Republican Hawks Have an Agenda for Ukraine, Iran, China, ISIS, and the Pentagon Budget

The Republican Party as a whole might not have firm
plans for the next two years, but there are factions within the
party that have extensive agendas already. Eli Lake of The
Daily Beast, who has a lot of contacts among the GOP’s hawks,

reports that they’re

planning an ambitious battle plan to revamp
American foreign policy: everything from arming Ukraine’s military
to reviewing the ISIS war to investigating the U.S. intelligence
community’s role in warming relations with Iran.

In an interview Wednesday, Sen. John McCain, the incoming chairman
of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said he has already
discussed a new national-security agenda with fellow Republicans
Bob Corker and Richard Burr, the likely incoming chairmen of the
Senate Foreign Relations Committee and Senate Select Committee on
Intelligence.

“Burr and Corker and I will be working closely together on
everything,” McCain said. “For example, arms for Ukraine’s
[government], examination of our strategy in the Middle East, our
assets with regard to [Russian President Vladimir] Putin in the
region, China’s continued encroachment in the South China
Sea.”

McCain’s “first order of business” at his committee, Lake
writes, “will be to end the budget rule known as sequestration,
which requires the U.S. military to cut its budget across the
board.” Lake also notes that several new saber-rattlers will be
joining the old-timey hawks in the Senate, with Tom
Cotton of Arkansas getting the most attention. To read the
rest of Lake’s report, go
here.

Not every Republican is on board with the neocons’ agenda, of
course. Daniel McCarthy, editor of the antiwar American
Conservative, has posted a detailed assessment
of how the more dovish wing of the GOP will fare in the forthcoming
intraparty fights. He isn’t optimistic:

[W]ith Bush’s downfall came a
need to redefine the Republican Party’s ideology and brand. After
the country as a whole repudiated Bush by turning to Democrats in
2006 and 2008, the GOP also repudiated him by turning in 2010 to
the Tea Party and a new brand of liberty-minded Republicans
exemplified by Sen. Rand Paul and Rep. Justin Amash. These “liberty
movement” Republicans were few in number but represented a
qualitative change in tone and policy emphasis for the GOP,
particularly on national security and foreign policy. One could
easily imagine Republicans of this sort as the wave of the future,
if the GOP were to have any future at all: these were the kind of
Republicans who might represent a viable conservatism in an
increasingly diverse country where marijuana is legal and same-sex
marriage commands majority support. Their anti-authoritarianism and
commitment to cultural federalism suggested a way forward for the
party. Win or lose in years to come, they were certainly not the
same Bush brand that voters had rejected in 2006, 2008, and indeed
2010.

Yet now Bush is ancient history….Republicans today can once again
employ their familiar decades-old ideological armament against a
militarily inept, big-spending, socially liberal Democrat. These
weapons have done the trick for decades—until the Bush disaster
deprived them of their effectiveness—so who needs new
ideas?…

[T]he public does have some say in all this, and it has shown to
have no appetite for the decades-long wars that Tom Cotton’s
Republican Party appears to portend. The market for realism and
non-authoritian politics remains. But can anyone organize the
institutions and policy-making cadres to serve this demand? If not,
there is little chance of a lone politician or small group of
liberty-movement Republicans redirecting their party, much less
their country, away from futile wars and executive consolidation:
we will be back to the Bush and Clinton era, with Rand Paul as
lonely a dissenter as ever his father was. At least, that is, until
the Cottons and Clintons lose another, bigger war and plunge the
country into something even worse than the Great Recession. Then
we’ll get change without the hope.

The biggest open question may be the effect of the ISIS war,
which is likely to drag on a while without very satisfying results.
If the public turns against it in the next two years, the hawks
will be on the defensive again. But then, with the liberty
Republicans’ informal leader—Rand Paul—also endorsing military
action against ISIS, he might find himself tarred with the same
brush. For now, at any rate, the party’s pro-war faction has
what it usually has: the upper hand.