National security is a key issue in the 2016 presidential race. Terrorists are a constant threat. American troops are fighting in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. Russia and China are trying to expand, and Russia has already demonstrated its readiness to use force. The next President must be someone who understands these threats and will make our safety a high priority.
However, Hillary Clinton’s expressed views on national security could make you think she lives in a different world.
She has embraced the example of Bernie Sanders by declaring that “Climate change . . . is a defining national security challenge of our time”, apparently making it at least as important as fighting terrorism. She promises to press ahead with Obama’s anti-energy, anti-growth environmental policy, using executive action instead of the constitutional path of getting laws passed by Congress. Americans must assume that she means what she says, and that environmental extremism, not military necessity, would take priority when making decisions on weapons and defense infrastructure.
Just as Obama has refused to acknowledge the identity of our enemy, failing to even call it radical Islamic terrorism, Clinton’s original campaign website was equally vague, referring to “terrorism and the ideologies that drive it”, as if we faced a terrorist threat from many different ideological sources instead of one. She has now added a perfunctory reference to “jihadists”, but when a candidate reluctantly makes a rhetorical concession to public opinion, there is no reason to believe it will carry over into policy after election day.
Her strategy for fighting terrorism reflects her obsession with depriving law-abiding Americans of their guns. She insists that, in order to stop terrorists, mere suspicion should be enough to deprive us of the due process guaranteed by the Fifth and Fourteenth amendments to protect our Second Amendment rights. Furthermore, she would ban some rifles because of their appearance, a tactic tried during her husband’s presidency and found by his own Justice Department to be useless. She seem clueless about the failure of the much tougher gun control laws of France to keep fully automatic weapons out of the hands of terrorists.
While Clinton acknowledges the need to “restore stability to Libya”, she refuses to concede her poor judgment and her own role in destabilizing that nation by overthrowing its government and killing its leader. Has she learned anything? Would she repeat that mistake as president? She has given voters no reason for optimism.
Even though it was voted down by the Senate when Bill Clinton was president, Hillary Clinton is a crusader for ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty to prohibit all testing of nuclear weapons. This would require depending on computer simulations, rather than real-world tests, to be sure that our nuclear deterrent is truly effective.
Hillary Clinton boasts that she “has gone toe-to-toe with Putin.” It is not likely that voters can forget that she personally traveled to Moscow, promising Putting that his invasion of Georgia would be forgotten, and that Russo-American relations would be “reset” on the assumption that Russia would now behave nicely. Instead, Putting invaded the Crimea and joined the civil war in Syria to protect the dictator Assad from the Obama-supported rebels.
Clinton’s liberal view of the world is no more realistic than Obama’s. Electing her president would truly give Obama a third term.
