Foreign policy is typically a general election trap for Democrats, but now it’s presenting a problem for some 2020 presidential candidates in the primary.
President Trump’s order to kill Iranian Revolutionary Guard Quds Force leader Gen. Qassem Soleimani on Iraqi soil has shifted the 2020 political landscape and left some Democrats in uncharted waters. While Joe Biden’s long foreign policy record is both an asset and a liability, the positions of comparatively untested top Democratic rivals such as Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Pete Buttigieg are now receiving greater scrutiny as the opening Iowa caucuses near on Feb. 3.
For American Politics Research’s Costas Panagopoulos, Trump’s drone strike last week on Soleimani, the top general for Iran’s Ali Khamenei, may have “wittingly or unwittingly” helped “to narrow down the Democratic field.”
“I suspect recent developments in the Middle East could give a leg up to someone like Buttigieg, who has personal military experience in the region and can speak to the real-world implications of these decisions for American families, or to Biden, who has had considerable foreign policy experience for decades,” Panagopoulos told the Washington Examiner.
Biden, the former vice president, 77, was a longtime member and chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee before joining the Obama administration but voted in favor of the Iraq War and advised against the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, 37, served seven months in Afghanistan as a naval intelligence officer in an Army-style role, although he’s never fired his weapon, come under fire, or fought in battle.
In contrast, Sanders, a senator for Vermont, 78, has based his second White House bid partly on an anti-war platform after protesting the Vietnam War as a University of Chicago student. And though she sits on the Senate Armed Services Committee, Warren, Sanders’s senatorial colleague from Massachusetts, 70, has been targeted by her opponents over her lack of foreign policy exposure and flip-flops as she veers to the left of the ideological spectrum.
Democratic strategist Vic Fingerhut predicted the long-term political environment, however, would only become permanently altered with another major event.
“If something actually happens, if they strike U.S. assets overseas, then I don’t think there’s any question that it will change the focus. And it’s very unclear who will benefit. The conventional wisdom is that it will benefit Biden because he’s been around,” he said.
In the aftermath of Soleimani’s death in Baghdad on Jan. 3 during an operation launched to counter the “imminent threat” posed to U.S. citizens, Biden, Buttigieg, and Warren criticized Soleimani as a murderer of Americans but questioned Trump’s broader Middle East strategy. Sanders, meanwhile, slammed the administration’s choice to escalate tensions in the region without acknowledging the death of a terrorist.
On the campaign trail last weekend, when Biden, Sanders, and Warren were in Iowa and Buttigieg was in New Hampshire, Iran was raised by the press more than voters. Reporters’ questions then drove a media and online conversation about whether Soleimani’s killing should be called “an assassination.” Warren came under fire from liberals for not using the word sooner, while more center-left Buttigieg avoided the same level of scrutiny. Warren also made headlines for questioning the timing of Trump’s strike as the Senate prepares for the president’s impeachment trial, adding she wouldn’t have ordered the attack.
Despite the swipes, Fingerhut warned Democrats that the traditional divide between the major political parties over domestic and foreign policy no longer rings true in the Trump era.
“In the last 10 or 15 years, the very clear perception of the two parties has been blurred a little bit in the sense that Trump being a populist left as well as a populist right on trade issues, on infrastructure, stuff like that, and the fact that there’s been an economic expansion for several years, is that the Republicans are much stronger on domestic and economic policy than they’ve been in the past. Most of that is Trump, it’s not the Republicans,” he told the Washington Examiner.
