Army Bob: Did Mrs. Clinton fail as the Secretary of State?

by Robert M. Traxler

Let’s discuss Hillary Clinton’s tenure as Secretary of State. For the purpose of keeping this column to a reasonable length, Benghazi will be left out.

I would like to focus on two foreign policy failures under Mrs. Clinton’s watch, the killing of Muammar Kaddafi in Libya and the invasion of the Ukraine. Any American foreign policy needs to look to the history of the nation or government we are dealing with to map a course of action.

The history of the Ukraine, especially the Crimean Peninsula, should tell us the Russians would never relinquish possession of the all-weather Black Sea ports. When the Union of Soviet Socialists Republics (USSR) dissolved in 1991, the Russian Federation negotiated a lease on naval bases at Sevastopol on the Crimean Peninsula with the new government of the Ukraine.

The relationship with the Russian Federation was fine for years, until after a good bit of political turmoil the Ukraine adopted an anti-Russian government. An estimated 17.3 % of the total population of Ukraine is ethnic Russians and the majority of them live on the Crimean Peninsula in the areas surrounding the Russian Base at Sevastopol.

The Russians fought a bloody war with the French and British defending that base in 1853-1856, taking 390,000 casualties. In World War II, 170,000 Russians died defending the ports. Retaining access to the all-weather ports on the Black Sea is vital to Russian national defense and its economic security.

Retaining the bases on the Crimean Peninsula is a matter of national pride and economic necessity. No one with a basic knowledge of history would be surprised that the Russian Federation invaded after being told the leases would be canceled. A simple arrangement could have been worked out with Ukraine, and bloodshed averted. Secretary Clinton could have been seen as a sage diplomatic leader, but she did nothing and lot of good folks died. She failed, pure and simply failed; even though the actual invasion happened after she quit the job, the invasion was inevitable because of her inaction leading up to the avoidable invasion.

Every desk officer at Mrs. Clinton’s Department of State knew the importance of Crimea to the Russians and cautioned her to work with the Russians and the new government of Ukraine to honor the Russian leases, but she took no action and the predictable invasion happened. A total failure of diplomacy resulted and Secretary Clinton needs to shoulder the blame.

The second failure of Mrs. Clinton’s tenure as Secretary of State was Libya; ISIS/ISIL/DAESH now governs large portions of the nation and has a staging area for attacks on Europe. Muammar Kaddafi relinquished his nuclear weapons program, and the nuclear weapons producing equipment is sitting in bunkers in Tennessee. He did so in exchange for a promise: we would let him retain power and let him live out his life; but we reneged on the agreement. The result is that no third world despot with a nuclear weapons program will ever honestly and openly relinquish it — Kaddafi did, and then we helped kill him.

Libya just may be the most dangerous failure of diplomacy in world history. Third world tin-horn despots will never relinquish their nuclear weapons programs; keep them and they live, give them up and they die as Muammar Kaddafi did. The result of Secretary Clinton’s failure is an extremely more dangerous world for generations to come.

The vacuum of power after Kaddafi was killed opened the door widely for ISIS/ISIL/DAESH to control millions more people and get access to a vast arsenal of weapons and billions of badly needed equipment and funding.

Both of these diplomatic failures are titanic, with President Obama’s administration and Mrs. Clinton at the epicenter of both tragic failures of basic common sense diplomacy.

We can put Libya in a way Mrs. Clinton and President Obama will understand. When a third world despot detonates an atomic bomb it will generate pollution that will add to global climate change; that and not the deaths of millions will concern Mrs. Clinton and panic our current liberal government. Never forget that according to them, climate change is the most dangerous threat we face.