A pointless debate:
"The third Republican presidential debate tonight will reportedly focus on foreign policy issues, but I can’t think of a good reason why I would waste part of my evening watching it. Presidential debates are not informative, and they are rarely even entertaining. There is nothing less appealing than the prospect of watching a stage full of militarists denounce each other for being insufficiently belligerent. I will probably end up scanning a transcript of their remarks later to see how deranged their rhetoric has become, but that’s it.
We know in advance that the “debate” will be superficial and the candidates will compete with each other to bluster about the latest exaggerated foreign threat. Each candidate will profess his or her undying devotion to Israel and the occupation (while denying that the occupation exists), and each of them will claim that every problem in the world is the result of Biden’s “weakness.” Since the debate will be in Miami, I am counting on the entire field to bend over backwards to declare their hatred of Cuba and Venezuela and their desire to strangle those countries with sanctions forever. The most likely area of disagreement will probably be over Ukraine, but this is just going to be a rehash of what we have heard in earlier debates.
Nikki Haley will pretend that two years as U.N. ambassador makes her some sort of foreign policy genius, Vivek Ramaswamy will probably indulge in more Kurtz-like fantasies about putting heads on stakes, and Ron DeSantis will grin widely while trying ever so hard to appear like a normal human being. Unfortunately for Haley, it seems that many media outlets have decided that it is now her “moment,” and whenever a Republican presidential candidate receives this sort of adulation in media coverage it is usually the beginning of the end for that campaign.
Nothing new will be revealed, and everyone involved must realize that the exercise will have no effect on the outcome of the primaries next year. At best, the also-ran candidates are auditioning to be Trump’s running mate. That all but guarantees that most of them will say nothing interesting or controversial about the Republican frontrunner.
There are plenty of things in Trump’s foreign policy record that a serious opponent could attack from the failure of “maximum pressure” to his escalations of every war he inherited, but for their own reasons none of the remaining challengers will do that. In DeSantis’ case, he was a faithful cheerleader for all of Trump’s policies when Trump was president. Haley was part of the administration and helped to implement some of Trump’s most destructive and vicious policies, and her time working for Trump is one of the only things she has to run on. Ramaswamy has made copying Trump one of his main selling points, so he isn’t about to denounce anything Trump did. Trump is also evidently still popular with most Republican voters, so there is little upside for any of the candidates to call him out for his many foreign policy failures. Instead we are going to hear from the other candidates how Trump’s record was wonderful, but that voters should still choose one of them as the next nominee anyway.
There will be lots of criticism of Biden, but judging from the candidates’ foreign policy speeches thus far most of this criticism will be inaccurate and dishonest. A presidential debate with candidates from the opposing party could be an occasion to hold the incumbent president accountable for his real failures, but I am confident that they are going to settle for attacking a mostly made-up version of Biden’s record defined by imaginary “appeasement” and sanctions relief that never happened. It is a safe bet that the audience will end the evening with a less accurate understanding of the relevant issues than they had when they started."
There is nothing less appealing than the prospect of watching a stage full of militarists denounce each other for being insufficiently belligerent.
daniellarison.substack.com
