Scott Walker: Hillary Clinton ‘messed up’ as America’s top diplomat

Should former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton run for president, she starts out with the foreign policy experience under her belt of serving as the country’s chief diplomat in President Obama’s administration.

But in what could be a key Republican rebuttal against that narrative heading into 2016, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker indicated Wednesday that “experience” can be relative.

“I think the most important thing in foreign policy is leadership,” Mr. Walker said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” “The knock on the president is not whether or not he had experience. I mean, Hillary Clinton had a lot of experience being the Secretary of State, but you look at most of the places where she played a direct hand - in Russia, in the Middle East, in other places around the world - and it’s largely messed up right now.”

Mr. Walker, who is weighing a 2016 bid for the White House himself, went on to argue that President Reagan’s standoff early in his presidency with air traffic controllers in the country was more than just a domestic policy move, but a powerful foreign policy decision in that it showed the world the United States was serious.

“Years later, documents released from the Soviet Union showed that that exactly was the case,” Mr. Walker said. “The Soviet Union treated it more seriously once he did something like that. Ideas have to have consequences. And I think this president failed mainly because he’s made threats and hasn’t followed through on them.”