Republican presidential candidate Scott Walker has no notable foreign policy experience. This continues to be a problem, even as Walker mews his strange theories on how Ronald Reagan showed the only foreign policy experience a person really needs is
union-busting, which is why you may have noticed Walker recently adding an explicitly anti-Iranian-deal plank (well, twig) to his public platform. "Iran deal bad" is a safe and banal position, if you're a Republican running for something.
Unfortunately for Scott Walker, it's also served to highlight just how devoid of substance his proto-foreign-policy is. In his campaign announcement and adopted into his subsequent talking points, Walker has highlighted ex-Iranian hostage Kevin Hermening as the cornerstone of his foreign policy belief that Iran should never be negotiated with, ever. That's it. That's the whole talking point; if you want specifics from Scott Walker on Iran and world non-proliferation efforts more fleshed out than pointing a finger at campaign friend Hermening and declaring the matter closed you are still fresh out of luck. It took the ambitious Walker years to formulate this much policy in the vanilla pudding factory he calls a mind; don't expect miracles between now and the upcoming debates.
There is, however, a further problem with Walker's reliance on his campaign friend as his foreign policy lodestone. Hermening, then a Marine, was one of 52 Americans taken hostage by Iranian students during the Carter administration; he works today as an investment adviser, but his own claim to modern foreign policy expertise consists mostly of an op-ed piece he wrote post-9/11 that was extreme even by foreign policy extremist standards.
There, Hermening called for the deportation of all illegal immigrants, especially those with a Middle Eastern background and anyone who reacted "with glee" to the coordinated attacks by 19 al-Qaida terrorists. He also urged wiping out the capitals of seven heavily Muslim countries — if they didn't support American efforts to kill Osama bin Laden.
"Every military response must be considered, including the use of nuclear warheads," Hermening wrote in the column. [...]
But does Hermening still think destroying these seven capitals would have been an appropriate response to Sept. 11?
Yes, he does.
So the Scott Walker foreign policy platform consists of pointing at a man who thought the proper foreign policy response to 9/11 would be mass deportations and dropping nukes on Muslim capital cities, whether they had anything to do with Al Qaeda or not, until an unspecified miracle occurred and America emerged triumphant from the possibly radioactive fog. This seems a poor choice of inspiration, although in truth it probably isn't substantively less vapid than much of the rest of the Bill Kristol-led conservative oeuvre.
Maybe that's the bigger problem. Not that Scott Walker's only foreign policy views are apparently cribbed from a Guy He Knows who wants to deport immigrants and nuke nations, but that this Junior's First Foreign Policy coloring book approach manages to get Walker two-thirds of the way toward the supposedly far more intellectual stances espoused by the people advising all the other candidates. Now there's an alarming thought.