Well, indeed we did. I recently complained, rather at length, at the failure of the U.S. political system to generate a meaningful discussion of U.S. foreign policy, noting that, for the past several decades, we’ve been allowed to choose between “idealistic” hawks like Hillary Clinton and, well, shotgun-wielding freaks. But just before the holidays, both the Republican and the Democratic debates featured at least semi-coherent statements from Donald Trump (yes, Donald Trump), Ted Cruz (yes, Ted Cruz), Rand Paul (thankfully returning to pre-ISIS form), and, on the Democratic side, Bernie Sanders, though he’d rather talk about the horrors of global capitalism.
That’s the good news. The bad news is that Trump and Cruz, when they aren’t arguing against regime change, are talking bloody nonsense, while Paul and Sanders don’t stand a chance of winning the nomination of their parties. Trump doesn’t want to topple governments in the Middle East. He just wants to “steal their oil,” which I guess would involve temporarily enslaving Middle Eastern populations to pump the oil for us for free. Cruz, on the other hand, is simply advocating “carpet bombing” as the solution to our problems, although he really doesn’t know what that means, except that he’d do it in a way that would ensure that only bad guys got killed.
As I’ve said before, Trump, if he won the nomination, would probably wreck the Republican Party. Cruz would certainly damage it. Any man who uses “neocon” as an epithet is not going to be welcome to the Republican establishment, though one can imagine that, when push comes to shove, both Ted and the neocons could find some common ground. After all, they both hate the Iran deal.
At this point in time, it appears that only Rubio has a chance of heading off Cruz, and Marco is the most conventionally neocon of all the Republican candidates, the real Bush III. He can be more Bush than Jeb, because he doesn’t bear the burden of the name! Hillary, in the meantime, is positioning herself to run to the right of Trump or Cruz, and shoulder to shoulder with Rubio. It is, frankly, tragic that our presumptive Democratic nominee regards regime change, aka “invasion”, as her first foreign policy option.
Afterwords
For Hillary, the fact that regime change has been a disaster in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya only proves that we haven’t been trying hard enough. Fourth time’s the charm! Probably!
