Although there are many issue clusters with which presidential candidate Hillary Clinton identifies, a signature one is that of foreign policy. Indeed, her supporters usually tout her four years as secretary of state as the defining difference between her and her competitors in both the Democratic and Republican parties. Problem is, things don’t really add up on that score.
When Mrs. Clinton’s detractors raise any or all of the several very significant failures in American foreign policy during the years she served as President Obama’s secretary of state, the response from her and her supporters is swift and to the point: She was not really in charge. She was simply doing Mr. Obama’s bidding.
If so, though, how then can she seriously lay claim to the title of the “foreign policy candidate”? Surely she can’t have it both ways. And, in truth, there is not one clear foreign policy success of the Obama-Clinton team that readily comes to mind. Just the opposite: it is impossible to overlook the failed policies that define her performance as secretary of state.
The early days of Mrs. Clinton’s tenure at the State Department are particularly notable for a number of naïve outreach calls to such longtime American adversaries as Russia, China, and Iran. The theme of the effort centered around the notion that the U.S. was ready to abandon its supposed historical role as a predator nation seeking to impose its selfish interests on a hapless world. Implicit was the idea that problems in the international arena stemmed from U.S. excesses over the years and that the nations of the world would react positively to American penitence.
But it did not take long for the perception of newly skittish and even timid America to take hold and inform the foreign policies of the targets of our outreach. China began formulating its annexation of parts of the South China Sea by building artificial islands. The Russians jump-started their designs on Georgia and Ukraine among other adventures. And Iran took a quantum leap in its support for terrorist movements around the world.
U.S. foreign policy while Mrs. Clinton ran the State Department was a spectacular failure with regard to the Arab Spring. There was scant appreciation of the fact that despicable dictators ensured stability in important parts of the world and that throwing them under the bus would lead to chaos. Also underestimated was the profound unreadiness of Arab populations for democratic government – witness the disruptions in Egypt and the disintegration of Libya. ISIS was allowed to metastasize and the terrorist group ultimately seized large swaths of Syria and Iraq. The U.S. dithered on Syria to the point that Russia felt free to step in and fill an important vacuum in the region.
With respect to Israel, the record is even more glaring. President Obama was inclined to push Israel to take some unpleasant bargaining positions with the Palestinians, especially concerning settlements. But Mrs. Clinton seemed at times to go beyond being a dutiful secretary of state obediently following her president’s wishes. To cite one notorious example, when outlining the administration’s position to reporters in 2009 she became downright fierce and decidedly undiplomatic, angrily declaring that Mr. Obama “wants to see a stop to settlements – not some settlements, not outposts, not ‘natural growth’ exceptions.”
Mrs. Clinton, like Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump, whose statements on Israel and the Middle East have been all over the place, has some serious explaining to do if she wishes to win over voters who place a premium on Israel’s security and a strong and consistent American foreign policy.