Give Paul Ryan His Foreign Policy Due

Eager to discredit Paul Ryan, liberals can’t decide whether to caricature the Republican vice presidential nominee as a “neophyte” or “ideologue.” Ryan, we’re told, is simultaneously a babe in the woods and a dogmatist in no need of counsel.

The latest example of this analytical schizophrenia comes courtesy of New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd. Writing about a speech the Wisconsin congressman delivered at the Values Voter Summit in Washington, Dowd observed that, “Ryan was moving his mouth, but the voice was the neocon puppet master Dan Senor,” a former spokesman for the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq and now a leading adviser to the Republican ticket. Senor’s job, Dowd alleged, is “to graft a Manichean world-view onto the foreign affairs neophyte.”

That world-view, Dowd elaborated, consists of “a moral, muscular foreign policy; a disdain for weakness and diplomacy; a duty to invade and bomb Israel’s neighbors; a divine right to preemption.”

Dowd’s use of the term “puppet master” to describe Senor, and the implication that he and other “neocons” are more loyal to Israel than to the United States, sparked a heated debate last week, when some journalists accused her of deploying anti-Semitic tropes. More important, however, is the lazy assumption on which Dowd’s entire argument rests: that because Ryan “has not sauteed in foreign policy in his years on Capitol Hill,” he therefore mouths whatever his manipulative “neocon” advisers tell him to say.

While Ryan has earned a reputation as an expert on the federal budget, his interest in the economy has not been to the exclusion of foreign affairs. A brief study of Ryan’s foreign policy positions over the course of his seven terms in Congress shows that — Dowd’s caricature notwithstanding — he has been absolutely consistent in favoring “a moral, muscular foreign policy,” opposes “weakness and diplomacy” when the latter is useless, has a hawkish stance against Israel’s enemies (which he views, correctly, as our own), and believes that America has a “right to preemption” against its enemies — all ideas that Dowd alleges were implanted in his brain by shadowy “neocons” since he was selected as Mitt Romney’s running mate in August.

Unlike some conservatives who advocate American retreat from the world as a way to reduce federal spending, Ryan believes U.S. hegemony to be nonnegotiable. “If there’s one thing I could say with complete confidence about American foreign policy,” he warned in a speech last year, “it is this: Our fiscal policy and our foreign policy are on a collision course; and if we fail to put our budget on a sustainable path, then we are choosing decline as a world power.”

Since entering Congress in 1999, according to Bloomberg Businessweek, Ryan has supported at least eight bills targeting Iran because of its human rights abuses and nuclear program. Two years ago, following a congressional trip through the Middle East, Ryan reported that “Iran’s history of belligerence in the region, its inflammatory Islamist rhetoric, and its support for terrorist and insurgent groups throughout the region are just as alarming for many governments in the Middle East.”

In a speech last summer, Ryan criticized the Obama administration for “tak[ing] our allies for granted” and boasted that “America’s foundations are not our own — they belong equally to every person everywhere.” Criticizing President Obama for forsaking our traditional alliances and deploying moral and universalistic language in the service of American exceptionalism: This is the stuff that gets one written off as a “neocon” by right-thinking members of the establishment. (Indeed, pretty much any foreign policy thinker or politician who is not Brent Scowcroft or Jim Baker, neither of whom has ever been elected to anything, is derided today as a “neocon.”) Meanwhile, Wall Street Journal columnist Bret Stephens praised Ryan’s speech last year as a “neocon manifesto.”

Whether Ryan is a neocon or not, he clearly had well-developed views on foreign policy long before his selection as the vice presidential nominee. Immediately after he was picked, Newsweek determined that “the selection of Paul Ryan as Mitt Romney’s choice for vice president tilts the ticket closer to the neoconservatives on key questions about America’s role in the world and the size of the military.”

Dowd realized this herself. Last month, she wrote dismissively that “Ryan helped pay for W.’s endless wars,” an implicit admission that he held the views he now espouses before Dan Senor started whispering in his ear. Four days before, she characterized Ryan as “an ideologue disguised as a wonk,” a hard description to square with that of being somebody else’s “puppet.” Whether one is sympathetic to Ryan’s world-view is irrelevant to the acknowledgment that he in fact has one; Dowd’s assumption that Ryan was in need of having opinions “graft[ed]” onto him is not just conspiratorial, it is factually wrong.

Dowd’s confusion about Ryan illustrates the difficulty that liberals have in reacting to conservatives, whom they view through two, mutually exclusive, modes: the rube and the ideologue. Even Sarah Palin, who came to the job of Republican vice presidential candidate as a governor with barely developed foreign policy views, had basic, conservative instincts about America’s role in the world and an appreciation for our allies and adversaries. Palin may have been vastly unprepared for the position and in need of serious coaching, but she did not require “neocons” to tell her that Vladimir Putin is a bad actor or that Iran should be stopped from acquiring nuclear weapons or that America should be the world’s unquestioned military hegemon. These are beliefs that most Republicans (and a fair number of Democrats) already hold.

But when it comes to analyzing conservatives, such nuances are lost. Either they are uncompromising “ideologues” or vacuous “neophytes.” Or in the case of Paul Ryan, they’re both.

Kirchick is a fellow with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.