Haley Still Thinks It's 2004

There are plenty of reasons to dislike what Ramaswamy is selling, but that doesn’t mean that the answer is to rally around a hardline throwback like Haley.

David Brooks thinks Nikki Haley is the best alternative to Trump:

Haley dismantled Ramaswamy on foreign policy. It was not only her contemptuous put-down: “You have no foreign policy experience and it shows.” She took on the whole America First ethos that sounds good as a one-liner but that doesn’t work when you’re governing a superpower.

No doubt conventionally hawkish Republicans liked what Haley had to say, but it takes a lot of gall for someone with nothing more than two years of experience as ambassador the U.N. to lecture someone else on a lack of foreign policy experience. I have heard Ramaswamy speak on foreign policy and I wasn’t impressed, but at least he isn’t a robotic ideologue reciting views that were discredited decades ago. That’s what Haley is, as she has proven on many occasions both during her time in the Trump administration and in the years since she left. Her China speech at AEI was terrible, and her frequent comments on foreign policy issues over the last few years have been no better.