National security has emerged as a central issue in the 2016 presidential election. That’s probably bad news for the Republican Party’s front-runners.
Ben Carson and Donald Trump have failed to exhibit a command of the issues and have made a series of gaffes on the campaign trail which expose their lack of knowledge and perhaps even call into question their fitness for office.
In the wake of last week’s terror attacks in Paris, a top national security adviser to Carson told the New York Times that the retired pediatric neurosurgeon has struggled to learn the finer points of foreign affairs, and that ongoing tutorials over the last few months haven’t helped much.
The adviser said that he had been involved in weekly conference calls with Carson in an effort to “make him smart” on foreign policy and national security issues but that Carson has not been able to process “one iota of intelligent information about the Middle East.”
This is not news to anyone who’s been listening to Carson’s speeches or watching his debate performances. His answers to foreign policy questions are marked chiefly by an avoidance of specifics. When he does offer details, they are often spectacularly wrong — such as his assertion in the last GOP debate that China was intervening militarily in Syria.
On several occasions he has acknowledged that he doesn’t have enough information to answer fairly basic foreign policy questions. “I have to admit that I don’t know a great deal about that, and I don’t really like to comment until I’ve had a chance to study the issue from both sides,” Carson said recently when the Miami Herald asked him to comment on U.S. policy toward Cuban refugees.
For all the love political outsiders are getting from GOP primary voters, these episodes demonstrate the danger posed by novice presidential candidates. They also demonstrate how foreign policy has a way of separating the serious presidential candidates from the amateurs.
Foreign policy blunders have doomed presidential candidacies before. In a 1976 presidential debate with then-Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter, President Gerald Ford famously said, “There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe.” That clueless line, and Ford’s refusal to back down from it, may well have cost him the election.
Like Carson, Trump prefers to avoid foreign policy details, and for good reason. When talk radio host and Washington Examiner columnist Hugh Hewitt pressed Trump for details about his policy toward Iran, Trump seemed to confuse Iran’s Quds Force with Kurdish forces in Iraq. When Hewitt corrected him, Trump accused him of asking “gotcha questions.” Trump was last seen claiming credit for recent U.S. strikes on Islamic State oil infrastructure as if he were the first to think of the idea, even though such strikes have been going on for months (albeit with restrictive rules of engagement).
Carson and Trump are both intelligent individuals — their careers demonstrate as much. But they’ve both been in fields that don’t require them to think much about policy, especially foreign policy. To compensate, both have tried to reassure voters that they’ll be up to speed by Election Day.
“A year from now, I will know a lot more than I know now,” Carson said in a recent PBS interview. Trump told Hewitt that by the time he becomes president “I will be so good at the military, your head will spin.”
But that’s not enough. It’s one thing for a candidate to need some coaching on the latest innovations in health care or the finer points of corporate tax policy. It’s something else entirely to require tutorials in Foreign Policy 101. Even in times of peace, a president’s most important role, and the one in which he exercises the most robust power, is as commander-in-chief. Unlike his role in other areas, the president is the undisputed architect of America’s foreign policy.
Today, from the threats posed by hostile regimes in Iran, China, Russia and elsewhere, to the dilemma of Syrian refugees, to the challenges of the Islamic State and the broader Middle East, the world cannot afford to have an amateur in the Oval Office.
Nor can the Republican Party afford to have a foreign policy amateur as its nominee. For all her liabilities, Hillary Clinton has a keen enough grip on foreign affairs that she will easily expose the ignorance of any opponent who doesn’t get it.
In 2008, Republicans argued that the presidency does not lend itself to on-the-job-training. They were right. Barack Obama’s presidency has exposed the folly especially of electing someone more eager to change U.S. foreign policy than he was familiar with its nuances. Republicans should be careful not to repeat that mistake.
