For all her tough talk of confronting Russian aggression and her dark insinuations about a Putin-Trump nexus, even a quick assessment leads to the unmistakable conclusion that Hillary Clinton will tend to go it easier on the Kremlin - far easier, probably - than Donald Trump.
As her husband bashed the elder Bush for "coddling tyrants from Baghdad to Beijing", yet was soon acting as if he were completely bought and paid for by the Chinese communist regime, we're likely to see just as quick and complete a reversal from Hillary with respect to Moscow - because the only alternative outcome is World War III, and obviously she's not suicidal.
Leaving aside the fact that Hillary's history of deal and influence-peddling for Kremlin-linked Russian oligarchs has been well documented by Clinton Cash and other exposés of the "pay-to-play" Clinton Foundation, it's easy to see why, despite all outward appearances, Putin might actually prefer America's first female president to its first purely private-citizen one.
First and foremost, Mrs. Clinton's primary foreign-policy focus will be her progressive socioeconomic agenda, not the age-old geopolitical contest between great powers. In this respect she will probably exceed even Obama, whose relative indifference to realpolitik over the last seven and a half years has already been a key factor in Washington's creeping strategic decline in the key regions of Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and East Asia - in the face of accelerating Russian, Iranian, and Chinese expansionism, respectively.
To wit, Secretary Hillary's aggressive pursuit of regime change in Libya in 2011 and her earlier support for the 2003 invasion of Iraq as a first-term Senator were as much predicated on her antipathy towards brutal dictators from a humanitarian perspective as they were on any sound strategic sense (which in hindsight was clearly lacking on both sides of the aisle). It helped in those particular cases, of course, that America attacked a largely defenseless adversary - just as her husband did Serbia over Kosovo in 1999, also for an ostensibly humanitarian motive.
Against adversaries that can actually impose real costs on American intervention, however, there's little reason to believe Hillary will have any more stomach for risk of loss than either Obama or Bill for that matter - and in fact good grounds to think she'll have even less.
That's because authoritarian regimes have gotten ever shrewder at incremental concessions, especially with regards to the standard Western concerns of human rights and civil liberties. This means a Hillary Clinton administration will have its hands full responding to all manner of "reform" and "liberalization" peddled by dictatorships as proof of their goodness - through the considerable influence channels they've acquired abroad, including in the US itself.
We can already see this kind of dynamic in play with Iran. The Islamic fundamentalist regime has so blatantly resorted to extorting hard cash in exchange for releasing American prisoners - even considering that this has transpired in the context of the gradual easing of sanctions on it - that it's only logical to expect it to adopt similar ploys with regards to its own native dissidents, thousands of whom are still rotting in its jails. Tellingly, this has all taken place amidst an ever weaker American resolve - if any is left at all - to check Tehran from acquiring regional hegemony over the coming decade or so. And that's Iran - orders of magnitude weaker in the face of American power than either China or Russia.
Cynically, one might even speculate that much of the intensifying repression of authoritarian regimes all over the world is based neither on irrational fear nor on arrogant overconfidence, but more mundanely simply to stack up bargaining chips that can be used later to extract concessions from a reliably gullible West.
And as a liberal, feminist woman, Hillary is likely to be far more inclined to grant such concessions than the blowhard, take-no-prisoners macho-chauvinist Mr. Trump. After all, that's essentially what she's running on.
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