[Clinton] is [...] wrong that the hard power of the United States is as, um, powerful, in getting results as she believes. By contrast, President Barack Obama has always been skeptical of the claims of hard powerists, and basically repeated that view in an interview with Thomas Friedman. President Obama has it right and the former secretary of state has it wrong.
Here is some of what Clinton said, in this case, about Syria:
JG: You go out of your way in Hard Choices to praise Robert Ford, who recently quit as U.S. ambassador to Syria, as an excellent diplomat. Ford quit in protest and has recently written strongly about what he sees as the inadequacies of Obama administration policy. Do you agree with Ford that we are at fault for not doing enough to build up a credible Syrian opposition when we could have?
HRC: I’m the one who convinced the administration to send an ambassador to Syria. You know, this is why I called the chapter on Syria “A Wicked Problem.” I can’t sit here today and say that if we had done what I recommended, and what Robert Ford recommended, that we’d be in a demonstrably different place.
JG: That’s the president’s argument, that we wouldn’t be in a different place.
HRC: Well, I did believe, which is why I advocated this, that if we were to carefully vet, train, and equip early on a core group of the developing Free Syrian Army, we would, number one, have some better insight into what was going on on the ground. Two, we would have been helped in standing up a credible political opposition, which would prove to be very difficult, because there was this constant struggle between what was largely an exile group outside of Syria trying to claim to be the political opposition, and the people on the ground, primarily those doing the fighting and dying, who rejected that, and we were never able to bridge that, despite a lot of efforts that Robert and others made.
The problem with this is there simply was no reasonable way to do what Clinton describes. Indeed, America's history in trying to do things like this has been abysmal failures [...]
Whoever comes to challenge Clinton for the Dem presidential nomination, I hope they challenge Clinton on this wrongheaded idea that American hard power is effective at solving the world's problems. Because it isn't.
