Hope Is Not a Strategy: Hillary Clinton and the Autocrats
- john raymond
- Aug 15
- 3 min read
Hillary Clinton is no fool. She has seen power up close, and she knows how dangerous it can be when men turn it inward to secure themselves at the expense of everyone else.
In her recent comments on the Trump–Putin meeting in Alaska, she correctly described the pattern: authoritarian tactics, bad-faith maneuvers, and the looming danger that no one will be immune. Her instincts are right.
Yet when she turns to the specifics, her analysis is filtered through a layer of hope that blunts her own warnings. She imagines that Trump might play the peacemaker, that he could even be lured into statesmanship by the vanity of a Nobel Prize, that better staffing might somehow strengthen his understanding of Putin’s nature.
This hopeful overlay is humane, but it is not strategic. It misdiagnoses irredeemable predators as merely misguided actors who can be coaxed toward good faith.
This dissonance flows from Clinton’s essential character. She is, at bottom, a hopeful person. She wants to believe that even men like Trump can be persuaded to act in service of peace, that the machinery of negotiation and incentives can move them.
This is why she couches her analysis in if-then conditionals: if Trump stands up to Putin, then he could deliver security to Ukraine; if Putin withdraws, then a ceasefire could be real; if nothing is agreed, then perhaps no harm is done.
These are the words of someone searching for a way forward, someone unwilling to let despair dominate her conclusions. That is not a moral failing. But when applied to men like Trump and Putin, it becomes a strategic one.
The reality is darker. Trump is not a normal counterpart who happens to use “authoritarian tactics.” He is an aspiring autocrat whose entire project is to consolidate one-man rule and shield Kremlin objectives from Western resistance.
Putin is not a negotiator who might be coaxed into lasting agreement; he survives by perpetual conflict, retreating only tactically to preserve strength.
Netanyahu, too, does not simply “miss opportunities” for peace; his political survival depends on the continuation of insecurity.
These are not actors waiting for the right incentive to behave honorably. They are men who destroy the weak to serve the strong, and who use process, optics, and words like “peace” as camouflage for predation.
When seen in this light, Clinton’s hopeful contingencies collapse. Vanity will not redirect Trump’s loyalty; it will provide the very costume through which he sells betrayal as statesmanship.
A summit that produces “no deal” is not harmless; the choreography itself gives Putin legitimacy, splits Western unity, and sets the stage for blaming Ukraine as the obstacle to peace. More competent note-takers will not prevent betrayal, because the betrayal flows from intent, not from process errors.
Clinton’s reliance on hope is not random. It is a survival mechanism shaped by decades in public life. Moderation buys her credibility in the mainstream press; conditional verbs keep doors open; careful phrasing reassures audiences that she is reasonable, not shrill.
After 2016, she is doubly cautious about blunt labels that can be weaponized against her. Hope, in this sense, is both personal armor and political currency. Yet that very armor dulls the sword of truth. It keeps her analysis respectable when it should be unambiguous.
What is needed now is not the rhetoric of possibilities but the clarity of facts. The Alaska meeting is not a negotiation waiting for the right terms; it is a hostile operation designed to legitimize Putin on U.S. soil, normalize Trump as a statesman, and prepare the narrative inversion that casts Ukraine as the obstacle to peace.
To see that clearly is to accept a bleak truth: some men are not merely wrong, they are evil. They will never be redeemed by their own actions, and no arrangement that rests on their good faith will hold.
Hillary Clinton is right to want peace, right to seek hope. But hope cannot be the foundation of strategy.
To confront men like Trump, Putin, and Netanyahu requires not hopeful conditionals but declarative truths: they will not change, and therefore our response must be built on countering their intent, not wishing it away.
Clinton sees the darkness; her flaw is that she does not let her vision flow all the way into her conclusions. And in this moment, wisdom demands not comfort but precision.
Hope may be humane, but against evil men, it is also a serious blunder.
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