Of Course Clinton Has Foreign Policy Experience, But That 'Experience' Has Been a Total Disaster
Hillary's so-called foreign policy "experience" is a series of bellicose missteps.
By Adam Johnson / AlterNet
January 20, 2016
On Tuesday the Clinton campaign released a signed letter by ten prominent diplomats and career national security wonks backing Clinton for President and calling Sanders foreign policy expertise into question. The letter was both unsurprising and underwhelming. Unsurprising because it was signed by former Bill and Hillary Clinton appointees (half of whom have connections to weapons contractors and all of whom will be looking for work in January 2017) and underwhelming because she could only muster ten signatories. This isn’t to say there aren’t legitimate critiques of Sanders’s foreign policy - there certainly are - but as the democratic primary race heats up with only days until the first primary, Clinton and her partisans are doubling down on the conventional wisdom she can pass the “Commander-in-Chief test" due to her foreign policy experience - a consensus widely shared by registered Democrats, 72% of whom trust Clinton over Sanders on matters of "foreign policy".
There’s only one problem: this consensus is entirely without objective merit.
The entire notion of “foreign policy” experience is based more on vague impression that reality. What matters above all, as Obama rightly insisted in 2008, is judgment not “experience”. In the case of Clinton there hasn’t been a major foreign policy decision in the Middle East she pushed for that didn’t end up being a disaster both at home and the countries she advocated meddling in. The most commonly cited “mistake” was her support for the Iraq war which is one of the main reasons she lost the nomination the first time around. But even if one excludes this. Even if one puts it into a memory hole and buries it along with her support for DOMA, welfare reform, and harsh prison sentences, the choices she’s made after 2008 show she not only didn’t learn any lessons from that war but has only grown more bellicose and hawkish. From her advocating regime change in Libya, to arming dubious opposition forces in Syria, to undermining peace with Iran -- Clinton has consistently been wrong on foreign policy even after her supposedly humbling loss of 2008.
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