WHERE DOES MRS CLINTON STAND ON FOREIGN POLICY ISSUES?

1. Russia: Mrs. Clinton has called Mr. Putin a “bully,” and has described the relationship between the U.S. and Russia as complicated. During the 2008 presidential election, she said Mr. Putin “was a KGB agent, by definition he doesn’t have a soul.” Mr. Putin later responded by saying, “I think at a minimum it’s important for a government leader to have a brain.” As Secretary of State, she worked to broker more cooperation between the two countries. In 2009, she posed with Mr. Putin for a photo-op in which they pushed a big, red “reset” button. By the end of her tenure, however, she wrote a private memo to the President warning that relations with Russia had hit a low point and the “reset” in relations was over, according to people who saw the document. In reaction to Mr. Trump’s call in July for Russia to seek out her emails, a top foreign-policy adviser to the Clinton campaign said “this has to be the first time that a major presidential candidate has actively encouraged a foreign power to conduct espionage against his political opponent.”
2. China: Mrs. Clinton has been a constant critic of China’s human-rights record. She has called the current U.S./China dynamic “one of the most challenging relationships we have,” but she has also said the two countries share a “positive, cooperative, and comprehensive relationship.” During her time as Secretary of State, Mrs. Clinton said she pushed hard for China to agree to new greenhouse-gas emission standards. She also gave a 2010 speech that focused on internet freedom and criticized China, Tunisia, and Uzbekistan for having “stepped up their censorship of the internet.” The speech mentioned China 10 times. She was one of the U.S. officials in 2009 who launched an annual meeting between the U.S. and China focused on strategic and economic issues.
3. Europe and Brexit: Mrs. Clinton speaks frequently about supporting U.S. allies in Europe, marking a contrast with Mr. Trump. But she has also said Europeans should do more to monitor the flow of foreign fighters back to Europe from Iraq and Syria, saying it poses terror threats. She made more than 50 visits to European countries as Secretary of State, and has numerous relationships with leaders and diplomats there. Mrs. Clinton warned against the U.K. exiting the European Union, as her campaign had said Europe needed to remain united and that the British voice is an essential part of the EU.
4. Immigration and Mexico: Mrs. Clinton has called for a comprehensive immigration overhaul, including a pathway to citizenship for those in the U.S. illegally, aside from violent criminals. She supports executive actions under the Obama administration that seek to protect millions of people from deportation, including young people brought to the U.S. illegally as children and parents of U.S. citizens. Mrs. Clinton used to say positive things about NAFTA but recently has been more circumspect, saying it helped some people and hurt others. Her main opponent in the Democratic primary, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, hammered her for her past support of NAFTA, as has Mr. Trump
5. Iraq: Mrs. Clinton voted in 2002 as a Senator from New York to authorize the use of military force against Iraq, a decision that opponents have used to attack her for years and that she has since apologized for. She visited Iraq just once as Secretary of State, in April 2009. She has criticized the Iraqi national army for not doing more to secure the country and deter Islamic State, and praised Kurdish forces fighting in the north of Iraq. She has called for pressuring Iraq to “get its political house in order” and the creation of a national guard.
6. Iran: Mrs. Clinton has struck a tougher stance than Mr. Obama with Iran. She has said she supports the recent nuclear agreement, but she criticized the Iranian government for its treatment of sailors who were detained after allegedly drifting into Iranian waters. She has said Iran continues to violate U.N. Security Council resolutions through its testing of ballistic missiles, and she has called for new sanctions against the country. Mrs. Clinton was in the Obama administration during a historic thaw of relations between the U.S. and Iran. Mr. Obama wrote letters to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei during Mrs. Clinton’s time in office, and she has taken credit for beginning negotiations. She was also part of a historic increase in sanctions against Iran during the early years of the Obama administration, which supporters say helped force Iran to negotiate on its nuclear deal.
7. Islamic State/Syria: Mrs. Clinton has said Sunni Muslims and Kurdish forces should play a bigger role in combating ISIS, and has also called for expanding U.S. airstrikes in Iraq and Syria to defeat the terror network. She has also called for combating Islamic State’s ability to use social media to recruit, train, and plan attacks, urging more cooperation from technology companies. She also has said the U.S. should play a bigger role in helping resolve the humanitarian crisis caused by a huge wave of migrants fleeing Syria. The biggest difference between Mrs. Clinton and President Obama in this area is her push to create a no-fly zone over Syria, a move that would likely put the U.S. in direct conflict with Russia, which has bombed anti-Assad forces in the area. Mrs. Clinton has received criticism for comments she made in 2011 that suggested some U.S. officials from both parties viewed Mr. Assad as a “reformer.” She later said she was representing the opinion of others, not herself or the White House.
8. Israel and Palestinian Territories: Mrs. Clinton has criticized Mr. Trump’s approach to Israel, trying to align herself very closely with Israeli leaders in their push for security. She has said her relationship with Israeli security officials spans more than 25 years and she has defended steps the country has taken to protect itself from rocket attacks. She has called for boosting U.S. support for Israeli missile-defense systems. She also supports helping Israel with technology to detect tunnels that Hamas uses to send fighters and bombers into Israel from the Gaza Strip.
9. Islam and Muslims: Mrs. Clinton has said banning the entry of Muslims into the U.S.–even the proposal of it–will alienate Muslim allies in the Middle East and harm U.S. relations. She has said the proposal is being used by Islamic State to recruit new terrorists. To help combat terrorism and better spot warning signs of radicalized youth, she said the government must do more to build alliances with Muslim community leaders in the U.S.
10. NATO: Mrs. Clinton has said that leaving NATO would only embolden Moscow. She has praised the existence of the alliance and said the U.S. should do more to strengthen allies, particularly against Russian aggression. She has said the U.S.’s involvement with NATO serves U.S. interests by enhancing relationships with European countries and creating a large bloc of opposition to Russian expansion. She has said that NATO allies rallied to the U.S.’s assistance after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, and that the U.S. should be prepared to do the same.
11. North Korea: Mrs. Clinton has proposed toughening sanctions against North Korea to force it to abandon its nuclear program, using the recent Iran deal as a model. While she was secretary of state from 2009 until Feb. 1, 2013, the Obama administration had mixed success in cracking down on North Korea. Despite economic sanctions, North Korea conducted a nuclear-weapons test on May 25, 2009, four months after Mrs. Clinton took office. In February 2012, the Obama administration and North Korea entered into an agreement known as the “Leap Day” deal that allowed the U.S. to provide food aid to North Korea in exchange for a moratorium on the enrichment of uranium and any new missile testing. The agreement was short-lived, however. North Korea conducted another nuclear test in February 2013, shortly after Mrs. Clinton left the Obama administration. In April, the country launched a rocket that the U.S. said violated the agreement, and the food aid was canceled.

Track Record

Mrs. Clinton’s record as Secretary of State is among the most militaristic, and disastrous, of modern US history. Mrs. Clinton was a staunch defender of the military-industrial-intelligence complex at every turn, helping to spread the Iraq mayhem over a swath of violence that now stretches from Mali to Afghanistan. Two disasters loom largest: Libya and Syria. Mrs. Clinton has been much attacked for the deaths of US diplomats in Benghazi, but her tireless promotion of the overthrow Muammar Qaddafi by NATO bombing is the far graver disaster. Mrs. Clinton strongly promoted NATO-led regime change in Libya, not only in violation of international law but counter to the most basic good judgment. After the NATO bombing, Libya descended into civil war while the paramilitaries and unsecured arms stashes in Libya quickly spread west across the African Sahel and east to Syria. The Libyan disaster has spawned war in Mali, fed weapons to Boko Haram in Nigeria, and fueled ISIS in Syria and Iraq. In the meantime, Mrs. Clinton found it hilarious to declare of Qaddafi: “We came, we saw, he died.”

Perhaps the crowning disaster of this long list of disasters has been Mrs. Clinton's relentless promotion of CIA-led regime change in Syria. Once again Mrs. Clinton bought into the CIA propaganda that regime change to remove Bashir al-Assad would be quick, costless, and surely successful. In August 2011, Mrs. Clinton led the US into disaster with her declaration Assad must “get out of the way” backed by secret CIA operations. Five years later, no place on the planet is more ravaged by unending war, and no place poses a great threat to US security. More than 10 million Syrians are displaced, and the refugees are drowning in the Mediterranean or undermining the political stability of Greece, Turkey, and the European Union. Into the chaos created by the secret CIA-Saudi operations to overthrow Assad, ISIS has filled the vacuum, and has used Syria as the base for worldwide terrorist attacks.

The list of her incompetence and warmongering goes on. Mrs. Clinton's support at every turn for NATO expansion, including even into Ukraine and Georgia against all common sense, was a trip wire that violated the post-Cold War settlement in Europe in 1991 and that led to Russia’s violent counter-reactions in both Georgia and Ukraine. As Senator in 2008, Mrs. Clinton co-sponsored 2008-SR439, to include Ukraine and Georgia in NATO. As Secretary of State, she then presided over the restart of the Cold War with Russia.

It is hard to know the roots of this record of disaster. Is it chronically bad judgment? Is it her preternatural faith in the lying machine of the CIA? Is it a repeated attempt to show that as a Democrat she would be more hawkish than the Republicans? Is it to satisfy her hardline campaign financiers? Who knows? Maybe it’s all of the above. But whatever the reasons, hers is a record of disaster. Perhaps more than any other person, Mrs. Clinton can lay claim to having stoked the violence that stretches from West Africa to Central Asia and that threatens US security.

Jakob Augstein notes in Der Spiegel: Trump would probably be the better choice in the question of war and peace than Clinton. Clinton has expressly expressed the wish to establish a flight ban on Syria, or parts of it. In truth, it would be an act of war. The risks are unpredictable. Above all, the risk of a military conflict with Russia.

The highest soldier of the United States of America, General Joseph Dunford, President of the United States General Staff of the United States Forces, is certain. To control the entire airspace over Syria would mean war with Syria and Russia. Dunford’s predecessor in office estimated a few years ago that an effective flight bomb over Syria would involve the use of 70,000 soldiers and a monthly cost of $ 1 billion. And it’s interesting, indeed, that the Neocons who got us into the Iraq war have endorsed Clinton instead of Trump. Mr. Trum might speak in a crude, knee-jerk manner … but Mrs. Clinton is probably more likely to actually get us into war.