How Hillary Clinton lost the debate over American Foriegn Policy

It was perhaps the nastiest Presidential debate in American history. The Republican candidates had gathered in Charleston, South Carolina for their first Presidential debate after Donald Trump won the New Hampshire primary. Marco Rubio, who had seen his momentum in Iowa dashed by a poor debate performence in New Hampshire, hoped to consolidate the establishment wing of the party behind him. Ted Cruz, who had won Iowa and should have been well placed to win South Carolina, was on the verge of making another of his futile efforts to actually collect on the fruits of being in the right at that right team. Jeb Bush, whose campaign had been left for dead before a third place finish in New Hampshire ahead of Rubio, Cruz and Christie, tried to capitalize on momentum he perceived to be behind his campaign. And Donald Trump?Well the front-runner's performence was panned by the usual Republican commentators . Constant booing lured him into a fight with the audience, overwhelmingly made up of Bush and Rubio backers. He seemed short-tempered. Most damaging of all, however, he had committed heresy. Asked a question about a statement he made implying support for impeaching George W. Bush in 2008, he declared the Iraq War "a big fat mistake", one that had handed Iraq over to Iran. He opposed support for the Syrian rebels, suggested that the US should only fight one war at a time even if that meant cooperation with Russia, and then most dramatically, accosted Jeb Bush for the fact that 9/11 happened on his brother's watch.

For many observers, accustomed to Republican primary debates that functioned much like Chinese Communist Party meetings, where candidates competed to demonstrate greater adherence to the party line while denouncing their opponents for having once committed the heresy of supporting a tax increase, or voting for a budget which included funding for Planned Parenthood, this ended Trump's campaign. Combined with the subsequent endorsement of Rubio by Niki Haley, the script set-out for the result night was a Marco Rubio comeback which would setup a two person race. So dedicated were cable stations to this narrative that they continued it even when it was unclear if Rubio would even come 2nd(he managed it by .2% over Ted Cruz), and clear he would lose by double digits to Trump. Like most things involving the Donald, things did not work out according to plan.

This did not end with the primary. The media remained convinced, even after it ended that Donald Trump did not have a clear vision of foreign policy, despite the fact that he had, if anything, the clearest of any candidate in either party during the primaries. This continued into the general election, where with brief digressions into hysteria over whether Trump might be a Russian agent aside, the assumption was that policy was Trump's greatest area of weakness, and hence would doom him at the debates. This did not exactly happen. Trump did not do well in instapolls, but even at the time, they indicated that on policy clashes - trade, the Middle East, and Russia, Trump prevailed. It was on substantive material, namely discussions about his own tax returns, or accusations of sexual harassment, where Trump struggled. Noticing this, Clinton Team focused almost all of their their attacks in the final weeks on Trump the individual.

With the benefit of hindsight the Clinton campaign should have been much slower to draw conclusions about strategy from that data, and more worried about the implications of voters siding with Trump on actual things a President might do, while having reservations about him as an individual. Hillary Clinton's own husband stands out as evidence that voters will support someone they think has engaged in unethical and immoral behavior if they think he is more likely to deliver policy-wise. This point was brought home when an electorate in which 60% had reservations of Trump's ability to be President nevertheless voted for him.

The closest the Clinton camp came was to push the line that Trump had lied about his opposition to the Iraq war. Unfortunately, this was also a line of attack that no one had a particular reason to care about. Regardless of what his view was in 2002, he was willing to call the war "A, fat, mistake," including onstage at a Republican primary debate. Hillary Clinton, by contrast, had voted for the war and never over the course of the 2016 campaign was willing to make it clear that she regretted that decision. On the contrary, by playing up interventions in Libya and Syria that increasingly looked like catastrophic repeats, she became the candidate of Iraq and the ideology behind the invasion regardless of what Trump may or may not have said in 2002.

Beyond that, the only line of attack that came close to hitting Trump on substantive national security issues were the suggestions that he was somehow "in league with the Kremlin". The way in which these attacks were made, however, obliterated their effectiveness. For one thing, they suffered from the same weakness as attacks on Trump over Iraq, namely that Clinton's own position was no more popular, and potentially less so, than the Trump one being attacked. The Obama Administration has done a dreadful job explaining what the conflict in the Ukraine is actually about or what America wants from it. NATO Membership? God know, a huge expense with no rewards. EU Membership? Think Merkel wants 50 million Ukrainian migrants? The result has been that the Russian-American conflict increasingly looks pointless, and with some justification, about pettiness on the parts of Obama and Putin. At that point, in which the conflict seems to have no real purpose, it requires one to believe that Putin is both evil and set on world conquest in order to buy the Democratic attack line. And while many voters can imagine Putin threatening the Ukraine, they just don't see him reaching Poland, much less bothering the US.

The result was to limit the effectiveness of the Putin-Trump attacks to those who already held strong positions on Russo-American relations, which may well be an overwhelming majority of official Washington, but is a small minority of the country. But the way in which the attacks were run made them ineffective even within this group. For one thing, Democrats rapidly moved from suspicions of Russian involvement in hacking to conspiracy theories about Trump being in league with the Kremlin, Putin having secret sex tapes, and fantasies of Trump being charged with espionage. The hysteria over Trump joking about wanting Russia to release Hillary Clinton's missing emails, looked unhinged to many observers, on par with the more eccentric schools of birther-ism regarding Obama. To make matters worse, by loudly broadcasting accusations of hacking, the Clinton campaign implied the accuracy of the leaked materials, which meant when and if Russia released tampered ones, it became increasingly hard to maintain they were forgeries.

The Clinton campaign's attacks on trade, immigration and the proposed "Muslim" ban also were run in ways designed to offend. All three were expressed in the context of American "obligations" to foreigners. Trade in terms of "everyone being better off" rather than a defense of the national interest, immigration in terms of obligations to individuals who were not in the country legally, and the Muslim ban in terms of "owing" allies like the Saudis(a very bad pick, albeit a Clinton foundation donor). This culminated in Clinton taking a moment at the end of the second debate to "apologize" to America's allies and partners for any doubts Trump was casting, and pledging that America would "honor its commitments". Many of my friends thought this bold. I suspect quite a number of different voters found it arrogant. Most people can be remarkably generous when given a good reason, as they like to feel compassionate. At the same time, there is no better way to offend people than to tell them what they "have to do" when the reality is that they have a choice.

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