FRIDAY, MAR 4, 2016 08:40 PM CET
Cornered Neocons: Trump’s heresy on foreign policy has put Republican hawks in nightmare scenario — backing Hillary Clinton
Clinton represents the status quo on foreign policy — aligning her far more with neocon values than Trump
TOPICS: ELECTIONS 2016, AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY, NEOCONSERVATISM, DONALD TRUMP, HILLARY CLINTON, BERNIE SANDERS, ELECTIONS NEWS, NEWS, POLITICS NEWS
Bill Kristol, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Robert Kagan (Credit: AP/Reuters/Janet Van Ham/Wade Payne/Scott Morgan/CBS)
“The war in Iraq was a big, fat mistake. All right? The war in Iraq, we spent $2 trillion, thousands of lives…We should’ve never been in Iraq. We have destabilized the Middle East. You call it whatever you want…They lied. They said there were weapons of mass destruction. There were none. And they knew there were none.” – Donald Trump
A Trump nomination is a nightmare for the Republican establishment. There are many reasons why that’s so, some more obvious than others. To begin with, a Trump-led ticket would mean not just a third consecutive term for the Democrats, it would also result in down-ballot defeats and perhaps even the loss of their majority in the Senate – that’s reason enough to panic.
But one of the less discussed concerns surrounding Trump has to do with foreign policy; specifically, the fact that Trump doesn’t have one, and what he has said scares the hell out of Republican hawks. We saw a glimpse of this at a recent Republican debate, in which Trump popped the conservative bubble and said what no one else on that stage would – that the Iraq War was a mistake; that zealots exploited questionable intelligence for ideological purposes; and that military adventurism has made us and the world less safe. These are all indisputably true claims, and yet Republicans can’t accept them.
It’s heresy in the GOP to question the neoconservative paradigm – just ask Rand Paul. It’s assumed, as an article of faith, that America is the moral leader of the world; that we must not only defend our values across the world, we must also use force to remake it in our image. This is the thinking that gave us the Iraq War. It’s the prism through which most of the GOP still views international politics. Trump – and Bernie Sanders – represents a departure from this paradigm.
Although it’s unlikely to happen, a Trump-Sanders general election would have been refreshing for at least one reason: it would have constituted a total rejection of neoconservatism.
Most Americans understand, intuitively, that the differences between the major parties are often rhetorical, not substantive. That’s not to say substantive differences don’t exist – surely they do, especially on social issues. But the policies from administration to administration overlap more often than not, regardless of the party in charge. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Much of the stability is due to money and the structure of our system, which tends toward dynamic equilibrium. And there are limits to what the president can do on issues like the economy and health care.
But one area in which the president does have enormous flexibility is foreign policy. Which is why, as Politico reported this week, the GOP’s national security establishment is “bitterly digging in against” Trump. Indeed, more than any other wing of the Republican Party, the neoconservatives are terrified at the prospect of a Trump nomination.
“Hillary is the lesser evil, by a large margin,” said Eliot Cohen, a former Bush official with neoconservative ties. Trump would be “an unmitigated disaster for American foreign policy.” Another neocon, Max Boot, says he’d vote for Clinton over Trump: “She would be vastly preferable to Trump.” Even Bill Kristol, the great champion of the Iraq War, a man who refuses to consider the hypothesis that he was wrong about anything, is threatening to recruit a third party candidate to derail Trump for similar reasons.
Just this week, moreover, a group of conservative foreign policy intellectuals, several of whom are neocons, published an open letter stating that they’re “united in our opposition to a Donald Trump presidency.” They offer a host of reasons for their objections, but the bottom line is they don’t trust Trump to continue America’s current policy of policing the world on ethical grounds.
3 opmerkingen:
Geweldige aanbeveling voor Hillary Clinton.
Henk Hofland zal zich thuis voelen.
Zo liet vanmorgen oud-VPRO programmamaker Ronald van den Boogaard zich voor het karretje spannen van het ultra-rechtse radioprogramma De Nieuwsshow van de TROS.
Hij mocht o.a. vertellen hoe corrupt de Russische overheid wel niet was......
Excuses,excuses aan Ronald van den Boogaard ! Het was Raymond van den Boogaard van het NRC....
Een reactie posten