2016

Cruz embraces the dark side of Reagan’s legacy By John Bradshaw, NSN Executive Director The Hill | Feb. 9, 2016 Sen. Ted Cruz’s (R-Texas) continuing infatuation with dictators reflects a long and dangerous tradition among conservative politicians. Cruz has recently expressed his admiration for Egypt’s leader Field Marshal Abdul Fattah al-Sisi’s hardline rule, saying that while al-Sisi “may not be a champion of democracy” he has kept the Muslim Brotherhood in line. He has also defended the legitimacy of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, pined for the days when Muammar Qaddafi ruled Libya, and regretted the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. Cruz justifies his endorsement of these odious regimes by claiming that they are a bulwark against terrorism. Substitute “communism” for “terrorism” and Cruz’s formulation becomes indistinguishable from… Read More ›

Hyperbole is not a Strategy December 18, 2015 While all the candidates on the Republican debate stage in Las Vegas criticized Democrats on national security issues, very few of them presented anything resembling a clear strategy for tackling the threats facing the United States. Instead, they substituted tough talk, threats, and fearmongering for strategy, showing that they know how to scare people, not solve problems. Jeb Bush thinks we need “to destroy ISIS before it destroys us.” By saying that, Jeb Bush showed that he has no idea what kind of threat ISIS is or how to combat it. If every ISIS combatant assembled in one place, their roughly 30,000 fighters would be fewer than the total number of soldiers in a two U.S. Army… Read More ›

Donald Trump Is Helping the Terrorists Win By Steven Simon and NSN Advisory Board Member Daniel Benjamin December 15, 2015 | POLITICO American politics are undermining American national security. In their jockeying for the Republican presidential nomination, GOP contenders—Donald Trump above all—have managed to exacerbate dramatically the two U.S. weaknesses most likely to erode our country’s safety: fear and Islamophobia. The United States has made tremendous progress in the fight against terrorism since September 11. Yet it has also become all too clear that we are short of the kind of societal resilience that is essential for our success in fighting terrorism. Beyond that, we lack a shared recognition of the importance of the American Muslim community in preventing the spread of extremism. In recent weeks,… Read More ›

The paranoid style in Islamophobic politics J. Dana Stuster, NSN Policy Analyst December 14, 2015 | THE HILL When Donald Trump issued a statement recently calling on the U.S. government to bar Muslims, including U.S. citizens, from entering the United States, the condemnation came swift, as though there was still some line of good taste or ethics Trump had only just crossed. The critics are right, of course: Trump is a narcissist, a fascist, a demagogue with a third-grade vocabulary and a three-year-old’s understanding of the constitution. Which makes him an easy scapegoat for the Islamophobia that’s migrated from the far-right fringe of the political discourse to the mainstream. But Trump is a symptom, not a cause. It’s not enough to condemn Trump when his hateful… Read More ›

NSN 2016 Update: Return to the Dark Side December 4, 2015 In recent days, conservative candidates for president have revived the rhetoric of the immediate post 9-11 period and have seemed almost eager to play into the hands of ISIS, campaigning on policies that reinforce ISIS’s claims that the West is engaged in religiously-motivated warfare against all Muslims. Ben Carson, Chris Christie, and Donald Trump all want to bring back waterboarding. While these candidates agree that the United States should start torturing people again, none of them have provided any reason to believe that torture gathers information that could not be gathered by lawful methods. There are, however, strong reasons not to bring back waterboarding: not only is it torture, and therefore a war crime,… Read More ›

NSN 2016 Update: Clash of Civilizations November 13, 2015 Over the last few days, Republicans have engaged in a spirited competition over who can say the most horrible things about Syrian refugees, and a few went further, calling for unconstitutional religious tests that threaten the core freedoms this country was founded to protect. Marco Rubio is reading straight from the ISIS playbook when he calls the conflict in the Middle East a “clash of civilizations.” “ISIS wants to make this a clash of civilizations,” says Rand Beers, former Acting Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security and founder of NSN. “Why should we be helping them make their case? Why should we be turning on our own values?” By feeding the ISIS narrative and comparing… Read More ›

TO INCREASE YOUTH TURNOUT, MAKE VOTING SEXY Tara Sonenshine, NSN Advisory Board November 13, 2015 | THE HILL With a year left before a presidential election, America has a major challenge ahead: getting its young citizens to exercise, not just in the gym, but in the voting booth. We need teens and 20-somethings, and the entire under-35 generation, to get motivated and engaged in choosing the direction of this nation. In 2014, just under 37 percent of eligible voters turned out to vote, the lowest level of voter turnout seen in a midterm election since World War II. Of all demographics, the greatest drop-off in voting from a presidential year to a midterm is among young voters under 40. The share of the electorate composed of… Read More ›

NSN 2016 Update: Week of 11/8/2015 November 13, 2015 Today, NSN debuts a new offering—a roundup of conservative candidate statements on foreign policy and quick rebuttals to them. This week’s theme: conservative candidates don’t understand the Middle East, past or present, but still think they can chart its future.  “It wasn’t that long ago that Russia had no influence in the region at all.” – Jeb Bush on the Middle East Jeb Bush’s comments show that he doesn’t understand Russia’s history in Syria, so how can he get the policy right? Actually, Russia’s influence in Syria dates back to Bashar al-Assad’s father, Hafez al-Assad, who invited Brezhnev’s USSR to lease the Tartus naval facility back in the 1970s. In fact, Jeb Bush gets it precisely backwards: Russia is not fighting… Read More ›

RUBIO ON NATIONAL SECURITY: A CANDIDATE OF THE PAST John Bradshaw, Executive Director at NSN November 6, 2015 | THE HUFFINGTON POST Marco Rubio wants to be perceived as a youthful, forward-looking candidate, but his views on foreign policy are frozen in the Cold War. He fixates on Cold War enemies — Russia, China, Iran, and Cuba — and hasn’t updated his worldview to account for the changes that have arisen in recent decades. In his speeches, debates, and a recent article in Foreign Affairs, Rubio lays out foreign policy views that borrow the rhetoric of Ronald Reagan and the policies of Bush-era neoconservatives. He sees potential conflicts everywhere and prefers to address them using military force. His critique of the Obama Administration’s foreign policy ignores… Read More ›

IS REPUBLICAN NARRATIVE ON NATIONAL SECURITY DRAWING ON 2014 PLAYBOOK? Brian Katulis, Chairman of the Board at NSN September 18, 2015 | WALL STREET JOURNAL Five hours of debate among Republican presidential candidates Wednesday provided some insights into GOP views on national security. Sharp internal divisions remain, but glimmers of a new overall political narrative have started to emerge. Republicans have been in political disarray on foreign policy since at least 2010 over the Iraq war, the new START arms-control agreement, and defense spending. These internal divides help explain why Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign offered a lot of rhetoric on the Middle East uprisings but no sharp substantive policy contrast to the Obama administration… Republican vulnerabilities include a lack of clear details on what they would… Read More ›