Ben Carson's Disqualifying Foreign Policy Views
Former Faculty
By Micah Watson, Assistant Professor of Political Science & Director, Center for Religion and Politics
Feb 17, 2015 -
This video from Fox News (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ZiA7Ro3EFc) should be as damaging to Dr. Ben Carson's presidential aspirations as the one Sarah Palin had not so long ago. Five quick points.
1. He opens by saying we shouldn't be Democrats and Republicans, but Americans, because a house divided cannot stand. Beyond the banality of this trope (trope=Democrats and Republicans, not the house divided line), the current irony of this is that he draws almost all of his support from one stream of one of the parties. The historical irony is that we have had a party system since John Adams, and it's served us pretty well.
2. In making the defensible point that it is wiser to attack ISIS while it is relatively weak, he goes on to say it will be "almost impossible" to defeat it when it is stronger. How does he know this? And what sort of confidence does he project for a future American commander-in-chief who may need to rally the country to defeat ISIS if it becomes stronger? If he is president someday and has to drum up support for a campaign against a stronger ISIS, he's provided ammunition for his political foes. And how much stronger could ISIS be than previous foes we have fought and defeated in the past?
3. His definition of a good leader is someone who can "take people with different agendas and pull them together and move them in the same direction to accomplish a goal." That this is something he has never done in the political arena does not seem to give him pause. That the craft in which he has done so (medical) relies on highly and specifically skilled and credentialed experts running the show in a top-down way not necessarily conducive to the rough give-and-take of politics also seems to elude him. That he has not attracted any meaningful support from Democrats is also a problem (I'll leave aside the fawning question from FOX about how Dr. Carson has given this "great thought" and even quoted Churchill).
4. With regard to action in Iraq and his commitment to putting boots on the ground, Dr. Carson said that the coalition will form if you have a leader. This is a naivete on par with aspects of President Obama's Cairo speech. At least the "if you build it they will come" line in Field of Dreams had an entertaining story to go along with it. Sometimes a coalition can be built and sustained (Papa Bush and Gulf War I), sometimes not so much (GWB and Gulf War II).
5. Dr. Carson, "We have people trying to manage the military who know nothing about the military, about military strategy." “There is no such thing as a politically correct war. We need to grow up, we need to mature. If you’re gonna have rules for war, you should just have a rule that says no war. Other than that, we have to win. Our life depends on it.” Where to start? We have civilian control of the military for a reason. It's one of the most valuable aspects of our constitutional tradition. If Dr. Carson had limited his comments to criticizing an overly litigious and hen-pecked rules-of-engagement oversight apparatus, that would be defensible. But he calls for the evisceration of *in bello* just war criteria altogether. There should be no rules, he says, because if you were going to have rules there should be the "don't have war" rule. Who comes up with that, and who can defend advocating for such a person to command our military? Just war moral reasoning is part of what distinguishes the values we hold dear from the atrocities and inhumanity perpetrated by groups like ISIS. It is taught to and by our officers in the military academies, and has a long and distinguished (though not universal) Christian pedigree. Doing *anything* to survive is the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes and Nicolo Machiavelli.
To paraphrase Solzhenitsyn, the line between good and evil does not run between the borders of ISIS and the US, but within the human heart. We can honor and enable our soldiers to do what they do best without also thinking they need no moral framework other than "by any means necessary." These views are indefensible, and disqualifying.