When Predicting Hillary Clinton's Potential Foreign Policy, Look at More than Just Cheap Talk

​Originally published in the Mischiefs of Faction blog.

By Jonathan M. Ladd

​The press has given a lot of attention to Hillary Clinton's recent interview with Jeffrey Goldberg, in which she lays out a more hawkish foreign policy vision than President Obama has espoused. It is completely reasonable to scrutinize the policy statements of a (presumed) presidential candidate. But I do worry that a lot is being made over statements she has made, with much less attention to actual decisions she and her advisers have made in the past and the electoral incentives she would face as president. In reaction to Hillary's recent comments, liberal journalist/activist Glenn Greenwald said in an interview:

Hillary is banal, corrupted, drained of vibrancy and passion. I mean, she’s been around forever, the Clinton circle. She’s a fucking hawk and like a neocon, practically.

Others have pronounced her a neoconservative as well. On Morning Joe, Joe Scarborough stated,

Hillary is the neocon's neocon. It's going to be fascinating if she decides to run and she gets the nomination, that she will be more of a sabre-rattler and more of a neocon that the Republican nominee. Is that not the case? There's hardly been a military engagement that Hillary hasn't been for in the past 20 years.

In this Sunday's New York Times, Jacob Heilbrunn predicts that neoconservative Robert Kagan might be Clinton's Secretary of State based on the fact that he works at the Brookings Institution and that Brookings' President Strobe Tolbot has praised Kagan's work. On this basis, Heilbrunn concludes that "Far from ending, then, the neocon odyssey is about to continue." The neoconservative magazine, the Weekly Standard even published quotes from Hillary's interview with Goldberg as an mock "Special Guest Editorial."

I don't know for sure what Hillary Clinton's policies will be if she is elected president. As the old saying goes (attributed to many different people over the years): "It is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future." And I do think that candidates' public statements have some predictive value. But I also think one should be very cautious making a prediction about a candidate's actions in office based entirely from nonbinding position-taking, especially if that person's past actions and her incentives point in the opposite direction.

Lets take Heilbrunn's list of Clinon's neocon "actions." He says:

Mrs. Clinton voted for the Iraq war; supported sending arms to Syrian rebels; likened Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, to Adolf Hitler; wholeheartedly backs Israel; and stresses the importance of promoting democracy.

All of these are rhetorical except for the vote for the Iraq war. This is the closest thing to a major neocon action she has ever taken. But her vote was not pivotal there. The resolution passed the Senate 77 to 23. It would have passed regardless of how she voted and she and her advisers knew that. So this was (like the large majority of votes by members of Congress) a position taking vote, not a pivotal one. At the end of the day, that position was a mistake politically, because she plausibly could have defeated Barack Obama for the 2008 Democratic nomination if she had voted the other way.

But it did not appear that way at the time. In October 2002 when the vote was taken, the idea of war in Iraq was popular in polls. And in the 1991 Iraq War, those that voted for it, like Al Gore and Joe Lieberman, later benefited politically from those votes. In both cases, their hawkish stands on the first Gulf War increased their chances of being placed on the national Democratic ticket. All the other evidence for her neoconservativeness comes from interviews, speeches, and selective leaks from her aids about positions she supposedly took during secret internal Obama administration deliberations

In addition to this position-taking, I think it is important to look at:

1. her past record of actions, and
2. the electoral incentives she would face as president.

As I have noted before, despite the fierce arguments of the 2008 Democratic nomination fight, there has been a lot of continuity between the 1993-2001 Clinton Administration foreign policy and the 2009-present Obama Administration foreign policy. Both President Obama and President Clinton were very cautious about committing any ground troops overseas. Bill Clinton planned to Kosovo intervention in order to avoid any ground troops and have zero American deaths, a goal which he remarkably achieved. It could be that Hillary and Bill Clinton will have major differences in their foreign policy philosophy, but Hillary has never distanced herself from her husband's policies or his advisers in this area. And of course, Hillary served as Secretary of State in the Obama Administration, where she took many concrete actions, not just position-taking. But whether you approve of disapprove of her performance at the State Department, her actions supported President Obama's less confrontational, less militaristic policies rather than the neoconservative policies advanced by the Bush administration.

Finally, beyond her record, look at the incentives she will face. Wars are a big potential electoral liability. After a brief rally-around-the-flag period, overseas casualties depress presidential approval ratings. That is one reason Bill Clinton was so intent on avoiding them. On top of that, Hillary would still need to run for re-election as a Democrat. The Democratic nomination coalition is very hostile to sending troops overseas. The last Democratic president to preside over a war of choice overseas could not get renominated in 1968 and none have tried it since. Aggressive neoconservative policies like those of the Bush administration---committing substantial numbers of American troops to war zones in the middle east or elsewhere---would put her renomination in peril and she knows that.

So when interpreting Hillary Clinton's foreign policy statements over the next two years, don't forget to consider her past actions and her incentives as well. And if her words contradict these last two considerations, be cautious about weighing her words too heavily.
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