Hillary’s challenges in fight against Daesh

The political challenge is particularly acute as the Democrat presidential hopeful has to distance herself from a record that she helped shape

As United States President Barack Obama has conducted his ill-fated experiment in diminished US leadership, he has fended off critics with what many dismissed as a straw-man argument: That the only alternative to his approach was mindless bellicosity. Then Ted Cruz came along — and turned out to be the straw man. When the Republican Texas senator said of Daesh (the self-proclaimed Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) that he would “carpet-bomb them into oblivion” and find out “if sand can glow in the dark”, it seemed he wanted to prove that mindless bellicosity was no figment of Obama’s imagination.

But there is a common thread to what Obama and Cruz offer: the false promise of an easy way out for the US in the fight against terrorism. Obama wanted Americans to believe, and may have believed himself, that the “tide of war is receding,” as he said in 2011. It turned out that he could end the US’ wars, temporarily, but that didn’t mean the wars ended — and before long, the president was forced to return Americans to battle.

Cruz — like Donald Trump, who promises to “quickly and decisively bomb the hell out of” Daesh — wants Americans to believe that the bad guys can be defeated speedily and easily, with no sacrifice by Americans and no harm to American values.

But carpet-bombing kills civilians, not terrorists. Pilots need information that only people on the ground can provide, and air power succeeds only as part of a larger military and political strategy. For the US, there is, in reality, no alternative to sustained, yearslong commitment to the world’s most troubled region. That doesn’t mean an invasion by hundreds of thousands of troops, but it does demand intelligent diplomatic, economic and military engagement.

That’s not a popular thing for any politician to say. Fortunately, at least one candidate is saying it. Ironically, perhaps, that candidate is Obama’s former secretary of state. In a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations in November, Hillary Clinton said that the US needs to wage both “an immediate war against an urgent enemy” and “a generational struggle against an ideology with deep roots”. “It will require sustained commitment in every pillar of American power,” Hillary said. “This is a worldwide fight, and America must lead it.” She called for no-fly zones in Syria, which Obama has steadily opposed.

Pugnacity and isolationism

Perhaps most telling, she promised to recommit the US to the kind of sustained, values-based engagement that (though she didn’t say this) Obama has deemphasised and that Cruz and Trump, with their odd mixture of pugnacity and isolationism, would jettison.

“We have to join with our partners to do the patient, steady work of empowering moderates and marginalising extremists, supporting democratic institutions and the rule of law, creating economic growth that supports stability, working to curb corruption, helping train effective and accountable law enforcement, intelligence, and counterterrorism services,” Hillary said.

Sustaining such views through a presidential campaign won’t be easy. Voters much prefer, understandably, to be told that the country can concentrate, as Obama told them, on “nation-building here at home”.

Not every Republican is peddling the Cruz-Trump snake oil. But Hillary’s political challenge is particularly acute since she has to distance herself from a record that she helped shape — and do so without alienating the most ardent supporters of a president she worked for. Her unconvincing repudiation of the Pacific trade deal that she helped design illustrates the pressures. And the policies that Hillary promotes aren’t easy, as critics rightly point out.

But on issues of US leadership, Hillary seems disinclined to compromise, despite pressure from a dovish primary electorate. That may reflect a calculation of what will sell best in the general election, but it also seems to reflect core principles — principles that she argued for, sometimes unsuccessfully, as secretary, and principles on which almost certainly she would govern as president.

Her views have the added virtue of being right. Americans can see that Obama’s policy of premature disengagement hasn’t worked in Libya, Iraq, Syria or Afghanistan. Will they also see through Cruz’s phony alternative? That is one of the key questions to be answered in 2016.

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