Last week’s primary defeat of Virginia congressman Randy Forbes, chairman of the Seapower and Projection Forces subcommittee of the House Armed Services committee, was one more surprise in an increasingly unpredictable political year. Virginia Republican primary voters, however, have already proved that they can be very demanding and somewhat fickle with regard to the elected officials they send to Washington, no matter how high these members rise in the ranks of the House leadership. The fall of Eric Cantor in his Richmond-area district in the primary of 2014 emphatically proved the point.
It appears that Forbes’s young opponent, Scott Taylor—who although a veteran will lack the seniority and gravitas of the incumbent—based his campaign on charges of “carpetbagging,” (Forbes had moved after redistricting to a more friendly district) as well as an attack on Forbes’s past expressed support for the Trans Pacific Partnership trade agreement.
Alas, Forbes’s defeat will send the champagne corks popping among the Chinese Navy admirals at the Yulin Naval Base, which serves as Beijing’s gateway to the hotly disputed waters of the South China Sea. The South China Sea is set to become a focus of international attention again later this month when the Permanent Court of Arbitration in the Hague issues its ruling on the suit brought by the Philippines against Beijing’s territorial claims including its now infamous nine-dash line.
No one in the Congress had kept a sharper eye on Beijing’s increasing maritime maneuverings than Forbes. He regularly wrote of specific national security concerns, especially with regard to a rising China, in such publications as National Review and the Wall Street Journal. The congressman also gave periodic briefings to Washington think tanks, where he raised increasing concerns posed by Beijing’s ambitious naval expansion and cautioned about the anemic underpinnings of the U.S. “rebalance” to Asia with U.S. naval forces declining to pre-Pearl Harbor levels.
In April, at the Armed Service committee mark-up of the National Defense Authorization Act for example, Forbes introduced several key Asia-Pacific policy provisions. At the time, he noted that
Asia-specific provisions introduced included a required estimate of Chinese missile inventories in the Defense Department’s annual report to Congress, directed Asia-Pacific air base hardening and dispersal strategy, expressed congressional support for U.S.-Singapore Defense Cooperation, and expressed support for U.S.-Japan-South Korea Cooperation.
Foreign observers in Washington with interests in East Asia and the South China Sea have already expressed concern over who will fill the congressional vacuum left by the departure of Forbes and his staff. With the military, and specifically naval, focus of Forbes’s coastal Virginia-based district, one would have thought that voters there would have been especially appreciative of his efforts to rebuild a strong naval defense—particularly in the face of an expanding Chinese navy in the South and East China seas, as well as the Taiwan Strait. This is not even considering the new North Korean submarine-based missile launch capability just recently demonstrated.
Alas, in 2016, it wasn’t to be.
Dennis P. Halpin, a former adviser on Asian issues to the House Foreign Affairs Committee, is a visiting scholar at the U.S.-Korea Institute (SAIS) and an adviser to the Poblete Analysis Group.
