Bachmann Doctrine: Her foreign policy views

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REUTERS/Alex Gallardo

Rep. Michele Bachmann has been hawkish on the ongoing mission in Afghanistan and the winding-down American presence in Iraq.

WASHINGTON — When protesters interrupted her speech on the USS Yorktown in South Carolina Thursday, Michele Bachmann was in the middle of what her campaign had deemed a major address on the Minnesota congresswoman’s foreign policy positions.

Bachmann, like the other Republicans looking for their party’s presidential nomination, has been outlining bits and pieces of her foreign policy goals throughout the first five months of her campaign. But the race so far has been largely focused on economic issues, and the candidates have generally tiptoed around foreign policy up to now.

In her speech Bachmann essentially laid out a tried and true conservative foreign policy agenda, with the notable caveat that she’s looking to cut defense spending along the way. The speech was a way for her to ease into the foreign policy arena while keeping some of the focus on the issues she’s run on up to now.

Here are the basic topics Bachmann addressed (quotations come from the prepared text of her speech, from which she frequently deviated) and, if they’ve come at any of the recent Republican debates, what other candidates have said on the same issue.

There is, of course, more nuance to each candidate’s positions than what is presented here; consider this a primer for Saturday night’s foreign policy debate in South Carolina. 

Defense spending cuts
Right away, Bachmann said she would consider cutting defense spending when crafting a budget. She would do it by targeting “unnecessary Pentagon programs” and reducing contracting and health care costs.

What Bachmann is opposed to, however, is forcing the Pentagon to absorb $600 million in spending cuts if the congressional deficit super committee fails to come to a consensus deficit-reduction plan.

“We will do significant damage to our military capabilities,” she said. “We can make cuts, but they must be strategically planned and not randomly made on a political whim.”

On Oct. 18, when the Republican candidates debated in Las Vegas, Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul were asked about cutting national security spending. Gingrich gave one of his vintage wonky responses: “The fact is, we ought to first figure out what threaten us, we ought to figure out what strategies will respond to that. We should figure out what structures we need for those strategies. We should then cost them.

“I’m a hawk, but I’m a cheap hawk. But the fact is, to say I’m going to put the security of the United States up against some arbitrary budget number is suicidally stupid.”

Paul, meanwhile, has proposed a 15 percent cut to the national defense budget, though he justifies it by saying a less ubiquitous military presence globally will reduce the risk of attacks against Americans at home or abroad.

War on terror
Bachmann has been hawkish on the ongoing mission in Afghanistan and the winding-down American presence in Iraq. She’s frequently said “General [David] Axelrod,” an adviser for President Obama’s re-election effort, has influenced the president’s Middle East strategy more than generals on the ground.

She said Thursday that she would make her military decisions based on conditions on the ground, and she offered no hard timetables for troop withdrawl.

“As president, my decision to withdraw troops from Afghanistan or Iraq would be based on military considerations and not on turns helping my personal political fortunes.  We must and we can win in Afghanistan and we must provide General [John] Allen the resources he needs to win,” she said. “And we must return to the negotiation table with Iraq so that the peace is preserved there [instead of withdrawing remaining U.S. forced by the end of this year], and to seek repayment for the heavy price we paid in liberating the Iraqi people from a brutal dictator.”

Most of the Republican pack jumped on Obama when he announced the final withdrawal timeline in October, nearly all of them expressing doubt that the conditions are the ground warrant American forces leaving the region.

Perhaps the most outspoken advocate for leaving troops in the region is Rick Santorum, who’s had lively back-and-forths with other candidates (mainly Paul) on the issue. In September, he was emphatic about leaving a fighting force in Iraq.

“I’m not for taking them out of the region,” he said at a debate in Orlando. “I believe we need to listen to our generals, and our generals are being very, very clear that we need to continue to stabilize Iraq, the Iraqi government wants and needs our intelligence in particular, needs force protection. We need to have anywhere — I’m hearing numbers of 20,000, 30,000 troops potentially to remain in Iraq, not indefinitely, but to continue to make sure that this is a stable transition.”

Iraq and Afghanistan have not been major debate topics up to now — in fact, according to a transcript no one even said the word “Iraq” during Wednesday’s debate.

Israel
When Bachmann gives her stump speech, some of her most well-received lines are those that come in defense of Israel. She has been highly critical of Obama’s policy of negotiating peace based on the country’s 1967 borders, and said Thursday: “President Obama’s weakness in the Middle East that has embolden the Palestinians to attempt to achieve statehood through the U.N. rather than at the legitimate negotiation table with Israel.”

The United States should withdraw from UNESCO, the U.N. agency that recognized a Palestinian state this month, and it should stop funding for any U.N. agency that grants Palestine membership in the future, Bachmann said.

The GOP candidates have been pretty unanimous in their support for Israel. Herman Cain and Mitt Romney, the two candidates leading in most polls, were asked about Israel at the candidate’s September debate and they both propped up America’s ally.

“The right course is to stand behind our friends, to listen to them, and to let the entire world know that we will stay with them and that we will support them and defend them,” Romney said.

“If you mess with Israel, you’re messing with the United States of America,” Cain said. “We will stand solidly behind Israel.”

Miscellaneous
• The United States should “utilize our facilities at Guantanamo Bay,” Bachmann said, and she would rescind Obama’s executive order banning enhanced interrogation techniques.

• Some topics she did not address: Iran, Libya, China or relationships with American allies, including those dealing with the debt problems in Europe.

• America “faces an enemy within as well,” Bachmann said: the national debt. The deficit super committee has improperly used defense funding as a “pawn,” and  “Obamacare” will drain the nation of resources it could be putting into national defense, Bachmann said.

She ended her speech on that note: “While jobs and the economy are the most important issue in this election, we must never forget that we are at war. We can win the war against our debt that is threatening our national security. We can win the war on terrorism. But we must win this war by convincing the world that freedom is better than rule by terror.

“Ours will be a long and difficult task; a war that will not be won easily, but we will win it.  We must win it if we are to keep America free, safe and sovereign.”

Devin Henry can be reached at dhenry@minnpost.com. Follow him on Twitter: @dhenry