GOP Defense Hawks Take Flight

GOP Defense Hawks Take Flight

Republican hawks are embattled. The 2016 election will reveal whether they can go back on the attack, or whether a series of protracted conflicts abroad has finally rendered them impotent and obsolete.

SENATOR JOHN McCain can easily recall the stumble that he believes prompted allies and adversaries alike to question the firmness of American resolve. President Barack Obama planned to launch an offensive military strike against the Syrian regime for crossing his publicly declared “red line” against the use of chemical weapons. Lacking a UN Security Council resolution or even the support of close allies such as Great Britain, however, Obama wanted the backing of Congress. So the president invited his one-time political rival and frequent critic McCain to the Oval Office, along with Senator Lindsey Graham. Together they stand in for a once-reliable constituency of defense and foreign-policy hawks on Capitol Hill, and their active support would be critical in rallying a balky Congress to back military action.

“President Obama said he wanted to accomplish three goals: degrading the capability of the Assad regime, upgrading the position of the Free Syrian Army and changing the momentum on the battlefield against Assad,” McCain told me in a telephone interview. “The president said he would do what was necessary to get that done.” Thus assured, Graham and McCain met with reporters outside the White House and backed Obama’s planned use of military force in the strongest possible terms, setting the stage for the most consequential foreign-policy vote since the 2002 authorization for the Iraq War. “If President Obama is willing to make the case to the American people,” McCain said, then “I’m ready to go to my colleagues in the Congress and say, ‘Now’s the time for us to come together before it’s too late.’”

And yet Congress did not come together. The Congress and the country that the Obama administration and its unlikely allies tried to rally behind forceful action in Syria last year were far different from the vengeful superpower that fixed Saddam Hussein in its crosshairs a decade ago following the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Two of the longest, most costly and most unsatisfying wars in the nation’s history, combined with the Great Recession, had seen to that. An Associated Press poll in September 2013 indicated that a majority of Democrats (53 percent) wanted Congress to reject their own party’s commander in chief in his call for military strikes on Syria. Remarkably, 73 percent of Republicans also wanted Congress to oppose the president’s call to action.

Why did Congress fail to rally behind the president? One obvious reason was that after the fiasco in Iraq and the country’s longest war in Afghanistan, the American public was skittish about another military intervention in the Middle East. Another is that there were few, if any, hawkish Democrats left to buck public opinion. And in the Republican Party, the wings of traditional defense hawks have been clipped by Tea Party legislators. Republican neoconservatives generally supportive of calls for military action have been marginalized within the caucus, not only by controversies surrounding the Iraq War, but also by the electoral defeats of McCain in 2008 and Mitt Romney in 2012, both of whom espoused platforms of aggressive U.S. leadership, peace through military strength and “American exceptionalism.” In an era of hyperpartisanship, it’s also true that fewer and fewer lawmakers can resist the temptation to take a shot at the commander in chief from the opposing party.

As a result of those trends and political currents, Congress appeared ready to reject Obama’s request for authority to use military force last September, with an unlikely coalition of antiwar Democrats and partisan Republicans appearing especially strong in the House. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi was forced to argue that Obama really didn’t need congressional approval to use military force after all. Faced with the prospect of acting unilaterally without even the support of a majority in Congress, Obama himself retreated from his own “red line” and accepted a last-minute deal proffered by Moscow.

McCain learned of Obama’s U-turn on the television news. “President Obama informed us of his commitment to act militarily in Syria, and then I had to find out secondhand he revoked that commitment. That had never happened to me before,” said McCain, sounding more disappointed and saddened than angry. Meanwhile, McCain’s own party agreed to take the Pentagon hostage during the fierce budget battles of recent years, then was complicit in shooting the captive with the imposition of across-the-board spending caps known as sequestration. Some Republicans have joined the Democratic Left in railing against the National Security Agency’s surveillance methods and data collection, and out of partisan pique Republicans recently delayed passing a bill to aid Ukraine even as Russian troops were annexing Crimea by force. And Senator Rand Paul rose to prominence in large part based on a thirteen-hour filibuster he gave last year against drone operations, during which he conjured an American dystopia of the future where U.S. presidents target civilians sitting in neighborhood cafes with Hellfire missiles. Since then, McCain has been reduced to pleading futilely for weaponry for Ukraine. It’s a far cry from Iraq, when McCain, together with Graham and former senator Joseph Lieberman, could successfully push a hawkish agenda.

 

THE FLIGHT of the defense hawks, and the seeds of Washington’s current political dysfunction on issues of foreign and defense policy, can be traced all the way back to the end of the Cold War. The disappearance of the Soviet Union as a monolithic threat sounded the death knell for the foreign-policy consensus behind anti-Communist containment and U.S. global leadership, a consensus that had survived for nearly half a century and defined America’s activist role in the world. Its dissolution left both parties ideologically adrift, but as the party most invested in anti-Communism and a strong defense, Republicans were arguably more lost.

Republican cold warrior George H. W. Bush, the hero of the lopsided victory in the 1991 Gulf War, was thus defeated by a young upstart Democrat named Bill Clinton, who ran on the mantra “It’s the economy, stupid.” In the eyes of many Republicans, Bush 41’s cardinal sin was to break his “no new taxes” pledge, and thus a tax-cutting orthodoxy began to eclipse the solidly prodefense plank of Ronald Reagan’s legacy. Indeed, the “Contract with America” that Republicans used as a blueprint to capture the House in 1994 hardly mentioned foreign or defense policy, other than supporting Reagan’s dreams of a missile shield.

Meanwhile, an American public battered by recession and saddled with the massive debt left by the Reagan-Bush years demanded and got a “peace dividend” that reduced defense spending by roughly 30 percent during the 1990s, making them difficult years for prodefense stalwarts in either party.

Gingrich’s “Republican Revolution” also changed the political dynamic in Washington in important ways. A populist movement that gained much of its momentum from reactions against Clinton’s attempt to establish a national health-care system, it was led by Gingrich, Trent Lott, Dick Armey and Tom DeLay. Part of Gingrich’s genius was to envision ways to demarcate the boundaries of “red” and “blue” America that favored a Republican majority in Congress. He masterfully pushed hot-button issues touching on “God, guns and gays” to appeal to the innate social conservatism of the South and Mountain West. The Republican caucus was, in turn, reshaped by the values and worldviews of those regions, especially as embodied by Christian evangelicals who were a bedrock of the new Republican base.

During that initial post–Cold War period, two strains of thought in foreign and defense policy struggled for supremacy in a Republican Party in opposition. Some leading Republicans like Pat Buchanan embraced an isolationism that traced back to Henry Cabot Lodge and Warren Harding, which culminated in Republican support for the Neutrality Act of 1935, legislation designed to keep the United States out of World War II. Vying for influence with the isolationists were Republican neoconservatives, who embraced a values-based approach to foreign policy which held that America has a special calling to promote the spread of democracy and liberty in the world, and that U.S. military power must be unsurpassed in order that evil empires and nations could be confronted and defeated, not accommodated. Many of the neoconservatives were former Democrats in the vein of Henry “Scoop” Jackson, moderate on social issues but ardently anti-Communist. Disturbed by the sway of the antiwar movement on the Democratic Party in the 1970s and 1980s, these defense hawks migrated to Ronald Reagan’s Republican Party, contributing to their gradual decline in the Democratic Party.

As House Speaker, Gingrich also gathered the reins of power closely to his leadership circle, lessening the influence of committee chairmen, a shift in the balance of power that continued under Democratic leadership. Gingrich abandoned the tradition that seniority would determine committee chairmanships, elevating his chosen candidates to committee chairs ahead of old bulls that had been patiently waiting in line—and accumulating expertise—on their chosen committees.

Perhaps most importantly, because he owed his own ascent to a successful campaign to bring down former House Speaker Jim Wright on ethics charges, Gingrich embodied a hyperpartisan, take-no-prisoners approach to politics that has taken root in the loamy soil of post–Cold War Washington. Many centrists and moderates from both parties who had little stomach for the divisiveness such tactics ensured were driven away from national politics, hollowing out the center of American politics and in some cases depriving Congress of deep expertise on foreign and defense policies, and of its institutional memory.

After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, prominent neoconservatives within the administration of George W. Bush won the internal argument on foreign and defense policy within the Republican Party, and America went looking for dragons to slay. High on the neoconservative hit list ever since the Gulf War of 1991 was Iraq’s Saddam Hussein.

Add in the myriad tragedies and controversies of the Iraq War, a Great Recession and the accumulated baggage of another decade of partisan warfare, and you arrive at a postwar political landscape in Washington that looks eerily familiar. That suggests that the flight of the defense hawks could be partly cyclical, a natural phenomenon in periods of postwar military retrenchment. However, the fact that the two parties are fighting the same ideological battles over the same bitterly contested national-security turf more than two decades after the end of the Cold War could also mean that forging a consensus on America’s role in the world, and the military required to support it, is simply beyond Washington’s grasp.

Consider that a Republican Party in opposition that is home to most of the remaining reliable defense hawks is once again fighting an internecine war between its libertarian and neoconservative wings, for instance, even as it opposes a Democrat in the White House at nearly every turn. Downsized committee chairmen are even less able to buck leadership and protect national-security fiefdoms. The abandonment of “earmarks” has decreased the allure of serving on defense-related committees, where in the past largesse from the Pentagon budget could be more easily funneled to home districts. The two parties are even more polarized on Capitol Hill, with prodefense Southern conservatives having largely disappeared from the Democratic Party, even as liberal internationalists and probusiness realists from the Northeast and West Coast have largely left the Republican Party. Once again, a war-weary American public is demanding a peace dividend.

And, once again, traditional defense hawks have taken flight before a shockwave election.

 

WHEN REPUBLICANS swept back into the majority in the House in 2010 on the crest of a populist Tea Party wave, everyone understood that these small-government revolutionaries would pull the party to the right on domestic issues. The question on the minds of foreign-policy and defense experts in Washington was on which side of the traditional Republican Party divide between neoconservatives and realist internationalists the Tea Partiers would fall. Traditional defense hawks hoped that the “Don’t Tread on Me” pugnaciousness and nationalism of these new members would translate naturally into support for a strong defense and muscular foreign policy. To date, they have been sorely disappointed.

In the budget battles between the Obama administration and congressional Republicans that ensued, it soon became clear that in their fervor to rein in spending and shrink the size of the federal government, Tea Party Republicans were perfectly willing to target the Defense Department for disproportionate cuts.

“It’s perplexing to someone accustomed to Republicans who tended to bend over backward for business, but perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that a GOP which sees big government as a threat might also view a big military posture and big defense companies as a manifestation of that threat,” said Loren Thompson, a defense consultant and chief operating officer of the Lexington Institute. Indeed, much of the GOP’s populist energy has come from new lawmakers who firmly believe that the United States should stop being the world’s policeman and social worker, and focus on fixing what’s broken at home. On those points, and perhaps only on those points, the Tea Partiers share a common view with many Democrats on Capitol Hill.

Indeed, when the White House proposed sequestration in 2011 as a way out of a bitter impasse over raising the debt ceiling, it did so with the mistaken expectation that prodefense Republicans would stop the caucus from pulling the trigger on across-the-board reductions of more than $500 billion in defense spending (on top of $500 billion in cuts already imposed by the Obama administration over ten years). According to Bob Woodward’s book The Price of Politics, White House staffers sold the idea to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid by reasoning that a sequester would be so destructive that nobody would allow it to happen.

The idea embedded in the Budget Control Act was that a “supercommittee” would find $1.2 trillion worth of cuts over a ten-year period, split between “security” and “nonsecurity” spending (entitlements exempted), and thus avoid automatic, across-the-board cuts of the same magnitude. Perhaps sensing which way the political winds were blowing—with Tea Party challengers successfully defeating reliably conservative Republicans by running to their right in primaries—the Republican leadership failed to assign to the supercommittee prominent prodefense lawmakers who might have protected the Pentagon’s interests. In fact, not one of the six Republican or six Democratic lawmakers appointed to the supercommittee served on the Senate or House Armed Services Committees. Republican leaders decided that small-government, tax-cutting stalwarts and Tea Party favorites such as Jeb Hensarling and Pat Toomey took priority. Not surprisingly, the bipartisan supercommittee failed to reach a consensus, sequestration was triggered and the Defense Department took the brunt of the blast.

 

THE DEFENSE cuts associated with sequestration have been criticized by top U.S. military leaders in terms that in previous times would have been considered alarming in the extreme, and yet no one seems to be listening. Lifelong Republicans and Secretaries of Defense Robert Gates and Chuck Hagel have both raised the alarm, with Hagel recently warning that they put at risk “America’s traditional role as a guarantor of global security, and ultimately our own security.” General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has said that U.S. military forces are on a path of steep decline that, unless reversed, will reach a point where “it would be immoral” to use that force. One defense hawk who takes such warnings seriously is Representative Buck McKeon, chairman of the once-powerful House Armed Services Committee. He recently noted that the bipartisan budget deal reached by Senator Patty Murray and Representative Paul Ryan averted for two years the “arbitrary gutting” of the armed forces, but it will still require a $45 billion cut to the military.

“I share the broad dismay about the shrinking might of the military reflected in this budget,” he said in response to the Defense Department’s most recent budget submission, which will produce the smallest U.S. Army since before World War II, and doesn’t even try to stay within the sequester caps that remain the law of the land, and which kick in again in 2016. While McKeon believes the buck for the Pentagon’s predicament ultimately stops on President Obama’s desk, he also knows that Republicans have been complicit in the rapid decline in the Pentagon’s fortunes. “If we don’t like the tough choices on the table, then shame on us as Republicans for following the President down this path,” he said in a statement.

As if to drive home how out of step such prodefense sentiments are in today’s Republican Party, the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal said “defense hawks” like McKeon “exaggerate how severe the cuts [in military spending] are,” and it criticized him for leading a “rebellion” of said hawks in an “act of masochism” that threatens the cherished sequester spending caps.

For his part, McKeon is retiring at the end of his current term, as are Senator Carl Levin, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee; Senator Saxby Chambliss, ranking member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence; and Representative Mike Rogers, chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. All these men were reliably supportive of a strong defense and assertive U.S. global leadership. Until recent years, this faction also included notables like Joseph Lieberman, Jim Webb, Richard Lugar, Bob Bennett, Ike Skelton and Norm Dicks.

Whether it’s the diminished power that comes from wielding a chairman’s gavel in the modern Congress, the tilt of both parties away from the center and toward their respective extremes, or the increased levels of partisan vitriol and the government gridlock that goes with it, there is clearly something about politics in Washington today that is driving away many serious lawmakers. They take decades of expertise and institutional memory out the door with them, in many cases in the realms of defense and national-security policy. To understand why they might find politics as currently practiced in Washington distasteful, consider last year’s confirmation hearings for former senator Chuck Hagel, nominated to serve as secretary of defense. During the hearings, Tea Party favorite Senator Ted Cruz implied that Hagel, a Vietnam War veteran and recipient of two Purple Hearts, might be taking speaking fees from extremist groups or foreign governments like North Korea. He offered no evidence.

 

AFTER YEARS in the political wilderness as a result of their close association with the Iraq War, Republican neoconservatives, whose view of America’s role in the world most closely comports with a prodefense agenda, were poised to make a comeback with the election of Mitt Romney as president in 2012. At the suggestions of hawkish advisers, Romney espoused Ronald Reagan’s philosophy of peace through military strength, proposing to maintain wartime levels of ground forces, accelerate modernization of the air force and significantly expand the size of the navy. To pay for this military buildup, Romney promised to spend at least 4 percent of GDP on defense each year, which would have added more than $2 trillion in defense spending over Obama’s plans for the next decade.

Unfortunately for Romney and his backers, a war-weary American public already saddled with $16 trillion in national debt just wasn’t buying.

With potential Republican presidential candidates beginning to position themselves for the 2016 election, however, some defense hawks are returning to the party nest. In recent speeches and comments Ted Cruz has embraced more muscular foreign-policy positions, publicly differentiating himself from the views of Rand Paul. So has Senator Marco Rubio, who hired Jamie Fly, a former head of William Kristol’s Foreign Policy Initiative, as his foreign-affairs aide. At the same time, the House recently passed Paul Ryan’s budget calling for increases in defense spending. And in a recent speech at the Virginia Military Institute, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor issued a full-throated call for renewed American leadership in the world, arguing that allies today “see a divided, inward-looking America that is focused on its weaknesses rather than its strengths, and they know this is an America that invites challenges and emboldens adversaries.”

But it is Rand Paul who is most forcefully challenging such stances. As a result, Paul has come under attack from not just McCain but also a phalanx of neocons and conservatives. Rich Lowry, the editor of National Review, attacked Paul for “dewy-eyed foolishness” about foreign affairs. In a recent op-ed in National Review, Paul responded. He took issue with what he called “today’s young aspiring Buckleyites,” who “sharpen their knives to carve up conservatives who propose a more realist and nuanced approach to foreign policy.” William F. Buckley Jr., Paul said, was more of a realist than a crusading interventionist, and conservatism has long had a “strain of libertarianism.” So the battle between the two sides has now been joined. The 2016 election will likely reveal whether the hawks can once more go on the attack against the realists, or whether a series of protracted conflicts abroad has finally rendered them impotent and obsolete.

 

James Kitfield is a senior fellow at the Center for the Study of the Presidency and Congress and a contributing editor at National Journal.

Image: ВО Свобода - День Гідності, CC BY-SA 3.0.