Whoever wins the Republican nomination and takes on Barack Obama in the 2012 presidential election is going to campaign hard on the issue of the US national debt and the idea that constantly running deficits is dragging the nation into decline. This is going to have a serious impact on the foreign policy debate in the US.
It is striking that John Huntsman (pictured with Barack Obama), the former US ambassador to China who was governor of Utah and is running as a middle of the road Republican, has chosen to introduce himself to voters in New Hampshire with criticisms of the cost of the Libya mission. He said, ‘I think we have to be very careful about where we choose to spend our money and what we define as being important to our national security interest.”
This is similar to the tack taken by Mitch Daniels, the Indiana governor who the Republican establishment is desperately trying persuade to run. He has observed that the US had to ask “questions about the extent of our commitments” and stressed that, “If we go broke, no one will follow a pauper.”
All this suggests that Obama is not going to find himself under fire for being ‘soft’ on foreign policy. Rather, he is going to be attacked for the cost of US commitments round the world. I suspect that Obama’s response to this will be to try and have made real progress towards leaving Afghanistan before November 2012 so that he can claim that he is ending the expensive wars that he inherited.
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