No one knows exactly what foreign policy challenges await the next president. A terrorist attack could swing public support behind a new war in the Middle East. Clashes between China and Japan could create an emergency in the Pacific. Vladimir Putin may barge into the Baltics or redraw a border elsewhere.
Voters must choose wisely. How would they like the next president to respond in such a crisis? Does the country need a hawkish leader, quick to use military force – or more of a dove, given to circumspection and restraint?
The reality is that no candidate is simply a “dove” or a “hawk”. A candidate’s disposition on one conflict may not apply in another. Republican candidate Carly Fiorina, for example, is the source of much tough talk on Russia, but she has expressed a hesitancy to arm the Syrian opposition and has taken a clear stance against the Iraq war: “I would not have gone in.”
A candidate’s hawkish words may not match his or her less hawkish policy prescriptions. Donald Trump, the Republican frontrunner, often speaks with a sharp beak: “I would bomb the shit out of them,” he has said of oil fields controlled by the Islamic State group. But he is skeptical about arming the Syrian opposition and undecided on a no-fly zone: “I want to sit back and I want to see what happens.”
Anatol Lieven, a senior research fellow at the New America Foundation, warned against drawing quick correlations between a candidate’s rhetoric and that person’s prospective actions.
“What people say in a campaign and what they do is very often significantly different,” Lieven said. “Look at Ronald Reagan and his ferocious anti-Soviet rhetoric,” which was prelude to engagement and détente.
There’s no shortage of ferocious rhetoric on the Republican side of the 2016 race. Marco Rubio has breathlessly diagnosed a “clash of civilizations” and invoked the Nazis to describe “radical Islam”. Chris Christie has described his China policy thusly: “The first thing I’ll do with the Chinese is, I’ll fly Air Force One over those islands,” meaning the Senkakus/Diaoyus, disputed by China and Japan. Both men have left the door open to major new troop deployments in the Middle East.
None competes, however, with Lindsey Graham, the senator from South Carolina. “If I’m president of the United States and you’re thinking about joining al-Qaida or Isil, I’m not gonna call a judge,” he has said. “I’m gonna call a drone and we will kill you.”
Graham’s failure to register in the polls, despite such talk – or perhaps because of it – may be telling. The American public is opposed to sending ground troops to Iraq and/or Syria by a margin of 53% to 43%, according to a Gallup poll published a day before this month’s attacks in Paris. The split is about the same as it was a year ago.
Richard Grenell, a former US spokesman at the United Nations who has argued for more intelligence officers to be deployed in the Middle East, said that, in evaluating the candidates, he was listening for signs of a strategy beyond “bomb Isis”.
Jeb Bush, the former Florida governor, has shown a particular depth on foreign policy, Grenell said.
“I think Bush is sensing that it needs to be more than just talking tough; it’s got to be a whole packaged strategy,” Grenell said. “After Bush, I think the next best at national security articulation is Marco Rubio, who is also talking tough and then talking about, ‘What do we have to do, by working with our allies?’”
Grenell pointed to new video ads produced by Bush that highlight military challenges and military action. In one, retired generals talk about the need for a strong commander-in-chief. In another, Bush joins cadets at the Citadel military academy for a pre-dawn run. “I’ve got your back,” he tells them.
Julian Zelizer, a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University, said the question of next steps in Syria was “tricky” for one candidate in particular: Hillary Clinton.
He summarized her quandary as “trying to figure out how she can be hawkish as a Democrat, not over the top, and not subject to criticism from liberals, who fear that sometimes she goes too far for political expediency”.
Clinton has said that “we don’t want American troops on the ground in Syria” but that she “sees merit in the targeted use of special forces personnel” as deployed earlier this month by Barack Obama. Clinton supports a no-fly zone in Syria, directly arming the opposition, and “financial assistance, equipment and training for rebels in Ukraine”.
She also voted in 2002, as a senator, to authorize the use of military force in Iraq, which she later called a “mistake”.
Zelizer said: “The other reason it’s hard for Clinton is she is a politician who does believe in nuance, and I don’t think she sees this as hawk versus diplomat.”
Grenell, who was briefly a national security spokesman for the Mitt Romney presidential campaign, countered: “She’s purely political ... The Hillary Clinton of 2008 called the Barack Obama of 2008 ‘naive’ for sticking to his political promise to end all wars and to bring all the troops home.
“That’s what she said in 2008. She lost the nomination. So she’s changing her strategy, because it’s Bernie Sanders’ time to challenge her.”
Analysts emphasize the difficulty of predicting how effective a particular candidate may be on foreign policy, based on his or her experience or lack thereof.
Both Lieven and Grenell said they did not see Trump as viable commander-in-chief material. But he might be good on Russia, they separately mused.
“If, God forbid, Trump were elected president,” said Lieven, “who knows, he might actually – since he is a kind of gangster himself – he might sit down with Putin and get somewhere.”
Grenell said: “We need somebody who talks tough, ... I’m not a Trump fan, but he’s just crazy enough to send the message that he’d be willing to do what it takes.”
Lieven said leadership on foreign policy required a combination of skills and qualities for which there was no one recipe.
“What one would be looking at is questions of intelligence and nerve, and natural pragmatism, or moderation – rather than actual experience,” Lieven said.
“If you look at some of the presidents in the [20th century], with the exception of Eisenhower – and of course, Nixon, in the sense that Nixon was a good foreign policy president, but then he had Kissinger behind him – it’s not as if any of the others have any foreign policy experience behind them at all.
“Some of them turned out to be pretty good. Others turned out to be terrible.”
- This article was amended on 29 November 2015, to correctly represent Richard Grenell’s position. He has called for more intelligence officers to be deployed in the Middle East, not for more troops.
