Kamala’s Growing Flock of GOP Hawks

by Ted Galen Carpenter Posted onOctober 21, 2024

An especially notable feature of the 2024 presidential campaign has been the number of prominent Republicans who have endorsed Democratic Party nominee Kamala Harris. The latest convert is former congressman Mickey Edwards, a 6-term representative from Oklahoma, who had been a member of the GOP’s leadership in the House of Representatives.

Some Republican defectors have been even more prominent. The biggest coup of all for the Harris campaign was the decision by former Vice President Dick Cheney – along with his daughter, former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) – to support Harris.

Republican apostates invariably cite two reasons for refusing to support their party’s nominee, Donald Trump. With regard to domestic policy, they charge that Trump is a closet authoritarian who supported the “insurrection” on January 6, 2021, and poses a continuing threat to democracy.  With respect to foreign policy, they allege that Trump would (at a minimum) be “soft” on autocratic rulers, such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin or North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, while failing to support America’s venerable system of military alliances with other democracies.

Such allegations are exaggerated at best and entirely fictional at worst.  Trump’s policy toward Iran, for example, has never suggested a willingness to appease an autocratic regime.  Washington’s assassination of General Qasem Soleimani on Trump’s watch confirmed that point.  Likewise, the numerous policy initiatives Trump took to undermine Russia’s interests discredits the case that he was cozy with Putin.

Even as they highlight Trump’s alleged authoritarian tendencies, Harris and the leaders of her campaign conveniently ignore the dreadful civil liberties track records of their new political allies.  It was bitterly ironic, for example, for Harris to proclaim that she was “honored” to have the support of Dick and Liz Cheney.  It wasn’t that many years ago that Democrats and their allies in the news media routinely asserted that both members of the Cheney family were shameless authoritarians who posed a threat to civil liberties.  Now, the Cheneys are supposedly champions of democratic values.

The principal reason why establishment Republicans are so attracted to Harris is that she seems to be a more reliable tool for continuing, without change or even reflection, the excessively meddlesome and aggressive foreign policy that the United States has pursued for decades.  It is no coincidence that the roster of Harris supporters reads like a “who’s who” of the warfare state. The Harris camp is heavily populated by former leaders of the Pentagon, and the intelligence agencies.  Such supporters include former C.I.A. directors Michael V. Hayden and William H. Webster; a former director of national intelligence, John D. Negroponte, and former Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen.

Ironically, the notion that Trump threatens the vested interests of the national security state because he embraces “isolationism” is a myth.  As I pointed out several years ago, Trump did not favor even a badly needed new foreign policy based on realism and restraint, much less did he endorse the isolationist caricature.

But to zealous hawks, he was – and remain – a foreign policy loose cannon.  Indeed, many in the knee-jerk interventionist camp embrace even the most absurd anti-Trump myths.  Mickey Edwards typifies the nervous hawkish establishment perspective. “Trump is supportive of Vladimir Putin because he thinks Putin likes him.  He is in thrall to Kim Jong Un for the same reason. Putin is a former KGB agent; spy services, including our own, specialize in analyzing the best approach to turn a target — threat, temptation, and in a case like Trump’s, overweening flattery.  When Trump purports to represent the United States, our allies roll their eyes and our enemies wink and smirk. They see the little man with the big ego and rub their hands together in joy.”

Hawks like Edwards do not wish to take any chances regarding a new Trump presidency, especially when the alternative of a reliable global interventionist tool such as Kamala Harris is readily available.  Edwards states bluntly: “The United States needs someone who will stand up to bullies, not snuggle up to them.  Harris is someone Western leaders will acknowledge as a peer.”  The corrupt leaders of the national security apparatus have dug in their heels. That development means that there is little hope for a constructive change in Washington’s foreign policy even if Trump wins, and virtually no hope at all for such a change if Kamala’s hawkish boosters prevail.

Ted Galen Carpenter is a senior fellow at the Randolph Bourne Institute and a senior fellow at the Libertarian Institute. He also served in several senior positions during a 37-year career at the Cato Institute.  Dr. Carpenter is the author of 13 books and more than 1,300 articles on foreign policy, national security, and civil liberties topics.  His latest book is Unreliable Watchdog: The News Media and U.S. Foreign Policy (2022).