By Ankit Panda
Hillary Clinton shouldn’t abandon the Obama administration’s cautious approach to foreign policymaking.
Former U.S. secretary of state and likely 2016 U.S. presidential aspirant Hillary Clinton took aim at incumbent U.S. President Barack Obama’s foreign policy in a recent interview with The Atlantic‘s Jeffrey Goldberg. Of Obama’s failures she says: “Great nations need organizing principles, and ‘Don’t do stupid stuff’ is not an organizing principle.” To be sure, Clinton is a knowledgeable stateswoman, skilled diplomat, and keen analyst of global affairs and has much to take credit for as the United States’ top diplomat for most of Obama’s presidential term so far. However, her dismissal of Obama’s look-before-you-leap brand of foreign policy is dangerous and certainly a view worth reconsidering ahead of a 2016 presidential campaign. When it comes to American foreign policy, not doing stupid stuff is perhaps much harder than it looks.
Making this argument in August 2014, as the Middle East burns and Ukraine teeters on the verge of schism, is tough, but the facts are that most of the critiques being levied against U.S. policy in places like Syria and Iraq are based on a brand of intellectually unsound counterfactual reasoning. As we witness the atrocities being committed by the Islamic State (IS) in Iraq, it is easy to imagine what could have been had the United States listened to calls to intervene in Syria late in the summer of 2012, when a moderate Syrian opposition was somewhat perceptible amidst the Levantine rubble.
In the end, the administration assessed its options in Syria and chose the least inflammatory route for U.S. policy by some accounts. In the eyes of the administration, rushing to provide lethal aid, setting up “safe zones,” or conducting air strikes against al-Assad’s forces were precisely the sort of options that could very easily have led to a slippery slope of “doing stupid stuff.” The trajectory of U.S. policy in the past three years in the Middle East might not have been the best possible one, but given the information that was available at the time, it was arguably the most responsible approach. Present events in the Middle East can be explained in many ways, but regardless of the causes of chaos there, the administration’s cautious approach has served the American national interest (albeit imperfectly).
Read the full story at The Diplomat