Israel Matzav: Ryan a 'defense hawk'

Sunday, August 12, 2012

Ryan a 'defense hawk'

Although my guess is that the main reason that Mitt Romney chose Representative Paul Ryan (R-Wi) as his running mate was to shift the focus of the campaign to President Obama's poor handling of the economy, there's a bonus in the pick for conservatives in general and Israel supporters in particular. Ryan is a defense hawk, who visited Israel in 2005 and has been an enthusiastic supporter of the Jewish state.

In recent months, Ryan has been receiving briefings from Elliott Abrams, George W. Bush's former Middle East director at the National Security Council, and Fred Kagan, one of the architects of the military surges in Iraq and Afghanistan, as first reported by Weekly Standard reporter Stephen Hayes on Twitter. Another conservative foreign-policy specialist who has briefed Ryan said the Romney campaign in Boston has arranged for briefings with a parade of former government experts on foreign policy in recent weeks.

Abrams told The Daily Beast on Saturday that he found Ryan’s views in line with the mainstream of the Republican Party today, saying Ryan was "relaxed, serious, funny, very smart, and knows more about foreign policy than people may think, in view of his concentration on the economy."

...

Danielle Pletka, the vice president for foreign- and defense-policy studies at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, also praised the Ryan pick. “Unlike a lot of fiscal conservatives, one of the great things about Paul Ryan is he is not omni-directionally a budget cutter,” she said. “He understands the primary role of the federal government is the national defense and not the handing out of food stamps.”

One reason why the Ryan pick is seen as a win for foreign-policy hawks is because of the Romney campaign’s choice of Robert Zoellick, a former World Bank president and bitter foe of neoconservatives inside the George W. Bush administration, to head up the process of selecting national-security and foreign-affairs appointments if Romney wins. Writing in The Washington Post, conservative blogger Jennifer Rubin points out that many hawks within the GOP have already complained about the choice of Zoellick to head what the Romney campaign calls the “readiness project,” noting that Zoellick has favored more engagement with China.

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One hint to Ryan’s overall view on foreign policy can be found in his 2011 speech to the Alexander Hamilton Society. In that speech Ryan sounded a theme first coined by Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer that the decline of America as a world power is a choice not an inevitability.

Ryan, however, differed from many foreign-policy hawks in his speech by identifying America’s mounting debt as a threat to the nation’s ability to field the military necessary to remain a world power. “A safer world and a more prosperous America go hand in hand,” he said. “Economic growth is the key to avoiding the kind of painful austerity that would limit our ability to generate both hard and soft power.”

I have video of that speech for you.

Let's go to the videotape.

Ryan visited Israel in 2005, and is described as an enthusiastic supporter of the Jewish state.

Republican Vice Presidential contender Paul Ryan came to Israel in 2005 as part of a large Republican Congressional delegation hosted by the American Israel Education Foundation, a charitable organization affiliated with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. On the trip he met with a wide array of Israeli political leaders, led by then-prime minister Ariel Sharon, and visited strategic sites in Jerusalem and Israel's borders with Syria and Lebanon.

Republicans Abroad in Israel co-chairman Kory Bardash, who had breakfast with Ryan at a Republican summit in Park City, Utah, in June, called him "very enthusiastically pro-Israel and a political "superstar."

Bardash said Ryan was impressed when he told him that he knew many immigrants to Israel from Wisconsin who would be voting in the US election.

"He was very excited to know that I came to the summit from Israel, and he was very supportive of our organization's efforts," Bardash said. "He has co-sponsored pro-Israel legislation, he is very strong against pressuring Israel to make concessions to the Palestinians, and he is very critical of Hamas, which he called 'an Islamic terrorist organization.'"

I hope Bardash is right, although in most cases, the Vice President has very little influence on foreign policy. Ask Joe Biden.

Labels: Campaign 2012, Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan