Foreign Policy in the 2016 Election

The thing about writing on foreign policy in this campaign is that there’s depressingly little to write about. Erik flagged the Counterpunch article below; while I think that any formulation of “Sanders could have done better if he’d hit Obama harder from the get go!” is laughably stupid, it was correct to make the point that Sanders did not dwell overmuch on Clinton’s most glaring foreign policy weaknesses.

And Donald… oh, Donald. It’s not just that Donald doesn’t seem to have a coherent foreign policy vision from moment to moment (we can safely ignore Rania Khalek on this point), it’s that he doesn’t even have the beginning of a coherent team. #NeverTrump has taken hold on both sides of the Neocon/Realist divide in GOP FP circles, probably to a greater extent than in domestic policy.

Anyway, I did write this bit on the defeat of Randy Forbes in the Virginia GOP primary. It’s an interesting event insofar as Forbes (quite conservative across the board) had worked hard to develop a strong expertise on Asia and defense issues, especially on the maritime side. Didn’t help, even in Virginia.

Forbes was a hugely important voice for the Navy on Capitol Hill. He published “A Conservative Case for Seapower,” which laid out an argument for why the Republican Party should concentrate its foreign and defense policy around maritime issues. He was generally an advocate for the Littoral Combat Ship, although he also favored heavy scrutiny for the program. He favored AirSea Battle and other projects for ensuring that the services worked effectively together in the Pacific, and argued that the U.S. Army should pursue land-attack cruise missiles as part of a system for controlling the PLAN’s access to the Second Island Chain.