Michael Crowley reviews what we know about Jeb Bush’s foreign policy views:

For the moment, Bush has refrained from analyzing his own party and stuck to attacks on President Barack Obama. He has mocked Obama’s so-called “leading from behind” strategy and called for a stronger U.S. alliance with Israel and a tougher stance on Iran. All were familiar talking points in Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign [bold mine-DL].

This points to what might be Jeb Bush’s biggest weakness on foreign policy. Very much like Romney and like his brother during his first campaign, Bush is a relative novice and falls back on slogans to make up for the fact that he hasn’t spent much time on these issues. Like Romney, Bush sees to feel compelled to pander to his party’s hard-liners to demonstrate that he can be trusted, and he adopts these positions at least partly because it is the path of least resistance. Like any governor with no real foreign policy experience, he will probably be heavily influenced by his advisers. Unsurprisingly, as Crowley reports, “some of Bush’s most important allies within the GOP foreign policy establishment are closely associated with his brother,” which means that another Bush administration would bring back at least some of the people responsible for one of the worst foreign policy records in modern U.S. history.

By all accounts, Bush sees nothing wrong with what his party’s hard-liners have been selling and has no trouble agreeing with them. As Crowley notes, he was an early signatory on a letter for the Project for a New American Century (PNAC). Nothing he has said in the many years since then would make anyone think that he disagreed with his brother’s hard-line policies or with the party’s post-Bush hawks. Taken together, these things more or less guarantee that Bush will seek to please Republican hard-liners and will tend to rely on their counsel. Since that counsel is reliably terrible, another era of Bush foreign policy would be very costly and harmful to U.S. interests just as the last one was.