Why Are We So Sure Hillary Will Be a Hawk?

It's been widely speculated that if elected president, the former secretary of state will pursue more muscle-bound, interventionist policies than her predecessors. Except maybe she won't.

If she wins election in November, the conventional wisdom is that Hillary Clinton's handling of foreign affairs will be less restrained than Barack Obama's, and that she'd be more willing to use military force to advance U.S. objectives in various corners of the world. This belief is one reason die-hard supporters of Bernie Sanders have been reluctant to embrace her candidacy, and it is the assumption that prominent profiles of Clinton — such as Mark Landler's "How Hillary Clinton Became a Hawk" in the New York Times Magazine — tend to reinforce.

Unlike some of the things of which Clinton has been (bizarrely) accused, this particular claim isn't without some basis. She did back the Iraq war in 2003, the Afghan "surge" in 2009, and the ill-fated intervention in Libya in 2011, and by all accounts she wanted the United States to do a lot more in Syria too. As I've observed, most of her close advisors are card-carrying liberal interventionists (or worse), which reinforces concerns that a future Clinton administration would be ready to repeat the same policies that have consistently disappointed in the past....

Continue reading (log in may be required): http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/09/25/why-are-we-so-sure-hillary-will-be-a-hawk-election-trump-syria-iraq-obama/