Hawks of a Feather

“We’ve got to reinstate American leadership when it comes to world affairs,” said Scott Walker in Oklahoma City. “The rest of the world wants America to lead,” said Chris Christie later that day. “We have to lead based on strength.” Carly Fiorina calls her vision for foreign policy “influence through strength.” Lindsey Graham’s super-PAC is actually called Security Through Strength. In a recent speech to the Council on Foreign Relations, Marco Rubio said the first of three pillars of his foreign policy doctrine is “American strength.” As he put it, “The world is at its safest when America is at its strongest.”

The glaring exception to all this hawkishness, of course, is Rand Paul, the libertarian senator who made his mark in 2013 with a filibuster protesting the American policy of using drones to kill Americans engaging in terrorism overseas. Paul was absent from Oklahoma City last month, busy with another filibuster to stop the National Security Agency’s metadata collection program. Days later, in an interview on MSNBC, the Kentucky senator lambasted the “hawks in our party” for policies that he said have allowed the terrorist group ISIS to “exist and grow.”

“Everything that they’ve talked about in foreign policy, they’ve been wrong about for 20 years,” Paul said of the Republican hawks. “And yet they have somehow the gall to keep saying and pointing fingers otherwise.”

But whether Paul likes it or not, the GOP is the hawkish party, and its presidential nominee is likely to be hawkish, too. That’s clear enough from the rhetorical echoes across the field. Here’s Christie in a major foreign policy address in New Hampshire last month: “Throughout history, leaders in both parties have based our foreign policy on these principles: strength, leadership, and partnership with the people and nations who share our values.” Bobby Jindal, in an interview: “I want a world where our friends trust us and our enemies fear and respect us. That was the bipartisan consensus post-World War II through the Cold War.” Rubio, at the Council on Foreign Relations in May: “Only American leadership will bring safety and enduring peace. America led valiantly in the last century—from Truman to Kennedy to Reagan.” And Walker, in an interview: “Think back to Harry Truman. This is a bipartisan view that we’ve historically had that when we win, we don’t want to give up the victory.”

There’s agreement, too, on some of the major foreign policy issues of the day. The field’s collective assessment, contra Rand Paul, is that Obama’s lack of leadership in Syria and Iraq helped create the conditions for ISIS to flourish. “I see a president who drew a line in the sand and then allowed people to cross it,” said Walker. Jindal agreed. “Earlier in this conflict, there were certainly stronger and more robust moderate opposition groups,” Jindal said. “And over time, they’ve certainly gotten weaker while ISIS has gotten stronger because this president refused to equip them, to train them, to work with them.”

“He could have stopped them in Syria by funding the Syrian rebels early. I think he also could have gotten rid of Assad at the same time,” said Rick Perry. “But he chose not to.”

Or consider the field’s tough talk on Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran. Jeb Bush calls it “horrific,” while Rubio says it “almost guarantees war.” Walker says undoing the deal would be his first act as president, while Fiorina says hers would be to call Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to reassure him of America’s commitment to the Jewish state. Cruz, a hawk-come-lately, has sponsored the “Sanction Iran, Safeguard America Act,” and Ben Carson has said unless open inspections are allowed, the United States should impose the “most severe sanctions possible.” 

“I think it’s very important for us to communicate to the Iranian leadership that, certainly if I were in office, that every option would be on the table to stop them from becoming a nuclear power,” said Jindal. “It’s not acceptable for them to be a nuclear power.”

Beyond the Middle East, Republicans still sing a hawkish tune. On Europe, the candidates decry Obama’s accommodation of Vladimir Putin’s aggression in annexing Crimea and posting troops in eastern Ukraine. America, they agree, ought to be flexing its own muscles toward Moscow, not pursuing a Hillary Clinton-style “reset” with Russia. “Putin’s a nationalist, so he loves the old Lenin adage that you probe with bayonets, and if you find mush, you push. If you find steel, you pull back,” said Walker. “I think that’s not only true with Ukraine and Russia but around the world there’s this kind of sense they’re finding mush.”

And it’s not just Cuban-Americans Rubio and Cruz who are outraged at the administration’s policy shift toward Havana. “We had Cuba on the ropes, from my perspective,” said Perry. “When the great Soviet Union crashed, [Cuba] got picked up by the Venezuelans when Venezuela is already on the ropes, possibly could go under, and therefore Cuba really didn’t have a lifeline until Barack Obama gave them one.” 

“I mean, I am stunned at his lack of understanding how you connect the dots in foreign policy,” Perry added.

Sure, events and decisions during the Obama administration have provided common targets for all the Republicans. And the all-but-certain Democratic nominee, Obama’s former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, is the perfect foil on foreign affairs for the GOP to unite against. 

But some of the credit for this synergy goes to a loose confederation of conservative foreign policy experts calling themselves the John Hay Initiative. Named after the Republican diplomat who rose from Abraham Lincoln’s personal aide to become secretary of state under Theodore Roosevelt, the initiative is made up of veterans of the Mitt Romney presidential campaign and includes Brian Hook, Eric Edelman, and Eliot Cohen. Its goals are simple: to keep presidential candidates well informed on foreign policy and encourage them to embrace a, well, hawkish view of America’s role in the world.

The group emails candidates a regular briefing as well as policy papers. They’ve helped staff the campaigns of Walker and Rubio with like-minded aides and drafted Christie’s New Hampshire speech. In addition, they’ve worked, at varying levels of intimacy, with Bush, Fiorina, and Ted Cruz. Perry was the first and most enthusiastic likely candidate to reach out to the initiative, and it shows. He may be the most fluent of the Republican field, except for Rubio, in his knowledge of foreign policy issues.

If there are differences on foreign policy among the non-Paul candidates, they are a matter of degree or emphasis, not kind. Some, like Walker and Fiorina, are more cautious than others about sending more troops to Iraq to combat ISIS. Christie, a former U.S. attorney who prosecuted terrorists under the Patriot Act, stresses “protecting the homeland,” while Jindal focuses on the global fight against “radical Islam.” Perry is more specific than his rivals about how and where defense spending should be allocated.

But anyone hoping for a divisive or paradigm-shifting debate within the party on foreign policy—Hillary Clinton, say—will be disappointed.

Michael Warren is a staff writer at The Weekly Standard.