'Even a Shining City on a Hill Needs Walls': Senator Tom Cotton
Tom Cotton, the junior senator from Arkansas, and the future Republican candidate for president (mark my words), has accommodated himself handsomely to the reality of the Trump presidency. On the one hand, this is unsurprising—his political base accommodated itself to Trump (Arkansas gave its adopted daughter, Hillary Clinton, only 34 percent of its vote, to Trump’s 60). Meanwhile Cotton—Harvard Law School graduate, Army Ranger captain, Iraq War veteran, congressman and senator, and still a few months shy of his 40th birthday—subsumes much in his life to ambition. On the other hand, though, Cotton is a foe of Russia, a believer in overseas engagement (and not only armed engagement), a dispositionally hardline, clever foreign policy analyst in a Senate mostly devoid of interesting global thinkers, and a proponent of the NATO alliance. Trump and Cotton had not struck me as a natural fit.
And yet, when I went to visit Cotton in his Senate office a few days ago, I found a senator ready to defend Trump’s approach to almost every issue, including the president’s evident desire to reopen discussion about America’s One China policy, which has held through Democratic and Republican presidencies alike. Cotton’s aggressiveness on this was particularly noteworthy. When I asked him why he would reconsider the U.S. relationship with Taiwan, given the red-line quality of this issue, he said, “Beijing doesn’t get to dictate to us how we make policy. We don’t make policy based on what offends them or what causes them to lose face.” Then, just to underscore the reality of the New Pugnacity, he added, “They need to remember that we are the world's superpower and they are not.” The One China policy was good enough for one Reagan and two Bushes, I said, so why not him? “Times and circumstances change, and policies change along with them.”
I visit Cotton periodically to talk foreign policy, and I’ve come to think of him as a heavily-armed Wilsonian—a believer in the force of arms, but also an idealist about the American message to the world, and in the belief that democracy is a universal natural right.
