For criticisms against Hillary Clinton, I take those
on foreign policy most seriously, and yet they are not enough to dissuade me.
I'm not sure it is possible to get foreign policy right.
I'm sure it's possible to get foreign policy horribly
wrong. For example, considering nuclear proliferation to be a good idea because
it keeps people in line shows a strong lack of understanding.
Allowing people to adapt brainwashing techniques
into torture methods to produce false information, thus fabricating "evidence"
to convince Congress to authorize war with a country that you are only
interested in because of Daddy issues is clearly wrong. I feel comfortable
labeling those things bad. Still, in foreign policy, that something is not
egregiously wrong does not mean it is right either.
For example, many foreign policy decisions post
World War II were based on standing against Communism. The Soviet Union was actually trying to increase
their influence at one point, so it may not even have been completely
ridiculous to fight communism, but fighting it often went badly. Vietnam may be the
most obvious example, but one thing you can see with both that and the Korean
conflict is that there were a lot of deaths and you still end up with communist
countries there. Sometimes you get rid of a monarchy, but if you end up with a
hereditary dictatorship, it may not be much better. At least, I think that's
how we feel about Kim Jong-Un.
At one point, working against Russian influence in Afghanistan seemed like a good idea. They even made a Tom Hanks movie about it: We
are going to end the Cold War by weakening Russia's grasp! And
then you will have the Taliban repressing people and sheltering Al-Qaeda when
they launch attacks against us that kill thousands of people.
I have written about this before, kind of, but years
later it is just more entangled. Before World War II it wasn't about communism,
but there was still King Leopold plundering the Congo for rubber, and US fruit
companies exploiting the Amazon, and everyone wanting a piece of the oil in the
Middle East.
You can look at conflict between Hutus and Tutsis,
or problems in South Africa, and say the tribes aren't capable of governing themselves, but that
overlooks everything that was changed and upended by the colonizers, and all of
the loss of life and leadership as their resources were being stolen.
History has really deep roots, and ignorance of
those roots doesn't change the shape of the tree.
So, you have people being oppressed and killed.
Ignoring it is horrible. Doing something will result in many deaths, and be
very expensive. It is unclear how many lives you can save or how to sustain
those lives once the first threat is gone, because they will need water, food,
and shelter. What do you do?
I don't like drone use, especially when they are
used to kill people. The last time I referred to that (about three years ago),
I saw it as a continuation of the status quo by someone who had joined it -
that getting power makes you automatically more invested in maintaining it, and
it was understandable if not ideal.
That could still be true, but I also see the
pressure to not let there be any more attacks. Are they stopping attacks? It's
possible. When some things are working well, you don't know about it because
you only see when things go horribly wrong.
It's just an area where I am slower to judge. I see
a lot of difficulty for the things that I do know, and I realize there is a lot
that I don't know.
That being said, it is meaningful to me that, as
Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton advocated for women's rights and children.
So many of the things that went wrong in the past went wrong because it was
easy to not think about protecting the vulnerable. It is significant to me that
she does think about them.
I will take the candidate who is pro love and
kindness. That is the direction we need to take.
Somewhat related posts:
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