Martin O’Malley outlined his foreign policy vision on Friday in a speech that subtly but consistently knocked Hillary Clinton, the former Maryland governor’s 2016 opponent for the Democratic presidential nomination.
Throughout the speech, his first detailed comments on global issues since announcing his candidacy last month, O’Malley criticized the way that foreign policy has been dealt with for years, an implicit critique of Clinton given her role as secretary of state during the first Obama administration. He particularly highlighted the war in Iraq and the 2012 terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya, two events inextricably tied to Clinton.
“The invasion of Iraq — along with the subsequent disbanding of the Iraqi military — will be remembered as one of the most tragic, deceitful and costly blunders in U.S. history,” O’Malley said at TruCon 2015, a foreign policy conference in Washington. “And we are still paying the price of a war pursued under false pretenses.”
Clinton famously voted for the Iraq War in 2002, granting then-President George W. Bush the authority to invade the Middle East nation. During the 2008 Democratic presidential primaries, then-Sen. Barack Obama — who was against the war — used Clinton’s support as a bludgeon to hammer her campaign with liberal Democrats.
Clinton has said her vote was a mistake, but O’Malley’s reference to the war indicates that Clinton’s Democratic opponents still see this as a potent line of attack. Fellow Democratic challengers Lincoln Chafee, a former Rhode Island governor, and Bernie Sanders, a Vermont senator, have also trotted out the issue.
In another subtle knock against Clinton, O’Malley said that the United States “must recognize that there are real lessons to be learned from” the terrorist attack in Benghazi.
“Namely, we need to know in advance who is likely to take power — or vie for it — once a dictator is toppled, not after,” O’Malley said.
Clinton was a key voice in the Obama administration pushing for U.S. intervention that resulted in the ouster of Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi. Since then the North African country has fallen into chaos, a failed state that is providing a breeding ground for terror and a haven for groups such as ISIS.
O’Malley specifically mentioned the death of Chris Stevens — the ambassador to Libya killed in the 2012 attack — in arguing that the diplomatic corps must be strengthened.
“We must give them the tools they need to identify and engage with a new generation of leaders from different walks of life — often in hostile environments … where we lack historic ties (and) where we lack relationships,” O’Malley said. “That was the work that Ambassador Chris Stevens was about. He gave his life reaching out to those emerging from the rubble of Gadhafi’s dictatorship.”
No event from Clinton’s four years at the State Department has haunted the 2016 candidate more than the Benghazi terrorist attack, in which three other Americans were also killed. The former secretary of state has called it her biggest regret from her time at the department, but that has not stemmed near-constant scrutiny.
The House Select Committee on Benghazi, led by Rep. Trey Gowdy of South Carolina, is currently investigating the matter. Clinton has agreed to testify before the panel, which follows her testimony on Benghazi in the Senate in 2013.
O’Malley aides rejected the idea that the governor was calling out Clinton by talking about Benghazi or Iraq but did not deny that the governor was suggesting a departure from the way foreign policy has been conducted.
Doug Wilson, O’Malley’s senior foreign policy adviser, said after the event that anyone who thought the speech was aimed at Clinton “would be totally missing the point.”
“You see no mention of candidates’ names in what he had to say,” Wilson said. “This was not a speech about Hillary Clinton.”
He added, “This speech is not about the framing of the debate” between O’Malley and Clinton.
The foreign policy vision O’Malley outlined on Friday was also a domestic one. The governor stressed the need to address climate change and immigration reform in the United States as a way to boost the county on the international national stage.
Foreign policy, the governor said, “means understanding that comprehensive immigration reform here at home is both an economic and a national security imperative.”
“It means joining with allies to deploy renewable energy technologies — both at home and around the world — to confront the very real and present danger of potentially irreversible climate change,” he said, later adding that the issue is a “very real existential threat to human life.”
O’Malley also backed the Obama administration’s negotiations with Iran.
“I believe negotiations,” he said, “are the best way to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon, the best way to avoid even greater conflict in the region and the best way to stop widespread nuclear proliferation across the Middle East.”
In a speech his aides billed as his most “comprehensive” comments on foreign policy to date, O’Malley also argued that an “economy that works for all” is critical to a more thoughtful foreign policy.