What’s the matter with the GOP candidates on foreign policy?

[Brian4Liberty]

What’s the matter with the GOP candidates on foreign policy? Blame their advisors. (http://rare.us/story/whats-the-matter-with-the-gop-candidates-on-foreign-policy-blame-their-advisors/)
By Matt Purple - September 3, 2015


Why does the Republican Party refuse to adapt on foreign policy? Why does it cling with bursting knuckles to the failed bromides of the past?

Robert Draper, the same New York Times reporter who heralded the “libertarian moment” last year, has a new piece out exploring how Republican foreign policy consultants are affecting the 2016 race. Draper introduces us to Richard Fontaine and Robert Zoellick, both advisors to the Jeb Bush campaign with lengthy resumés—Fontaine previously counseled John McCain while Zoellick used to be the president of the World Bank.

Draper writes:


Zoellick and Fontaine belong to a nomadic tribe of worldly Republican technocrats who migrate from academia to government to nonprofit policy centers to the private sector. Nearly all are hawks who abhor not only Obama’s posture of caution but also the old-style, consensus-building internationalism espoused by officials who served in the first Bush administration, like Richard Burt and Lorne Craner, who are now on Rand Paul’s foreign-policy team. ... Others have made their names on the Hill as forceful interventionists: Robert S. Karem, who advised the House majority leaders Eric Cantor and Kevin McCarthy before directing Jeb Bush’s foreign-policy team; Jamie Fly, formerly Rubio’s aide in the Senate and now in his campaign; and Michael Gallagher, a former Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff member who now runs Scott Walker’s foreign-policy shop.
...

It’s an enviable lifestyle of jetsetting and Acela-lounging ... This is why bad ideas survive: because the same people who have been kicking them around for the past two decades exist inside a hermetically sealed habitat where they’re never properly called to account. Iraq may be burning, a caliphate installed, a hundred thousand dead, its Christians almost gone, but the air conditioning in business class works just fine.

Contrast that with Draper’s profile of Elise Jordan, who served in the Bush administration, including as a speechwriter for Condoleezza Rice. She watched Iraq go south, but always held out hope that the vaunted surge could be a model for other military interventions. After Bush left office, she actually went to Afghanistan as a freelance journalist, where she observed how President Obama’s escalated efforts there were failing to produce results. That disabused her of any neoconservative notions and today she’s an advisor for Senator Rand Paul’s campaign. “The fact that so many are threatened by him is a sign of how the Republican Party can’t deal with some deviations from conventional thought,” she said. Yes, indeed.

Jordan isn’t an isolationist; she’s someone who learned from 15 years of upfront experience. Unfortunately, Draper’s account suggests she’s a rare commodity on the right.
...
But that’s not the lesson the Republican establishment wants to learn. Most of the advisors profiled by Draper follow in the footsteps of the Mitt Romney campaign, which drew upon such discredited thinkers as Dan Senor, Paul Bremer, Robert Kagan, and John Bolton. Paul Wolfowitz, one of the chief architects of the Iraq war, is today advising Jeb Bush’s campaign.
...
More: http://rare.us/story/whats-the-matter-with-the-gop-candidates-on-foreign-policy-blame-their-advisors/

[Valli6]

Some other interesting parts from Robert Draper's NY Times story (9/1/15).


The only Republican candidate who has expressed disagreement with this point of view is Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky. Regarding the surge, Paul has offered measured praise: ‘‘It was a military tactic and it worked.’’ But he has flatly stated that ‘‘invading Iraq was a mistake.’’ Paul’s blunt assessment of the Iraq war has won him some peculiar bedfellows — among them, Elise Jordan, who served in Bush’s National Security Council’s communications team in Washington and Afghanistan and also traveled to Iraq while serving as a speechwriter for Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. She is now on the foreign-policy team of Paul, the least interventionist candidate in the Republican field. Jordan, who is 33, has often been asked variations of: ‘‘Wait. You work for Rand Paul? And you were in Iraq?’’ To which her reply has been: ‘‘Yes. Exactly.’’

As a Bush staff member, Jordan watched Iraq degenerate into turmoil — observing at close hand, she said, ‘‘a really clear disconnect between what we were telling ourselves and what was happening on the ground.’’ The surge revived her hopes in America’s ability to quell sectarian violence by military means. But after leaving the White House, she worked as a freelance journalist, visiting Afghanistan in 2010 to embed with U.S. troops for an article about the military’s counterinsurgency efforts against the Taliban. This was during a troop surge modeled after the maneuver in Iraq, but in Afghanistan, the tactic proved ineffectual. Jordan began to question the value of the war there and, more broadly, the neoconservative notion that America can impose its values on other nations. ‘‘While I still believe that all people deserve freedom, it’s paternalistic to think we can bring it to them,’’ she told me.

She met Paul in March 2013 — days after his nearly 13-hour filibuster relating to Obama’s drone program, and three months before her husband, the acclaimed Rolling Stone journalist Michael Hastings, was killed in an automobile accident. Echoing what Paul’s other advisers would tell me, Jordan was struck by how thoughtful and well read he seemed, belying the caricature of him as an isolationist. Since signing on, she has been surprised by the vigor with which the other candidates, particularly Marco Rubio, Rick Perry and Lindsey Graham, have attacked his foreign-policy views. ‘‘The fact that so many are threatened by him is a sign of how the Republican Party can’t deal with some deviations from conventional thought,’’ she said.

Those attacks have dwindled of late, no doubt because Paul has struggled to raise money, mount a disciplined campaign and break through the primal roar of the Trump movement. Still, it remains the case that Paul is the only candidate committed to designing a post-neocon Republican foreign policy. As another of his advisers, the Carnegie Mellon University international-relations professor Kiron Skinner, says, ‘‘He’s trying to provide a corrective to both the Bush and Obama administrations, in which we use American military power responsibly and when there’s a clear understanding of what’s needed.’’

That feat has been difficult for Paul to pull off as he attempts to placate both the libertarian followers of his father, Ron Paul, and the conservative G.O.P. base. He has hedged on his commitment to eliminate all foreign aid, gone out of his way to show his support for Israel and adopted more confrontational language toward Syria and Iran. Paul has also said that if he were president, he would ‘‘seek congressional authorization to destroy ISIS militarily.’’ Asked by CNN’s Jake Tapper to clarify what this would entail, he said that he meant ‘‘Arab boots on the ground.’’ The candidate has yet to elaborate on how he would be the first American president to inspire an Arab army to ‘‘destroy’’ an Islamist extremist group.

Of course, presidential campaigns don’t tend to be incubators of complex foreign policy. Throughout the 2008 campaign cycle, Obama the candidate was fond of declaring on the stump that Al Qaeda grew stronger because the Iraq war had caused the Bush administration to ‘‘take our eye off the ball’’ instead of ‘‘refocusing our attention on the war that can be won in Afghanistan.’’ Today the president is at pains to explain why this refocusing has not come close to fulfilling his campaign declarations.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/06/magazine/between-iraq-and-a-hawk-base.html?_r=1

... and just a reminder that Heidi Cruz worked for Robert Zoellick.

[Heidi Cruz] also is a former director at the U.S. Treasury Department and was special policy assistant to Ambassador Robert B. Zoellick, then Chief U.S. international trade negotiator. http://www.cmc.edu/rdschool/discover/boardofadvisors.php

[BGfree]

Israel

[brandon]

Good article. I really like the last sentence.


It’s a stark illustration for realist conservatives that if they want to change the GOP’s foreign policy, they first need to change its intellectual culture.

Yep.

[RonPaulMall]

From the perspective of AIPAC and Israel, nothing is wrong with them. They have been doing exactly as they have been told like good little candidates.

[luctor-et-emergo]

From the perspective of AIPAC and Israel, nothing is wrong with them. They have been doing exactly as they have been told like good little candidates.

Which is odd really, since most American Jews vote for the Democrats.

[Brian4Liberty]

From the perspective of AIPAC and Israel, nothing is wrong with them. They have been doing exactly as they have been told like good little candidates.


Which is odd really, since most American Jews vote for the Democrats.

Yeah, a lot of the time, it is more accurate to call it Likud Party politics, which in the US is represented by the radical neoconservatives.

On the other hand, even with US Democrats, they tend to take more extreme positions about Israel and her neighbors than a lot of people in Israel. That is most likely a result of the "bravery of being out of range" phenomenon. You will find this with any group that proposes more adamant policy from a foreign, safe location. Think of ex-Taiwanese who push for a stronger stance against China, or ex-Cubans who push for more extreme positions against Cuba, or in the past, those in the US who were more adamant about Ireland.

[cindy25]

Iowa, and the nomination selection process. Israel should have no influence in the GOP. there are few Jewish Republicans.

but Israel saw an opportunity, and uses the bible thumpers in Iowa (and other states) because the way the selection process is set up. Iowa has too much influence, and then so many Southern primaries after NH.

there is such a need for a 3rd party