Soccer Dad

Foreign policy grown up

Earlier, perhaps, I was being a bit glib when I wrote that

And I'd even argue that they [the Republican candidates for President - sd] have more substance than any Democratic candidate, save Hillary. The rest of the Democratic field seems to think that hating W is more than enough.

But I'm not alone. In Foreign Policy Grown Up Sebastian Mallaby writes

The truth is that Clinton did not give Bush any sort of "blank check" -- if Bush wants to bomb Iran or hit Iranian units inside Iraq, he can do so without a Senate resolution. But Obama and Edwards are so intent on Bush-bashing that they refuse to cut him any slack, even when he advances a policy that they might ordinarily favor. After the administration announced a new package of Iran sanctions on Thursday, Edwards declared that the president and his team had once again "rattled their sabers in their march toward military action." Bush hatred has driven him to the point where he regards sanctions as a harbinger of war rather than an alternative.

But the next paragraph is even more devastating.

Clinton's rivals are contemplating history and deriving only a narrow lesson about Bush: Don't trust him when he confronts a Muslim country. But the larger, more durable lesson from Iraq is that wars can be caused by a lack of confrontation. The Iraq invasion happened partly because the world had lost the stomach to confront Saddam Hussein by other means. By 2002, the sanctions on Hussein's regime had been diluted, and there was pressure to weaken them further. Hussein was no longer "in his box," to use the language of the time: If you believed that a resurgent Saddam Hussein presented an intolerable threat, it was worth taking the risk of unseating him by force, sooner rather than later.

Mallaby concludes

Likewise on sanctions, Clinton is the only one to insist that sanctions are less a prelude to war than a means of forestalling it. They are more likely to work, moreover, if the military option is looming in the background, which is why bellicose comments from Bush or his vice president don't prove that war is the preordained strategy. The idea that the threat of war can prevent actual war is the most basic lesson of nuclear doctrine, but it appears to escape the Bush haters. In a recent interview with NPR to military force but also acknowledges that Americans face real threats, that feckless foreign powers can sometimes make the ideal of multilateralism unattainable and that war can sometimes be the least bad option.

Obama, who promised to rise above partisanship, seems too fearful of his party's Bush-hating base to offer that vision. It's impressive and surprising that Clinton, who railed against a vast right-wing conspiracy not so long ago, has risen above Bush hatred in forming her worldview. She has come a long way in just one decade.

(Take that David Ignatius, you silly fear monger.)

I made similar arguments on Friday regarding the sanctions against Iran. However, I left out the Washington Post's editorial on those sanctions.

Faced with this defiance, the international coalition is getting weaker rather than stronger. U.S. diplomats so far have been unable to win support for a third round of U.N. sanctions, which should have come six months ago. Russia and China have been stepping up their trade with Iran. A French initiative for the European Union to apply new sanctions has been blocked by Germany. The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, which is supposed to implement U.N. decisions, has launched a separate strategy aimed at allowing Iranian enrichment and preventing further sanctions.

The U.S. steps announced yesterday, which were directed at three state-owned banks, the Revolutionary Guard and its al-Quds Force, and a branch of the defense ministry concerned with weapons programs, do not directly designate any of those entities as a terrorist organization, as some in the administration and many in Congress had advocated. But they are designed to curtail Iranian access to the international banking system and deter non-American companies from doing business with Iran. If the sanctions are as successful as the financial crackdown on North Korea, they could have the same result: forcing Iran to end its defiance of the Security Council and begin serious negotiations to stop its bomb program. Though administration officials describe the measures as the toughest taken against Tehran in 30 years, they are restrained when set against the Revolutionary Guard's escalating campaign to kill Americans in Iraq by supplying sophisticated bombs, rockets and training to allied Shiite militias.

I'm *no* fan of Hillary. But if there will be a Democratic president running this country from 2009-2013, I'd rather it be Hillary than any of the alternatives. Mallaby is correct, in the Democratic field, Hillary is the foreign policy grown up.

UPDATE: Thanks to Bookworm Room for realizing I left out the word *no* in the last paragraph.

hillary clinton, democrats, foreign policy.