Haley 2024: 'New' Leadership, Bankrupt Ideas

On foreign policy, Haley offers nothing but the usual hawkish complaining.

Nikki Haley announced her bid for the Republican presidential nomination this week:

Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina and U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, formally launched her 2024 campaign for the White House on Wednesday, pitching herself to voters as part of a "new generation" of Republican leaders who can win at the ballot box.

"I know America is better than all the division and distractions that we have today," Haley told several hundred supporters in Charleston, South Carolina. "And I'm confident that the American people agree. We're ready — ready to move past the stale ideas [bold mine-DL] and faded names of the past, and we are more than ready for a new generation to lead us into the future." 

Many presidential candidates have used some version of Haley’s “new generation” pitch, but the pitch doesn’t work when the candidate has nothing new or particularly interesting to offer. Haley claims to be moving past “stale ideas” and “faded names,” but she is a throwback to an earlier era of the Republican Party and she has the leftover ideas to match. There was a time when she was seen as part of the future leadership of the party, but that was many years ago. Now she is setting herself up to be the Marco Rubio of 2024.

Insofar as Haley has aligned herself with the Trump-era Republican Party, she represents continuity with the stale ideas of the administration in which she served. To the extent that she promises to be something different from Trump, her policy views make her more of a return to Bush-era Republicanism. Her campaign staff is overflowing with ex-Club for Growth people, her foreign policy is defined by hardline views and associations with extremists. I don’t know how much traction Haley is going to get in the primaries, but we can be sure that she isn’t offering up any fresh thinking or a new policy agenda that might set her apart.

On foreign policy, Haley offers nothing but the usual hawkish complaining:

Nikki Haley @NikkiHaley

Iran is steps away from a nuclear bomb, North Korea fired more missiles last year than any other on record, terrorists have made Afghanistan home under the Taliban, and Russia invaded Ukraine Freedom-loving people around the world are less safe with President Biden in charge

It’s debatable how responsible Biden and his policies are for many of these things, but it is absurd for Haley, a leading advocate for quitting the nuclear deal with Iran, to lay the expansion of Iran’s nuclear program solely at Biden’s feet. Biden’s Iran policy has been failing because it is still largely a continuation of the one that he inherited from Haley’s former boss. However close Iran is to acquiring nuclear weapons, that happened in large part because Trump followed the advice of Haley and other Iran hawks to renege on the agreement that had put significant restrictions on their nuclear program. Haley is a typical hawk in that she and the rest of the Trump administration created this mess and now blame the people that came after them for the consequences of what they did.

Haley probably doesn’t want to be calling attention to North Korea policy, either, since she was involved in implementing the failed “maximum pressure” policy that is still in place. North Korea’s nuclear arsenal and missile development have done nothing but advance for the last six years in a clear testament to the failure of the bankrupt pressure approach that she championed while she represented the U.S. at the United Nations. If these problems have continued to get worse under Biden, it is because Biden has not broken with the failed policy that Haley also supports.

Many former governors have little or no foreign policy experience when they run for president. This can be a political liability because managing foreign policy is such a large part of what the president does, but it can also benefit these candidates because they can honestly say that they had nothing to do with the failed policies of earlier administrations. Haley has put herself in a bad position where she still has relatively little foreign policy experience, but she also had a high-profile role in the Trump administration supporting two of its biggest failed policies. Not only will Haley have a hard time challenging Trump because their foreign policy records are one and the same, but her attacks on Biden will also tend to fall flat because the policies she is attacking are the ones that she helped create.