08/19/15 – Brandon George Whitehill – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
Got a good chat room question I'm going to answer for you in about half an hour from now.
So you'll hang around.
But right now we go to Brandon George Whitehill from the Foreign Policy Research Institute.
He wrote this, I think, improperly titled article, A Quick Guide to the Foreign Policy Views of the Democratic Presidential Candidates.
I'd say it's pretty thorough.
Very good job.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing, Brandon?
I'm doing well.
Thank you for having me, Scott.
Very happy to have you here.
And, well, very happy to read this.
This is a great bit of research that you've got here.
We've got two ten-minute segments.
And if it's okay with you, I'd just like to go through just about as much of this as we can get through.
Tell me first all about Jim Webb.
So I kind of have a methodical order in how I did this.
If I can just give a general overview first.
Sure, sure.
On the last day of my internship with the Foreign Policy Research Institute, I had a really interesting conversation with someone there who said that the Democratic Party can be kind of characterized by a triangle with three points.
On one point, you have the Clinton family ever since Bill Clinton, and then Al Gore was kind of a product of the Clinton family, then Hillary in 2008, then a Secretary of State, now as a presidential candidate.
And then another point is the more left progressive side, which loves Elizabeth Warren.
Their candidate is Bernie Sanders.
When we get to Lincoln Chafee, at least on foreign policy, he's certainly far on the left there.
And then the third point is the more moderate, try to appeal to the independents and that kind of group of people.
And that is Jim Webb, and differently, but in kind of the same way, Martin O'Malley.
So to start with Jim Webb, he takes a very – drawing on his own personal experiences, he takes a very moderate approach of foreign policy that is neither characterized by the far left or the far hawkish right.
He is the only veteran running for the Democratic nomination.
He was a Marine captain in the Vietnam War, also served under the Reagan administration as Assistant Secretary of Defense and Secretary of the Navy.
And his whole approach of foreign policy is caution and consistency.
He says the biggest foreign policy issue that we have today is that we do not have a consistent doctrine ever since the fall of the Soviet Union.
We've intervened inconsistently.
We've intervened when we should not have.
And he's highlighted along the years all the mistakes we've made.
He wrote an op-ed three months before the vote to authorize forced Iraq, opposing it, calling it a strategic blunder, saying unilateral wars designed to bring about regime change and long-term occupation should be undertaken only when a nation's existence is at stake.
And so he'd like to see a more consistent approach of foreign policy.
And his favorite doctrine throughout history is the Nixon Doctrine, which said we'll be a nuclear umbrella for our allies, but we're not going to undertake the defense of all the world's free nations.
So I don't know if you want to get into specific policy views of each one, but that's his general approach at foreign policy.
Well, I might add, and I'm not sure if this has too much to do with your article, really, but I mean, he is running for president.
And it seemed like what he had going for him was all of those kind of conservative or right wing and military credentials, being the secretary of the Navy under Reagan and all those things.
But then while he was a senator, he I don't know how anti-war he was, but he certainly supported the Baker plan for getting out by 08 rather than the surge and all that kind of thing.
And it seems like that would have would have been what's unique about Webb is if he's running to the right in Hillary pretty much in every way at set piece and running with her as the hawk and him as the more responsible and less wild in foreign policy kind of thing.
That kind of seeming contradictory thing is what could have made him special.
And then he came out against the Iran deal.
And so now he's just as bad as anybody.
What does he have going for him at all?
So now he's just more like a Republican than a Democrat, I guess.
Well, yeah, he's certainly the only Democratic candidate who's come out against the Iran deal.
So that is what really sets him apart.
And that is certainly something that's to the more, I guess you'd call it the hawkish right of the general pool of candidates.
But you look at, I guess there's two ways of looking at it.
You can look at what they're saying now and you can look at the entire experiences that they've had.
And if you look at what they're saying now, just kind of a cross section, you might not see Webb as the more anti-war and the more reasonable candidate for foreign policy.
But if you look at everything that's gone back, you know, his opposition to the Iraq war, his time in the Senate, he went to Burma to open relations there, which set a precedent for the administration to open up relations with Burma.
He's a very reasonable person.
He supports normalizing relations with Cuba.
Whereas if you look at what Clinton is saying now, you might see her.
Oh, she doesn't want to put troops on the ground for ISIL.
She's for the Iran deal.
You know, no war there.
But if you look at her record, she supported the Iraq war.
She supported the Patriot Act.
She supported.
She defended her Iraq war vote in the 2008 election.
She vigorously advocated the intervention of Libya.
And on and on.
Right.
Yeah.
I mean, there's a long record.
We'll get back to her, her whole list.
But your point, though, I understand what you're trying to say, though.
You know, with this latest wrinkle, it I mean, I think he really blew it.
It's not too late for him to change on that and be good on on the Iran deal, too.
I think then he would have a great set of talking points for running against her.
We're now running to her right on the Iran deal.
Seems like a bad strategy.
I wonder if that guy's wrong.
Someone hire Bob Shrum to tell Jim Webb what to do.
That guy always tells every Democrat to run as a Republican and they always lose.
And certainly he hasn't taken the same rhetoric as some of the Republican candidates are saying.
Tear it up on day one.
He said he's against it, certainly.
But he has said, you know, he has some reservations about it.
But that's enough to make every Daily Kos kid say, well, never mind you then.
You know what I mean?
That whole like you said, that's that that that policy typically belongs on more of the progressive left side.
So he would have been unique to use it.
But instead he blew it.
That's all I'm saying.
Anyway, let's let's move to because we'll have to do Clinton in the next segment because she's going to take so long.
But let's move here to Bernie Sanders.
He seems like a nice guy.
Everybody seems to like him so much and all this stuff.
But how antiwar is he really?
I notice he doesn't seem to talk about it on the campaign trail at all.
So, yeah, every time you hear Bernie Sanders talking about foreign policy, whether it's about war, whether it's about diplomacy or whatever it may be, he brings in economics and the state of our domestic economy.
And he says this is a cool quote that kind of encompasses that the United States has a lot to be concerned about.
And we should be concerned absolutely about the Assad regime.
We should be concerned about ISIS.
We should be concerned about the terrible poverty that exists in African parts of Asia.
But we should also be concerned about a concern about that in America.
Our middle class is disappearing and that we have more people living in poverty than at any time in history in this country.
And that kind of encompasses how if you talk about ISIL, yeah, they're a threat.
We should do this.
But we have American suffering here.
And I'll be damned if we send more taxpayer money and more American young people to go go fight that.
We have so many problems here.
Well, that really is unique for him to just talk about the Islamic State in realistic terms, rather than the politically mandated terms of the most hysteria, which is what everybody else is going with.
Right.
And he does have a pretty longstanding, consistent record of being antiwar.
In 1991, he voted.
He opposed.
He was in Congress at the time, the House of Representatives.
He opposed Bush 41's invasion of Kuwait to get Saddam Hussein out of there, which was something that was kind of hailed as multilateralism.
Look at the United States and partnership of these countries.
But he opposed that.
He did vote for the authorization, of course, after 9-11, but voted against Iraq, voted against the surges, voted against the Patriot Act, all these these big programs to fight the war on terror.
And he was against the Libyan intervention and pretty much against everything that Hillary Clinton was for.
So it is a pretty consistent antiwar record on that front.
Yeah.
Well, and I know he was pretty damn rude when it came to his position on what happened in Gaza a year ago.
But I guess overall, he's more or less better on Palestine than somebody like Hillary.
I mean, he does say he wants a two state solution and sooner, not later, that kind of thing.
Yeah.
Whatever that's worth.
I'm not sure.
I don't know.
Yeah.
The viral video referring to it is a pretty heated exchange.
And we have to do take it in the context that he is the only Jewish candidate running for president.
So that certainly has something to do with his experiences.
Well, you know, there he has that that same Jim Webb thing where he has his Zionist flank covered.
He can go ahead and be a peacenik on the issue.
Right.
Just like Webb has his I was the secretary of the Navy flank covered.
So he can be a peacenik if they choose to.
They could be even easier than Hillary, who has to prove that she's a real man, which is a different set of circumstances.
You know what I mean?
She has to do that whole 3 a.m. in the morning.
I can be just as tough as any male president thing, which is a different sales pitch that she at least believes that she has to push.
Anyway.
Sorry.
We have to take this break now.
Sorry for talking so much.
When we get back, we're going to learn more about Martin O'Malley and Hillary Clinton and the positions of the Democratic presidential candidates on bomb and foreigners.
It's Brandon George Whitehill from FPRI dot org.
We'll be right back after this.
Hey, I'll Scott here.
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I'm still breaking hearts announcing the winner of that Costa Rica trip.
Yeah.
Sorry, Megan.
You missed it, dude.
John Cornish won.
All right.
Yeah.
So, hey, I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Brandon George Whitehill.
He wrote this great quick guy.
He calls it pretty thorough.
Worth your time.
It's.
Oh, I guess maybe we ran an antiwar.com yesterday.
But anyway, you could find it there in the viewpoint section.
Quick guide to the foreign policy views of the Democratic presidential candidates.
And so we pretty much, I think, gotten Webb and Sanders out of the way.
We touched on Clinton a little bit and everybody knows how bad she is.
Gene Healy talked yesterday on the show about how her making up with Bill after Lewinsky was over urging him to bomb Serbia.
That's who she is.
So we and you mentioned a bunch of other horrible things about her.
But so just for time's sake, let's save her to the end.
And if there's much more to say about Sanders, go ahead.
And then otherwise, I don't know anything about O'Malley.
So, yes, Sanders, I think we wrapped up pretty nicely.
He's concerned with progressive reforms on the domestic front, something that some people kind of say the same thing as Obama with health care.
That was his crown jewel.
They're interested in the progressive agenda there.
So that's really what he focuses on, even tying those things to foreign policy.
So even if we spend a couple of seconds on it, it's worth mentioning Lincoln Chafee here also, who I forgot for a second.
Thank you for remembering.
You would because, you know, no one really knows who he is.
But he was in the Senate during 9-11 and the votes on Afghanistan and Iraq.
And he was the sole Republican vote against the war in Iraq.
So he has that record behind him, though it's sort of a pejorative term today.
I think Chafee could be considered what some would say is a pacifist.
He's the only candidate who's advocated talking to ISIL, not sanctioning Russia or China.
He's very open to warming relations with other countries.
And his whole motto is wage peace.
So he's unique sort of in that sense.
Yeah.
He's an interesting guy.
Former, I guess, the son of a Rockefeller Republican was how he got his Senate seat.
Right.
Yes.
He sort of inherited it.
And he was kind of the last rhino liberal Republican, Northeastern establishment Republican.
And then, as you said, he was the only one in the Senate and from that spot opposed Iraq War II.
But then or I guess even before then, he switched to the Democrats.
Right.
Or no, that was that was the other guy I'm thinking of.
Chafee was a Republican senator.
Then he was an independent governor of Rhode Island.
Right.
I believe in 2013, he officially registered as a Democrat.
I was thinking of I can't remember the guy's name anymore.
There was a there was a Senate Republican who switched to the Democrats in 2001, I think, and changed the balance.
But I got him confused.
I wish I could remember his name.
At least I'd get that straight.
Anyway.
OK, so go ahead and tell us all about O'Malley.
All I know is I heard he had a bad police policy in Baltimore.
Yeah, I don't I don't know.
I'm not a Maryland citizen.
But my friends who I have made from Maryland are not big O'Malley fans.
Anyway, on the foreign policy front, he's he's saying a lot of the same things Clinton is saying.
Where they diverge from Sanders, Chafee and to an extent Webb is that they say we need to be more engaged with the world.
And certainly not in an armed sense, sending troops to go fight ISIL on the ground, for example.
They don't want that.
But O'Malley would say that it's irresponsible to to say that we need to retrench, that we need to bring things back home.
He says that the strongest thing America can do abroad is have a strong middle class because that will protect certain values about capitalism and freedom and everything.
But he certainly says that retrenchment as a policy is understandable, but irresponsible.
And he's a big advocate for multilateralism, talking with other other nations, strategic collaboration.
You know, those those big words that foreign policy scholars use.
So, yeah, that's his big thing.
And he brings a lot of progressive causes to foreign policy to talk about a strong domestic economy, addressing climate change.
You know, income inequality are big things that he says we need to do.
He wants to have clean energy by the year 2050.
And he directly Lincoln got some criticism for directly linked climate change to the rise of ISIL, saying, you know, because we wiped out farmer.
Not we, but the drought in Syria wiped out farmers that led to instability in the rise of ISIL.
So he really ties those things and makes them kind of inextricable in that sense.
Well, in fact, you know, I read about how the drought and the famine had helped, you know, push all the country Sunnis to the outskirts of the cities and and all the crises that came about from that without necessarily being connected to climate change theory or activism in general at all.
But just, hey, there are famines in the world and that is what happened here.
You know, whether you want to call it climate change or somebody else doesn't is sort of beside the point at that point.
Right.
Right.
It does seem to be he's he's on to something there, at least in the in the part of the causal chain.
I mean, the whole Arab Spring was one big bread riot, really.
Right.
And he's for humanitarian assistance abroad to to provide, you know, sort of the standard of living that's needed to have a strong middle class.
This is, like I said, one of those values that he wants to project on his record.
You know, as a governor, he's probably the least experienced in foreign policy of all these these candidates.
I mean, all of these candidates were in Congress at some time dealt with foreign policy firsthand, except O'Malley.
But he was against the Iraq war from the beginning.
He was against the intervention in Libya.
He's for this Iran deal now.
So he has kind of established himself with that.
That's good that he was against Libya when Hillary was pushing for it.
I hope that gives them something to fight about in the debate.
Somebody wants to fight about that in the debate.
Oh, I'm sure they will.
Yeah.
And then.
So now we won't have enough time to finish, but run down this list of things that Hillary bond.
Well, Hillary voted for Hillary as part of if we go back to the Clinton administration, she pushed for a lot of these these campaigns to bomb where ethnic cleansing was happening.
She was a big advocate for that.
But then in her own career in the Senate, she voted for the Iraq war for the Patriot Act in 2008 in the primary.
She defended her vote while while Obama as a state senator at the time was against it from the beginning while in the Senate was against it.
She said, you know, it maybe wasn't the right idea, but I think it was the right thing to do.
She didn't regret her vote at the time.
She really regret her vote until her memoir when she said it was a mistake, plain and simple.
So she has that on her record, of course.
And then a secretary of state pushed for the intervention of Libya, which was a complete and utter disaster.
You have the Republicans at her heels about Benghazi and this whole email scandal now and whether or not she compromised national security.
And she also writes in her memoir that she was for arming Syrian rebels and that that was a mistake to not be more proactive on that front.
So, I mean, on the Afghan surge, too, was, you know, that was her and Petraeus.
She definitely helped to push the consensus.
And and, you know, going back, actually, 2009.
And I hate to give Obama credit for anything.
He doesn't deserve credit.
But I mean, in fact, they successfully buffaloed him.
But she kind of ganged up on the president with Petraeus and McChrystal and the rest of them, even as they were leaking to the media saying he's dithering and taking too long and all this kind of stuff.
She was really bad on that.
And I think to a great deal responsible for giving the president no choice, quote unquote, but to go out, go along with the plan to surge there.
Yeah.
I mean, you look at the major foreign policy decisions that have been made and she's really been on the hawkish side of all of them, whether or not she's come to regret them.
Yeah.
Well, and of course, there's her the whole pivot to Asia, too.
I knew we were going to run out of time.
The whole pivot to Asia and her giant, you know, essay that she wrote for foreign policy about America's new Asian century coming and containing China there and all that.
So anyway, hey, great work here, man.
Thank you very much for coming on the show, Brandon.
I appreciate it.
All right.
So that is Brandon Whitehill at FPRI dot org.
A guide to the foreign policy views of the Democratic presidential candidates.
We'll be right back.
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