The War for Trump's Foreign Policy

Left: U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina on February 24, 2016, on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. [State Department photo/ Public Domain]
Right: Senator Dr. Rand Paul (KY) testifies at the Longworth House Office Building in Washington, D.C. on Tuesday, May 8, 2012. USDA photo by Lance Cheung.

Jack Hunter, writing at The American Conservative, outlines the battle shaping up between Sens. Rand Paul and Lindsey Graham over influence on the Trump administration’s foreign policy. Perhaps surprisingly, Hunter thinks Paul may be winning. He writes (abridged):

This war between libertarian realist Paul and uber-hawk Graham is not new.

And it continued on Tuesday in a Daily Beast story on how Bob Woodward’s new book about the inner workings of the Trump administration illustrates just how much Graham has tried to bend the president’s ear on foreign policy.

What foreign policy ideas does Graham have in mind for Trump? Assassinating North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, for one. It is well known that Graham wants regime change in Iran and Syria. When urging the president to keep U.S. troops in Afghanistan indefinitely, he said to Trump, according to Woodward, “Do you want on your résumé that you allowed Afghanistan to go back into the darkness and the second 9/11 came from the very place the first 9/11 did?”

To Graham’s credit, he was at least upfront about subscribing to the familiar neoconservative formula for perpetual war.

Yet to our knowledge, Trump has not tried to coordinate with China to assassinate North Korea’s leader, and seems to have resisted those within his administration who have urged regime change in Iran and Syria.

It appears that while Graham is trying to convince Trump to start World War III, it is still Paul who is attempting to prevent it.

Today, under Trump, those realist and noninterventionist views are not only receiving more attention than anyone would have expected just a few years ago, but the libertarian Paul appears to be resonating with the president more than the frozen-in-2003 Graham—much to hawks’ chagrin.