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1 of 1- Goose
- Cogito ergo sum
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G.O.P. Is Vague on Using Power Abroad
G.O.P. Is Vague on Using Power Abroad
By DAVID E. SANGERAUG. 15, 2015
If the diverse group of candidates competing for the Republican presidential nomination agree on one thing when describing how they would engage with the world if they made it to the White House, it is this: If only the United States were stronger, and more feared, the country would not feel threatened by the Islamic State, manipulated by Iran or challenged by a rising China.
But after that, finding any consensus on how they would exercise American power differently from President Obama, or a Democratic opponent in 2016, much less how they would define an alternative Republican foreign policy, gets a bit messy.
In speeches, town-hall-style meetings and interviews, many align themselves with the spirit (but not the arms control agreements) of President Ronald Reagan, knowing it is a sure pathway to applause. Except for his son Jeb, they usually avoid talking about the first President George Bush, now considered, despite his victory in the Persian Gulf war, as far too internationalist for current Republican tastes.
And many struggle with the question of whether to align themselves with the unilateral actions of President George W. Bush’s first term, dominated by the invasion of Iraq, or his second term, when, over the objections of hard-liners, he negotiated with the North Koreans, placed modest sanctions on Iran and set a schedule for America’s withdrawal from Iraq.
“They are all having a hard time threading this needle,” said William J. Burns, George W. Bush’s ambassador to Russia and undersecretary of state for policy, and then Mr. Obama’s deputy secretary of state. “For a long time after 9/11 we focused on military force with diplomacy as the backup, often to clean up the mess. President Obama has tried to reverse that — with diplomacy backed up by force.”
Voters “recognize those are two very different narratives,” said Mr. Burns, now the president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Listening to the Republican candidates, one can sense how delicately they are trying to step around the buried I.E.D.s of the past decade of American strategy. All begin with the argument that the United States has to do more to take on the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL. But most — most recently Jeb Bush, the former governor of Florida, during his speech at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library on Tuesday — are leery of advocating returning American troops to a combat role in Iraq, or using more than air power to dislodge the Islamic State or President Bashar al-Assad in Syria.
But there are exceptions. John R. Kasich, the Ohio governor, terms himself a “cheap hawk” from his days on the House Armed Services Committee. Before announcing his run for president, he declared that in the fight against the Islamic State, “we should be part of a coalition even if it means putting boots on the ground, because as it relates to ISIS you either pay me now or pay me a heck of a lot later.” But he has offered no comprehensive plan, and in a talk on Monday he is expected to turn to familiar territory: rebuilding the Navy and revitalizing American defenses.
Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, the candidate with the deepest experience in the foreign policy battles of the past few decades, goes further, advocating engaging the Islamic State with American troops.
And when Donald J. Trump, one of the candidates with the least such experience, argued the other day for seizing the oil fields that fund the extremists, he drew a sharp, almost sarcastic rebuke from the retiring Army chief of staff, Gen. Ray Odierno, who led American troops during the worst days of the Iraq war.
Mr. Odierno cautioned Mr. Trump — and by extension other candidates — that in their eagerness to advocate force, they risk forgetting the central lesson of the Iraq and Afghan wars, which he called the need to ensure “sustainable outcomes” after American troops leave. A similar debate about short-term versus long-term results, and American strength or weakness, is playing out in the debate over the nuclear agreement with Iran signed a month ago in Vienna.
Not surprisingly, all the Republican candidates oppose it. Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin likes to start talks about Iran by declaring that he would “tear up” the accord on his first day in office, a line that often draws applause — as it does for at least five other candidates. But scrapping the accord would, of course, free the Iranians to do the same. So some candidates are more cautious. “I’m not one of those guys who’s going to say to you, ‘On Day 1, I will abrogate the agreement,’ ” Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey said recently.
Almost none of the candidates say what they would replace it with, or how they would prevent Iran, once the deal was abandoned, from resuming a program that has, by the Obama administration’s own public estimates, brought it within two or three months of “breakout,” the production of one weapon’s worth of highly enriched uranium.
“I will reimpose the sanctions waived by President Obama and work with Congress to impose new crushing sanctions,” said Marco Rubio, the Florida senator whose service on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and relentless travels around the world have given him a fluidity and confidence on national security issues often missing with the other Republican candidates. But even he has skirted the question of what good reimposing those sanctions would do if America’s negotiating partners — China, Russia and three European powers — refuse to go along.
The Iran debate has pointed up the struggle that Republicans are facing as they try to mark out territory within the framework of the neoconservative worldview that has shaped Republican foreign policy in recent years. For applause lines, they often declare that the United States will act unilaterally. To offer a salve to a more libertarian wing of the party that fears America is overly enmeshed abroad, some — notably Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky — talk about demanding that allies pick up the slack. Rarely do they go the next step: describing how to handle situations that Mr. Obama has faced repeatedly, from Syria to Ukraine, when allies demand American action but are unwilling to put their own troops, or economic well-being, at risk.
“As long as Republicans throw rocks at Obama foreign policy they can score points,” said Charlie Cook, whose political report is closely read by the campaigns. “But if they offer any solutions that even imply boots on the ground, they are in trouble.”
Jeb Bush struggled with that last week. At the Iowa State Fair on Friday, he called the Iraq troop surge in 2007 “extraordinarily effective,” leaving some with the impression that it may ultimately be the model for his strategy for the Islamic State. He was challenged by one person for including among his advisers Paul D. Wolfowitz, the former deputy secretary of defense who strongly advocated invading Iraq. While Jeb Bush acknowledges that his brother had also planned a scheduled Iraq withdrawal, he said that plan was intended to be modified by the Obama administration, which he has charged left the country early.
On Thursday, Mr. Bush hinted that he would consider waterboarding battlefield prisoners, a practice Mr. Obama banned. He quickly found himself in the same box his brother struggled with, insisting that “America doesn’t torture” but then suggesting that waterboarding is not torture.
One obvious area of disagreement — and an increasingly tricky one for the candidates — is whether and when to deal with repressive regimes.
Mr. Rubio took that on explicitly on Friday in a speech to the Foreign Policy Initiative in New York, focusing on Iran and Cuba, whose relationships with the United States have been frozen for decades. Mr. Rubio’s critique of the Iranians was standard Republican fare: A naïve American president, he suggested, refuses to recognize that “in Iran we face radical Shia clerics who wish to one day unite the world under Islam and believe this will only happen after a cataclysmic showdown with the West.” In Cuba, he said, “we face proudly anti-American leaders who continue to work with nations like Russia and China to spy on our people and government” and violate “the basic human rights of their own people, preventing democratic elections.”
But Mr. Rubio never explained how modern Cuba was a direct threat to the United States, or why more than five decades of sanctions — which he pledged to reimpose — failed to bring about the kind of regime change he favored. And on Iran, he never addressed Mr. Obama’s central argument: that it is a lot easier to take on Iran in the Middle East if it does not possess nuclear capability than if it does.
With all these interventionists staking out ground, the discordant note has come from Mr. Paul. He has been conflicted about how to respond to his rivals, who look at him and often see the isolationist views of his father, the former congressman Ron Paul.
Mr. Paul has tried to reassure Republican primary voters that he is no isolationist — a term he loathes. But if the goal was to mollify the interventionist wing of the party, it has not appeared to work. The day he announced his presidential campaign, a group called the Foundation for a Secure and Prosperous America began a $1 million ad campaign that attempted to tether the senator to Mr. Obama’s policy on Iran, calling him “dangerous.” Perhaps that is because he is the only candidate who has come out strongly in favor of having dialogue with countries like Iran because, he has said, he views diplomacy as a better first step. He is also the only one who has said removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq was a historic mistake.
“Each time we topple a secular dictator,” he told a group of Orthodox Jewish leaders in New York in April, “I think we wind up with chaos, and radical Islam seems to rise.”
Mr. Obama’s aides have often said the same thing.
We live in a time in which decent and otherwise sensible people are surrendering too easily to the hectoring of morons or extremists.