Rick Perry's Stale Foreign Policy Arguments

Rick Perry's Stale Foreign Policy Arguments

Perry’s argument is the usual hawkish combination of threat inflation, fear-mongering, lazy references to “isolationism,” and stale Reagan nostalgia. He talks about a “profound” threat to the U.S. and the entire world from a jihadist group when it is no such thing, and hopes that his readers will be so alarmed by this that they won’t pay attention to how shoddy his argument is. Perry is engaging in the same behavior that the former head of MI6 recently criticized: he is helping to give groups like the Islamic State the attention they crave, and he is grossly exaggerating the danger they pose to the U.S. and its allies. The governor’s analysis relies on blurring the differences between competing jihadist groups and their goals to frighten the public into assuming that any similar group that emerges represents a major security threat to the U.S.

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