Hillary clilton and Donald Trump

One of the big themes of the concluding session of the Democratic convention Thursday was that Hillary Clinton would be a strong and effective commander in chief, while Donald Trump would most decidedly not be.

 

At the convention, the usually mild-mannered, retired Marine four-star Gen. John Allen, who commanded forces in Afghanistan and later was the U.S. envoy to the anti-ISIS coalition, gave a stem-winding speech strongly making this case. Allen said with Clinton in the Oval Office, "Our international relations will not be reduced to a business transaction. Our armed forces will not become an instrument of torture, and they will not be ordered to engage in murder or carry out other illegal activities."

 

Allen also made the case forcefully that with Clinton at the helm ISIS would have much to fear: "We will pursue you as only America can. You will fear us. To ISIS and others like you: We will defeat you."

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Next up was a gauzy film about Clinton, narrated by Morgan Freeman, that reminded Americans that as secretary of state she had endorsed President Obama's decision to send into Pakistan a U.S. Navy SEAL team on a risky mission to capture or kill Osama bin Laden in 2011.

In the speech accepting her party's nomination -- surely the most important of her career -- Clinton said that as secretary of state she had traveled to 112 countries representing the United States. The contrast with Trump's record of zero public service and his cartoonish understanding of the world at large didn't need any underlining.

 

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She also forcefully made the case that she would wage war on terrorists saying, "Anyone reading the news can see the threats and turbulence we face. From Baghdad to Kabul, to Nice and Paris and Brussels, to San Bernardino and Orlando, we're dealing with determined enemies that must be defeated. So it's no wonder people are anxious and looking for reassurance -- looking for steady leadership."

Clinton took aim at Trump's claim, "I know more about ISIS than the generals do," saying "No, Donald, you don't."

She also asked with rising derision in her voice, "Ask yourself: Does Donald Trump have the temperament to be commander in chief? ... Imagine him in the Oval Office facing a real crisis. A man you can bait with a tweet is not a man we can trust with nuclear weapons."

Given the portrait painted Thursday that Clinton would be a strong and effective commander in chief in contrast to Trump, does her record bear this out, and how might her approach differ from Trump's?

Clinton, unlike Trump, has an extensive foreign policy record to examine based on her four-year tenure as secretary of state, which can help us understand how she might operate as commander in chief.

As secretary of state, for example, she presided over the effort in 2010 to significantly tighten sanctions on Iran, which helped to bring the Iranians, eventually, to the negotiating table on their nuclear program. This diplomatic effort resulted in a 12 to 2 vote in the U.N. Security Council to enhance sanctions against Iran, "one of her major achievements as secretary of state" according to New York Times' reporter Mark Landler in his authoritative book "Alter Egos."

Hillary Clinton's evisceration of Donald Trump

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This move highlights what could perhaps be most distinctive about Hillary Clinton as president: her refusal to be typecast as either hawk or dove. Instead, she has long been resolutely both, advocating for military interventions in Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan and Syria while also being unafraid to express her support -- as in one noteworthy 2011 episode in which she and then-CIA director Leon Panetta got into a shouting match over CIA drone strikes in Pakistani territory -- for critiques of the use of force.

It is this record as both hawk and dove that suggests some of the contours of what a Clinton foreign policy would look like.

What is also very clear from her record is that Hillary Clinton is now and presumably would continue to be as president a hawk who is also willing to negotiate. When it comes to foreign policy, these are the qualities we should most associate with effective commanders in chief.

America's two big foreign policy ideas

As president, either Clinton or Trump will have to navigate the two big ideas in American foreign policy: isolationism and interventionism. As was memorably defined by U.S. Secretary of State John Quincy Adams in 1821, isolationism means: "America does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well wisher to freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own." In other words, the United States will not become embroiled in foreign conflicts over ideals like "freedom" and "democracy" and will instead concentrate on strengthening itself at home.

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By contrast, interventionism stipulates that the United States needs to uphold -- and even enforce -- global order and liberty not only because it's the right thing to do, but also because it's very much in America's own interests, a view best expressed by John F. Kennedy in his 1961 inaugural address at the height of the Cold War when he said, "We shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty."

Over the past century the United States has swung back and forth between periods of isolationism and interventionism. Isolationism kept America out of World War I until the end of the conflict and it was relatively late to send troops to join the alliance fighting the Axis powers during World War II. After that war, America emerged as the dominant world force of interventionism, spearheading the global architecture of NATO, the United Nations, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund that has helped to sustain America's position as the world's only superpower.

Then the George W. Bush administration came into office promising a period of relative isolationism and opposition to "nation building." Condoleezza Rice, Bush's national security advisor, had famously opined, "We really don't need the 82nd Airborne escorting kids to kindergarten."

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9/11, of course, changed all that. The Bush administration engaged in long and protracted multi-trillion-dollar nation-building efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq.

So how do Clinton and Trump fit into this long history of American isolationism and interventionism?

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To the extent that Trump has laid out his vision of foreign policy, he is a neo-isolationist. He has famously called for a temporary ban on Muslim immigration, proposed building a wall along the Mexican border, and suggested a rethinking of the NATO alliance, which he described as "obsolete" to The New York Times in April. He also explained to the Times, "We cannot be the policeman of the world."

Trump is also an "America first" populist who has said he would torture terrorism suspects, kill their families and "bomb the s..t out of ISIS," in so doing indiscriminately bombing the cities in Iraq and Syria into which ISIS fighters have burrowed themselves. These kinds of actions are deemed to be war crimes by, among many others, the U.S. military.

Clinton, on the other hand, is very much part of the American foreign policy establishment, which for the past several decades has viewed the United States as an "exceptional country," a phrase that Clinton used in her San Diego speech last month. This view of the United States' proper role in the world also comes freighted with responsibilities to act around the globe to promote both American values and interests.

Clinton joins some of Kenya's Masaai traditional dancers before a dinner hosted in her honor on August 5, 2009.

 

* 출처: cnn.com