Paul Wood recently talked with Ben Carson, and he tried to pin him down on policy specifics to no avail. Here is their exchange on Carson’s plan for the war on ISIS:

‘Would you send troops?’

‘There are a lot of things that are available to us.’

‘Such as?’

‘There’s no way I would ever make it public.’

I don’t know how that answer could possibly satisfy anyone, especially when Carson has just finished declaring wrongly that ISIS is an “existential threat” to the U.S. Carson’s judgment of the threat from ISIS is wrong, but if he seriously imagines the threat to be this great he ought to have more to say about how he intends “not only to contain them but to eliminate them.” Like Trump, Carson avoids making specific commitments that he might be asked to defend. That may keep him from alienating any supporters in the near term, but eventually the absence of any policy agenda is going to be a major problem for him.

As Wood explains, Carson says that “there will soon be detailed policy announcements” beginning with foreign policy and the military, but for the time being this is just another way to evade the question. He has so far been able to get away with this because no one really expects his campaign to go the distance, but as a candidate he is still obliged to spell out what he would be expected to do in the unlikely event that he is elected president. His rhetoric is often so aggressive that it implies that he favors a major escalation of the war in Iraq and Syria. He says that the U.S. needs to “use every resource available to us” against ISIS. If he means that, that would make him even more hawkish on this war than Graham. If that’s the case, that needs to be made clear to his supporters and to all Republican voters.