Hillary Clinton and the Foreign Policy Triangle

There's an interesting piece on Vox today trying to reconcile several different views of presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton (I can say that now, after her wins in New York and most of the other northeastern states that voted last night) in terms of her foreign policy attitudes. One view comes from a profile by Mark Landler in the New York Times Magazine titled, "How Hillary Clinton Became a Hawk," whose thesis (which, as the Vox article notes, embodies the conventional wisdom) is that Hillary is a "super-hawk," "the last true hawk left in the race," with far more "appetite for military engagement abroad" than even any of the Republicans. Than even Ted "Let's See if Sand Can Glow in the Dark" Cruz. Yikes! The other view comes from the nuclear nonproliferation group Global Zero, on whose scorecard Clinton ranks far more dovish across the board than the Republicans, and is not so different from Bernie Sanders. This is a question of some considerable importance, and one that received perhaps less attention during the Democratic primary than it deserved, because if Hillary is, indeed, a super-hawk, that would be by far her greatest potential weakness with the Democratic electorate. (Bernie failed to make much hay with this, because he seemed remarkably out of his depth in foreign policy arguments, but it's still worth thinking about.)

The Vox piece ends up concluding that things are considerably more complicated than perhaps either of the opposing views would suggest:

[H]er past record, current policies, and ... larger worldview . . . reveal Clinton as someone who is exceptionally enthusiastic about the merits and potential of American engagement in the world. She is indeed, more than any other candidate in the race, a true believer in American power.

But Clinton's policies and past record suggest that her vision of power includes military force as well as diplomacy, so that while she is more likely to act in foreign affairs, she is also more likely to do so peacefully.

This is an area where, I think, viewing foreign policy through a simple one-dimensional spectrum is a real mistake. American attitudes toward foreign policy are best thought of as a triangle, with three distinct poles: isolationism, imperialism, and internationalism. Isolationism is simple: it's the view that we shouldn't really be involved in foreign affairs at all. This was the prevailing attitude in, say, the 1920s, and into much of the 1930s. Imperialism is the view that we should aggressively use our national might, and especially our military power, to advance our own interests across the globe. Our literal imperialism around the turn of the 20th century was the clearest embodiment of this view, and I therefore use the word "imperialism" as a neat shorthand, but in our own era I think the neoconservatives exemplify this overall attitude. Finally, internationalism is the view that we should take an active, perhaps even a leading, role in foreign affairs, but that we should do so in cooperation with other countries where possible, should emphasize diplomacy, and should in general act for the general good of the world rather than for selfishly pro-American reasons. Woodrow Wilson (and his League of Nations) and Harry Truman (who brought America into the U.N.) are exemplars of internationalism.

And it really is a three-way system. You can't construct any one of these worldviews out of some mixture of the other two; they're qualitatively different orientations toward the world. And they map onto the ordinary political spectrum in some interesting ways. Internationalism is a distinctively liberal attitude, and imperialism a conservative one, but while you can have isolationism of either a liberal or a conservative stripe, it's not especially a "centrist" approach. Indeed, during much of the 20th century it was the very most conservative Republicans who were isolationists. Broadly speaking I think that conservative foreign policy thought runs along the edge of the triangle from imperialism to isolationism (see this excellent Jonathan Chait piece identifying Ted Cruz with the modern isolationists, who see air power as a way to dominate the world without engaging in it, and Marco Rubio with the neo-imperialist neocons)*, while liberal foreign policy runs along the edge from internationalism to isolationism. Bernie Sanders, for example, is somewhere in the middle of that line: he's emphatically not an imperialist, and is in conventional terms incredibly "dovish," but is somewhat skeptical about American involvement abroad, whether diplomatic or militaristic.

Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, is I think on that other edge, the line running from imperialism to internationalism. And I think she's pretty clearly most of the way toward internationalism, maybe almost all the way there. But she's definitely not an isolationist. She sees America as having tremendous capacity to do good in the world, by various means, and as President she will doubtless try to do a lot of good in the world using those various means. Maybe that will get her into trouble sometimes; I certainly think that Obama's skepticism of America's ability to change things for the better has been a healthy one. But it's a fundamentally different impulse from the truly "hawkish" ones of the imperialists. She is interested in using military power, but not for conquest. Maybe from a left-isolationist standpoint that doesn't matter. Maybe for an internationalist skeptical about American power, in more of the Obama tradition, it's a well-meaning but ultimately mistaken and potentially even disastrous approach. This piece isn't entirely a defense of Hillary Clinton.

Rather, it is simply an argument that you cannot understand Hillary Clinton if you try to see foreign policy through a one-dimensional, bipolar lens, with "hawks" on one side and "doves" on the other. There are three different foreign policy camps, and unless you understand that, you can't understand how the different candidates relate to one another.




*And what, you may ask, about Donald Trump? I... don't know, exactly. I think he's a sort of imperialist? But a very different one than the neocons. Basically, as many people have noted, it seems like his "ambition is to sit at the head of a vast American tribute empire," not surprising, perhaps, given that his own business is basically a tribute empire built around the name Trump. I guess that's imperialist? Or some sort of weirdo hybrid between imperialism and isolationism? Maybe it's more isolationist? We shouldn't get involved unless they pay us? Transactional isolationism? I don't know. Certainly it's not within the four corners of any standard-issue map of foreign policy approaches.