Wednesday, August 13, 2014

McConnell on Hillary

Scott McConnell evaluates Hillary Clinton's recent foreign policy statements in The American Conservative.

So to sum up: Hillary regrets the lack of American action against Syria, while seeking to lay the rhetorical foundation for a subsequent war against Iran, all the while claiming to be “hepped up” about the rise of Sunni jihadism. It’s a point of view which makes little strategic sense, unless the world view approaches something like perpetual hostility toward virtually every non-Israeli actor in the Mideast. Clinton’s hostility to Iran and Syria does however correspond with the views of Bibi Netanyahu, who receives a nice bouquet from Hillary in the Goldberg interview, laying the blame for the women and children killed and maimed left by Israeli shelling and bombing at the feet of Hamas. Coddling Israel may be the main point here, along with the swipes at Obama.

As yet, amazingly, Hillary has no real opponent for the nomination. Centrist inside politics watchers have concluded her Goldberg interview means that she carefully calculated that she can run to the right and face no consequences. It’s probably true that most of the names floating about, Brian Schweitzer and Elizabeth Warren pose little threat to a Clinton coronation. But someone who could talk coherently about foreign policy—James Webb, for instance—might be a different matter, though no one besides Webb himself knows if he has the discipline and energy to take on what would a grueling, and probably losing campaign. The absence of the genuine challenger to a hawkish Hillary leaves one depressed about the state of American democracy.

No comments: