Columbia University economist Jeffery D. Sachs said Tuesday that the foreign policy record of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the likely Democratic presidential nominee, is a “record of failure.”
The left-leaning economist said he would still vote for her in November, but he said that he recognized that Mrs. Clinton played a key role in Obama administration foreign policy that destabilized the Middle East and enabled the rise of the Islamic State terror group, also known as ISIS or ISIL.
“Clinton has played a terrible role in this. I’m voting for her but she’d better change,” Mr. Sachs, director of Columbia University’s Earth Institute, said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” program.
“She’d better change because it has been a disaster in Libya; it has been a disaster in Syria. She has always gone for the war approach. That’s what Benghazi showed, also,” he said, referring to the Sept. 11, 2012, deadly terror attack on a U.S. diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, Libya.
Mr. Sachs, who backed far-left candidate Sen. Bernard Sanders of Vermont in the Democratic primary race, said that he could not support likely GOP nominee Donald Trump because he was “so unstable in so many ways.”
“But on foreign policy, Hillary’s record is just horrible in this regard,” he said. “Trump is so unstable, you can’t support him, but Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy record is a record of failure. That’s the problem.”
• S.A. Miller can be reached at smiller@washingtontimes.com.
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