Is there an endgame for the global war on terror?
.. The United States claims the right to fly into any nation’s airspace and kill anyone it wishes. Add it all together and when it comes to that war on terror across significant parts of the globe, the once-reluctant heir to the Bush legacy leaves behind a 21st-century mechanism for perpetual war and eternal assassination missions. And no candidate in either party is willing to even suggest that such a situation needs to end.
.. Four years later, whack-a-mole seems to still be as polite a way as possible of categorizing America’s strategy.
.. Do today’s foreign policy challenges mean that it’s time to retire the Constitution?
.. no candidate has said: “Let’s spend less than 54% of our discretionary budget on defense.”
Cruz’s Preposterous Foreign Policy Team
Heilbrunn mentions that Gaffney has been waging a long-running smear campaign against Grover Norquist, but the more significant lie that Gaffney has been spreading for years is that U.S. foreign policy is being directed by the Muslim Brotherhood. That is just one of his many absurd claims over the years. This is the sort of unhinged, obvious nonsense that is usually not even worth addressing, but since one of the top two Republican candidates for president is listening to someone like this it worth calling attention to it. Cruz has proven once again that he has terrible foreign policy judgment, and he disqualifies himself by indulging the worst sort of conspiracy theorizing and alarmism.
Obama Is Not a Realist
He’s an isolationist with drones and special-operations forces.
.. “You could call me a realist in believing we can’t relieve all the world’s misery,” Obama muses to Goldberg.
.. For Obama, as Goldberg paraphrases No. 44, “the Middle East is no longer terribly important to American interests”; even if it were, “an American president could do little to make it a better place.”
.. A realist knows that distant threats, if ignored, can turn into direct ones. Hence, the “precautionary principle”—better to act than wait in the face of risks not fully known—that is so dear to climate warriors like Obama serves as another pillar of the realist faith.
.. Obama pulled back and invited the Russians in, never mind that Henry Kissinger had essentially kicked them out of the Middle East in the 1970s—pushing them out of Egypt, Russia’s main stronghold in the region, by bringing then-President Anwar al-Sadat into the American camp. Mr. Putin was delighted to oblige Mr. Obama, and there went 40 years of American primacy in the world’s most critical arena.
.. This is what happens when U.S.-made vacuums beckon. Now, realists don’t haveto fight every battle. The Brits did nicely as the “offshore balancer” who engineered the coalitions that laid low the hegemonist du jour, from Habsburg to Hitler.
..“Free riders aggravate me,” he tells Goldberg, betraying a grievous misunderstanding of what it means to be the world’s No. 1. A measure of free-riding is a given whenever a very strong power consorts with a bunch of weaker ones.
.. Even Israel has struck a separate deal with Mr. Putin: We’ll let you prosecute your air war against America’s anti-Assad allies, if you don’t interfere with our attacks against Hezbollah’s arms pipeline from Iran to Lebanon.
.. Nor do you have to grow up in gangland to know that street cred in the global arena depends on a reputation for violence that will render force unnecessary.
.. “Obama believes that history has sides”—this is how Goldberg sums up the president’s faith. “America’s adversaries—and some of its putative allies—have situated themselves on the wrong one, a place where tribalism, fundamentalism, sectarianism, and militarism still flourish. What they don’t understand is that history is bending in his direction.”
.. This is not grand strategy. It is religion. Yet the central myths of Judeo-Christianity are the Pharaonic Slavery and the Crucifixion. They warn that tragedy comes before redemption.
Trump’s Missing Foreign Policy Advisers
If it’s true that politicians generally honor their foreign policy campaign pledges, Trump isn’t interested in making very many specific commitments that might so constrain him. Having a list of foreign policy advisers would give the rest of us some clue what his policies would look like, and so perhaps it is also no accident that this list has not been forthcoming.
.. It means that Trump’s campaign will be at a constant disadvantage when debating foreign policy despite the many glaring flaws in Clinton’s own record. It also raises another warning flag that a Trump administration would be poorly-staffed and ill-prepared to govern, and you can guarantee that will be used against the GOP in the general election.
Clinton has a lousy record and accepts many dangerous assumptions about the U.S. role in the world, but there’s no question that she will be well-briefed and can speak the lingo that foreign policy professionals and pundits expect to hear. Trump isn’t and for the most part doesn’t. That may be an important part of what his supporters like about him, but it could also make him an easy target in general election debates. This isn’t a problem that’s going to fix itself, and it’s one of many things that the Trump campaign has to take a lot more seriously than it has.