NYTimes | “Hillary
is very much a member of the traditional American foreign-policy
establishment,” says Vali Nasr, a foreign-policy strategist who advised
her on Pakistan and Afghanistan at the State Department. “She believes,
like presidents going back to the Reagan or Kennedy years, in the
importance of the military — in solving terrorism, in asserting American
influence. The shift with Obama is that he went from reliance on the
military to the intelligence agencies. Their position was, ‘All you need
to deal with terrorism is N.S.A. and C.I.A., drones and special ops.’
So the C.I.A. gave Obama an angle, if you will, to be simultaneously
hawkish and shun using the military.”
Unlike
other recent presidents — Obama, George W. Bush or her husband, Bill
Clinton — Hillary Clinton would assume the office with a long record on
national security. There are many ways to examine that record, but one
of the most revealing is to explore her decades-long cultivation of the
military — not just civilian leaders like Gates, but also its
high-ranking commanders, the men with the medals. Her affinity for the
armed forces is rooted in a lifelong belief 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 Bush once put it, into “any dark corner of
the world.” Unexpectedly, in the bombastic, testosterone-fueled
presidential election of 2016, Hillary Clinton is the last true hawk
left in the race.
For those who
know Clinton’s biography, her embrace of the military should come as no
surprise. She grew up in the buoyant aftermath of World War II, the
daughter of a Navy petty officer who trained young sailors before they
shipped out to the Pacific. Her father, Hugh Rodham,
was a staunch Republican and an anticommunist, and she channeled his
views. She talks often about her girlhood dream of becoming an
astronaut, citing the rejection letter she got from NASA as the first
time she encountered gender discrimination. Her real motive for
volunteering, she has written, may have been because her father fretted
that “America was lagging behind Russia.”
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