Trump, Clinton debate best foreign policy to advance US imperialism

BY SETH GALINSKY

As Hillary Clinton heads toward clinching the Democratic Party nomination and Donald Trump the Republican nod, there has been increased discussion of their foreign policies. Both defend U.S. imperialist interests around the globe, and the use of military might to enforce those interests. But New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd gets at some of their differences in an April 30 column, where she wrote, “It’s Hillary the Hawk against Donald the Quasi-Dove.”

Along similar lines the April 24 Times magazine featured the article “How Hillary Clinton Became a Hawk” by Mark Landler, the paper’s White House correspondent. He writes approvingly that Clinton believes “that the calculated use of military power is vital to defending national interests, that American intervention does more good than harm and that the writ of the United States properly reaches, as [George W.] Bush once put it, into ‘any dark corner of the world.’” He adds that Clinton “is the last true hawk left in the race.”

Landler notes Clinton’s “decades-long cultivation of the military,” beginning when her husband Bill Clinton was president and continuing during her stint as U.S. senator in New York and later as President Barack Obama’s secretary of state.

A month after the Sept. 11, 2001, al-Qaeda attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, Sen. Clinton traveled to Fort Drum in New York’s Jefferson County at the invitation of Gen. Buster Hagenbeck, the new Army 10th Mountain Division commander. “She sat down,” he told Landler, “took her shoes off, put her feet up on the coffee table and said, ‘General, do you know where a gal can get a cold beer around here?’”

Clinton for more robust intervention

“Spurning a long tradition of New York senators,” Landler adds, she took a seat on the Senate Armed Services Committee instead of Foreign Relations when offered a choice in 2002. “For a politician looking to hone hard-power credentials — a woman who aspired to be commander in chief — it was the perfect training ground,” Landler said. “She dug in like a grunt at boot camp.”

During her time as secretary of state, Clinton generally favored “more robust intervention” than Obama, Landler notes. Obama has been reluctant to send large numbers of ground troops, preferring to use drones, airstrikes, special forces and “diplomacy” to advance Washington’s interests.

Clinton was a proponent of Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s recommendation in 2009 to send 40,000 more troops to Afghanistan. She supported the Pentagon’s plan to leave a “residual force” of up to 20,000 U.S. troops in Iraq. She opposed proposals by aides to Obama in February 2009 to make symbolic concessions to Moscow as a gesture of “good will in resetting the relationship,” the Times says.

In 2010 after the North Korean military allegedly torpedoed a South Korean ship, Clinton backed a plan to send a U.S. warship to the Yellow Sea between North Korea and China, a move sure to provoke Beijing. “We’ve got to run it up the gut!” Clinton said. Obama declined her plan.

In one dispute with Obama where she won out, Clinton pushed for the use of U.S. air power in 2011 to hasten the fall of the regime of Moammar Gadhafi in Libya.

There are numerous other examples.

Trump’s ‘America First’

In a speech April 27 Trump said that “since the end of the Cold War and the break-up of the Soviet Union” the U.S. government has “lacked a coherent foreign policy” and under Obama and Clinton has been “reckless, rudderless and aimless.”

Trump says he is going to put “America First.” He says he opposed the U.S. war in Iraq and that Washington should be “getting out of the nation-building business.”

“Unlike other candidates for the presidency, war and aggression will not be my first instinct,” Trump said. “A superpower understands that caution and restraint are signs of strength.”

“We went from mistakes in Iraq to Egypt to Libya, to President Obama’s line in the sand in Syria,” referring to Obama’s empty threats to take action against the Bashar al-Assad regime if it used chemical weapons.

“Each of these actions have helped to throw the region into chaos,” Trump said “and gave ISIS [Islamic State] the space it needs to grow and prosper.” While Trump says Obama gave too much away with his “disastrous” deal with Iran, unlike his now-defeated Republican competitors he has never said he would tear it up. Instead, he says he will “renegotiate” it.

The Republican candidate also says that to bargain from a position of strength he will “rebuild our military” and spend more money on new armaments. At the same time he said he will tell ISIS “their days are numbered.”

In the increasing disorder in the Mideast, Trump says that Washington should “seek common ground” with Moscow and Beijing.

Conservatives and liberals alike who are apoplectic about Trump’s march to the Republican nomination derided his foreign policy speech. The liberal Huffington Post said it was an “incoherent view of the world,” while the conservative National Review called it “incoherent and shallow.”

But many working people who have been drawn to Trump’s meetings, seeking answers to the grinding depression conditions spawned by the capitalist economic crisis, are skeptical of U.S. intervention around the world. They are attracted to his portrayal of himself as the candidate of “peace and prosperity, not war and destruction.”

“More drones or fewer, more diplomacy or less, more special forces or more infantry, everything Washington does is to defend the interests of U.S. capitalists around the world, not working people,” said Osborne Hart, Socialist Workers Party candidate for U.S. vice president, May 3. “While Clinton and Trump have tactical differences on how to best defend imperialist interests, nothing they do advances the interests of the working class. Working people need our own foreign policy independent of the bosses.”

Related articles:
Workers need international solidarity, not ‘Americanism’

Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home