Getty 2016 Why Brexit Persuaded Me to Vote for Hillary Clinton

Kori Schake is a fellow at the Hoover Institution. She was the director for defense strategy and requirements on the National Security Council staff, and deputy director for policy planning in the State Department of the George W. Bush administration.

Last Friday, people across the United Kingdom woke up shocked to learn that their nation had actually voted to leave the European Union. More than a million people now reportedly would like to change their vote from “leave” to “remain”; more than 3 million signed a petition for a second referendum. EU institutions and major corporations based in London announced they would move operations and jobs from Britain to EU countries.

My reaction was a little different: I decided to endorse Hillary Clinton for president.


It wasn’t an easy decision. As a conservative, I find Hillary Clinton stands for the opposite of a number of things I believe strongly: that our government is involved in too many areas of our lives, that its profligacy is spending our country into bankruptcy, and that it very often makes problems worse because it knows too little to keep pace with change. Clinton has a seemingly inexhaustible list of government programs to address every social concern, and no conceivable way to pay for it all.

So, I have deep misgivings about a Clinton presidency, but the anguish of British voters who cast a protest vote thinking it wouldn’t matter — that their vote wouldn’t be decisive — convinced me that something much bigger is at stake in this election. The unthinkable, I realized, was actually possible this year. In the British referendum, major polling firms had the “Remain” vote leading by as much as 8 percent. As little as five hours before results were announced, betting markets gave Remain a 96 percent chance of success. And I realized I didn’t want to wake up on November 9 to find Donald Trump elected president and wish I had done more to prevent it.

The unthinkable, I realized, was actually possible this year.

As one of the signatories of the national security experts’ “never Trump” letter, I genuinely believe the erratic statements Donald Trump has made would be disastrous if adopted as American policies. His candidacy is itself bad for our country: after watching him win primary after primary, our allies have already begun questioning the durability of long-standing American commitments. Governments reliant on our security guarantees, already worried by President Barack Obama’s passivity in “leading from behind,” see the presumptive Republican nominee taking even more reckless stances. They’re understandably hedging their bets. Regaining the confidence of America’s friends in the world will be the work of more than one presidency.

It is impossible to imagine Donald Trump doing the things an American leader is called to do in an insecure world: steadying an American ally after a terrorist attack (as President Bush did after the 7/7 attacks in London), reconfiguring foreign assistance to reward good governance (as President Bush did with the Millennium Challenge Accounts), making hard decisions to reinforce an ally being intimidated (as President Clinton did for Taiwan in 1996, sending two carrier battle groups to counter Chinese bullying), or consoling gold star families when their dead are returned home from the war (as President Bush did, privately and prayerfully).

Trump’s emphatic support for torturing terrorists and killing their families will be a huge victory for ISIL, Al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations, compromising our claim to be different and better than what we are protecting ourselves from. The American military, bound by the Uniform Code of Military Justice that holds individuals culpable if they carry out an illegal order, would refuse—resulting in a civil-military crisis that would fragment our own nation and delight our adversaries. It’s of a piece with the cacophony that would ensue over his insistence of building a wall and forcing Mexico to pay for it—when net migration from Mexico has been negative for several years and a wall will do nothing to prevent the main source of illegal immigrants, which is people overstaying their visas. His historically retrograde ideas about trade policy (like that 45 percent tariff on Chinese goods) would extinguish supply chains on which nearly every American business relies—to say nothing of his claim that our military embezzled money in Iraq, and his proposal for a ban on Muslims entering the U.S.

Trump is not only damaging to our country in foreign and defense policy, he's damaging to the social fabric of our republic.

All of Trump’s manufactured melodramas distract from the important work our country needs to be doing to better prepare American workers for the ways our economy is changing, pay down our national debt, strengthen our alliance relationships to handle challenges from Russia, China, and metastasizing terrorist organizations, improve our children’s education, revise the Tax Code to be fairer and make our country a more attractive place to do business. Moreover, his comments about our fellow Americans are profoundly offensive. He's not only damaging to our country in foreign and defense policy, he's damaging to the social fabric of our republic, which relies of creating one out of many—e pluribus unum.

Before the Brexit vote, I was desperately hoping for a contested convention, or the emergence of some worthier candidate—someone judicious and experienced, respectful of views they didn’t agree with, willing to work to find common ground to solve the country’s problems. Someone who believes people have rights and loan them in limited ways to governments for limited purposes. But 10 million Republicans have voted to place Donald Trump at the head of the party of Lincoln. Their choice should be respected.

I was planning to cast a protest vote in November: write in Mitch Daniels or one of my terrific nephews, and vote Republican down-ballot to support strong Republican voices in Congress and help rebuild the party in the long run. But that approach is only satisfactory if Trump has no chance of winning. I’m genuinely concerned now that Trump could get elected, and that is why I’m voting for Hillary Clinton.

She will not be a president to my liking. Her economic policies are a disaster. She is campaigning against the trade deals she negotiated, and which I support for both economic and foreign policy reasons. Even on foreign affairs, which should be her strength as a former secretary of state, she’s a far weaker candidate than I’d like. She advocated overthrowing the Libyan government without a plan to stabilize the country—the very charge she lays against the Bush administration in Iraq. She led the transition from military to civilian leadership during the Iraq drawdown, and it failed miserably. She was clay-footed in handling the Arab Spring. Her private email server was illegal, and tendency to skirt accountability troubling.

But there is no question that Hillary Clinton's are a safer pair of hands than are those of Donald Trump. She colors inside the lines; he goes all the way off the drawing board. Presidential contests are two-person races in the United States, and the only candidates who have a serious prospect of victory are the party standard-bearers. Protest votes are more satisfying than voting for the lesser of two evils, but they could result in Donald Trump being elected, just as British protest votes created an outcome many who cast those ballots realized, only too late, they never wanted at all.