After days of waiting, the results of this week’s Iowa caucuses are nearly complete. With 97% of precincts reporting, Pete Buttigieg is at the top of the pack with a razor-thin 0.1 percentage point lead in delegate count, in a near-tie with Bernie Sanders.
No matter how the final tally pans out, it’s true that in less than a year, Buttigieg has gone from a mayor with no national name identification to a top-tier presidential contender. While Iowa is only the first state in the Democratic primary process, Buttigieg’s solid performance means that we all seriously need to consider how he would perform as commander in chief.
Foreign policy has been a third-rate issue in the Democratic primary thus far. Many Democratic voters are far more interested in healthcare, immigration reform, and electability than on how many troops the different candidates would deploy to Europe. When foreign policy has been discussed at all, it’s usually in the context of criticizing President Trump. Debate moderators, reporters covering the beat, and the campaigns themselves need to spend more time ensuring their candidates offer a foreign policy vision that is humble, realistic, and makes sense.
We must ask: How would a President Buttigieg deal with overseas challenges?
We won’t know for sure until Buttigieg is actually sworn in, but a cursory look at his public remarks shows an aspiring politician who isn’t interested in revolutionizing how the United States does business overseas. He only seems interested in marginal changes.
Buttigieg does talk a lot about finally ending America’s endless war in Afghanistan. The mayor frequently reminds voters that when he left Afghanistan in 2014 after completing his service as a military intelligence analyst, he thought U.S. involvement was coming to a close. Of course, this wasn’t how things played out. The war continues today.
On Afghanistan and the Middle East in general, Buttigieg wants to have his cake and eat it too. On Syria, for instance, he says conventional forces would withdraw, but special operators and counterterrorism units would stay behind to prevent terrorists from exploiting the situation. In effect, Buttigieg is not seeking to end our endless wars as much as he just wants to make those wars somewhat smaller and make our participation in them less visible to the public.
On Iran, Buttigieg has backed the sensible option: reentering the 2015 nuclear deal the Trump administration bailed out of and using the momentum generated to begin a bilateral dialogue with the Iranians on issues such as regional security, terrorism, and ballistic missiles. Buttigieg’s proposed strategy is probably the only one that would give us an opportunity to deescalate tensions with Iran before the relationship becomes unsalvageable or conflict breaks out.
Our future president will also need to have a China policy that is coherent, well-thought-out, and grounded in realistic objectives.
China has quickly become a serious competitor to the U.S. But the foreign policy community has yet to arrive at a consensus for how to manage relations with this Asian superpower — other than condemning Beijing for human rights abuses, challenging its trade practices, and conducting Navy operations in the South China Sea.
If Buttigieg’s remarks are a guide to his thinking, he would take a “deal with them when we can, resist them when he must” approach to China. This might be the most prudent course, given the economic interdependency between Washington and Beijing and the fact that China’s rise is inevitable at this point. The question, as always, is what the details would look like. On this, Buttigieg is hardly the only Democratic candidate who hasn’t figured them out.
So, yes, the candidate passed his first test in Iowa. But if Buttigieg wants to win the White House, he still has work to do to convince the public he could be a strong commander in chief.
Daniel DePetris (@DanDePetris) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. His opinions are his own.
