If Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton becomes president, she’s likely to replace nearly every single senior national security official in the Obama administration, as “the Clintons like full control.”
Defense sources told Roll Call they expect Clinton, if she becomes president, to drop virtually all senior national security officials. For starters, the ideological differences between Clinton and Secretary of Defense Ash Carter boost the chances she’ll opt for someone else to head the Pentagon, even though Carter advised Clinton in her 2008 run against President Barack Obama.
Such a move would mark a break with the Obama administration, which kept on the Bush administration’s Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. Incidentally, Gates has since been nothing but trouble for the Obama administration, continually going to the media to blast the National Security Council for its embrace of amateur ideologues.
Michèle Flournoy, the former undersecretary of Defense for policy, is a strong contender for the position. She previously declined the possibility of serving as Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel’s replacement. While she cited family reasons for her choice, it’s also possible, based on her previous testimony to Congress, that she simply did not want to deal with aggressive micromanagement of the Department of Defense by the Obama administration.
Flournoy currently serves as CEO of the Center for a New American Security and has advocated positions much in alignment with Clinton’s foreign policy. First, Flournoy would bump up the number of ground troops fighting against the Islamic State in the Middle East. Second, she thinks U.S. troops should take territory from the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in the southern part of the country.
But aside from shuffling around Democratic officials, it seems even more likely that GOP national security experts defecting from Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump won’t get much in the way of considering for a Clinton administration. She will probably outright snub them.
“I think bipartisan appointments don’t help that much unless it’s just the right person—and unless you govern and choose in a way that seems to reflect the viewpoints of those Republicans, in a sort of compromise style,” Michael O’Hanlon, senior foreign policy fellow at the Brookings Institution, told The Hill. “I’m not sure that’s very realistic for most situations, actually.”
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