October 5, 2016 | No Comments
Will the real Republican foreign policy please stand up?
The morning after Mike Pence offered core foreign policy positions that diverged from those of his running mate, Donald Trump, Republicans puzzled over what to make of them and what, if anything, they might suggest about a potential Trump administration.
Not much, was the early consensus among Trump skeptics.
“I think Mike Pence cheered a lot of Republican conservatives who have been pretty gloomy until last night by forcefully articulating a case for conservative internationalism and strong US leadership in Europe and the Middle East as well as rebuilding the military,” said Eric Edelman, a former Under Secretary of Defense for Policy in the George W. Bush administration.
“Too bad that those very principles have been consistently undermined by the person with whom he is running at the top of the ticket. Honestly, I am not sure what it means other than that Mike Pence is what he has always been: a voice for a tough-minded, Reaganesque approach to national security,” added Edelman, one among dozens of former Republican foreign policy insiders to publicly declared that he cannot vote for Donald Trump.
Donald Trump has spent months saying friendly things about Russian President Vladimir Putin, and has repeatedly suggested that the U.S. should avoid choosing sides in Syria’s civil war, except to strike the Islamic State. But last night Pence parted ways with Trump on both those points—arguably the two most important questions in American foreign policy.
Pence ridiculed Putin as “the small and bullying Russian leader” and argued that the U.S. should create “safe zones” to protect Syrian civilians and “be prepared to use military force” against the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad.
“Trump has been openly contemptuous of positions Pence was taking,” said Matthew Waxman, a senior Bush State Department and Pentagon official now at Columbia Law School. “Maybe this was intended to placate mainstream Republicans who are offended by Trump’s positions or ignorance. But there’s no reason to expect that Pence would have any real effect on a Trump foreign policy.”
“This is not just an issue of politics but of national security. That Trump and his running mate can’t even tell a consistent story on the most significant foreign policy challenges shows that a Trump administration would be unable to communicate effectively with adversaries and allies,” added Waxman, who has also declared he cannot vote for Trump.
Trump’s views on Russia and the Middle East have been central reasons why leading Republican national security insiders have refused to support him. But during the night’s discussions about Russia and Syria, Pence was far more in sync with the conservative foreign policy establishment.
Citing growing Russian aggression outside its borders in recent years, for instance, Pence said: “The provocations by Russia need to be met by American strength.” He later added that the U.S. should deploy a missile defense system in Eastern Europe to counter Russia.
A couple of years ago, those would have been boilerplate Republican talking points, ones frequently offered by the GOP’s 2012 nominee, Mitt Romney. But in the context of Trump’s views about Russia they were almost startling.
Trump has consistently argued that the U.S. should try to cooperate with, not confront, Moscow. “I’m not going to tell Putin what to do. Why would I tell him what to do?” Trump said in late July. “Why do I have to get tough on Putin?”
Nor has Trump called Putin anything like “small and bullying,” a phrase Pence repeated twice on Tuesday, suggesting a calculated effort to differentiate himself from his running mate. To the contrary, Trump has called Putin a “strong leader” and sought to personally befriend him. When Trump brought his Miss Universe contest to Moscow in 2013, he invited Putin to attend the pageant, asking on Twitter, “will he become my new best friend?”
Trump has maintained that friendly tone as a presidential candidate, expressing pleasure when Putin complimented him last year as “impressive,” and saying with approval that the Russian has “strong control” over his country.
“I think I would have a very, very good relationship with Putin,” Trump said at a September candidate forum. “And I think I would have a very, very good relationship with Russia.”
Pence’s call for creating safe zones in Syria, which Pentagon planners say could entail a major military operation, and possibility even striking Assad’s forces, bore little resemblance to Trump’s past statements about Syria and the Middle East.
Trump has repeatedly criticized US interventions in the region, saying that American action to oust Arab dictators like Saddam Hussein and Muammar Qadhafi have only wasted billions of dollars and created new terrorist threats.
On Syria, Trump has said the U.S. should resist choosing sides in the conflict. “Assad is bad,” Trump told The Guardian in October, saying of Syrian rebels the U.S has supported: “Maybe these people could be worse.” In May, Trump said on MSNBC that he would have “stayed out of Syria” were he already president, and, when asked if that meant he would not “go into Syria” in the future he replied, “Right.”
GOP campaign veterans struggled to remember a time when a vice presidential nominee broke so clearly with his or her running mate. Stuart Stevens, a senior advisor to Romney’s 2012 campaign, recalled that, in a 2000 vice presidential debate, Dick Cheney split with the GOP platform and with George W. Bush when he said that gay marriage was a matter that should be left to the states, not banned by federal law.
But that was an isolated issue, albeit a major one at the time. And Cheney had a compelling personal reason for the break: his daughter, Mary, is gay.
And unlike Pence, who denied that Trump had flattered Putin, “there was no attempt [by Cheney] to say there are not two different opinions,” Stevens said.
Stevens also noted that in recent cases where nominees with little foreign policy experience selected running mates to burnish their credentials—Cheney in 2000 and Joe Biden in 2008—the ticket did not offer different opinions on core issues.
“The difference here is that the disparity of opinions of what should be done is so large. No one talked in 2000 about a Cheney foreign policy versus a George W. Bush foreign policy. And the same with Biden,” he said.
By some accounts, however, Cheney did wind up exerting strong influence over Bush’s foreign policy, including his response to the September 11 attacks.
But Stevens said no one should count on Pence exerting such an influence.
“No one will assert, I think rightly, that the vice president’s opinions will dominate the presidency,” he said. After seeing a vision of what a more traditional Republican presidential nominee might sound like, he said, “I think a lot of conservatives are just kind of groaning.”