Last week, U.S. Congressman Paul Ryan gave a foreign-policy speech
to the Alexander Hamilton Society in Washington, D.C. (full disclosure: I am
the advisor to the Duke University chapter of the Hamilton Society). I think
the speech foreshadows one of the main foreign-policy questions that will haunt
the 2012 presidential campaign: Can the U.S. afford to be the global leader?
As I have already argued,
the 2012 foreign-policy debate will not be the same as 2008. There are many
reasons for this, but an important one is that Republicans are uncharacteristically
divided on foreign policy. Ron Paul was something of a gadfly in 2008, and he
still represents only a small fraction of the Republican Party, but his
isolationist arguments resonate among fiscal hawks today in a way that they
didn't only four years ago. War weariness and perhaps even a broader
"global-leadership weariness" is no longer the exclusive province of
Democrats. Candidates will be debating just how much the U.S. taxpayer should
be willing to pay to secure success in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and elsewhere
-- but the debate may be as lively within the parties as between them.
Ryan's speech is an important marker in that debate. He has
impeccable credentials as a deficit hawk, having offered the most serious and
comprehensive fiscal plan of any political leader. It is a bold plan, so bold
that it may ask for sacrifices that the voters are unwilling to make. No one
can accuse Ryan of taking spending lightly.
Thus, one might predict that he would give a speech talking
about how, in this time of fiscal austerity, every program, even worthy
programs like defense, need to take "their share" of cuts in order to
balance the budget. That was not the thrust of the Ryan speech. On the
contrary, he talked about how the defense burden has already been declining as
a share of the federal budget and the national economy. And he quite clearly
singled out health-care expenditures as the principal driver of deficits, not
national security. He went on to criticize the deep cuts in defense spending
proposed by President Obama and made good use of Secretary Gates's acidic
critique of indiscriminate cuts -- "that's math, not strategy."
Ryan is not a declared presidential candidate, but he sure
sounds like someone weighing a presidential (or vice-presidential) run. In
policy terms, he is not staking out virgin territory: Tim Pawlenty and Mitt
Romney are two prominent declared candidates who have already made similar
arguments. But the polling suggests that Republican voters are still mostly
undecided, and while domestic policy and other issues (such as electability)
may be uppermost in the minds of primary voters, I suspect that the price of
U.S. global leadership is also affecting their calculations.
It will be interesting to see whether one of the other main Republican
candidates (besides Ron Paul) adopts more of a "cut defense" position
in an attempt to capture the anti-war wing of the Republican Party. That
wouldn't distinguish the candidate from Obama, but it would separate the
candidate from some of his or her most serious rivals for the Republican
nomination. It rarely turns out well for U.S. foreign policy when candidates
jockey for electoral advantage in this way, but it is hard for leaders to
resist the electoral pressure to do so. I expect that before the Republican
primaries are over, at least one major candidate will make a gesture in this
direction.
Read More
(5)
HIDE COMMENTS LOGIN OR REGISTER REPORT ABUSE