Paul Ryan only pretends to have a foreign policy

Paul Ryan still hasn't learned much about foreign policy. As speaker of the Republican-led House he almost perfectly symbolizes the ever-expanding incoherence of his party when talking about foreign affairs and American power.

Coming back from his first trip to the Middle East as speaker, Ryan announced to reporters, "I'm not a neocon." So far, so good. It would be hard to take an honest look at the Middle East and still be a neocon these days. But then Ryan stubbornly continued and revealed that he doesn't know what a neoconservative is, or even what he himself is. "You have to think of these conflicts as very long-lasting, big-time commitments. They're not quick and they're not clean and they're not antiseptic."

This is a bizarre thing for Ryan to say, and maybe a bizarre thing for an isolationist like me to correct. But very few neoconservatives have believed that the conflicts in the Middle East are small-time, clean, or antiseptic. If anyone could be said to have a pleasant memory of a panel discussion, for me, it was a luncheon in Philadelphia in 2006, when Max Boot informed a group of conservatives, both young and old, that the United States should make a 50-year commitment to Iraq, just as it had made long commitments to Japan, Germany, and South Korea.

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What Ryan is criticizing is more accurately described as the Clintonite foreign policy of "smart power," where America is willing to topple a dictator by rallying international support for limited, mostly air power campaigns that are coordinated with and empowered by an existing rebel group on the ground. That was the playbook in Kosovo in the late '90s and for the more recent campaign in Libya, which Hillary Clinton supported when she was secretary of state.

At the same time, Ryan denounced the Trumpian view of initiating a "Fortress America" where we "just pull back and think our oceans are going to save us." He added: "The evidence of the last couple of decades disproves that theory." The evidence Ryan is referring to is the 9/11 attacks and things like the San Bernardino shooting, where the shooters had pledged their allegiance to ISIS.

Ryan's implication is that the United States has to be engaged militarily or otherwise to prevent those sorts of attacks. It's a very stupid analysis. Ryan says we have to let our allies know we appreciate our relationships with them. But maintaining good relations with Saudi Arabia's government did not prevent 15 Saudi nationals from perpetrating the 9/11 attacks. Would we have had a greater chance of preventing those attacks by "promoting our values" more in the Middle East, through military or diplomatic means, or by simply following up and finding the three future hijackers who had been living in the U.S. after their visas had expired? The question answers itself. The normal duty of maintaining the integrity of our borders would have justified looking into at least three of the hijackers. Adjusting an entire region such that it won't produce radicals seems quite a bit more fanciful.

Ryan's incoherence is really the result of hawkish-instincts in the context of a war-weary country. Despite being a budget cutter, Ryan carefully preserves the Pentagon's dollars from his axe. When, in 2013, he opposed the president's proposal of intervening overtly in the Syrian civil war (we already were intervening covertly), Ryan didn't say that intervention would be wrong or lead to bad outcomes. He didn't point to polls showing how it lacked a popular mandate from the American people. Instead he criticized the scale saying, "a feckless show of force will only damage our credibility."

Ryan constantly criticizes Democrats, and only Democrats, for not engaging in more reckless behavior, merely on the grounds that it would be symbolically satisfying. In his 2012 vice-presidential debate against Joe Biden, he criticized the Obama administration's Iran policy, saying "when the Green Revolution started up, they were silent for nine days." What did Ryan want? Air support or a hashtag?

Ryan doesn't know what he thinks on foreign policy. He only knows that it is popular to say that he wants America to be strong. He knows that it is safe to say that America should be promoting its values abroad — somehow, by some means. When public opinion finally forces him to oppose an intervention, he finds a way to criticize the intervention as not strong enough. There will never be a Ryan doctrine on foreign policy, because nothing connects one Ryan thought on foreign policy to the next, save opportunism.