The Cowboy Abroad

In May, after President Barack Obama called for Israel and Palestine to negotiate their borders based on "the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps," Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s office sent around a statement of his own. "As someone who has visited Israel numerous times," it read, "I know that it is impracticable to revert to the 1967 lines." It was a departure from the Perry camp’s usual missives, which are typically about how Texas has just created 40 new jobs by poaching a paper-clip company from California or something like that. And it was revealing — but what it revealed, to this Perry watcher, was simply that he really was thinking of running for president.

This is the tricky thing about governors who would be commander in chief: Unlike members of Congress, who arrive on the campaign trail encumbered by voting records and committee-hearing transcripts, we have little idea what state-level chief executives think of the world beyond the borders of Texas, or Arkansas, or Alaska. In the case of Perry — the longtime governor of Texas who before officially announcing his candidacy on Aug. 13 was better known in parts of the national media for carrying a gun while jogging than for his position on anything — what little we know is as follows: This summer, he reportedly met with Douglas Feith and William Luti, neoconservatives who served in George W. Bush’s administration. He also met with former Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf in Austin last month, though Musharraf explained that this was because he, like so many other observers, was curious to learn about Texas’s economy. In his 2010 book, Fed Up!, Perry warns that Washington has lost its focus on its "fundamental defense mission." Perry dings  Obama for indulging in the "utter fantasy" of a world without nuclear weapons and for having devoted more attention in his Quadrennial Defense Review to climate change than to China, Russia, North Korea, or Iran. (That last bit is probably especially vexing to Perry, who says he doesn’t believe in man-made climate change.)

Going on these scant data points, Perry certainly looks like another Republican hawk, and possibly of the neocon variety. But rhetoric is one thing, and behavior another. Indeed, looking at his record as governor, there are indications that a Perry White House’s foreign policy could be more pragmatic than his words and political associations might suggest.

Perry’s record on foreign affairs, such as it is, suggests that business interests take precedence over more abstract concerns. Perry has been hawkish on border security, for example, and has even said that the United States should consider deploying troops to Mexico to stop the country’s bloody drug war from spilling over the Texas border. But he also campaigned for Mexican trucks to be allowed on American highways — a development that was promised in the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement and anticipated by Mexico, but held up by the United States until earlier this year, when the Obama administration lifted the ban.

Perry also riled the nativist wing of the Republican Party with his plan for a significant expansion of the state’s overloaded infrastructure. The Trans-Texas Corridor, proposed in 2002, would have built a new network of roads and rail lines, including a major thoroughfare cutting through the middle of the Lone Star State, from Mexico to Oklahoma. Because the state budget was already strained and Texans are resolutely opposed to tax hikes, the plan called for the roads to be privately financed and tolled. A half-Spanish developer partnership, Cintra-Zachry, was contracted for much of the work; fringe commentators warned that the whole thing was a step toward the dreaded North American Union. The plan eventually met with less-paranoid criticism — Texans were not enthused about large swaths of their land being seized by eminent domain for a for-profit enterprise — and was scuppered. But Perry has been a pragmatic business-first internationalist on other issues as well, publicizing his willingness to do business with countries whose regimes he has criticized in other contexts. In 2004, he announced a $5 million grant to Venezuela-owned Citgo as it relocated its corporate headquarters to Houston, and last year he riled the cybersecurity community when he wooed Chinese telecom Huawei to set up its American headquarters in Plano.

Perry’s constant cheerleading for the 10th Amendment — the constitutional touchstone of states’ rights advocates — points to another pattern in his politics, which is that he defers to the will of the people on those occasions when they coalesce to express it. This, combined with his pro-business bent, may mitigate Perry’s hawkish tendencies. One of his critiques about entitlement spending, for example, is that it contributes to the deficit so much that it diminishes America’s ability to maintain the world’s most effective military. But having a strong military doesn’t mean you have to use it. And on the campaign trail Perry has struck some pragmatic notes. "We need to be thoughtful before we ever go into an area that America’s interests are truly being impacted," he said last week in South Carolina, speaking of Afghanistan. These aren’t the words of a man who wants to spread democracy from Kyrgyzstan to Syria; they are the words of a politician who doesn’t like losing causes.

One thing that can be said with confidence about Perry is that as president he wouldn’t be much concerned with international opinion (which is lucky for him, because otherwise he would get his feelings hurt — a President Perry is unlikely to be be feted in Oslo). Two factors make this so. The first is Perry’s cynical-yet-not-inaccurate belief that the global community is not always effective. Remarking on the 2010 sinking of South Korea’s Cheonan in Fed Up!, Perry observes acidly, "The United Nations responded with its characteristic force, passing yet another resolution expressing displeasure." On Barack Obama’s 2009 call for a new treaty to end the production of fissile materials for use in nuclear weapons, he writes, "We don’t need a stable of U.N. lawyers to tell us that the international system has no reliable mechanism for enforcing such a treaty." Given that North Korea has yet to be punished for the Cheonan’s sinking and that the fissile material treaty is going nowhere fast, Perry seems on solid ground here.

The second, and more problematic, is Perry’s conviction that the United States isn’t always bound by international rules — a tricky argument for him to make, given that he believes a lot of American laws are themselves suspect. This was most clearly on display in the 2008 case of Medellín v. Texas. José Medellín was a Mexican national who, along with several other criminals, raped and murdered two teenage girls in Houston in 1993. He was also a vicious thug who, having admitted to the assault and signed a confession, was summarily sentenced to death. The case was straightforward, except that Medellín was not advised of his right to contact the Mexican Consulate. Mexico sued the United States in the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in 2003, arguing that it had the right to review the cases of Medellín and 50 other Mexican nationals in American prisons. The ICJ sided with Mexico, finding that the United States had breached the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations. President George W. Bush issued a memorandum ordering state courts to examine the convictions, and Medellín sued. In 2008, the Supreme Court sided with Texas, finding that the ICJ’s judgment was not enforceable as domestic law. "Amazingly, however, three justices did not agree," Perry writes in Fed Up!, "perhaps believing instead that international law should trump the laws of Texas."

None of this is predictive of Perry’s hypothetical behavior as president, of course; Bush, you’ll recall, spoke on the campaign trail in 2000 of a "humble" foreign policy, and we all know how that turned out. The best predictor, should it come to that, might be the views of the voters. Recent polling from the Pew Research Center suggests an uptick in isolationist sentiment. In 2004, 44 percent of respondents and 58 percent of those identified as conservative Republicans agreed that it was "best for the future of our country to be active in world affairs," as opposed to concentrating on problems at home. By this year, only 33 percent of respondents took that view, including 39 percent of conservatives.

These results may be on account of war fatigue or the beleaguered economy, but it is the mood of the day. Although this election will likely center on economic issues, it would hurt Perry’s chances if he took a starkly different perspective from the voters on foreign policy, and if elected, he is not the kind of politician who will try to convince people otherwise. While Perry hardly sounds like an isolationist, neither does he have the record that would suggest a hard-core neoconservative temperament. There will always be the known unknowns and the unknown unknowns, as former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld — who has also reportedly had a hand in Perry’s foreign-policy education — would say. But looking over Perry’s record, there are no examples of him leading people somewhere they’re already determined not to go.