Oxon Hill, Md. —The top Republican presidential candidates speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference have predominantly shown a hawkish tone on foreign policy.
Potential presidential candidates Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, Rick Perry and Chris Christie have all knocked President Obama for not being more warlike, and promised a more aggressive foreign policy. Former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton just finished speaking, and his central criticism of Obama (and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton) was that they are “unwilling to do what was necessary to protect our country from foreign threats.”
The Hill covers this theme pretty well, with some highlights:
Setting aside policy for a moment, it seems to me that this approach has at least one political downside.
Attacking Obama so uniformly as a guy who doesn’t fight enough wars blunts a potentially very strong attack on Hillary Clinton: She played a central role in planning and executing Obama’s illegal, ill-advised, poorly executed and disastrous war in Libya.
I laid out in a recent column how damning Libya is for Obama — and the same applies to Hillary Clinton:
I don’t know that dovish foreign policy is more popular than hawkish foreign policy. I do know that it becomes more difficult to attackone of Hillary’s most shameful episodes if your theme is that Obama and Hillary didn’t fight enough.
