Jeffrey Stacey is looking forward to how Clinton will conduct foreign policy, which he assumes would have magically remedied almost all current problems overseas:

But had the Clinton Doctrine been in place over the last four years, odds are that the United States could have kept Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Cooperation Council happy, deterred Putin from intervening in Syria, removed the Assad regime from power, and gotten the UN to shepherd a governance transition after his removal. Libya would have been a more stable (albeit struggling) country as well. In Asia, Washington would have seen Beijing’s hard-liners have less influence in Chinese affairs. And in Europe, Clinton could have made U.S. allies provide a greater share of their own security burden. Plus, a Clinton administration would have also been able to negotiate a successful nuclear deal with Iran.

Stacey is right that Clinton would have been and will be more aggressive than Obama has been, but that’s about all that one can say for this panegyric masquerading as analysis. As far as the author is concerned, there is no situation that a more forceful and militarized response wouldn’t have made better. In practice, what he keeps calling the Clinton “doctrine” is just unfocused meddling in every conflict that comes along. That is a fair summary of Clinton’s foreign policy record, but it doesn’t have much to recommend it.

He says that she would have directly intervened in Syria early on, which might be true, but there is no attempt to explain why this would have been a desirable thing for the U.S. to do. He also assumes that Clinton would have removed Assad from power, which would have very likely made Syria even more chaotic and unstable than it is, but says nothing about the cost of doing that. It’s likely that toppling the Syrian government would have delivered the rest of Syria into the hands of jihadist groups with the resulting expulsions and massacres of religious minorities that would have presumably followed. The Clinton “doctrine” might very well produce such an outcome, but this is one reason why she shouldn’t be trusted with the presidency. The idea that Libya would have been more stable if Clinton had been in charge is a blatant attempt to wish away the serious consequences of one of Clinton’s biggest errors in government.

Some of the other assertions are even harder to take seriously. Clinton “could have made” allies take on a larger share of their own defense? How? Does she possess some mind control powers no one is yet aware of? Stacey claims that she would have also somehow caused hard-liners in China to have less influence at home. It’s not clear how that would have happened, since she is more likely to take a confrontational approach when dealing with China that would seem to play into the hands of hard-liners in Beijing. The bigger problems here are that all of this ascribes to Clinton a level of competence in executing foreign policy than is nowhere in evidence in her record, and Stacey assumes that the U.S. has the ability to compel and shape foreign behavior to a much greater degree than it actually does.

One of the more glaring contradictions in this paean to Clinton is the claim that she could have negotiated a nuclear deal with Iran and kept the Saudis and the GCC “happy.” It should be obvious by now that the Saudis and the GCC won’t be “happy” unless the U.S. does everything they want at our own expense, and part of that would have meant not pursuing a nuclear deal with Iran. Stacey wants us to believe that Clinton could have avoided making any trade-off between securing U.S. interests and keeping regional clients satisfied, but it is impossible to miss from the clients’ own reactions to the nuclear deal that they cannot be placated no matter how many weapons or how much support Washington throws at them. It also seems misguided to assume that Clinton would have pursued the nuclear deal as president, since she was consistently the most skeptical member of the administration when it came to engaging Iran diplomatically.