Update: Clinton as Secretary of State

Unsurprisingly, Barack Obama does not read this blog and appears to have offered Sen. Hillary Clinton the Secretary of State job anyway.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton?

I for one think it would be a really, really bad idea to have Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State. Some feminists are in favor of this, presumably because they think it's good to have as many women in high-level administration jobs as possible. But the reason Hillary Clinton is bad on foreign policy is because she's known to be pretty hawkish, voting for the war in Iraq and never apologizing for it. It's a position I can understand as senator, but not in such a key diplomatic position as SoS. In fact, during the primary season, Clinton made a big deal out of the fact that she wouldn't meet with foreign leaders like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad without preconditions. Since the main job of the SoS to meet with foreign leaders, I think this seems like a bad fit.

Besides, Clinton has been a key leader on feminist issues in the Senate and with her experience on health care she seems like a key person to work to pass legislative change on her pet issues. I agree that it's important for the SoS to be someone who is pro-choice and with a good understanding of human rights issues (that's why I have reluctance to favor someone like Chuck Hagel, who has a good background in liberal internationalism and diplomacy), but I still think that Clinton isn't quite the right choice.

Image by Flickr user Llima.

Colin Powell Endorses Obama

Only in America could a man who lied to the U.N. about the reasons for going to war with Iraq lend foreign policy credibility to a Democrat.

The Problem with Foreign Policy

So it turns out that we have no motivation to go to war with Iran (except that they're, you know, Muslim and anti-American), since they stopped their weapons program since 2003. What the report more or less shows is that Iran has been deescalating a war situation instead of baiting one.

Brian wonders why it took so long for the report to be released and why the intelligence community would defect from the administration. To me, the second point of wondering doesn't seem surprising. After all, the administration has more or less blamed the entire Iraq war on faulty intelligence, something I'm sure gets under the skin of many intelligence professional at the DoD and the CIA. The decision to go to war didn't rest with them, it rested with the president.

Furthermore, I think this really shows how hawkish our entire foreign policy community is on Iran. Even so-called liberal publications like the New Republic in the last year have published essays suggesting a hawkish policy on Iran.* What's more, a lot of people aren't considered serious thinkers in the foreign policy community unless they show evidence of at least minor hawkishness. This seems like a problem to me.

Cross-posted at CampusProgress.org/blog.

*Edited from original text.

Young People Are the New Isolationists

My friend Mark over at UN Dispatch alerted me to a new poll conducted by the UN Foundation which shows that overall people have more faith in international co-operation than military action. What's really interesting, though, is that young people (which the UN defines as the 15-24 age range) view themselves as islolationists more than older generations do. They tend to resist interference in other countries' internal problems. I'm all for resisting military invasions, but what I think is danerous about this, though, is that it suggests a general disengagement with what's going on in the world. There are plenty of places (see: Pakistan and possibly Sudan -- although there are some strong arguments to be made for military intervention there) where some strong diplomacy could swing things in a favorable direction. Since the US has so much power when it comes to trade (although to a lessening degree lately) it makes sense to monitor what's going on in other countries.

I'm interested to know, what do other young people think about isolationism?

Cross-posted at campusprogress.org/blog.