O'Malley slams Clinton on foreign policy.
Democratic candidate says he will bring 'new thinking.'
As reported in the Dec. 27 Seacoast Sunday, Democratic presidential candidate and former Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley spoke at length with the News-Letter last week about the opiate crisis. O’Malley also spoke about the United Statge's “lust for” regime change and how he differentiates himself on foreign policy from his rivals former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders.
O’Malley said that the relatively new strain of thinking in U.S. foreign policy — that it is our responsibility to decide “when and where” to topple brutal dictators — is misguided and has been destructive to U.S. interests. New leadership and new ideas are necessary in the White House to restore the U.S. to a responsible leadership role in the world, according to O’Malley.
Neither Clinton nor Sanders will be able to offer that, he said.
“I will not be relying on a 20-year-old Rolodex to retread the same people for their third or fourth tour of duty as policy-makers,” he said. “I will have the ability to bring in new thinking. Clinton will not.”
O’Malley said that “Cold War-era thinking” has led the U.S. government to a place where “(we think) we’re somehow doing the cause of democracy in the world a favor by toppling a regime.”
“I have no doubt that (Clinton) loves our country, but she’s never demonstrated an ability to see over the horizon, to anticipate secondary and tertiary effects,” he said.
O’Malley said that what the U.S. has to do is, “as a leader of nations,” create new
regional alliances that can stabilize failed nation-states and prevent the establishment of terrorist safe havens.
Referring to United Nation “peacekeepers,” O’Malley said that what the U.S. needs is international alliances and regionalized “peace-making” forces.
“We haven’t done that yet,” he said.
With the ostensible reason for U.S. involvement in Afghanistan being the elimination of Osama bin Laden, O’Malley said that the mission, unfortunately, became a nation-building mission with a militarized peacemaking element that continues to this day.
“I realize we don’t live in an ideal world, but ideally in a situation like that, that peacemaking, stabilization role would have been internationalized, would have included people whose front lawns are at the open-up on that potential vacuum,” he said. “But we didn’t do that.”
Pointing to Clinton’s record, O’Malley said that not only did she vote in favor of entering Iraq, but she was “gleeful” at the 2011 toppling of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya.
“She didn’t have the foggiest notion of who the new leaders coming in behind Gaddafi were,” he said. “Now we have a whole 100- to 150-mile stretch of Libyan coast in danger of becoming a fallback safe haven for ISIL.”
“Look at Iran. Imagine … how different this world would be if Iran had continued on a democratic path in (1953, under Prime Minister Mossadeq), but instead we joined forces with British intelligence and helped join in the toppling of a democratically-elected leader in Iran because we believed he might be more disposed to the Russians,” he said.
O’Malley went on to criticize the belief that Bashir al-Assad “must go” in Syria, saying that he is “not sure what looking glass we fell into that made us the arbiters of of where and when brutal dictators have to go.”
“We have an obligation to speak out against human rights abuses, to lead other nations to combat the use of chemical weapons and the atrocities Assad was committing, but we have a lust, a lust that seems in our more recent foreign policy past, without appreciating that it can lead to even greater brutality than the regime we were toppling,” he said.
“Too often we take actions that are inconsistent with our values,” O’Malley added.
http://www.seacoastonline.com/article/20151229/NEWS/151229258