Republican hawks sidelined amid President Trump’s reluctance to project American power abroad were buoyant after the commander in chief ordered the assassination of Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani and redoubled the U.S. military commitment to the Middle East.
Often disappointed as Trump broke bread with dictators, as he did with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, and flirted with ceding international influence to competing powers, as he did with the partial pullout from Syria, traditional Republican hawks, such as Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, are enjoying a moment of satisfaction.
After three years of often siding with GOP noninterventionists, most prominently Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, Trump followed the advice of the GOP hawks in his orbit with a targeted drone strike in Iraq that eliminated Soleimani, the chief of the Iran Revolutionary Guard Corps, and the deployment of approximately 3,500 Army soldiers to Kuwait.
“Qassem Soleimani masterminded Iran’s reign of terror for decades, including the deaths of hundreds of Americans,” Cotton said in a statement. “He got what he richly deserved, and all those American soldiers who died by his hand also got what they deserved: justice. America is safer now after Soleimani’s demise.”
Paul was careful not to criticize Trump overtly for taking out Soleimani, action taken just days after Iran directed the siege of the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad and after several years of Tehran-directed attacks that killed hundreds of American troops and undercut American interests. But the senator voiced concern about the president’s decision and what it portends for his foreign policy, while gingerly suggesting that the president has strayed from his noninterventionist roots.
“President Trump viscerally understands that the toppling of Saddam Hussein made Iran stronger. Soleimani, like Hussein, was an evil man who ordered the killing of Americans,” Paul tweeted Friday. “The question today is whether the assassination of Soleimani will expand the war to endanger the lives of every American soldier or diplomat in the Middle East?”
As a presidential candidate in 2016, Trump was skeptical of international alliances and Washington’s post-World War II role as the military protector of the West. Having opposed the war in Iraq and questioned the war in Afghanistan, Trump said the United States should reduce its military and diplomatic commitments in the Middle East and elsewhere, and shift the resources required to finance those responsibilities to domestic investments. As president, Trump has questioned the U.S. alliance with South Korea and the stationing of troops there, and he also threatened to pull out of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
Conservatives who have supported Trump’s foreign policy say that striking Soleimani does not amount to turn back to the hawkish Republicanism the president had repudiated. They argue that the president has never rejected bold action to subdue and deter enemies, just the extended entanglements, sometimes derided as nation-building, prevalent under George W. Bush in response to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
“Iran needed to be confronted,” said Ned Ryun, a Republican operative and early Trump supporter.
But some foreign policy analysts were caught off guard by Trump’s targeting of Soleimani given his presumed allergy to military action. Unlike Osama bin Laden and Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, who were both leaders of rogue terrorist organizations and assassinated by the U.S., Soleimani, who ordered terrorist acts, was nonetheless the head of an official branch of the Iranian military.
The U.S. for years reacted to Tehran’s provocations with restraint. But killing Soleimani so publicly, without the plausible deniability of a covert strike, was a move some observers might have expected from a Republican hawk — but not from Trump.
“I was stunned,” said Aaron David Miller, a former U.S. diplomat and Middle East analyst, “stunned because one of few redemptive aspects of Trump’s foreign policy these last three years has been his risk aversion.”
