This is a useful conversation that ranges beyond the realm of the lesser-evil cliché, and one that answers these key questions: What exactly is “the playbook,” and why does onetime George W. Bush aide Lawrence Wilkerson say Hillary Clinton comes straight out of it?

Wilkerson, who served as former Defense Secretary Colin Powell’s chief of staff in the Bush II White House, is the one to whom The Real News Network’s Paul Jay turns, in this TRNN video clip, to gauge Donald Trump’s and Hillary Clinton’s approaches to foreign policy issues as well as to potential and actual armed conflicts.

Neither of them is up to Wilkerson’s standards, and perhaps surprisingly, given the Bush administration’s adventures in nation-building, his take on when and how to resort to war is less hawkish than Clinton’s.

After signaling his concern that the Democratic nominee, like former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power and National Security Adviser Susan Rice, views war as “the first instrument of choice,” Wilkerson said that Clinton “seems … to want to show her bona fides in national security in demonstrative ways to prove that she does have those bona fides — and that means war, and looking for war and finding war.”

Watch the whole interview below (via TRNN):

–Posted by Kasia Anderson

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#2016 election#benghazi#colin powell#donald trump#george w bush#hillary clinton#libya#neoliberal#samantha power#war hawks