releases: https://www.cotton.senate.gov/?p=blog&id=849
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| https://www.cotton.senate.gov/?p=blog&id=849 | 'A Foreign Policy for Jacksonian America' | 2017-12-11 | 2017 | 2017-12 | Republican | House | AR | Tom Cotton | C001095 | www.cotton.senate.gov | legacy | December 11, 2017 Contact: Caroline Rabbitt Tabler (202) 224-2353 A Foreign Policy for ‘Jacksonian America'Jason WillickWall Street Journal Washington At 40, Tom Cotton of Arkansas is the youngest member of the U.S. Senate. He was called a young man in a hurry four years ago when he announced, during his first and only term in the House, that he would challenge the incumbent senator, Mark Pryor. Now there is talk President Trump may nominate him to lead the Central Intelligence Agency as part of a national-security shake-up. Admirers have also suggested he is presidential timber. I met Mr. Cotton this week in his Capitol Hill office to explore his foreign-policy thinking. What emerged was the outline of a coherent if contentious worldview-one might even call it a doctrine-that begins with a sense that U.S. foreign policy has been adrift for a quarter-century. "The coalitions of the Cold War rapidly began to break down as soon as the Soviet Union dissolved," Mr. Cotton says. That first became clear during the debate over the Balkan wars of the Clinton years. "You had some Cold War hawks that were all of a sudden sounding like doves," Mr. Cotton says, referring to conservatives who'd been staunchly anti-Soviet but were wary of U.S. involvement in what was then Yugoslavia. "You had Cold War doves"-including the liberal humanitarians of the Clinton administration-"that were beginning to sound like Teddy Roosevelt, ready to charge up the hill. That pattern consistently repeated itself" in subsequent years. When it comes to America's present challenges-from Iran to North Korea, China to Russia, Syria to Ukraine-Mr. Cotton, a conservative Republican, is squarely on Team Roosevelt. "There is always a military option," he says. "That is the case everywhere in the world." But he believes that the lack of a clear organizing principle for how and when to use that power has knocked America's global strategy off kilter. It also has created a divide between foreign-policy elites and what Mr. Cotton calls "Jacksonian America"-heartland voters who favor a strong national defense but are skeptical of foreign entanglements and humanitarian interventions. "Foreign policy, to be durable and to be wise, must command popular support," Mr. Cotton says. Statesmen and diplomats "might craft what they think is a wise foreign policy-something that Metternich or Bismarck might draw up in his study," he continues. "But without the support of Jacksonian America, the people who are going to cash the checks that are written by elites in New York and Washington"-that is, to pay the price for intervention-"no foreign policy can ultimately be successful." On that score, he thinks the Clinton, Bush and Obama administrations all fell short. "Some of the interventions over the last 25 years, I think, have been plainly unwise and had very limited popular support, and they've created foreign-policy disasters," he says. As a prime example, he cites the desultory 2011 air campaign in Libya, whose aftermath is now "destabilizing Europe and creating new terrorist breeding grounds." President Obama, Mr. Cotton argues, "probably did the wrong thing" in helping to oust Moammar Gadhafi while leaving Bashar Assad alone. If the U.S. had intervened in Syria and not Libya, "we might have had a happier end in both." What about Iraq, where Mr. Cotton served as a U.S. Army infantry captain? The senator does not say, as President Trump has, that the invasion was a mistake-although neither does he tell me, as he insisted as recently as 2016, that Iraq was a "necessary, just and noble war." Instead, he observes that the war's mismanagement alienated voters and cost Republicans dearly. The Bush administration, he adds, erred in prioritizing democratic ambitions ahead of the basic task of securing the country: "There was a belief in the immediate aftermath of the invasion in 2003 that we could simply fly the flag of democracy, have an election with some purple fingers"-the symbol of proud Iraqi voters in 2005-"slap a uniform on some people, call it an army and declare victory." On the other hand, he calls the 2007 surge George W. Bush's "finest hour." For Mr. Cotton, the lesson from Iraq is not that the U.S. should be more circumspect about confronting hostile powers. Rather, it is that security must come first-before "political reconciliation, economic development, democracy promotion, human rights or anything else. Without security, there's nothing else." That's one reason Mr. Cotton's hawkish approach to Iran emphasizes strictly military objectives, not political or ideological ones. "Any military action against Iran," he says, "would look more like Operation Desert Fox from Iraq in December of 1998 or Operation El Dorado Canyon in Libya in 1986." Those were limited bombing campaigns designed to punish misbehaving regimes. Mr. Cotton insists-controversially-that such an attack on Iran would not require a sustained military commitment: "It would be primarily a naval and air attack against its nuclear infrastructure." Mr. Cotton sees Iran as a greater long-term challenge than North Korea. But Kim Jong Un's nuclear brinkmanship is the more immediate threat. "If I were the leader of Japan or I were the leader of South Korea," he says emphatically, "and I had any reason to doubt U.S. resolve to extend its nuclear deterrent to me, then I would absolutely pursue nuclear weapons." Mr. Trump has suggested he is relying on Beijing to help solve the North Korea problem. Mr. Cotton thinks that is unlikely: "China is a rival in every regard. China is not a partner." He calls China's 2001 admission to the World Trade Organization "one of the biggest failures of post-Cold War foreign policy." He is fiercely critical of the view that integrating China into the global economy would cause it to liberalize internally. "Those who argue that position," he tells me, "should have their judgment impeached in future, similar arguments." At the same time as Beijing is becoming more repressive at home, it is challenging the U.S. "in every domain, not just militarily, but politically and economically and diplomatically." Mr. Cotton worries that China, a rising power, can afford to play the long game, and that "in many ways, they've been beating us at that game." The U.S. needs to "join the competition in every way," including by conducting more freedom-of-navigation operations in the disputed South China Sea. Yet in the very long game, Mr. Cotton says, America's market liberalism gives it a clear advantage: "Nothing in China's state-driven economy has rewritten the basic rules of market-driven economics that have made the Anglo-Americans the dominant world power for 400 years." Has the Trump administration undercut this advantage by pulling out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal, which had been designed to draw other Asian countries into America's orbit? "I know that many of the countries in the Trans-Pacific Partnership who thought they got a good deal from the Obama administration have pitched that line," Mr. Cotton answers. "I know that Xi Jinping "-China's president-"has pitched that line as well. I'm skeptical." Mr. Cotton's view on TPP seems less an exercise in antitrade philosophy than a bow to political reality: "Ultimately, the American people simply did not want to ratify that agreement." The voters who swung the 2016 election to Mr. Trump "believed that we needed to make fewer economic and political concessions to allies than might have been necessary in the Cold War to defeat the Soviet Union." If Mr. Cotton sounds comfortable accommodating the Trumpist mood on trade, he rejects the view that the U.S. might be able to "get along" with Russia, as Mr. Trump frequently suggests. "Russia is the great land power of the Old World," he says. "The United States is the great maritime power of the New World. Those facts will never change; those facts will always create tension between our nations." Mr. Cotton points to a book on his coffee table, "Democracy in America" by Alexis de Tocqueville. "I assume you've read that book over there," he says. Tocqueville, Mr. Cotton paraphrases, predicted that Russia's authoritarian spirit and America's democratic spirit put the two countries on a collision course. As Tocqueville puts it, "each seems called by some secret desire of Providence one day to hold in its hands the destinies of half the world." In discussing Vladimir Putin, Mr. Cotton makes clear his prime concern is U.S. interests, not the Russian president's dictatorial practices at home. "I condemn Russia for their atrocious treatment of their own people," he says. "But it's of graver concern that they are bombing our allies in Syria, or that they are invading sovereign countries in the heart of Europe." Russia's various aggressions, he says, "spring from the common core of Vladimir Putin being a dictator." Mr. Cotton's hawkish realism is tinged with idealism. "It simply is a fact," he says, "that the American people have moral aspirations about America's role in the world, and about the Founding principles of America being universal." There's no contradiction, however, if favoring democracy also serves U.S. interests. "The easiest way to prevent attack is to secure the Western Hemisphere," he says, and "the easiest way to secure the Western Hemisphere is to defend forward in the Old World"-by which he means the Middle East and Asia as well as Europe. "In doing so, we would need to have alliances and those alliances are easier to build with countries that share our principles. That doesn't mean that we can only work with democratic governments or with capitalist societies, but those are longer-lasting, more durable alliances." Mr. Cotton does not share liberal internationalists' alarm over developments in Poland and Hungary, both of which are consolidating power around populist parties of the right. "Many of those Central and Eastern European countries are moving towards nationalism. and I think that's an understandable trend," he says. "If your nation had spent 100 years being invaded and occupied and facing genocide you might be happy with the way you are as well-which is small and politically, culturally, ethnically, linguistically homogenous. Much of the turn in these countries . . . is against the Brussels-driven transnationalist movement in Europe." This points to the obvious establishmentarian critique of the Cotton Doctrine: that a shortsighted focus on security over values and national interest over multilateralism risks damaging American interests in the long run. But there's another, more serious risk: that the impulse to increase America's military commitment in so many chaotic and disorderly places cannot hold the support of Jacksonian America. If military intervention leads to quagmire, it could widen the gap between elites and the public that Mr. Cotton says he is trying to bridge. If he can navigate around these treacherous pitfalls, the Republican Party may one day be his. But even if he can't, his ambition to ground America's long-drifting foreign policy is serious and valuable. The Cotton Doctrine represents a first draft of the GOP's effort to rebuild a coalition that began to fall apart not long after the Berlin Wall. | 1 | 2026-03-30T12:14:52Z | 2026-03-30T12:14:52Z |