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The Democratic Party’s Many Hawks

The party is not somehow to the "left" of where it was on foreign policy thirty years ago.
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Daniel Henninger must be joking:

If anything, the modern Democratic Party is more hostile to national defense than it was in 1984.

Let us hypothesize that Mrs. Clinton is a Democratic hawk. Name one other office-holding hawk in the party?

He allows that Feinstein might barely qualify, but claims not to be able to think of any others. There are unfortunately only too many Democratic hawks in office at the moment. Menendez and Schumer are obvious examples that should immediately spring to mind, and one need only look at how readily Senate Democrats have lined up behind Iran sanctions and ruling out containment to find the rest. All but two Democrats on the Foreign Relations Committee dutifully endorsed Obama’s would-be intervention in Syria last year, and the resolution wouldn’t have passed the committee if it hadn’t been supported by most of the Democrats. Before that, the same committee–controlled by the Democrats–overwhelmingly supported arming the Syrian opposition. Even earlier, most House Democrats voted for the use of force in Libya in the resolution that the House rejected.

On one issue after another, large numbers of Democrats in Congress have endorsed relatively hawkish policies, because they still assume that this is the politically safe and necessary position that they have to take. The point is that Henninger is simply ignoring what most Democratic politicians say and do on foreign policy and imagines that the party is somehow to the “left” of where it was on these issues thirty years ago. No remotely honest assessment of Democratic foreign policy over the last twenty years could come to this conclusion, so naturally it is the one that Henninger reached.

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