This past weekend, Tom Friedman, of the Times, sat down with President Obama, and Jeffrey Goldberg, of the Atlantic, posted online a long interview with Hillary Clinton. With the grim events in Iraq, Gaza, and Ukraine dominating the news, it’s fascinating to compare and contrast what the two former colleagues (and 2008 election rivals) had to say.
Goldberg, in a post introducing the interview, highlighted Clinton’s claim that the Obama Administration’s “failure” to build up a credible opposition in Syria created a vacuum that was filled by Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), the Al Qaeda offshoot that U.S. warplanes are now bombing in northern Iraq. Other stories focussed on Clinton’s apparent dismissal of a phrase Obama has reportedly used to describe his approach to foreign policy: “Don’t do stupid stuff.” A Bloomberg headline blared, “HILLARY CLINTON FAULTS OBAMA FOR ‘STUPID STUFF’ POLICY.” Politico’s Maggie Haberman wrote, “Hillary Clinton has taken her furthest, most public step away yet from President Barack Obama, rejecting the core of his self-described foreign policy doctrine.”
By Monday, speculation had turned to Clinton’s motives. Does this mean that she’s definitely running? (That was Goldberg’s interpretation.) Was it a cynical effort to distance herself from an unpopular President? Is she already looking beyond the Democratic primaries to appeal to independents and to moderate Republicans?
For folks inside the Washington politics-and-media bubble, these are endlessly fascinating questions. But what really stands from the interviews is the strident tone that Clinton adopted in her comments on Gaza and radical Islam. In defending the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s deadly response to Hamas’s rocket attacks, she sounded almost like a spokesperson for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. In talking about the threat of militant Islam more generally, her words echoed those of Tony Blair, the former British Prime Minister, who has called for a generation-long campaign against Islamic extremism—a proposal that one of his former cabinet ministers dubbed “back to the Crusades.”
Let’s take Gaza first. When Clinton noted that Israel has a right to defend itself from Hamas attacks, Clinton was merely restating what President Obama has said numerous times. But, when she passed on the opportunity to condemn the Israeli strikes on U.N.-operated shelters, which killed dozens of people, she was conspicuously failing to follow the example of her former colleagues in the State Department, who described one of the attacks as “disgraceful.” Clinton did acknowledge that the deaths of hundreds of children in the four-week-long military campaign was “absolutely dreadful.” But, rather than put even a bit of the blame on the Israel Defense Forces for its aggressive tactics, she pointed the finger at Hamas, saying, “There’s no doubt in my mind that Hamas initiated this conflict and wanted to do so in order to leverage its position…. So the ultimate responsibility has to rest on Hamas and the decisions it made.”
Another area where Clinton entered the realm of AIPAC talking points was in accusing Hamas of “stage-managing” the conflict and criticizing the media for going along with it:
These statements will have delighted Benjamin Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of Israel, whom Clinton defended several times in the interview. She even endorsed Netanyahu’s recent suggestion that Israel would never give up security control of the West Bank, a statement that some analysts have seized upon as the death knell for the two-state solution. “If I were the prime minister of Israel, you’re damn right I would expect to have control over security,” Clinton said of the West Bank, citing the need to “protect Israel from the influx of Hamas or cross-border attacks from anywhere else.”
Even for a former New York politician, these were contentious statements. But what is their ultimate import?
The cynical view is that Clinton is simply trying up shore up her reputation as a staunch ally of Israel. Earlier in Clinton’s career, pro-Israeli groups accused her of getting too close to the Palestinian cause. In 1999, a picture of her kissing Suha Arafat on the cheek ended up on the front page of the New York Post, under the headline “SHAME ON HILLARY.” After moving to New York in 2001 and running for senator, she adopted the default stance of most elected officials from the Empire State: unstinting support for Israel. As Secretary of State, in 2009-2010, she took part in efforts to restart the peace process, which, partly as a result of Israel continuing to expand its settlements, didn’t go anywhere. Unlike President Obama, however, Clinton maintained a reasonably cordial relationship with Netanyahu, and that was reflected in her supportive remarks to Goldberg.
If Clinton is courting the pro-Israel lobby, it wouldn’t be exactly surprising. With the Republican Party busy trying to make inroads among wealthy Jewish campaign donors, it hardly behooves her to adopt a more critical approach to the Arab-Israeli conflict shortly before announcing a run for President.
If you study Clinton’s words, though, there seem to be more to them than pandering. For one, she clearly believes that the best way to exert pressure on Israeli politicians, such as Netanyahu, is to win their confidence. Implicit in her comments is the suggestion that President Obama, by not making much of an effort to hide his dislike of the Israeli Prime Minister, or to win over the Israeli public, made another error. Referring to the failed negotiations at the end of her husband’s Presidency, the last occasion on which the Israelis and Palestinians came close to making peace, the former Secretary of State said, “Bill Clinton is adored in Israel, as you know. He got Netanyahu to give up territory, which Netanyahu believes lost him the prime ministership”—in his first term—“but he moved in that direction, as hard as it was.” A bit later in the interview, Clinton emphasized the point: “Dealing with Bibi is not easy, so people get frustrated and they lose sight of what we’re trying to achieve here.”
In this instance, the difference between Clinton and Obama is a tactical one on how to achieve a goal that they share. There is a bigger issue, however, which rises to the level of foreign-policy ideology. Ever since taking office, Obama has conspicuously tried to avoid making generalizations about Islamic extremism, or lapsing into loose talk about a clash of civilizations. In his interview with Friedman, he described the turmoil in the Middle East in terms of history and economics rather than religion. “I do believe that what we’re seeing in the Middle East and parts of North Africa is an order that dates back to World War I starting to buckle,” the President said. More specifically, he pointed to the rise of a disaffected Sunni population, stretching from Baghdad to Damascus, that was politically alienated and economically isolated: “Unless we can give them a formula that speaks to the aspirations of that population, we are inevitably going to have problems.”
Clinton, by contrast, placed the threat of radical Islam front and center, and she didn’t shy away from describing it. “One of the reasons why I worry about what’s happening in the Middle East right now is because of the breakout capacity of jihadist groups that can affect Europe, can affect the United States,” she said. “Jihadist groups are governing territory. They will never stay there, though. They are driven to expand. Their raison d’être is to be against the West, against the Crusaders, against the fill-in-the-blank—and we all fit into one of these categories.”
The key issue, Clinton went on, is how to contain the jihadi threat, and the appropriate analogy, in her view, is the long battle against Marxism-Leninism. “You know, we did a good job in containing the Soviet Union,” she said. “We made a lot of mistakes, we supported really nasty guys, we did some things that we are not particularly proud of, from Latin America to Southeast Asia. But we did have a kind of overarching framework about what we were trying to do that did lead to the defeat of the Soviet Union and the collapse of Communism. That was our objective. We achieved it.”
Rather than explicitly calling for a new Cold War focussed on radical Islam rather than on Communism, Clinton talked about exercising “smart power” and about engaging an American public that is now instinctively hostile toward foreign entanglements. But, reading the interview as a whole, that appears to be what she is advocating—a sustained global campaign targeting radical Islam (some, doubtless, will call it a “crusade”) that encompasses all of the options at the disposal of the United States and its allies: military, diplomatic, economic, political, and rhetorical.
As I said, the similarity to Blair’s recent call to arms is striking. If Clinton continues with this line of argument, she will inevitably be compared to Henry (Scoop) Jackson, the anti-Communist Democratic senator from the state of Washington who became a hero to the neocons. She will also be compared to modern-day Republican interventionists, such as John McCain. Judging by what she said to Goldberg, Clinton won’t necessarily mind the comparisons: “Great nations need organizing principles,” she said. “And ‘Don’t do stupid stuff’ is not an organizing principle.”
