Hillary Clinton's supporters have had a notoriously difficult time identifying a single significant achievement during her tenure as secretary of state, but during her 45-minute speech on Saturday, Clinton tried to name a few. "I’ve stood up to adversaries like Putin and reinforced allies like Israel," Clinton said. "I was in the Situation Room on the day we got bin Laden."
The problem with that first sentence is that it's the opposite of being true: As secretary of state, Clinton stood up to Israel and reinforced Putin.
On Clinton's watch, the U.S. sought a " reset" with Russia and scrapped missile defense plans in Eastern Europe to appease Putin, who invaded Ukraine just a year after Clinton left the State Department.
Clinton's tenure was marked by new tensions with Israel. As Noah Pollak pointed out, "Clinton took the lead in making indignant, confrontational public statements that were clearly intended to intimidate the Israelis and gratify the Palestinians."
After an ill-timed construction planning announcement by the Jerusalem municipality during Vice President Biden's visit to Israel in March 2010, Clinton made a now-infamous phone call to Netanyahu in which she berated and threatened the prime minister for 45 minutes, issued a list of demands he would have to meet to salvage the U.S.-Israel relationship, and then instructed the State Department press secretary to boast to the press of just how harshly she had treated Netanyahu. After the Clinton phone call, then-Israeli ambassador Michael Oren commented that relations between the two countries had hit their lowest ebb in 35 years.
Clinton's claim that she was sitting in the Situation Room the day Navy SEALs killed Osama bin Laden is true enough. But how is that anything to brag about?