Republican Candidates on Middle East: All About Iran and ISIS

Some of the 17 Republican candidates for the Presidential nomination in 2016 have wild theories on the Middle East. Donald Trump claims that the so-called “Islamic State” (ISIS) “built” a four star hotel in Syria, while Rand Paul accuses the Iraqi government of being an ally of its archenemy ISIS, as Ted Cruz confesses to his admiration for Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi.

But even with all the Trump and Cruz hubris, none of today’s GOP candidates is promising a return to the foreign policy of the last Republican resident of the White House: George W. Bush. The days of the Iraq war and democracy promotion in the Middle East are something of the past. Yet, the Republican field with its hawks, realists and isolationists, is promising a very different path in the Middle East than the one pursued by current President Barack Obama.

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“I am my own man” declared Jeb Bush in the last debate, drawing a wedge with his former brother George W. Bush who started two wars, and left office in 2009 with the biggest economic crisis since the great depression. The Republican class of 2016 “is a more careful and less ideological than that accompanying W. Bush to power in 2000” says Jonathan Schanzer, a former treasury official during the Bush days and the Vice President of research at the Foundation of Defense of Democracies.

Schanzer tells Al Arabiya News that the U.S. itself has transformed and so has the Republican party. Following the September 2001 terrorist attacks, “ it was a different nation, because we were hit”. Today, while the GOP still has “less tolerance than Obama for bad actors” it “is not going to go to war overnight and the American people are more war weary.” Schanzer adds that the “neoconservatives within the party are are less prevalent today, and we will neither witness a prominent return for (the Iraq war architects) Paul Wolfowitz or Richard Perle nor a push for democracy promotion.”

Schanzer anticipates that between now and the inauguration of new President in January 2017, all eyes will be on the senate vote on September 17th, and the implementation of the deal itself, to determine how will the next President address. Key questions will involve whether Iran is making the region more unstable or if it’s cheating in implementing the agreement. Either option could lead to ramping up sanctions on Iran, something that Marco Rubio, and Jeb Bush have promised.

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