Barack Obama’s nominee to be the most senior US military officer on Thursday effectively endorsed the foreign policy of the politician Obama defeated in 2012.
General Joseph Dunford, the marine commandant tapped to become the next chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, struck notes more congruous with the worldview of Mitt Romney, which Obama successfully mocked on the campaign trail as anachronistic.
Asked by senators on the armed services committee during his confirmation hearing about the greatest threat facing the US, Dunford replied: “My assessment today is that Russia presents the greatest threat to our national security.”
When Romney offered the same contention in 2012, Obama mocked him, saying in a presidential debate: “The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back because the cold war’s been over for 20 years.”
Dunford, a former commander of the Afghanistan war, argued that Russia’s status as a nuclear power and its irredentism in Ukraine rendered it the pre-eminent challenge to US security. Asked to rank the next greatest threats, Dunford listed China and North Korea before the Islamic State.
But Dunford clarified that his inclusion of China was a function of US interests in the Pacific and China’s rapidly advancing military capabilities.
“It doesn’t necessarily mean they’re a current threat or that we view them as an enemy,” Dunford said.
Dunford also denied that he would “attack those issues in sequence”, signalling instead he would focus on them all during his term as chairman.
Dunford, who is highly likely to be confirmed, indicated that he wished to study the US effort against Isis more closely. But he said he could imagine Iraq unravelling into Sunni and Shia-Kurdish rump states.
“I can imagine two states in Iraq,” Dunford said.
The chairman of the joint chiefs of staff is the president’s senior military adviser. While the chairman is not in the chain of military command, the general or admiral who fills the position exerts enormous influence over US defense priorities. Chairmen always style themselves as apolitical even as they navigate the thorny and unavoidable politics of the military and its interactions with the White House and Congress.
While leading the war effort in Afghanistan from 2013 to 2014, Dunford successfully prevailed upon Obama to slow down the White House’s long-announced troop withdrawal, a move the Senate committee urged Dunford to intensify now Isis has a presence in the country.
Dunford, while not repudiating the president he will serve, signalled his assent, saying his advice to Obama would “be based on the conditions on the ground”, rather than a timetable he said was “probably affected by the political events inside Afghanistan” and “the enemy”.
The general also signalled agreement with a key priority of John McCain, the other Republican Obama beat for the presidency. Dunford said he would be open to extending US military protection to the handful of Syrian militants the US is training to fight Isis should they come under attack by President Bashar al-Assad, their primary enemy.
McCain argues that the US will never be able to convince Syrian rebels to fight Isis on its behalf unless it aids them in overthrowing Assad, which the Obama administration considers a recipe for enmeshing the US in the Middle East’s most gruelling and complex civil war.
Dunford has cultivated McCain, who has an acrimonious relationship with the current chairman of the joint chiefs, General Martin Dempsey, and who chairs the Senate committee critical for approving Dunford’s nomination.
Three days after Obama announced in May that Dunford was his choice to replace the retiring Dempsey, Dunford honored McCain with an evening parade at the marine corps barracks in south-east Washington.
In Thursday’s hearing, Dunford also signalled support for Obama’s stalled “rebalance” or “pivot” to the Pacific.
“It’s absolutely critical that we do that,” he said.
