GOP candidates fight to define foreign policy

NSA spying row highlights program’s new sweep

WASHINGTON, Dec 17, (Agencies): For Republicans, this week’s presidential debate highlighted a brewing fight to define the party’s foreign policy posture, exposing divisions among candidates about the US role in fostering regime change in the Middle East and tactics to prevent terror attacks at home.

The fault lines reflect a party still in flux long after President George W. Bush’s unpopular Iraq war damaged Republicans’ standing on international issues. While there’s little appetite among Republican candidates for the sweeping military intervention and nation-building Bush championed, most are wary of being pegged as isolationists, particularly given Americans’ heightened fears of terrorism following attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, California.

“The fundamental debate is, well, if Bush did too much and Obama did too little, what’s the right amount of international engagement?” said Richard Fontaine, a former foreign policy adviser to Sen John McCain, a Republican, and current president of the Center for New American Security think-tank.

While foreign policy rarely decides presidential elections except in times of war, national security concerns are likely to remain a top issue for Americans at least through the early voting contests that begin in February. As Republican leaders eye the general election, they believe voters disappointed with President Barack Obama’s foreign policy stewardship will be reluctant to elect his former secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, the front-runner for the Democratic nomination.

First, though, Republicans must work out their own divisions, which could be viewed most clearly in Tuesday’s debate through the prism of the rivalry between Florida Sen Marco Rubio and Texas Sen Ted Cruz.

One of the most striking contrasts between the senators centered on how aggressive the US should be in seeking to topple Middle East dictators, some of whom have been bulwarks against Islamic extremists.

Cruz cast himself as a realist, arguing that while autocrats like Syrian President Bashar Assad don’t share American values, their potential cooperation in fighting extremism is preferable to taking a chance on whoever might replace them.

“If we topple Assad, the result will be ISIS will take over Syria, and it will worsen US national security interests,” said Cruz, referring to the militant group that claimed responsibility for the attacks in Paris and appears to have inspired the California shooting. Cruz was backed by Republican frontrunner Donald Trump and Kentucky Sen Rand Paul, who both said the US has higher priorities than ousting Assad.

Rubio’s view was more in line with both the Bush and Obama administrations’ calls for backing the spread of democracy in the Middle East. He argued that Assad’s iron grip on power in Syria has allowed the Islamic State to thrive and said he “will not shed a tear” if he is pushed from power.

The Florida senator reiterated his position Wednesday during a campaign stop in New Hampshire, saying, “This idea that we can lead from behind, or in the case of Senator Cruz, not lead at all, will just leave more of these vacuums in other parts of the world.”

The debate revealed little new about the candidates’ proposals for defeating the Islamic State. Most of the candidates have called for more aggressive action, though their plans have largely lacked specifics or been similar to steps the Obama administration is already taking.

Democrats have their own divisions on foreign policy, though they have been more muted given the relative tameness of the party’s presidential primary.

Clinton has largely supported Obama’s foreign policy, though she’s said the US should first focus on fighting the Islamic State instead of Assad. She’s also called for called for setting up a no-fly zone and humanitarian corridors in Syria, steps Obama opposes, though she shares the president’s resistance to large-scale ground combat operations in the Middle East.

Meanwhile, US intelligence agencies can now reach almost all domestic phone records, far more than they collected under a now-scrapped program by the National Security Agency, according to Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz.

That estimate of the amount of US phone records now available to investigators put the spotlight on a new intelligence reform law at a time when the limits of surveillance are being debated again after this month’s deadly shootings in San Bernardino, California.

In the Republican presidential debate on Tuesday night, Cruz, a Texas senator, defended his support for the USA Freedom Act, a reform passed this year that prohibits the NSA from collecting domestic call metadata in bulk, by saying the new system was better for intelligence agencies.

“The old program covered 20 percent to 30 percent of phone numbers to search for terrorists,” Cruz said. “The new program covers nearly 100 percent.” That prompted a backlash from Senator Marco Rubio, a Cruz rival for the Republican nomination for the November 2016 presidential election, and Senator Richard Burr, chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Both favor restoring the NSA’s ability to collect phone records in bulk.

Burr said on Wednesday morning his staff would look into whether Cruz had spilled confidential information. By afternoon, Burr, a North Carolina Republican, said no investigation would be undertaken.

Cruz is not a member of the intelligence committee. But before the new law’s passage in June, intelligence officials held classified briefings with lawmakers to discuss the legislation.

The Cruz campaign said the coverage figures for the old program that he cited in defending his pro-reform vote had been previously reported, including by the Washington Post in 2014. “Those figures have been widely reported and are saturated in the public domain,” Rick Tyler, a Cruz spokesman, said on Wednesday.

While the USA Freedom Act’s ending of bulk data collection is considered a win by most privacy advocates, it also gives US intelligence analysts easier access to a more complete set of phone records, experts have said.