How Hillary Turned Into a Neocon
Your first two books, Fool’s Crusade and the Politics of Euromissilesfocus on the projection of unilateral American power abroad. Queen of Chaos continues along these lines. How would you see Hillary Clinton differs from Donald Trump in her views of American military prowess?
Hillary Clinton adheres to the notion that American military power is capable of achieving just about whatever U.S. leaders want it to do. All that is needed to get our way is “resolve”. Thus she and her foreign policy clique (represented by the 51 “dissident” State Department employees who recently criticized Obama’s caution, neocon Victoria Nuland and Clinton’s probable choice as Secretary of “Defense”, Michele Flournoy) seem confident that U.S. air strikes could counter Russian influence in Syria. Such overconfidence leads to taking grave risks without weighing the possible outcomes.
So far, Trump’s foreign policy statements are somewhat ambiguous. In competition with Hillary for support from the influential pro-Israel lobby, Trump’s aggressive condemnation of the Iran nuclear deal competes with Clinton’s bellicose threats to “obliterate” Iran. However, by promising to “make America great again”, Trump implies that the U.S. is not so all-powerful. Considering that he set out to win the nomination from the Republican Party, which is not exactly a peace movement, Trump may have been using aggressive rhetoric precisely in order to sell a policy of withdrawal from worldwide battlefields. Blaming free rider allies sets a nationalist tone to such withdrawal. His focus on wiping out Islamic terrorism is consistent with normalizing relations with Russia and reversal of Hillary Clinton’s “regime change” policy. Sounding “crazy” could be a symptom of realism.
What made you decide to focus this book on an individual rather than a series of events?
The idea just came to me all at once. It suddenly seemed the obvious thing to do. Indeed, Hillary Clinton personifies all that is wrong with U.S. foreign policy.
You’ve said that wherever Clinton intervened as secretary of state, whether it’s Honduras or Libya, chaos has followed. This sounds like U.S. foreign policy writ large. What makes HRC unique in this regard?
It seems to me that no recent U.S. President has come into office so determined from the start to conduct a warlike policy. The others were usually pushed by advisors or by opportunism. But Hillary, to qualify as President, quite deliberately set out to be a “defense intellectual” – to put herself in the position of the advisor rather than the advised. Good student, she turned herself into a sort of neocon. Even as candidate, she is already planning to intensify support to forces trying to overthrow the government of Syria. She won’t need to be pushed into war – she is out in front.
This is the case even though it is perfectly clear that the wars she has supported have led to chaos, in Iraq, in Libya, in Syria. Is this a deliberate policy of “creative chaos”? Or the result of blind arrogance? Sure of her good intentions, Hillary Clinton remains unfazed by the destruction of existing states, the countless dead, the ruined lives, the bitter resentment that feeds fanaticism, the floods of refugees, even the burning hatred aroused against the United States and the West. “What difference does it make?”
How effective do you think Bernie Sanders has been in challenging HRC’s foreign policy positions?
Unfortunately, he was not effective at all. By resigning from the Democratic National Committee to oppose Hillary Clinton’s warlike “regime change” policy, Hawai’i congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard gave Sanders a great opportunity to use his campaign to strengthen an antiwar constituency. Sanders failed to follow her lead, sticking to domestic policy issues without relating his social reforms to the need to challenge the military-industrial complex. His opposition to the 2003 invasion of Iraq was principled and foresighted, but that was a Republican war. He has shown much more tolerance for “humanitarian” wars waged by Democrats. Bernie failed to reply to charges that he “lacked experience” by aggressively exposing the deadly nature of Hillary’s “experience”.
Despite his flaws, Sanders has galvanized the support of many progressives fed up with the Democratic establishment. What do you think these supporters should do now that BS has surrendered the nomination and endorsed HRC?
Well, it’s a sure thing that they won’t follow my advice. Since it appears hopeless either to reform the Democratic Party from within (apparently Sanders’ project) or to build the Green Party into a real national challenge, I think splitting the Democratic Party would be the best strategy. It might be easier to build a third party by splitting one of the two than by starting from scratch. The Bernie campaign made it clear how much popular support exists for a return to the social outlook associated with the New Deal, which many people continue to associate with the Democratic Party. In reality, the progressive left is now deprived of effective political representation.
Honestly, it is hard to see how to escape from the Two Party Trap.
HRC’s gender has played an over-sized role in discussions of her candidacy, but as you point out in the book there have been many female leaders throughout history who were just as corrupt and militaristic as men, many of whom were their spouses or parents. So how does HRC benefit from putting her gender front and centre?
That gives people a reason to vote for her. That and her “experience”. In reality, after being the wife of a President, that “experience” was carefully crafted to prepare her to run for President: first Senator, then Secretary of State. A suitable curriculum vitae for the job. I find it amusing that the candidacy is not a result of her experience, but rather, that the experience is the result of her (carefully programmed) candidacy. She has cast herself in the role. Being a woman tends to protect her from more critical examination of that record. Ignoring the details, her fans admire her just for having done all that even though she is a woman.
Still, there is no doubt that because she is a woman, she has been subjected to particularly vicious personal attacks. By the same token, Obama aroused unjustified animosity for being African-American. Just as having a black president failed to eliminate racism, a woman president is not going to end the war between the sexes in America – on the contrary. My problem with all this is that “the right of a woman to be President” is actually a very provincial domestic issue in the United States, at a time when so much else is at stake – including the danger of World War III. This is just not the moment to focus on gender. Some other time, some other woman.
In the book, you speak of neoconservatism and liberal interventionism as the prevailing ideologies of the military industrial complex. What, if anything, distinguishes the two perspectives?
The results are the same in both cases. You find the same “neocons” in both camps. Take a look at Victoria Nuland, wife of top neocon theorist Robert Kagan. She was foreign policy advisor to Dick Cheney before becoming Hillary’s spokeswoman at the State Department and Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian affairs under Obama.
The labeling is different. The Republicans tend to prefer “national security” pretexts – weapons of mass destruction, that sort of thing. The Democrats nurse their self-esteem with “humanitarian” bombings designed to stop “dictators” from “killing their own people”.
It all comes down to the same thing.
These conflicts, threats and humanitarian missions all serve to perpetuate the military-industrial complex as essential for our “national security” or for “human rights”. The U.S. economy has become addicted to military contracts, which provide guaranteed profits and jobs in congressional districts across the country. Rationalizing these interests has become the national ideology, leading into ever more inextricable messes in the Middle East, and now by engineering regime change in Ukraine. The military industry needs allies to buy our surplus weapons, and then these allies drag us into their own conflicts. The latest twist of these entangling alliances is the effort by certain Polish warhawks to lure NATO into a war with Russia. With Hillary Clinton, this will just go on and on.
This interview was conducted with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.
posted by Satish Sharma at
10:12
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