Ted Cruz on ISIS, and the split among GOP hawks **UPDATE on Trump**

[Mr. Morden]

Peter Beinart has a good column here on the split between McCain/Graham on the one hand, and Ted Cruz on the other, re: attacking ISIS.  Both want to do it, but McCain and Graham are using Wilsonian arguments in the mold of GW Bush, while Cruz comes at it as a Jacksonian.  Beinart describes Cruz's foreign policy ideology as the "worst of both worlds" between McCain-style uber-hawkishness and Ron Paul-esque non-interventionism:

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/09/how-to-defeat-isis-according-to-ted-cruz/380500/

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[Mr. Morden]

Here's a ~3.5 minute discussion of this split on the right, discussed back in 2011:

http://bloggingheads.tv/videos/3105?in=13:03&out=16:38

Basically, the split is over whether there's hope for democracy promotion in the Muslim world.

[Mr. Morden]

Seriously guys, no one else is going to comment in this thread?  This is an interesting potential fissure in foreign policy among GOP presidential candidates that we could see next year, and you'd all rather talk about whether the 100 year old former lieutenant governor of Guam could be vice president, or whatever?

[Mr. Morden]

Can you make the case that this will influence Republican foreign policy with some more likely nominee?

I think the more "mainstream" potential candidates like Christie and Rubio will take something closer to the Bush/McCain line of "optimism" about the Arab world.  They're hawks, but their hawkishness is intertwined with optimism about the prospects for democracy in the Arab world.  It's the more outsider candidates like Cruz in 2016 (and to a certain extent Bachmann in 2012) who tend to be "pessimist" hawks, who support bombing, but with no corresponding effort at organizing alliances with the locals because they basically think all the locals are our enemies, and trying to foster political reconciliation is hopeless.

However, I also think that that "pessimist" take is probably closer to where the GOP base is right now, and so even if you don't think Cruz is going to win the nomination, the mere fact of him making such a critique could push other candidates in his direction.  This is especially likely for candidates who don't really care that much about foreign policy, and are eager to take the political path of least resistance.  (Scott Walker is a possibility here.)

[Mr. Morden]

Cruz's advocacy of military power but suspicion of other nations looks like an approach Walter Russell Mead would call Jacksonian. In that sense I don't think it is anything new even if Cruz makes it look a bit more pandering and harebrained than usual. It is a stance that has widely been popular among the American Right, and stands in contrast to those Neoconservatives who combine both Jacksonian and Wilsonian values.

Exactly.  Jacksonianism has long been popular on the right, but among actual Republican politicians, it was in hibernation during the Bush presidency, as Wilsonianism was in vogue.  Is Cruz at the bleeding edge of a Jacksonian resurgence?  I guess we'll find out in next year's debates.

[Mr. Morden]

Santorum has "serious concerns" about arming Syrian rebels:

http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/219063-santorum-has-serious-concerns-about-arming-syrian-rebels

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[Mr. Morden]

*bump*

This thread is from over a year ago, but now here we are, yes, Cruz was at the bleeding edge of a "Jacksonian resurgence", as I put it.

It's embodied by Trump, Cruz himself, and to a certain extent Carson.  They're all talking in a hawkish way, yet in a "military pessimist" way as Beinart put it--skeptical of the ability of American military power to "fix" any problems in the Middle East--militarism that doesn't entangle the US in the politics of the region.  They want to simply smash our enemies, not create a political solution on the ground, so to speak, and this often puts them in the "support the strongman" position, which see Trump shrug at the continued reign of Assad while Jeb accuses him of playing foreign policy like a board game.

The more conventional establishment candidates, like (Jeb) Bush and Rubio, are in the (George W.) Bush/McCain mold of "We should use American military power to create a political solution to the underlying issues there and make those societies better."

Beinart revisits this topic, re: Trump and Jacksonianism, and ties it into the refugee debate:

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/11/donald-trumps-formula-for-success-in-foreign-policy/417456/

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[Mr. Morden]

*bump*

We just had a debate that was largely about the Jacksonians vs. Wilsonians on foreign policy, so I will now accept my accolades.