Whenever Hillary Clinton runs for President I’m reminded of Xerxes’ army in 300, the movie about the Spartans at Thermopylae. There are the legions of faceless volunteers, who come howling down on the Greeks; there are the masked Immortals on cable news, hacking their opponents to pieces in talking head duels; and Xerxes himself (Xerxes!), the God-King, legend made incarnate in flesh.
Thermopylae is memorable not because the Persians won, of course, but because the bravery of 300 Spartans and their king Leonidas inspired their fellow Greeks to band together and fight. It’s admittedly pretty self-serving to make the Spartans the candidates I like and Hillary the oppressive (if not nightmarish, pace 300) Iranian invader.
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Still, it is true that only a highly disciplined opponent can make a critique of Hillary Clinton disciplined enough to beat her, starting with her foreign policy record. The election looks likely to turn on foreign policy, what with chaos fermenting in Europe and the Middle East, and Hillary was the face of Obama’s foreign policy.The trouble is that these critiques can easily get bogged down in Beltway buzzwords, like Benghazi. Benghazi was embarrassing – a US ambassador was killed and the Administration tried to blame it on a YouTube video – but it became such a yarn ball of partisan minutiae that most Americans have relegated it to the fringe. In our Greek analogy, it’s Sicily.
Sicily isn’t going to stop Xerxes. Wrapping issues like Benghazi in with other foreign policy criticisms invalidates the whole thing. It all looks like partisan nonsense, when some of it isn’t.
Instead, the Spartan candidate should focus on the wholesale collapse of American bargaining power, which was rooted in the problem that Hillary and Obama viewed international agreements and diplomacy as something good. They are not good. They are not bad, either. They are transactions. What we get from them is good or bad. When I go to the grocery store to buy a cabbage, I’m not pleased by the act of paying a dollar and taking my cabbage. I’m pleased with my cabbage.
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Somehow, this Administration has confused cabbage buying with cabbages. It has heedlessly pursued bad diplomatic deals, corroding America’s global position without getting much in return. The three worst, all of which involved Hillary, were the Iranian nuclear deal, the opening to Cuba, and the sprawling death-squid of the Russian reset. Because this Administration has prized getting to an agreement so highly, our counterparts have been able to keep raising their price by threatening to walk away. And we fell for it – needlessly – every time.