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Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

Syria and the 2016 Race

The leading candidates don't appear to be willing to commit the U.S. to a new ground war.
Donald Trump podium

Dan Drezner noticed that three of the top presidential candidates have refused to support using ground forces against ISIS in the weeks following the Paris attacks:

As Cruz’s comments suggest, Clinton is still somewhat more hawkish on Syria than either of the two leading GOP candidates. But still, what’s interesting is that in the wake of the Paris attacks, the leading candidates in both parties have put firm limits on any U.S. military response to the Islamic State.

Drezner is right that the Paris attacks seem to have had no discernible effect on the race or the candidates’ positions. If there has been an effect, it has been different from the one that hawks expected (and wanted). The candidates considered to be the “serious” ones on foreign policy (Rubio, Bush, Kasich, Christie) have not received the boost from the attacks that hawks anticipated, and instead on the Republican side the demagogues have been making gains with aggressive rhetoric that doesn’t commit them to doing very much. Cruz has arguably become more vocally critical of the emerging bipartisan Syria consensus since the attacks than he was before. All that suggests that the public still has little appetite for deeper involvement in Syria.

The notable thing about this trio of candidates is that Clinton favors the most aggressive–and reckless–Syria policy of the three. On other issues, one could rightly see Trump and Cruz as being much more aggressive and combative on foreign policy, but on Syria they appear to be less so in certain respects. While Trump and Cruz profess to be great believers in the “bomb the hell out of them” approach, Clinton is willing to get the U.S. deeper into the Syrian civil war and like other Syria hawks wants the U.S. to fight people on both sides of that conflict at the same time. She backs the “no-fly zone” that Trump rejects and Cruz says makes no sense . However, like the previous Clinton administration she isn’t prepared to commit to waging a large ground war.

For his part, Cruz wants to “bomb them back to the stone age,” which implies a much more indiscriminate and destructive bombing campaign than we have seen over the last year. So there is good reason to think that both Trump and Cruz would favor fewer restrictions on the conduct of a military campaign against ISIS specifically than Clinton would. They think that this proves that the U.S. is “taking the gloves off” and that appeals to their idea of what American “strength” is. All three are willing to be more aggressive–and stupidly so–than the administration, but none of them is eager to endorse sending large numbers of Americans to fight and die in a war where the U.S. still really has nothing at stake. The good news about the 2016 race is that the leading candidates don’t appear to be willing to commit the U.S. to a new ground war. The bad news is that they’re still perfectly happy to escalate the war on ISIS in several other ways.

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