The GOP Plan to Bring Back a Unipolar World

The GOP Plan to Bring Back a Unipolar World

Republicans seem to think that by banging the drum for increased defense spending, they can restore America's greatness. They're wrong.

• By Gordon Adams, Richard Sokolsky
• December 30, 2015

With memories of the San Bernardino and Paris massacres still fresh, Republican presidential candidates have been lambasting the White House for what they deem as the administration’s foreign policy failures. They criticize President Barack Obama for weakening the United States, undermining its leadership and credibility, and allowing its adversaries — from the Islamic State (IS), to Russia, to China — to become more menacing.

To restore America’s strength, alliances, global standing, and leadership, the candidates have all, by and large (with the exception of Sen. Rand Paul), advocated greater use of force against IS, and an increased U.S. military presence in Iraq and Syria. More broadly, almost all have called for a major priming of the Pentagon pump with billions of additional dollars to restore what they describe as our sapped military strength.

Politically, you can’t blame them for these public broadsides — Americans seem to be on their side. Recent polling shows that national security and terrorism has become the most important election issue in the mind of the American public, rising from 21 percent in April to 40 percent in December, replacing jobs and the economy (which declined from 29 percent to 23 percent). According to a December 2015 NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, the public disapproves of Obama’s foreign policy by a ratio of 57 to 37 percent. http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/12/30/rubio-bush-republican-presidential-politics/