Daniel Larison, writing at The American Conservative explains to readers that Hillary Clinton projects to be a “very hawkish president.”
Presidents with less hawkish records than Clinton have ended up launching new wars and intervening in foreign conflicts far more often than their campaign rhetoric would have suggested.
Bush campaigned on conducting a “humble” foreign policy to distinguish himself from the frequent interventions of the Clinton administration, but as president presided over the most hubristic and reckless foreign policy in decades.
Obama was never as dovish as some of his fans and detractors wanted to believe, but he was supposed to be the less hawkish candidate in the primaries and the general election.
Despite that, Obama has been a war president for every day he has been in office, and that includes two wars that he initiated illegally on his own authority.
As a senator, Obama argued against starting wars without Congressional approval, but as president has done the very thing that he previously denounced.
I assume Clinton will launch Kosovo- or Libya-style air wars when the opportunities present themselves, and she will be quicker to take sides in foreign conflicts than her predecessor and will back the side she takes more aggressively. She probably won’t commit the U.S. to a major ground war, but then her judgment on foreign policy is reliably bad so there are no guarantees that she won’t.
