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March 19, 2011Elliott Abrams on Foreign Policy and the Tea Party
My interview with Elliott Abrams a few months back is now available here. Here's an excerpt from the initial transcript concerning Abrams' thoughts on the Tea Party, Defense spending and the challenge of isolationism, which strikes me as particularly relevant given the current foreign policy debates on the right:
Domenech: America’s presence around the world is going to be something that is likely to be more of an issue within the new Congress. There seem to be so many members who are willing to put defense spending on the gradation of cuts. And I wondered what your thoughts area about that generally and about some of the different pushbacks that exist within both the conservative movements against this new view. Who do you think has the right of it and which direction should we go?Abrams: It’s a very interesting question. I was very struck during the 2010 campaigns at the role that Sarah Palin played on this question. In many of her speeches, to Tea Party audiences, she said, "don’t cut the Defense budget, cut everything else, but we don’t want to cut the defense budget."
I have no doubt that there is fraud and waste in the Pentagon. It’s inconceivable that there shouldn’t be. It’s a government agency. There are going to be plenty of inefficiencies, but fundamentally, I think that it is a mistake at this juncture to be cutting the Defense budget, which is not so large, compared to various times in the past.
I think we missed one great opportunity and it was a terrible mistake. And that is, when the Obama administration started to spend its TARP money, the president was looking for shovel ready projects. It is now clear, at the end of two years of Obama, that he didn’t find too many. And I think the administration has acknowledged this. Well, there were a lot in the Pentagon. And the administration, for ideological reasons, did not want to spend the money on Defense related matters, and that was a huge mistake, both in terms of the economy because there were shovel ready projects that would have created employment and in terms of national defense.
This is going to be a very interesting debate within the Republican Party. I don’t see much isolationism, I have to say. I see one or two people, I mean, one associates this with Senator Rand Paul and that’s probably an unfair charge to make against him to say isolationist. You’d have to define the term and he’s not asking that we stop trading with foreign countries. I agree with the view that we do not have a revenue problem in the federal government, we have a spending problem and the solution to the problem is to stop the amazing amounts of red ink. We are likely to have an inflation problem soon enough.
But it seems to me that if you look at the world that we face, this would be a very inopportune moment to start doing what unfortunately the British have now had to do and dramatically cut back on their global role.
Domenech: Besides this debate within the Republican Party, there is also a debate that occurs within the evangelical community—who obviously make up a significant chunk of the base for both the Tea Party moment and the American center-right—about not just about our role in the world, but our role in the Middle East. What are some of the lessons Christians and evangelicals, in particular, ought to take from what’s happening in the Middle East right now and what our relationship ought to be with Israel going forward?
Abrams: I was in Israel in October and spoke to a group called the Jewish People Policy Institute which is Israeli, and I’ve been thinking about not just Israel as a country, but about the relationship with Jewish communities around the world. There were people there from all over, from Israel, of course, but from all over the world—Canada, Australia, Europe, Latin America. And I said to them, you know, "America really is an exceptional country, particularly if you compare it to the countries of those that you from Europe live in, in many ways, but I’ll give you one way that’s critical for everybody here: we have Christians."
We have a country whose majority religious group is Christians, unlike any country in Europe, with the possible exception of Poland today, I would say, where there are real Christians—in that case, Catholics. So this is a very interesting question. I try to explain to people from other countries that the critical Israel lobby in this country doesn’t consist of Jews, it consists of Christians, evangelicals primarily.
Look, I think that the United States has a very important role in the Middle East protecting moderate regimes in the Arab world and protecting Israel. And this is a critical moment because of the rise of Iran. People are saying this is a critical moment, every year, but the rise of Iran actually is, to use technical political science language, “a big deal.” And everybody in the Middle East knows it.
Domenech: That’s the formal term.
Abrams: That’s the formal term, yes. Everybody knows it and everybody talks about it constantly. If you ask why the UAE is building such a large and expensive air force, or why the Saudis want this arms deal with us, or why the Israelis want to buy “bunker buster bombs.” Or why several countries are experimenting with, so far, civilian nuclear power, Iran is the answer. So we have a critical role at this juncture, because Iran is seeking hegemony in the region.
Iran has a Mediterranean boarder because of Hezbollah and Lebanon. Iran has a border with Israel effectively because of Hezbollah and Lebanon. I remember in the Bush administration we had a heavy debate over whether it could possibly be true there would be a relationship developing between Hamas and Iran. And many experts said not possible because Hamas is Sunni and Iran is Shiite. Well, you know, ten years later, it’s obvious that the key foreign support for Hamas comes from Shia Iran. They’ve gotten over their theological disputes at least to this extent.Israel is quite isolated in the world. And it’s hard to see that getting better in the near future because of the political situation so many European countries where you have a growing alliance between Muslim communities and the hard left and you might even add some on the far right. It’s a combination of Muslim anti-Semitism, hard left Anti-Americanism and anti-Israelism and far right anti-Semitism. It’s a witch’s brew, so they are not going to get much help there in the near future and they are going to have to, in Israel, to rely largely on the United States. I hope that we prove reliable.
If you haven't already, you should be reading Abrams' superb CFR blog.
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