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Hillary Clinton is more hawkish on foreign policy than Barack Obama and that makes Robert Kagan feel “comfortable.”
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Who is Robert Kagan? He’s a prominent neoconservative who now prefers to be called a “liberal interventionist” and was a key intellectual force during the Iraq War and the Bush years. When quoted in a recent New York Times article, he was warm to Hillary Clinton.
“I feel comfortable with her on foreign policy,” Kagan said. “If she pursues a policy which we think she will pursue, it’s something that might have been called neocon, but clearly her supporters are not going to call it that; they are going to call it something else.”
Hillary Clinton — a neocon? The evidence mounts.
Kagan is a former confidante of Clinton’s on foreign policy during her tenure as Secretary of State. Columnist H.A. Goodman noted at the Huffington Post Tuesday in a story titled “Hillary Clinton Would Be Far More Conservative Than You Think:” “[I]t’s doubtful she’d stray too far away from his advice and the ideas of others who advocated counterinsurgency wars in distant lands.”
If that’s the case, Goodman argues, “liberals everywhere should be worried.”
But they don’t seem worried. At all.
The Washington Post’s Aaron Blake demonstrates how the Democrats’ default frontrunner has never had more overall support for a presidential run.
If Kagan, a staunch Iraq War proponent, is comfortable with and even admiring of Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy views, then why are Democrats so supportive of her? After all, wasn’t it precisely Bush’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that animated the Left the most throughout the 2000s?
Two Clinton foreign policy stances in particular illustrate how she is more similar to President Bush than Barack Obama in this regard.
First, Clinton was unambiguously for keeping troops in Iraq in 2011. Josh Rogin wrote at the Daily Beast last week:
Hillary Clinton today portrays her stance on Iraq as being the same as President Obama’s. But when she was Secretary of State, she pushed hard for keeping troops in Iraq—despite the fact that the White House was looking to bring all the troops home.
“Hillary Clinton was a lion for keeping troops there,” James Jeffrey, who was the U.S. ambassador to Iraq in 2011, told The Daily Beast in an interview. “She was a strong advocate for keeping troops there past 2011,” when American forces eventually withdrew.
Rogin also notes how Clinton and Obama were not on the same page on Iraq.
Obama “saw ending the Iraq war as a key campaign promise, a way to right a Bush administration wrong, and as a bow to the will of the American people.” Clinton felt there was a “national security interest in keeping thousands of troops in Iraq … [with] limited, but important, missions to be done: countering terrorists, advising the Iraqi armed forces, and protecting U.S. personnel” and “was particularly aggressive in pushing for a long-term troop presence.”
Clinton voted to authorize the Iraq War, though she would later blame that on bad intelligence.
Hillary Clinton also stood by and watched, making nary a peep, as Guantanamo Bay detainees piled up during the Bush years, H.A. Goodman reports:
Hillary Clinton was a freshman senator with only a year in office when Bush began to bring detainees to Guantanamo Bay in January 2002. She and many fellow Democrats in Congress said so little in opposition to the prison during those early years that right-leaning commentator William Safire accused them of giving Bush a blank check in his treatment of detainees. “Not a peep out of Hillary Clinton,” he wrote.
Democrats still blame George W. Bush for today’s foreign policy problems.
But will liberals blame themselves if Clinton is elected and continues the Bush-Cheney foreign policy agenda?
