The almost numberless foreign policy fires raging worldwide that affect the United States are the purview of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations and its new chairman, Bob Corker, Republican of Tennessee. The Islamic State continues its violent attempts to enlarge its self-proclaimed caliphate in the Middle East, Vladimir Putin is likely plotting Moscow’s next -muscle-flexing session, and the extended nuclear talks with Iran are far from reaching an -acceptable conclusion. And those are only the lead-headline items that awaited the committee when it recently reconvened.
Two weeks ago, I asked Senator Corker how he and the committee plan to prioritize. Corker—the first Republican to hold the chairmanship in eight years—was quick to draw on his experience in the private sector, in construction and real estate. “There are things that are urgent, and there are things that are important,” he said. Like a company manager, he’ll have to appropriately allocate time between daily duties, unexpected emergencies, and long-term planning.
In that last category, unresolved procedural items were on his mind. Before talking about Cuba policy, Chinese territorial disputes, or the possible effects of the recent Paris shootings, Corker brought up the fact that the last authorization of the State Department was issued 13 years ago and that a list of USAID programs have been operating since 1985 without a congressional re-up—simply because the committee and Congress spend so much of their time running with a fire hose from one foreign policy blaze to the next. When smoke is billowing from red-hot situations across the globe, it proves difficult to focus on bureaucratic matters.
What seems to frustrate Corker is that some of the supposedly urgent international situations America is embroiled in have been either created or greatly inflated by the White House.
President Obama’s announcement in December that the United States would recalibrate its policy toward Cuba, for instance, strikes Corker as a piece of manufactured urgency. Our relations with Cuba “hadn’t been on the front burner in a while,” he told me. Thanks to the administration’s decision to hold secret negotiations, Congress and its committees got only a brief heads-up about the change. With no time to plan and few policy specifics, members of the Foreign Relations Committee realized they would be overseeing one of the biggest policy overhauls in half a century—a total blindside.
According to Corker, the usual catalogue of international crises has been lengthened by an administration hesitant to act. When talking about Ukraine, Corker breathed a little sigh of relief, acknowledging that the diplomatic climate there is starting to improve, thanks in part to sanctions placed on Russia. (Sanctions, he noted, are handled by the Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, on which he also sits.) But “we waited too long for those sanctions,” he said. While the White House wrung its hands about how to counter aggressive Russian maneuvering, Putin completed the annexation of Crimea and dispersed pro-Russian thugs to wreak havoc across eastern Ukraine. With no resolute response from Washington, Corker argued, “we let that [situation] get more out of control.”
The Syria debacle, in his view, is another result of inaction. “Had we taken different steps, being more forward with the Syrian opposition, we’d be in a different place” today, he said. We might have helped land a decisive blow to the brutal Assad regime. Instead, the Syrian civil war has droned on, claiming the lives of roughly 200,000 belligerents and innocents. The ensuing regional instability has created the perfect environment for the newest international menace to gather momentum: the Islamic State.
Last year witnessed the Islamic State mature from a mere ragtag group of “jayvees,” as Obama once put it, to a global threat. Corker feels that, along with President Obama’s foot-dragging in Syria, a second administration blunder aided ISIS: the United States’s hurried departure from Iraq, leaving the inefficient and sectarian Maliki government to run the show. When asked if the administration’s hasty exit from Iraq was influenced by post-Bush exhaustion with the outside world, Corker agreed: “The president embraced that sentiment,” and the United States “precipitously left.”
Though Corker insists “Iraq can be successful,” he believes the Islamic State cannot be defeated without a strategy for America’s relationship with Syria. So far, no such strategy has been produced, and its absence highlights a recurring criticism Corker has of the White House: It rarely informs Congress of the steps it wants to take to reach, as Corker puts it, President Obama’s “rhetorical outcomes.” True to form, in his State of the Union address last week, the president asked Congress to pass a new Authorization for Use of Military Force—without stating what it should contain or outlining a strategy for defeating the Islamic State.
It’s easy to say the United States is going to “downgrade and destroy” the Islamic State. It also sounds nice that, closer to home, “America chooses to cut loose the shackles of the past so as to reach for a better future—for the Cuban people, for the American people, for our entire hemisphere, and for the world.” But how, Corker wanted to know, does the president propose to achieve these ends?
“The best way to push the White House [for policy specifics],” he said, “is to have the principal members of the administration up here to testify.” Hearings may improve coordination between the executive and legislative branches and between the parties. In Corker’s view, “foreign policy through partisanship doesn’t make sense”—a fine sentiment, but one difficult to live by in an era of divided government with, in the background, the 2016 presidential campaigns gearing up.
Corker—who came to the Senate and the Foreign Relations Committee in 2007 with almost no experience in foreign policy, but has since visited 63 countries—is about to put his ideas to the test.
David Allen Martin is a columnist and history professor at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.
