The Real Reason the GOP Foreign Policy Elite Prefer Hillary Clinton to Donald Trump

The Intercept’s Jon Schwarz warns readers they shouldn’t be “shocked to see ideology so easily trump party affiliation” when it comes to Republicans saying they’d vote for Hillary Clinton. As Schwarz points out, Clinton has had a “long history of collaboration with GOP on foreign policy,” and is as much of a war hawk as many Republicans. Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul and Republican front-runner Donald Trump, on the other hand, aren’t “belligerent enough, particularly about the Iraq war, Libya, Israel-Palestine, and Russia.”

From The Intercept:

… the GOP foreign policy elite see Hillary Clinton as preferable to either Trump or Paul. Her belligerence has never been in doubt. For her entire public life, she’s been an enthusiastic exponent of a deeply bipartisan consensus on foreign policy, one that says the U.S. can and should run the world. This has been evident in her personal lobbying as first lady for the Kosovo war in 1999; her push as secretary of state for escalation in Afghanistan; her support for regime change in Libya; and her call now as a presidential candidate for the deployment of more U.S. special operations troops in Syria. But it’s perhaps clearest in her and Bill Clinton’s decadeslong embrace of regime change in Iraq.

When it comes to domestic policies, there are genuine differences between Republican and Democratic elites. The Republicans’ most dearly held dream is to smash the New Deal and return the U.S. to circa 1900, complete with catastrophic financial panics and mass public poisonings. By contrast, Democratic elites understand that letting the 99 percent eat most days actually enhances corporate profitability.

But on foreign policy, the two parties are now like-minded enough that when the candidate for one strays from party orthodoxy, the candidate for the other may be a more than adequate substitute. As Max Boot, a prominent neoconservative writer, adviser to Marco Rubio, and (if necessary) Clinton voter, says: “What she basically espouses is a pretty mainstream view.” Even Dick Cheney has praised her competence and mused that “it would be interesting to speculate about how she might perform were she to be president.”