WASHINGTON (Sputnik) — Former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will likely pursue a more assertive foreign policy against Russia if elected President in 2016 than US President Barack Obama, experts told Sputnik.
“I think Hillary is going to be more of a hawk than Obama has been. But I don’t know that she is going to be a real strong hawk. She is not going to be like Lindsey Graham,” Drexel University Political Science Professor William Rosenberg said on Monday.
The state of US-Russia relations, Rosenberg argued, is difficult to predict because so many conditions on the ground can change between now and 2016.
“Right now, [Russian President Vladimir] Putin and the United States are on the same page with regard to Iran. They are on different sides of the page to a lot of other things. How these things play out is not so clear,” Rosenberg said.
Although Clinton is likely to be more aggressive vis-à-vis Russia she will likely adhere to many of Obama’s policies, which are already interventionist and overly ambitious, argued CATO Institute Defense Fellow Benjamin Friedman.
“She is somewhat more hawkish than Obama, but probably in this case more in a rhetorical than a substance way, and hence unlikely to author any large changes in US policy in Eastern Europe or Ukraine,” Friedman noted.
“Her husband’s attitude was pretty hawkish on Russia too. Vladimir Putin is responding to what happened in the 1990s. You can blame that on the Clintons,” Whalen said.
The Clinton administration tried to expand NATO to Russia’s doorstep, which George Kennan, the architect of the containment doctrine, warned against before passing away.
Russia interprets the NATO expansion as an attempt at hostile encirclement, Whalen added, and has tried to build a buffer zone with policies like acquiring Crimea.
On Sunday, Clinton announced online that she would run for the US presidency for a second time, after much speculation about her 2016 ambitions in the US media.
