Republican to Challenge Obama on Foreign Policy

GOP Aims to Keep War Spending Growing

This week’s mid-term election victory by the Republican Party sets up a major series of foreign policy clashes with the Obama Administration, as incoming congressmen eye battles on a number of fronts with the hawkish administration. But not the good kind like you’d want.

Rather the GOP congressmen are expected to try to out-hawk Obama as much as possible, fighting against the new START treaty on nuclear arms reduction and attempting to worsen relations with Cuba, Iran, and North Korea.

Beyond that, the battles center around an aforementioned effort to keep the Afghan war going as long as possible and to keep the military budget growing at the alarming pace that has already brought the nation to the brink of bankrupcy.

Given his enthusiasm for endless, escalating warfare it may seem difficult to outhawk President Obama, but by attacking his stated positions (the same stated positions that netted him a Nobel Peace Prize) instead of his actual, starkly different policies, they seem poised to forge an even more jingoist Congress ready to take even the most cynical lip-service to peace and blow it up into a sign of weakness ahead of the 2012 election.

Author: Jason Ditz

Jason Ditz is Senior Editor for Antiwar.com. He has 20 years of experience in foreign policy research and his work has appeared in The American Conservative, Responsible Statecraft, Forbes, Toronto Star, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Providence Journal, Washington Times, and the Detroit Free Press.