GreatnewsfromHillary:TheRussianresetworked

Great news from Hillary: The Russian reset worked

posted at 3:21 pm on July 24, 2014 by Allahpundit

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It’s obvious what she’s trying to do here but this is a weird, weird moment to do it.

When she says the reset “worked,” the use of past tense is quite deliberate.

“What I think I demonstrate in the book, is that the reset worked,” Clinton told guest host John Harwood on NPR’s “On Point” on Thursday during a conversation about her new memoir, “Hard Choices.” “It was an effort to try to obtain Russian cooperation on some key objectives while (Dmitry) Medvedev was president.”…

“When Putin announced in the fall of 2011 that he was coming back, I had no illusions,” Clinton said. “I wrote a memo to the President, in fact I wrote two memos to the President, pointing out that we were going to have to change our thinking and approach. We had gotten all we could get from the reset.”…

During the interview with Harwood, Clinton acknowledged the number of foreign policy crises around the world but appeared to distance herself from decisions the Obama administration has made since she left in 2013.

“Every administration, every party in the White House has the responsibility during the time it is there to do the best we can to lead and manage the many problems we face,” Clinton said when asked if the Obama administration is to blame for a number of issues around the world. “And I think we did in the first term.”

Five years ago, she posed like a dope with a fake “reset” button alongside Russia’s foreign minister. Five years later, we’re locked in Cold War II. Her spin doctors’ mind-bending task: Come up with an argument, somehow, that that qualifies as a “success.” The only way to do it is to argue that it was a success but that, through no fault of Hillary’s own, of course, it collapsed in a heap. Officially, she’s going to blame the failure of the reset on Putin re-assuming the presidency after four years of Medvedev, but that makes no sense. As Hillary herself concedes (“of course Putin still pulled the strings”), Putin was calling the shots as prime minister during Obama’s first term while Medvedev kept his presidential seat warm. Russian law forbids more than two consecutive terms as president — for now — so Czar Vladimir temporarily stepped aside for a catspaw. She’s drawing a lame distinction between Medvedev and Putin simply as an excuse for why her biggest initiative as Secretary of State now lies in ruins.

Unofficially, of course, she’s also drawing a tacit contrast between herself and Obama: Things with Russia were fine during his first term but once she left State, everything went to hell. If having Putin as president of Russia is the key to all this, I’m not sure why we should expect different foreign policy results from President Hillary; after all, Putin will still be czar or king or emperor two years from now. But you’re not supposed to think too hard about this. This is political reasoning at its most basic: Hillary in power (2009) = quiet Russia, Hillary out of power (2013) = aggressive Russia, Hillary in power (2017) = ________________. If she mentions the reset at all on the campaign trail, it’ll only be as a reference point from which to compare how much more menacing Putin is today, which proves we need a more hawkish Democrat like her in the White House. Bottom line, with respect to Russia, the next Democratic nominee will sound a lot more like the last Republican one than she will Obama.

Speaking of Hillary being out of power, this sure is interesting:

Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick, who raised eyebrows earlier this year by questioning the sense of “inevitability” around Hillary Clinton’s potential presidential candidacy, emphasized Thursday that he’s worried Clinton’s inner circle will perpetuate an “off-putting” feeling of “entitlement” surrounding her possible White House bid…

Patrick wasn’t asked directly if he’d consider running for president in 2016, but, asked by a listener whether he believes a presidential candidate from “liberal Massachusetts” could ever win the presidency, Patrick rejected the premise.

“Massachusetts is not that liberal,” he said. “We have more unenrolled independents than we do registered Democrats and registered Republicans combined … We have Democrats in Massachusetts who would be Republicans anywhere else.”

“It’s not like we’re pals,” he said when asked if he’d spoken to Hillary about this at length. Patrick would be a rare serious challenger to Hillary in a primary, partly because he’s got executive experience, partly because he’s a longtime friend of Obama’s and *might* be able to bring some members of ObamaWorld on board, and partly because he could potentially consolidate the black vote like O did six years ago. That probably wouldn’t deny her the nomination, but Hillary obviously wants to keep O’s coalition intact for the general election. If she wins a nasty primary fight with Patrick but alienates some black voters in the process, she’s got turnout problems in the general. Run, Deval, run!

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Tags: Hillary Clinton, lavrov, mh17, putin, reset, Syria, Ukraine

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IsHillaryimploding? postedat8:01pm

Is Hillary imploding?

posted at 8:01 pm on June 18, 2014 by Allahpundit

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Keep hope alive, says Jonathan Last. Not only has she been gaffe-ing up America’s airwaves — the “dead broke” remark, that gay-marriage meltdown interview with NPR, and some offhanded inanity about how smart the Russian reset was — but it’s all been happening against a backdrop of fiasco for American foreign policy.

How’d you like to be a former Secretary of State running on this record?

Obama — perhaps you’ve heard this? — got bin Laden. But other than that, his foreign policy record is disastrous: Libya, Egypt, Syria, the South China Sea, Crimea, Iraq, Afghanistan. It is difficult to find a spot on the globe that is better off today than when Obama took office. And yet Obama’s foreign policy is the only entry of substance on Hillary Clinton’s resume right now. Which means it will carry double the weight.

For Obama, Putin and Crimea are a mid-size political problem, ranked somewhere above the Keystone pipeline. For Clinton it’s an existential problem because foreign affairs are the only measures for her basic professional competence.

Think about it from the perspective of a Democratic voter: Hillary Clinton was wrong on Monica Lewinsky during the (Bill) Clinton years, wrong on gay marriage and Iraq during the Bush years, and now wrong on Putin and Syria and Egypt and the whole of American foreign policy during the Obama years. What has she ever been right on? And if you’re a Democratic voter, at some point you start to wonder, Can’t we do better?

Do you? Go watch this clip before you answer. My trust in the commentariat’s ability to gauge which gaffes are truly damaging among average voters and which aren’t is down to zero at this point, and yeah, I certainly include myself in “the commentariat.” The ultimate example of this, I think, is Obama’s “you didn’t build that” line during the 2012 campaign. Conservative media blew up over it, me included, to the point where it became a key theme at the GOP convention. Voters didn’t care, though, because most voters aren’t “builders.” They’re wage-earners. You could crap on entrepreneurs all day and they wouldn’t flinch, although it’d probably convince the Chamber of Commerce to pause from its amnesty campaigning for five minutes to write a check to your opponent.

My hunch is that nothing Hillary’s said this week has reduced her chances. It takes a big gaffe to register with average voters, and that gaffe has to reveal some perceived “deeper truth” about the candidate to have legs, I suspect. That’s why Romney’s “47 percent” comment outgrew the punditocracy and actually penetrated the electorate. It seemed to confirm the sense of him as a country-club Republican who looked down on the lower class. There’s potential, I guess, for Hillary’s “dead broke” comment and her stupid whining about how “brutal” American politics is to make her seem “out of touch,” but never forget that she’s got Bill around to give her a shot of blue-collar appeal when needed. If her last name weren’t “Clinton,” you might have something in drawing her as the consummate limousine liberal. As it is, I think it’s a glancing blow, nothing more, especially if the GOP ends up supporting the “out of touch” attack by, er, nominating a guy named Bush. As for the gay-marriage interview, it’s hard for me to believe liberals are going to give her too hard a time over any heresy knowing how difficult it is for a party to win the White House for three consecutive terms. Iraq is the perfect example. Her vote to invade helped Obama pull the upset in 2008, but no one thinks it’ll keep her from the nomination now. She’s clearly the strongest candidate Democrats have in an extremely difficult political climate. They’ll be prudent in deciding how severely to punish her for deviations from orthodoxy.

As for foreign policy, everything Last said is true — it looks like O’s going to toss her the keys to an agenda that’s been completely totaled. But … since when do voters elect presidents based on foreign policy? The only clear example I can think of recently is 2004 and it took 9/11 to make that happen. Even in 2008, when Obama ran as the anti-Bush and the GOP nominated the hawk di tutti hawks, McCain was competitive until the bottom dropped out on Wall Street. Unless Rand Paul shocks everyone in the primaries, the next Republican nominee is likely to run to Hillary’s right on foreign policy, which will set her up nicely to run a “no more Iraqs” campaign. (Repudiating her own vote for war will also rally the left.) That strategy might not work as well as it did in 2008, but barring any major terror attacks on the U.S., it’ll work well enough to neutralize most of the GOP’s foreign-policy criticism, especially if the economy picks up a bit in 2015-16 and gives her something else to talk about. You have two big problems running against her and neither has anything to do with the finer points of foreign policy. One: How do you neutralize Bill’s popularity? She’s going to run on his economic record, not O’s, and he’s going to help her — a lot, I’ll bet — with blue-collar voters. She may be a bad retail politician but he’s an exceptional one, and he’ll be campaigning as much as she will. What do you do about it? (Start by nominating a conspicuously blue-collar yourself, I’d guess.) Two: How do you neutralize the “it’s time for a woman” argument? That argument doesn’t depend on who’s gaffed worst or who was really responsible for security at the Benghazi consulate. My hunch is that the GOP will start this campaign with a single-digit lead among men and Hillary will start with a double-digit lead among women. Either we build heavily on the former or reduce the latter or we lose. Is the “dead broke” thing or Ukraine going to help do that?

Update: Tough but fair.

Does it matter whether Hillary is imploding when the GOP's big idea is a man in a squirrel suit?

— Just Karl (@justkarl) June 18, 2014

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Tags: Benghazi, democrat, foreign policy, Hillary Clinton, jonathan last, reset

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Russiaandothers:testingthelimits? posted

Russia and others: testing the limits?

posted at 11:21 am on March 17, 2014 by Bruce McQuain

One of the foreign policy promises Barack Obama made was that during his presidency, America would have a “light footprint” on world affairs.  Our first indicator of what that meant was the action in Libya when the US “led from behind”.  The Obama administration belived that pulling back from our strong presence and position in the world would help mollify other powers and usher in a new era of peaceful cooperation with America as a partner and not necessarily the leader.

How has that worked out?

Ask Russia, China and a few others:

The White House was taken by surprise by Vladimir V. Putin’s decisions to invade Crimea, but also by China’s increasingly assertive declaration of exclusive rights to airspace and barren islands. Neither the economic pressure nor the cyberattacks that forced Iran to reconsider its approach have prevented North Korea’s stealthy revitalization of its nuclear and missile programs.

In short, America’s adversaries are testing the limits of America’s post-Iraq, post-Afghanistan moment.

“We’re seeing the ‘light footprint’ run out of gas,” said one of Mr. Obama’s former senior national security aides, who would not speak on the record about his ex-boss.

What we’re actually seeing is naivete in foreign policy head toward a predictable conclusion.  Foreign policy isn’t bean bag and it has been established many times in history that the retreat of a great power from the world’s stage will see other seemingly lesser powers attempt to fill or take advantage of that power vacuum.  The “light footprint” didn’t “run out of gas”, the light footprint was foreign policy destined for failure from its inception.  Mr. Obama and his foreign policy team were warned about that constantly and preferred to ignore both the warnings and history.

Mr. Obama acknowledges, at least in private, that he is managing an era of American retrenchment. History suggests that such eras — akin to what the United States went through after the two world wars and Vietnam — often look like weakness to the rest of the world. His former national security adviser Thomas Donilon seemed to acknowledge the critical nature of the moment on Sunday when he said on “Face the Nation” that what Mr. Obama was facing was “a challenge to the post-Cold War order in Europe, an order that we have a lot to do with.”

But while Mr. Donilon expressed confidence that over time the United States holds powerful tools against Russia and other nations, in the short term challengers like Mr. Putin have the advantage on the ground.

Mr. Obama is managing “an era of American retrenchment” he initiated.  And it doesn’t look like a period of weakness to the rest of the world, it is a period of weakness that is compounded by our weak leadership.  We’re engaged in bringing our military down to pre-WWII levels and we’ve made it clear that we’re not interested in fulfilling treaty obligations with the likes of the Ukraine.  How else would one interpret our actions?

And, of course, one of the best ways we could address this particular crisis is to up our shipments of natural gas to Europe so they weren’t dependent of Russian pipeline supplies that flow through the Ukraine.  That would give Europe some leverage because they wouldn’t be held hostage by their need for Russian petro supplies.  But on the domestic front, the Obama administration has made building the necessary infrastructure to cash in on our growing natural gas boom almost impossible.

Are Russia and others testing the limits?  You bet they are and all of those interested in those limits are watching this drama unfold.  To this point, it appears Russia sees no downside to its action.  Should that continue to be the case, you can be assured other nations will also “test the limits.”

This is Mr. Obama’s 3am phone call.  And it appears he has let it go to the answering machine.

~McQ

Q and O

Tags: crimea, foreign policy, reset, Russia, Vladimir Putin

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Report: Hillary compares Russian moves to Nazi aggression

Report:HillarycomparesRussianmovestoNaziaggression

FlashbackII:HillaryresetsAmerica’srelationshipwithRussia

Flashback II: Hillary resets America’s relationship with Russia

posted at 8:01 pm on March 3, 2014 by Allahpundit

An obligatory follow-up to Guy’s post. Coming soon to a 2016 attack ad near you:

The event was viewed as bungled at the time because the Russian word imprinted on the button meant “overcharge” instead of “reset.” But the longer-term implications of the “reset button,” particularly in the wake of the Russian invasion of Crimea, may be far more damaging for Clinton than a translation gaffe.

Republicans will charge that Obama and Clinton badly misinterpreted the signals from the Russian government, and instead of welcoming Russia in from the cold, should instead have been guarding closely against Russian territorial expansionism in Eastern Europe. And in the post-Crimea world, if opinion shifts toward the idea that Mitt Romney was right about Russia, those charges have a chance of sticking.

Can you win a presidential election on foreign policy absent extraordinary circumstances? (E.g., 9/11 and 2004.) Hillary’s in a unique position as a would-be nominee because her biggest credential is diplomatic; the worse things get abroad during O’s second term, especially in matters where she had a high profile as SoS — the Russian reset, Libya, Afghanistan — the more ammo there is against her in theory. In practice, I don’t know. She can dismiss her biggest missteps by claiming she was just carrying out Obama’s orders, not following her own instincts. She can also point to Kerry’s screw-ups, especially the more dovish ones, and claim that she’d have been much tougher. Lo and behold, here’s one in the making now courtesy of our dear retaliation-minded friends in Moscow:

The Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee in Russia’s parliament, Mikhail Margelov, said on Monday that his country expects all economic sanctions against Iran to be removed immediately, Israeli daily Ma’ariv reported.

“There have been important developments. President Hassan Rouhani has openly declared that Iran has no intention to develop an atomic bomb,” Margelov said. ”Furthermore, Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, has issued a decree that prohibits the building of a bomb, calling it ‘a sin.’ ”

As a result of these public statements, Marglov concluded, “The conditions have now been met to justify the full lifting of sanctions on Iran.”

How bad would America’s fortunes abroad have to get, though, before 2016 votes start shifting because of it? Any kind of major economic upturn or downturn before the election will probably decide things; only if the economy continues to crawl along will secondary issues loom larger, and even there, health care and immigration will be far more important than foreign policy barring a major war. That’s part of the core irony of Hillary’s prospective candidacy: Even though she’s been a major player in the federal government for most of the last 20 years, she has virtually no policy record to run on or against. She’s almost pure “brand,” which is precisely what makes her dangerous. If the election turns into a referendum on how much voters like the Clintons, that’s a … difficult election.

As you watch this and memories of “smart power” arrogance come flooding back, bear this point from Dan McLaughlin in mind. It’s not just that Romney was right about Russia and that the “reset button” was goofy and naive. It’s that Obama, Kerry, and various liberal toadies mocked him for it. Foreign policy is hard so misjudgments can be forgiven. The sneering is harder to forgive. And it continues even now, while Obama mumbles stupidities about the “wrong side of history” and threatens sanctions that the EU has no intention of putting in place. Yesterday, when asked whether he thought punitive measures would change Putin’s behavior, some administration apparatchik couldn’t resist taking a shot at Bush by telling Time mag, “We in this administration have made it a practice to not look into Vladimir Putin’s soul.” This, while Obama’s intelligence brain trust was being roundly humiliated for not seeing Putin’s invasion of Crimea coming. Maybe that’ll be Hillary’s slogan in 2016: “Slightly better than Bush. Arguably.”

Tags: button, hillary, Iran, lavrov, reset, Russia, sanctions, video

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