Could foreign policy be Hillary Clinton’s downfall?

The American president is more moderate on foreign policy, and more sceptical of intervention, than the hawkish woman who may succeed him this year, says TP O’Mahony

THE consequences of American foreign policy are often catastrophic. Think of Vietnam, Cambodia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria. And yet the lessons of history are continuously ignored.

The foreign-policy elites in Washington DC are animated by two assumptions: (a) the rest of the world wants to be like us (Americans), and (b) therefore, we (Americans) have a God-given duty to reshape the world in our image.

It’s the doctrine of ‘manifest destiny’, and, as William Pfaff explained in his book, The Irony of Manifest Destiny, it is “a political ideology based on faith in universal human progress toward democracy, validating the superiority of American institutions, ideas, and practices”.

Belief in American exceptionalism is usually traced back to the pilgrim fathers who sailed from England aboard the Mayflower, and other ships, in the 17th century, to settle in what became New England. They provided the United States with its founding myth — that of a City on the Hill. The words were spoken by John Winthrop aboard the Arabella, in 1630, as it approached Massachusetts Bay: “For we must consider that we shall be as a city on a hill, the eyes of all people are upon us . . . .” America, from the start, saw itself as ‘God’s own country’.

This sense that the United States was God’s chosen instrument in His salvation plan would become so embedded in its culture that by the time of the invasion of Iraq, in 2003, president George W Bush publicly identified the war as a divine commission, something God wanted him to do. Bush, reacting to the terrorist challenge after 9/11, redefined the doctrine of manifest destiny, so that the American mission in the 21st century was now to abolish evil.

But the passionate attachment to the doctrine has a long history. “The American concept of manifest destiny, originally seen as transcontinental expansion, has been recast, since the time of Woodrow Wilson, as the creation of a world order that is nominally pluralistic, but under ultimate American leadership — which, it is taken for granted, would be welcome to nearly all,” says Pfaff.

Pfaff, who, for 25 years, wrote a column for the International Herald Tribune (he died in April, 2015), along with Noam Chomsky, Gore Vidal, John Pilger and others, warned of the dangers of an unwavering commitment to a political ideology that was implicitly a project to control the world. “The implications of this are dangerous to the United States, to its allies, and to international peace, because of its lack of realism,” Pfaff wrote in 2010.

“The American project to bring democracy to a recalcitrant world has already, under the Clinton and two Bush administrations, produced, in the first decade of the new century, a series of unsuccessful military interventions.”

What if there is a second Clinton administration? What foreign policy objectives would Hillary Clinton have, if she became commander-in-chief later this year? That’s a vitally important question, not just for Americans, but for the wider world. And it is the starting point for an investigation undertaken by Mark Landler, White House correspondent for the New York Times.

In his new book, Alter Egos — Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and the Twilight Struggle over American Power, he tells the inside story of the fraught and fascinating relationship that has shaped American foreign policy for the past decade. He also seeks to answer key questions about a new Clinton presidency by contrasting her approach to the big foreign-policy issues with Barack Obama’s.

The president, now nearing the end of his second term in the Oval Office, is often restrained, inward-looking, and aware of the dangers of overcommitment, whereas Hillary Clinton is typically hard-edged, pragmatic, and unabashedly old-fashioned.

By describing her as ‘old-fashioned’, Landler means that, as regards the use of American power, the woman who could well be the next US president is much more hawkish and interventionist than the man she may replace. It has not been forgotten that, as a senator, she voted in support of the invasion of Iraq in 2003, whereas Obama had been making anti-war speeches.

As the new president, Obama, says Landler, attempted to play the peacemaking role in the Middle East.

“His chief emissary in that effort was his secretary of state, Hillary Clinton. Despite their combined celebrity and skills of persuasion, the two failed to bring together the suspicious Israelis and Palestinians — a result that seemed to vindicate Obama’s conviction that Americans habitually overestimated their ability to shape events in distant lands”.

Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, believed that the failure of Obama’s foray into Middle East peacekeeping hinged on tactics, not on any reservations about the capacity of the United States to be a force for good in the world. “For a person of her generation and upbringing, that was an unspoken assumption,” says Landler.

While at college in Los Angeles, a young Obama had written a paper in which he criticised what he called “a naive faith in American ability to control the world according to its whims”.

Years later, he brought this scepticism with him to the White House. “Obama’s foreign policy was, sometimes to an extreme, a repudiation of the blunders of Bush’s military campaign,” writes Landler.

“In the summer of 2015, he lashed out at those who opposed his nuclear agreement with Iran, accusing them of the same blindness that led America into the sand trap of Iraq.”

As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton has very different instincts about the use of military power and the role of the United States as an agent of change in the world. Her muscular brand of foreign policy is in marked contrast to the man she is hoping to succeed. Landler has one telling quote from Obama: “Just because we have the best hammer does not mean that every problem is a nail”.

In May, 2014, he gave a speech at West Point on the limits of American power. It contained this passage: “Since World War II, some of our most costly mistakes came not from our restraint, but from our willingness to rush into military adventures without thinking through the consequences — without building international support and legitimacy for our actions; without levelling with the American people about the sacrifices required”.

As a key member of Obama’s White House team, Hillary Clinton showed far more hawkish proclivities.

Whether that will still be the case, if she is elected to the White House, remains to be seen. As secretary of state, hers was just one voice among several in the Oval Office.

Presidents take advice from many quarters, and, in addition to the secretary of state, there is the national security adviser, the head of the CIA, the military chiefs in the Pentagon, and the White House chief of staff. As president, Hillary Clinton — on whose desk the buck will stop — may become more acutely aware of the limits of American power. We’ll have to wait and see.

But what if she doesn’t win in November? What if Donald Trump is elected president? That’s not now nearly as unlikely a prospect as it was six months ago, or even three months ago.

Trump knows nothing about politics, but that’s part of his appeal. He is tapping into the frustration and anger of millions of disenchanted Americans for whom the American dream has gone sour.

The recent observation of one White House correspondent is very pertinent: “His self-belief helped him to sweep aside 16 rivals, including governors and senators, to become the first non-politician in decades to win a major party’s nomination for president”.

And Trump’s foreign policy? What objectives will that have, what ideology will drive it?

In politics, there are known unknowns and unknown unknowns. Donald Trump certainly belongs in the latter category.

Alter Egos – Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and the Twilight Struggles over American Power, by Mark Landler, is published by WH Allen, at €16.49