Foreign Policy

Perhaps like no other Republican presidential candidate, Senator Ted Cruz exemplifies the nation’s conflicted conscience over the direction of U.S. foreign policy in the age of terror. Should the United States promote democracy in the Middle East, or should we learn to live with Arab dictatorships, even as we seek to defeat and destroy the Islamic State?

The next American president should shape the United States’ Africa policy in response to three questions: How can America help constrain Islamicist violence in the African Sahel? What can America do to help counter state collapse in the roughly 34% of Africa where there is no effective state control? How can American foreign policy best encourage economic growth in the rising parts of Africa (taking into account China’s growing presence in Africa)?

From the Print Edition: a bold vision for moving toward peace

Commentators have devoted lots of print comparing President Barack Obama to other presidents. But on foreign policy, let’s judge the president by placing his record against his own measuring stick.

After months of warnings, the White House finally ordered the Navy to sail within 12 miles of an artificial island built by China. President Obama’s hesitant response to China’s aggressive behavior suggests he doesn’t grasp that there’s nothing new about the Navy challenging this sort of mischief. America has been keeping the open seas open for 215 years.

While showing how a war between the U.S. and China would play out, P.W. Singer and August Cole’s Ghost Fleet: A Novel of the Next World War is a highly-recommendable read that has already helped focus minds on this topic, both inside the Beltway and beyond.

A Christian approach to the human catastrophe of the Syrian refugee crisis—partially instigated and immeasurably worsened by Mr. Obama’s floundering foreign policy—must reject legislation rooted in fear, bigotry, and nativism. We need a mature debate about how to respond with prudence and compassion to this crisis. Yet we also have an obligation to expose the intellectually and morally bankrupt arguments that cascade unceasingly from the mouth of this president.

Given that Obama’s strategy is incoherent and will not work at achieving a specific goal, whether that goal is stopping ISIS or removing Assad, American voters should consider the three alternative options proposed at Brookings on November 16.

The primary aims of Mark Amstutz’s Evangelicals and American Foreign Policy are twofold. First he intends to provide a “more compelling account of Evangelicals’ influence on America’s role in the world” than has been previously appreciated. The book’s second, and primary, task is to issue both a challenge and a caution.