’m sure it goes over very badly with Democratic caucus-goers in Iowa, but it’s important to understand that Clinton absolutely doesn’t try to “stay as close as possible to non-intervention.” While it’s encouraging that Clinton feels that she has to pander in this way, we have to remember that pandering is all that it is. She’s misleading her voters and trying to distract attention from her real record by saying this.

Clinton’s record shows that she doesn’t normally try to “stay as close as possible” to a non-interventionist position. On the contrary, Clinton has taken the more aggressive side in every debate over the use of force and intervention in foreign conflicts since the mid-’90s. Back then, it was a point of pride for “centrist” Democrats that they were comfortable with supporting and even agitating for military action, but over the last fifteen years it has become more and more a liability with Democratic and independent voters. Clinton’s record in the Senate and as Secretary of State confirms that she is almost always in favor of intervening in a foreign crisis or conflict rather than not doing so, and she is typically on the side of those advocating for sending in weapons or intervening directly with force. Her role in pushing for intervening in Libya is fairly well-known, and everyone knows about her vote for the Iraq war, but those are just the most prominent examples of the pattern of bad judgment she has shown over the years. Just earlier this week, Clinton called for more military aid for Ukraine, and she has previously indulged in overwrought rhetoric about the conflict there. She has repeatedly gone on record endorsing a more aggressive policy in Syria complete with a “no-fly zone,” and despite her support for the nuclear deal she has made clear that she intends to take a hostile attitude towards Iran.

This was reflected again in the tone-deaf, clumsy attack she and her campaign launched against Sanders over his modest suggestion that the U.S. try to continue improving relations with Tehran. Whatever other flaws there are with Sanders’ positions, he is espousing a less confrontational, less reflexively anti-Iranian approach to the region while Clinton is fully embracing the opposite. As Peter Beinart noted, Clinton has committed herself to additional “reassurance” for the Saudis and the other Gulf states:

Granted, that kind of compromise is nowhere in sight, in part because of the militantly anti-Iranian and anti-Shiite policies in vogue among Saudi Arabia’s leaders. But Clinton would bolster Saudi militancy, thus making an agreement in Syria harder. In her speech last fall at Brookings, she pledged to “increase security cooperation with our Gulf allies, including intelligence sharing, military support, and missile defense to ensure they can defend against Iranian aggression.” (Never mind that in Yemen, it’s the Saudis, not the Iranians, who are dropping the bombs.) From her cold-war perspective, Riyadh is America’s ally, Tehran America’s enemy.

The odd thing about Clinton’s tussle with Sanders over Iran is that it is repeating the error that she made in her first campaign against Obama. Just as she did then, she was dismissing the desire for improved relations as proof of “naivete,” but in doing so she overlooked the benefits that might come from improved relations and badly misread the mood of her own party. She is probably now pretending that she tries to “stay as close as possible to non-intervention” because the attack on Sanders backfired and gave Sanders an additional boost with the people in Iowa and New Hampshire that Clinton needs to win over. People in these states shouldn’t be fooled by Clinton’s eleventh-hour interest in non-intervention, since she has spent almost her entire public career supporting its opposite.

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