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Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

Foreign Policy Experience and the 2016 Republican Field

Almost all of the likely candidates have never shown much interest in foreign policy.
Jeb Bush CPAC

Dan Drezner picked up on the report on Jeb Bush I commented on yesterday, and made some interesting observations about the GOP’s 2016 field:

Second, the wealth of 2016 GOP contenders will make it difficult for the foreign policy folk to congregate around one particular candidate. This is not going to be like the 2000 campaign, when George W. Bush essentially co-opted all of his father’s foreign policy advisers. Bush was able to compensate for his own deficit of foreign policy experience by pointing to the surfeit of it from his confidantes [bold mine-DL]. No single candidate will have that option this time around during the invisible primary stage.

That could be right, but my guess is that foreign policy professionals from the last administration are much more likely to gravitate to the so-called
“establishment” candidates, and of those the one named Bush seems to be the one most of them would be interested in backing. The fact that almost all of the likely candidates have virtually identical foreign policy views makes it very difficult for hawkish advisers to pick and choose between them on foreign policy grounds. If you’re a hawk and are looking to advise a presidential candidate (and presumably hoping to land a related job in a future Republican administration), which talking-point-reciting governor do you support? You have many choices, but going with a long-shot (Pence, Jindal, Walker) is risky and going with a has-been (Huckabee) or an also-ran (Perry) probably means being passed over by the eventual nominee. So Bush will probably be swamped by people eager to advise him, and most of the other campaigns are going to be taking whoever is left. Most likely advisers in the GOP won’t work for Paul for real or imagined ideological reasons, and Bush’s campaign makes a Rubio candidacy a non-starter even if Rubio isn’t willing to admit to this publicly.

The candidates’ lack of relevant experience is important, but more important is the fact that almost all of the likely candidates have never shown much interest in these issues, either. The dearth of candidates interested in foreign policy issues is a problem for the GOP, and it’s also a problem for the country in the event that the Republican candidate prevails. As we should have learned from the first Bush campaign, being surrounded and advised by ostensibly competent people is no substitute for competence and understanding on the part of the candidate, and it is definitely no substitute for good judgment. George W. Bush made reassuring noises about having a “humble” foreign policy because he wasn’t looking to advertise his lack of experience and knowledge on this subject. The 2000 election was an election focused on domestic issues, and those were the issues Bush emphasized. Unlike Romney, he wasn’t eager to remind everyone that he had no clue what he was talking about. The 2012 election campaign was a good example of what happens when one of the nominees doesn’t “meet a minimum threshold of foreign policy/national security acumen” but thinks that he does. That should remind us that the GOP is perfectly capable of putting forward a nominee with a huge roster of foreign policy advisers without meeting that threshold. It is at great risk of doing this again because in order to be rated as “qualified” on these issues all that candidates have to do is to make the right aggressive-sounding noises about “strength” and “leadership.”

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