Why Nikki Haley could be the most dangerous president

ROSS DOUTHAT FROM NEW YORK TIMES

Her hawkish foreign policy vision won’t rescue America.

In the alternate timeline where Ron DeSantis proved to be a capable campaigner and looked poised to defeat Donald Trump in New Hampshire and beyond, we would be facing a multitude of left-leaning essays on a single theme: “Why DeSantis is actually more dangerous than Trump.”

In this world, the only threat to Trump in New Hampshire is Nikki Haley, and her candidacy doesn’t look built to last much beyond that primary. But in the spirit of slipping in your controversial opinions while you can, and because she might yet be Trump’s running mate, here is my own fear: A Haley presidency could be more dangerous than a second Trump term.

This is not because I think that Haley is an authoritarian threat to American democracy. She is obviously not, and her nomination and election would have the salutary effect of re-normalizing Republican politics on important questions like, “Should you contest a lost election by pushing for a constitutional crisis and whipping up an angry mob?”

But when the history of 21st-century American decline is written, the crucial chapter will focus not on Trump but on one of his predecessors, George W. Bush: a better man than Trump, a capable politician with a number of sound policies to his credit, but also the architect of a hubristic foreign policy whose disastrous effects continue to ripple through the country and the world.

The Iraq war and the slower, longer failure in Afghanistan didn’t just begin the unraveling of the Pax Americana. They also discredited the American establishment at home, shattering the center-right and undermining the center-left, dissolving confidence in politicians, bureaucracies and even the military itself, while the war’s social effects lingered in the opioid epidemic and the mental health crisis.

Haley is not exactly a George W. Bush Republican. Rather, she shares the mood that emerged among establishment Republicans after Bushism collapsed, which blamed the failures of his presidency on overspending rather than Iraq, and envisioned a Republican future defined by fiscal austerity, moderation on social issues and full-spectrum hawkishness in foreign policy.

This was the worldview that Trump successfully ran against in 2016, when it was extremely ill-suited for the challenges the country faced. Today the landscape is somewhat different: Haley’s eagerness to talk about entitlement reform, for instance, is still probably a political loser, but the inflation-shadowed world of 2024 could use a grand bargain on deficits in a way the world of eight years ago did not.

However, on foreign policy a sweepingly hawkish vision is even more out of touch with the present global landscape, where the United States faces a destabilizing world with an overstretched military that can’t meet its recruitment goals and a set of rivals who see this moment as their window of opportunity. (Or of necessity, in the case of a China that’s powerful today but staring at rapid demographic decline just over the horizon.)