OPINION:
For a number of years, some “intellectuals” or “elites” have been eager to identify themselves as foreign policy experts and to make sure that the rest of us defer to them, no matter how defective their judgment and how disastrous their policies.
It’s a bipartisan problem.
President Biden, who has been a foreign policy “expert” for 40 years or so, has managed to be wrong about just about everything in the realm of foreign policy. He was against the first war in Iraq, but in favor of the second. He opposed the mission to execute Osama bin Laden. In Afghanistan, he left our allies to die and our weapons to be used by the Taliban.
For reasons that have never been fully explained, he has joined the rush of the Democratic Party to the side of the Iranians in the contest for the Middle East. Even after the slaughter of innocents in Israel early this month — tolerated by and almost certainly sponsored by Iran — he talked about the need to preserve a Palestinian authority.
Bad news: We already have one, and it either supported or was unable to prevent the Hamas attacks on Israeli civilians in early October. So far, the Palestinian Authority has yet to issue a statement condemning the atrocities perpetrated by Hamas.
You’d think a president would know something like that.
It’s no better on the Republican side. Those who pushed us into the second Iraq war under false pretenses have never been held accountable. Republicans share responsibility for our loss in Afghanistan.
Most recently, the senior elected official in the Republican Party has made it his personal mission to ship the United States to Ukraine a dollar at a time, irrespective of whether that money is being well spent (some of it is not), whether it could do more to ensure U.S. security were it spent elsewhere (like our southern border), or whether anyone has any endgame in mind with respect to the conflict in Ukraine.
I mention all of this because in the wake of the Hamas attack on Israel, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley has taken the opportunity to remind everyone that she was U.S. ambassador to the United Nations for a couple of years, and that she consequently should be considered a foreign policy guru. Fair enough, although why anyone would insist on being associated with the dog’s breakfast of grifters, bureaucrats and charlatans that is the Republican foreign policy establishment is beyond me.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has taken a slightly different approach. He has tried — successfully — to get Americans home safely from Gaza and Israel, and has emphasized the personal nature of his sentiments about the latest round of violence in the Middle East.
That makes sense, given that Mr. DeSantis is among the 3 million or so Americans we have sent over to the sandbox in the last 20 years in a desperate attempt to validate the theories of our foreign policy elites.
For people like Mr. DeSantis — unlike Mr. Biden or Ms. Haley or former President Donald Trump — the shooting and killing and barbarism in the Middle East is not an abstraction. It is part of their memory, accessible to them at any moment they choose — and in some moments they do not choose. Their opinions about what to do in the region are not informed solely by deep thinkers thinking deep thoughts, but by hard-earned experience.
For instance, Mr. DeSantis has rightly suggested that Arab nations, rather than the United States, should host the refugees resulting from the Israeli attack on Gaza. Ms. Haley has said that we have always managed to draw a distinction between terrorists and civilians, meaning, one supposes, that we should get ready to embrace a few hundred thousand refugees, all uniformly hostile to our ally Israel.
It should come as no shock to learn that Ms. Haley is also an unapologetic advocate of endless war and endless American spending in Ukraine.
When you think about which person should lead us, remember that the world is a dangerous place, sometimes made more so by the idiocy of the American foreign policy “elites.” In foreign policy, as in all other things touched by government, voters should have a steady state preference for those who have learned the practicalities of the world through experience, rather than those who know about things only through the haze of theory.
Then they should vote accordingly.
• Michael McKenna, a columnist for The Washington Times, is president of MWR Strategies.
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