Damon Linker expresses thoughts very similar to my own:

[I]n all likelihood, Hillary Clinton will face off against a Republican nominee I could never support. (Sorry, Bernie Sanders Dreamers — it’s not happening.) My choice will be pulling the lever for Clinton, or sitting out the election. (And before you suggest it: I won’t be wasting my vote on a third-party candidate, which would probably just help the GOP anyway.)

So why am I tempted to withhold my vote from Clinton?

It’s certainly not because, like some Holier Than Thou leftists, I think she’s an “enemy of the poor” and a “garbage rich person.” (But then, I favored welfare reform, which President Bill Clinton signed into law in 1996, so I obviously hate poor people, too.) It isn’t that, like Pig-Pen trailed by a cloud of filth, Hillary Clinton and her husband go through life enveloped by a rank-smelling fog of scandal, though that is and will remain a concern. And it certainly isn’t that she’s a woman: My daughter and I are eager for a female president. All things being equal, Clinton’s gender would strongly incline me to cast a ballot in her favor.

But all things aren’t equal. (Are they ever?)

What just might keep me from voting for Clinton is this: Her most recent and most prominent public position was secretary of state. And her biggest accomplishment in that office was helping to persuade President Obama to intervene militarily in Libya to oust Moammar Gadhafi.

It was easily the dumbest foreign policy decision of Obama’s presidency, plunging yet another Middle Eastern nation into anarchy, with the country eventually divided among an array of armed groups, including militias loyal to al Qaeda and bands of ISIS fighters. As one would expect, life in Libya today is markedly worse than it was under Gadhafi’s tyranny: Food and electricity are scarce, the economy is at a standstill, crime and violence are rampant, and the nation has become a major migration route for refugees from North Africa to Europe.

It would be one thing if Clinton acknowledged her error in encouraging the president to intervene militarily in Libya and pledged that she’d learned valuable lessons from the mistake. That would be more than a little galling, since those lessons — like that if you topple a dictatorship without making provisions for securing order, chaos is likely to arise in the resulting power vacuum — could easily have been learned from the precisely parallel failure of the Iraq invasion, which she also supported. But at least it would be a sign that the foreign policy of a new Clinton administration just might be made with slightly greater wisdom.

But Clinton has done no such thing. On the contrary, in the first Democratic debate, she stood by the decision to intervene and pronounced it a splendid use of American military force that amounted to “smart power at its best.” . . .

Over the past seven years, the Obama administration has made very tentative and halting steps in the direction of reconciling the United States to the recalcitrance of reality — to the limits of American power to shape the course of events in war-torn regions of the world and to produce outcomes that further our interests and the well-being of those swept up in convulsions of violence.

The Libyan fiasco was the administration’s single greatest step backwards in this regard — the moment at which the president allowed European allies and his secretary of state to convince him that the U.S. just had to do something about Libyan unrest between anti-government protesters and forces loyal to Gadhafi.

Everything we know about Hillary Clinton up to, including, and beyond Libya indicates that she would abandon Barack Obama’s partial and selective embrace of military restraint in favor of a more consistently hawkish foreign policy.

As Linker goes on to point out, the GOP can’t actually criticize the disaster of Libya because it is, as a party, if anything more reflexively belligerent. Which is why he’s thinking of sitting out the election entirely – unless the GOP nominates someone truly insane or wildly extreme on domestic issues.

My feelings about Clinton apart from foreign policy are a bit different. I’ve moved significantly to the left on a number of economic issues since the 1990s, and as a consequence am somewhat more receptive to a pitch from that quarter to expand the Overton window. And I’d love to see a truce in the culture war, instead of seeing the left press their advantage – but the left is pressing their advantage because it’s working for them; given that fact, it’s the right that needs to figure out how to gain electoral advantage by being more reasonable and less dogmatic, and they show no sign of wanting to do that.

But unlike the Republicans, the Democrats are exceptionally cohesive on both economic and social issues at this point, and I believe Clinton will move as her party moves on these questions. So, really, most of what matters is that she’s a Democrat.

Meanwhile, when it comes to her personal qualities, Clinton strikes me as a strong student of policy, a weak manager, and a mediocre politician. That’s probably not a combination that makes for a great President, but it certainly doesn’t mean she’ll be terrible. And I really can’t get exercised by the kinds of scandals the Clintons typically trail in their wake. The most scandalous thing about the Clintons is the very existence of their foundation, and so far as I can tell that’s completely legal.

There is one area, though, where Clinton is a true believer, and where she aims to lead, and that’s in foreign policy. She has favored every intervention of the past 20 years. She was instrumental in pushing for the Libyan intervention. But she is also on record as arguing for a tougher approach to Russia, and for the continuous expansion of NATO to additional countries. And she holds these views while also calling for a more robust intervention in Syria, including a no-fly zone that even she admits would require Russian cooperation to be at all effective. The difference between Clinton and Marco Rubio is that Clinton has actually been in the arena, and so has some idea of the challenges attendant on implementing a neoconservative foreign policy. But their goals, and their understanding of the world, are very similar.

So it’s fitting, I suppose, that Rubio is the only candidate of the four GOP leaders that Linker doesn’t say he’d oppose so strongly that it would compel him to vote for Hillary.