Follow us on social

Stand-together

Nikki Haley's 'American Strength' manifesto is more weak hawk sauce

The group is a who's who of discredited hardliners who haven't had an original foreign policy idea in 20 years.

Analysis | Washington Politics

A new Republican advocacy group, Stand for America, recently released a “policy book” outlining its views on both domestic and foreign policy. But the foreign policy views contained in this “book” are a grab bag of conventional hawkish nostrums. Moreover, the contents of the foreign policy section read like a litany of propaganda talking points focused on railing against China, Russia, and Iran, all of which are painted simply as rapacious enemies bent on conquest and destruction. 

The group’s stark Manichean rhetoric seems like a throwback to the earliest days of the “war on terror,” complete with references to clashes of civilizations and combating barbarism. The contributors themselves are mostly a Who’s Who of discredited hard-liners — beginning with the organization’s founder, former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley. The roster goes on to include President Trump’s National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster, former ambassador to Israel David Friedman, and Christians United for Israel (CUFI) president John Hagee. 

The heavy representation of former Trump officials is a reminder of just how hawkish the Trump administration’s foreign policy was, demonstrating how little change there has been in Republican thinking on foreign policy over the last five years. 

Haley sets the aggressive tone in her introduction to the foreign policy section: “On the one side is freedom, embodied in America. On the other side is tyranny — brutal, barbaric tyranny. We face enemies who don’t just want to defeat us. They want to destroy our way of life and bring the world back to the Dark Ages.” One might have thought that the last 20 years of fruitless crusading would have killed off such simplistic ideological zealotry, but the many failures of hawkish policies seem only to have made Haley and her allies more confrontational. 

Haley claims that China “is striving to control and conquer the world,” and warns that Iran is “plotting” terrible things against America. Her discussion of these countries never rises above reflexive vilification. She also casts Russia as “more aggressive” and concludes that Russia “won’t stop until it starts paying a steep price.” It never occurs to her to ask whether imposing that steep price serves U.S. interests. It is taken for granted that inflicting punishment is desirable. 

Meanwhile, H.R. McMaster merely restates his boilerplate arguments on China. According to him, U.S. policies have nothing to do with anything China does, and he rejects the idea that any of our policies in the region have increased tensions. He derides critics of a new Cold War by accusing them of strategic narcissism when he is the one incapable of understanding how anyone else sees the world. As the Quincy Institute’s Ethan Paul has explained before, McMaster doesn’t understand China or the concepts of strategic empathy or strategic narcissism, and those same errors crop up again here. He wrongly claims that critics of more aggressive policies toward China “attribute causality to us [the United States] alone.” It is much more accurate to say that McMaster refuses for ideological reasons to acknowledge that U.S. policies can sometimes backfire and provoke dangerous reactions from other states. 

Rep. Michael Waltz, a Republican Congressman from Florida, has quickly emerged as one of the most strident hawks since he was first elected in 2018. He recites a familiar list of complaints about withdrawal from Afghanistan, including the bizarre objection that evacuating Bagram air base deprives the U.S. of the ability to threaten China from the west. Some of his strongest objections to the withdrawal are that it will make it more difficult to start new wars. He laments that Iran “no longer fears a U.S. attack on its eastern flank,” as if there were a legitimate reason to be attacking Iran from any direction. Waltz repeats his call to designate the Taliban as a foreign terrorist organization, which would compound the already severe humanitarian and economic crises that Afghanistan now faces. He says that the U.S. should not turn its back on the Afghan people, and then proposes to wage economic war on them.

David Friedman’s contribution on Iran may be the most misleading of all. He repeats many false claims that the Trump administration has made about the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, and he echoes bad faith criticisms of the agreement that have been circulating for more than six years. At one point, he sneaks in a blatant falsehood when he says that “the deal was intended to slow down the Iranian nuclear weapons program” when Iran didn’t and doesn’t have a nuclear weapons program. Friedman doesn’t acknowledge the sweeping and far-reaching demands that the Trump administration made as part of the failed “maximum pressure” campaign, which he risibly calls “Donald Trump’s campaign of strength.” 

Naturally, Friedman doesn’t admit that it was “maximum pressure” and Israeli sabotage efforts that have driven the expansion of Iran’s nuclear program over the last two years, and he has nothing to say about the serious hardships that sanctions have created for tens of millions of ordinary Iranians. To create a sharper contrast with Biden, he wrongly describes the president as “desperate to overturn the Trump administration’s Iran policy and revitalize the JCPOA.” It would be wonderful if Biden’s Iran policy were different enough from his predecessor’s to merit such a description, but that isn’t true, either.

If all that weren’t enough to read like a parody of a hawkish argument, Friedman declares, “Iran is an evil empire that respects only strength.” This is the same crude thinking that brought the U.S. and Iran to the brink of war more than once during Trump’s presidency, and it will take us to the same place again if these views shape policy in a future administration.

John Hagee’s submission isn’t really a policy argument so much as it is a paean to the supposed virtues of the U.S.-Israel relationship, whose importance Hagee, the head of CUFI, can’t help but exaggerate. To call his article a whitewash of the Israeli government’s conduct doesn’t do justice to how uncritical his expressions of support and admiration are. He asserts that “Israelis value human and civil rights,” but of course does not so much as mention the millions of Palestinians whose rights are routinely violated and denied under Israeli rule. That is not surprising coming from an ideologue as extreme as Hagee, but Hagee’s inclusion in this group reflects how extreme this new organization is on issues related to Israel.

Unsurprisingly for a document called “American Strength,” the main emphasis in almost all the entries is on coercion and military power. When diplomacy does come up, it is only so the contributors can dismiss and denigrate it as foolhardy and a waste of time. If someone wanted to find the antithesis of foreign policy realism and restraint distilled into one collection of articles, this “book” would be a good candidate. The good news for advocates of restraint is that the arguments contained in it are exceptionally weak and they shouldn’t appeal to many people except other hard-liners.


From left: David Friedman (Credit:US Ambassador to Israel); Nikki Haley (Gage Skidmore/Flickr); H.R. McMaster (Munich Security Conference 2018/Flickr)
Analysis | Washington Politics
Recep Tayyip Erdogan Benjamin Netanyahu
Top photo credit: President of Turkey Recep Tayyip Erdogan (Shutterstock/ Mustafa Kirazli) and Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu (Salty View/Shutterstock)
Is Turkey's big break with Israel for real?

Why Israel is now turning its sights on Turkey

Middle East

As the distribution of power shifts in the region, with Iran losing relative power and Israel and Turkey emerging on top, an intensified rivalry between Tel Aviv and Ankara is not a question of if, but how. It is not a question of whether they choose the rivalry, but how they choose to react to it: through confrontation or peaceful management.

As I describe in Treacherous Alliance, a similar situation emerged after the end of the Cold War: The collapse of the Soviet Union dramatically changed the global distribution of power, and the defeat of Saddam's Iraq in the Persian Gulf War reshuffled the regional geopolitical deck. A nascent bipolar regional structure took shape with Iran and Israel emerging as the two main powers with no effective buffer between them (since Iraq had been defeated). The Israelis acted on this first, inverting the strategy that had guided them for the previous decades: The Doctrine of the Periphery. According to this doctrine, Israel would build alliances with the non-Arab states in its periphery (Iran, Turkey, and Ethiopia) to balance the Arab powers in its vicinity (Iraq, Syria, and Egypt, respectively).

keep readingShow less
Havana, Cuba
Top Image Credit: Havana, Cuba, 2019. (CLWphoto/Shutterstock)

Trump lifted sanctions on Syria. Now do Cuba.

North America

President Trump’s new National Security Presidential Memorandum (NSPM) on Cuba, announced on June 30, reaffirms the policy of sanctions and hostility he articulated at the start of his first term in office. In fact, the new NSPM is almost identical to the old one.

The policy’s stated purpose is to “improve human rights, encourage the rule of law, foster free markets and free enterprise, and promote democracy” by restricting financial flows to the Cuban government. It reaffirms Trump’s support for the 1996 Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity Act, which explicitly requires regime change — that Cuba become a multiparty democracy with a free market economy (among other conditions) before the U.S. embargo will be lifted.

keep readingShow less
SPD Germany Ukraine
Top Photo: Lars Klingbeil (l-r, SPD), Federal Minister of Finance, Vice-Chancellor and SPD Federal Chairman, and Bärbel Bas (SPD), Federal Minister of Labor and Social Affairs and SPD Party Chairwoman, bid farewell to the members of the previous Federal Cabinet Olaf Scholz (SPD), former Federal Chancellor, Nancy Faeser, Saskia Esken, SPD Federal Chairwoman, Karl Lauterbach, Svenja Schulze and Hubertus Heil at the SPD Federal Party Conference. At the party conference, the SPD intends to elect a new executive committee and initiate a program process. Kay Nietfeld/dpa via Reuters Connect

Does Germany’s ruling coalition have a peace problem?

Europe

Surfacing a long-dormant intra-party conflict, the Friedenskreise (peace circles) within the Social Democratic Party of Germany has published a “Manifesto on Securing Peace in Europe” in a stark challenge to the rearmament line taken by the SPD leaders governing in coalition with the conservative CDU-CSU under Chancellor Friedrich Merz.

Although the Manifesto clearly does not have broad support in the SPD, the party’s leader, Deputy Chancellor and Finance Minister Lars Klingbeil, won only 64% support from the June 28-29 party conference for his performance so far, a much weaker endorsement than anticipated. The views of the party’s peace camp may be part of the explanation.

keep readingShow less

LATEST

QIOSK

Newsletter

Subscribe now to our weekly round-up and don't miss a beat with your favorite RS contributors and reporters, as well as staff analysis, opinion, and news promoting a positive, non-partisan vision of U.S. foreign policy.