Yeah, no. She lived through the '70s, and knew the Republican party then, and didn’t fit in with them then, nor today.
Clinton is more interventionist than a lot of present-day Democrats and leftists like, sure. But if you think she’s in the same category as Kissinger and Nixon and the rest, you are way off the mark. The thing is, Clinton was massively influenced by the Rwanda genocide, and the failure of the international community to act and to intervene; and by the Bosnian War, with its own massacres and ethnic cleansing and rape, and how the NATO intervention in '95 was one of the biggest factors that ended that war.
Young people look at the unbelievable fuck-ups of the Iraq invasion, and the war in Afghanistan (which was largely such a mess because Bush & co. diverted all the attention and resources from it into the Iraq boondoggle), and think that military intervention is inherently terrible and never works out. And a lot of older people have started thinking that, too, after the shitshow that’s been 21st century so far.
But history shows that it can work, when you go in with a clear goal and a clear plan and defined end conditions, and Clinton knows that. And she’s seen the worst-case scenarios of what happens when the world sits by and watches while people are murdered by the thousands and tens and hundreds of thousands. So of course she has a different perspective.
(It’s weird how ingrained this idea that intervention is always bad has become in the American left. People were assuming Bernie Sanders was some kind of a pacifistic anti-interventionist, because it was the Correct Position and thus they ascribed it to him automatically, without looking at his track record.)
