Foreign policy, not military, likely focus in '16 campaign

From Navy Times:

Newly announced presidential candidate Sen. Rand Paul stood just a few hundred yards from the USS Yorktown in South Carolina on April 9 for the first national security address of his campaign.

That symbolic closeness may be the standard distance to national security issues over the next 18 months for Paul and the other presidential candidates.

Experts expect such issues to stay at the forefront of the 2016 presidential race, especially given the continued instability in the Middle East. But unlike the campaigns run at the height of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, those conversations appear now to be more about policy theory and less about operational and program details that have a much more immediate effect on troops' everyday lives.

"They're going to be talking about Iraq and Syria and the new nuclear deal" with Iran, said Larry Korb, senior fellow at the left-leaning Center for American Progress. "And the budget and sequestration will be a topic. But I don't expect to hear these candidates talking about military retirement reform or things like that."

So far, only the only high-profile names to announce their candidacy are Kentucky's Paul and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, both Republicans. Neither is the standard bearer on defense or foreign policy for their party, though both have worked to burnish those credentials in recent months.

During his speech in South Carolina, Paul spoke about the need to use military force responsibly while pledging to combat "radical Islam" threats anywhere in the world. But he spoke less about military funding than erasing the national debt, and more on "the Washington machine that gobbles up our freedom" than on U.S. defense policy.

Cruz, who sits on the Senate Armed Services Committee, has pushed for increased defense spending but spent the initial days of his campaign focused on similar "big government" rhetoric.

Hillary Clinton, the presumptive Democratic front-runner, brings with her four years of experience as secretary of state, work that intertwined but did not directly deal with military personnel and strategy.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and former Sen. Jim Webb, D-Va., are the only expected major party candidates with military service, but both are considered long shots to gain their party's nomination.

A Pew Research Center poll released in January put terrorism as the top public policy concern among Americans, above jobs, education and health care costs (ensuring a strong military came in eleventh).

Danielle Pletka, vice president for defense policy studies at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, said she expects that focus to continue even as candidates work to shift the conversation to other domestic issues.

"I don't see ISIS going away anytime soon," she said. "There are still issues with China, Russia. … We're facing the most foreign policy problems we've seen in years. Republicans should work to pin that on [President] Obama and the Democrats."

But she also acknowledged that "it's a big thing to leap from those threats to explaining the sequester on the campaign trail."

Korb expects candidates to play more to "fear" than to policies, pointing to the continued Islamic State threat and the possible rise of al-Qaida in Yemen. "They have to pivot there, because people are still uneasy about those issues," he said.

Those arguments have more to do with diplomacy and defense theory, and likely will not wander into dramatic fights over military policy or funding.

Pletka said she thinks most of the major Republican candidates are closely aligned on those nuts-and-bolts issues anyway, limiting how much the issues will come up in the primary debates.

Clinton won't be pushed on them until the general election, unless a prominent challenger emerges in the Democratic primary.