A number of conservatives who had been supporting DeSantis endorsed Trump following the Florida governor’s exit from the presidential race. Many of them argued that Trump had sewn up the nomination and was far preferable to Biden. Others said, additionally, that Trump is preferable to Haley. Ross Douthat devoted a recent column to arguing that Trump might be preferable to Haley on foreign policy because he would be less inclined to weaken America by overextending it.
I share some of these conservatives’ concerns. I would prefer it if Haley’s foreign-policy rhetoric reflected any sense of chastening post-Iraq and post-Afghanistan. I don’t agree with her apparent view that we should expand legal immigration to whatever level meets the desires of employers. On both issues, and doubtless a few others, I’m “Trumpier” than Haley is.
None of these concerns, however, alters my judgment that she would make a better president than Trump. Let’s start with immigration. George W. Bush could not persuade Congress to increase legal immigration. Trump couldn’t either. (As I keep pointing out, since it has been memory-holed, Trump spent the second half of his presidency saying we should have “record” levels of immigration.) It’s not clear to me that Haley would even try. With respect to illegal immigration, the key policy we need is not a wall or a program of mass deportations but a requirement that employers hire only citizens and legal immigrants. She is committed to that policy and implemented a version of it when she was governor of South Carolina.
The foreign-policy argument against Haley also seems overstated. More than most of her conservative critics, Douthat concedes that Haley might not be quite as hawkish as he suggests. He also notes that “hawkish politicians can practice realpolitik and play peacemaker—Ronald Reagan did both.”
That example is worth dwelling on. Reagan’s rhetoric before his presidency was crusading and moralistic, and he was certainly capable of making hawkish mistakes, such as the deployment of Marines to Lebanon. If his administration was more restrained in practice than his rhetoric suggested, it was in part because he knew full well that the country would not tolerate major interventions abroad. The “Reagan doctrine” was an alternative to committing U.S. troops. The fiercest hawks of the day lamented the “Vietnam syndrome” that restrained American foreign policy.
That syndrome weakened very gradually. Iraq syndrome is still with us, and I strongly suspect it would restrain the foreign policy of a President Haley.
And then there is the other side of the ledger. Haley hasn’t tried to subvert the Constitution or called for terminating any part of it, toyed with destroying NATO, veered crazily between praise for and threats to Kim Jong Un, thrown away Republican Senate seats, attacked one appointee after another, supped with notorious anti-Semites. . . . I could go on. Trump will almost certainly be the Republican presidential nominee. That’s no reason to refrain from saying that she would be a better one.