Bush was pilloried by Democrats for his “stuff happens” remark, but he defended it, telling me that the government doesn’t have a solution to every problem, and that sometimes government action makes matters worse. Some variety of a laissez-faire philosophy is standard for modern Republicans, at least on most domestic issues. But, increasingly in recent months, Bush, like a number of his colleagues, has been making the case for aggressive intervention abroad. Two days earlier, Russia had carried out its first air strikes in Syria. When I asked Bush how he would respond if he were President, he said that it was the lack of American action that had created the dire situation in Iraq and Syria, and invited the Russian military to bolster the Assad regime.
.. Bush’s view represents a return to a simplistic interventionism that seemed discredited in the wake of the Iraq debacle.
.. Obama thinks that intractable foreign-policy crises should be guided by the physician’s maxim of “first, do no harm”—or, as his aides have said privately, “Don’t do stupid shit.” To Republican hawks, this sounds like a willful and dangerous abdication of American power and influence.
.. When Jeb Bush began his campaign, he enlisted as advisers some of the realists from his father’s camp, including the former Secretary of State James Baker. But the heaviest contingent consisted of his brother’s liege men: Paul Wolfowitz, the Defense Department official who made the ideological case for invading Iraq; John Hannah, who had been an adviser to Dick Cheney and pushed bad intelligence into Colin Powell’s famous speech at the U.N. making the case for war; Porter Goss, the former C.I.A. director who condoned waterboarding as an interrogation technique; and Stephen Hadley, the former national-security adviser, who took the blame for false assertions that President Bush made about nuclear yellowcake allegedly sought by Saddam Hussein from Niger.
.. When voters went to the polls in November, 2008, Bush’s job-approval rating dipped to twenty per cent, the lowest of any outgoing President in the history of polling.
.. “There are some politicians in Washington who approach foreign military action as if they’re playing Risk,” he said. “They want to deploy troops and command them in battle.” He added, “A number of politicians treat American boots on the ground as a talisman to demonstrate that they’re really tough.”
.. As a former city commissioner in West Miami and then a state legislator, Rubio knew the foreign-policy issues that important Florida constituencies care about, such as the Jewish community’s staunchly pro-Israel views and the Cuban-American community’s fierce opposition to Castro. He had little experience with broader foreign-policy questions.
.. During the 2013 fight over budget cuts, Rubio advocated for government-spending reform. He has since grown less cautionary, arguing for an increase in military spending and calling it the “most important obligation of the federal government.”
.. Rubio’s foreign policy is a clear response to Obama’s alleged retreat from the world. The President’s biggest mistakes, in this view, were all failures to intervene more aggressively.
.. When Baker appeared on Jeb Bush’s list, neoconservatives expressed alarm. His foreign-policy views—diplomacy, stability, and serious doubts about interventions requiring large numbers of U.S. troops—are closer to Obama’s than to George W. Bush’s. Jeb Bush faced a revolt from donors and excoriation in neoconservative publications.
.. At the J Street dinner, Baker criticized Benjamin Netanyahu for “diplomatic missteps and political gamesmanship,” and spoke about his own role in the first Bush Administration’s withholding of loan guarantees to Israel in order to pressure the government to halt settlement construction.
.. Morton Klein, the president of the conservative Zionist Organization of America, told Bloomberg that Bush’s association with Baker would cost the candidate: “There are many mega-donors who will not be with him because of that.”
.. “What you need to know is that who I listen to when I need advice on the Middle East is George W. Bush.” The Bush campaign later insisted that Jeb was speaking narrowly about Israeli policy. Either way, the message was clear: the hawks were back in control of Republican foreign policy.
The US and China’s struggle for power in Asia
It’s quite an impressive feat of engineering, but no one paid much attention until just a few months ago, and when they did it wasn’t the structures but their strategic significance that grabbed attention. The startling aerial photos of new military bases being created out of dredged sand conveyed, more concretely than anything else, the image of China’s power on the march.
This increased focus did not happen by accident. Since earlier this year Washington has mounted a deliberate campaign of drawing attention to what China has been doing in these waters. The aim has been specifically to stoke fears about China’s growing power, and encourage other governments to support the US in pushing back against it.
.. China’s strategy is based on the fact that because the US is an outside power its leadership in Asia depends on formal and informal alliances with countries in the region. Beijing appears to have decided that the best way to undermine US leadership is to weaken those alliances. By applying carefully graduated degrees of pressure to US-aligned countries like Japan and the Philippines over long-running territorial disputes, China is trying to show that the US is no longer willing to confront China on their behalf.
.. If a conflict flared today, the US would no longer score a rapid and decisive victory. It would most likely face either a costly and humiliating stalemate or a dangerous escalation towards a bigger conflict.
.. The simple facts of geography mean that primacy in Asia means more to China, so it is more willing to accept the costs and risks of confrontation. China assumes the US understands this. The problem is that American policymakers, even now, do not agree. They still think that if the US stands firm China will back off and go back to accepting US leadership in Asia.
.. Five months later, China launched the first of its direct challenges to US resolve in the East China and South China seas. It used armed ships to muscle the Philippines out of disputed waters around the Scarborough Shoal, which had traditionally been under Philippine control.
.. The island-building program is clearly intended as an intimidating display of China’s growing wealth and power, which is hardly likely to win it any friends. But that does not make it as plainly wrong as Washington would wish.
.. The reality is that the US can do nothing to stop China building islands or turning them into military bases unless it is willing to take the kind of decisive action that would most probably lead to a military clash, risking escalation to a wider war.
.. From one side he would be told that the US simply had no choice but to support Japan even if that meant war with China, because to do anything less would be to abandon US leadership in Asia.
.. The US seeks to remain the primary power in Asia, and China seeks to replace it.
.. They say that the US should accept that escalating strategic rivalry with China is inescapable, and should commit itself to do whatever it takes to confront and contain this new rival, just as it did with the Soviet Union, and hopefully with the same result.
.. The second group of new ideas heads in the opposite direction. A number of experts argue that Washington should try to avoid escalating rivalry with China, by sitting down with Beijing to negotiate agreements on the many issues of contention between them.
.. Channelling John Howard’s promise to Beijing 19 years ago, Abbott declared that our US alliance “is not directed against anyone”.
Hillary Defends Her Failed War in Libya
Clinton was criticized not just for the Iraq War vote that cost her the 2008 election, but also for the undeclared 2011 war that she urged in Libya. The Obama Administration waged that war of choice in violation of the War Powers Resolution and despite the official opposition of the U.S. Congress. “Governor Webb has said that he would never have used military force in Libya and that the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi was inevitable,”
.. Michael Brendan Dougherty offers one of the most incisive descriptions of Clinton’s incoherent approach. “American military adventurism relies on a very backward notion of causation,” he explained. “When evil men in the world kill their own people, somehow America is to blame for not stopping them. When American action leads directly to disorder, barbarism, and terror, well, that’s someone else’s fault.”
.. The lessons of Iraq have been internalized: Once you create a total power vacuum that will attract terror gangs and radical Islamic fundamentalists, it’s best to not have any boots on the ground to stop them.
.. She stands behind her course of action even today. More than that, she calls it “smart power at its best”!
As a result, Democrats ought to conclude that she hasn’t learned enough from her decision to support the Iraq War, and that a Clinton administration would likely pursue more wars of choice with poor judgment and insufficient planning. It is difficult to imagine a more consequential leadership flaw.
Kasich’s Dangerous Irresponsibility on Syria
By contrast, Rand Paul was one of the only presidential candidates with a sane statement on this issue. He said this in an interview yesterday:
That’s drawing a red line in the sky. Once you draw a red line, and people cross it, what happens? Now we’re talking about an incident that could lead to World War III. We went 70 years having open channels of communication with the Russians, trying to avoid having one side shoot down the opposite side’s plane. I think the people who call for a no-fly zone are naive. Right now, Russia’s actually being invited by two of the neighboring countries, by Iraq and Syria. We’re going to say we’re going to stop Russia from flying in the area when two of the countries being flown over have invited that country in? [bold mine-DL] This gets back to whether we want to diplomatically isolate ourselves, or whether we want to diplomatically engage.