WASHINGTON — Republican presidential candidate John Kasich advocated today for an aggressive foreign policy that would unapologetically trumpet “Judeo-Christian values” to reassert the leadership of the West and stand with America’s traditional allies, including Europe, Japan, and South Korea.
Mr. Kasich, the governor of Ohio and one of a crowded field of candidates for the 2016 GOP nomination, gave what his campaign called a major national security speech at the National Press Club in Washington.
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He said he would create an agency whose job would be to promote American values to counter the attraction that extremists’ ideas seem to be exerting.
“U.S. Public Diplomacy and International Broadcasting have lost their focus on the case for Western values and ideals and effectively countering opponents' propaganda and disinformation. I will consolidate them into a new agency that has a clear mandate to promote the core Judaeo-Christian Western values that we and our friends and allies share,” Mr. Kasich said. He said those are human rights, democracy, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and freedom of association.
“In this vacuum of values, is it any wonder that we see bright, educated young people abandoning the West for the meaning they think they see in the extremists’ cause?” he said.
Mr. Kasich has called on the President to stop resettling Syrian refugees in the U.S. until the vetting process is improved, and said he was challenged on that by one of his twin daughters.
“One of my daughters last night said, ’Why are you not going to let these people come in? What’s that about, Daddy?’” Mr. Kasich said. He said he told her, ’Reesey, we understand these people are in trouble, but think about, Reesey, us putting somebody on our street, in our town, or in our country, who mean us harm. We can’t do that, can we Reese?’ ’I understand now Daddy why you said what you said,’“ he related.
Mr. Kasich said he has a ”big heart,“ but also ”a pretty good brain.“ Reese Kasich is 15.
The Q-and-A period afterward was dominated by critical questions about his position on Syrian refugees, including that there was no evidence that the existing vetting process isn’t good enough, until Mr. Kasich said he’d talked enough about the refugees.
”Until we get a handle on where we are, we need to stop. Once we have a rational program and can determine who it is that’s coming then it’s another story,“ Mr. Kasich said.
He called for invoking the mutual defense clause of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in defense of France that was targeted by terrorists last week.
“NATO came to our aid after 9/11. NATO must now do so again for France. We must be swift, decisive and absolute,” he said.
Mr. Kasich was critical of the current leadership as weak and unwilling to lead, creating vacuums filled by Russia, China, Syria, and Iran.
“The same mistakes in judgment and strategy that have let terrorism flourish in recent years and wrongly signaled weakness to Russia and China are found throughout American national security policy right now, and it all comes down to this: we have not led,” Mr. Kasich said.
He called for no-fly zones on the Turkish and Jordanian borders.
Contact Tom Troy: tomtroy@theblade.com or 419-724-6058 or on Twitter @TomFTroy.
First Published November 17, 2015, 7:42 p.m.
