Jim Talent
last updated: April 24, 2017
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Affiliations
- Bipartisan Policy Center: Senior Fellow
- American Enterprise Institute: Visiting Fellow
- Ted Cruz Campaign Adviser: 2016
- Mitt Romney Campaign Adviser: 2012
- Heritage Foundation: Distinguished Fellow, 2007–
- WMD Terrorism Research Center: Vice chair
Government
- U.S. Senate (R-MO): 2003-2007
- U.S. House of Representatives (R-MO): 1993-2001
- Missouri House of Representatives: 1985-1993
- U.S. Court of Appeals: Former clerk
Education
- University of Chicago: JD
- Washington University (St. Louis): BA
Jim Talent, a former Republican senator from Missouri, is a visiting fellow at the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and a senior fellow at the Bipartisan Policy Center. He was formerly a “distinguished fellow” at the right-wing Heritage Foundation.[1] According to his AEI bio, Talent directs the National Security 2020 Project at AEI’s Marilyn Ware Center for Security Studies. In this capacity, he is leading a team of experts “working on the formulation and promulgation of a new paradigm for defense policy, planning, and budgeting.”
Since losing his Senate seat in 2006, Talent has served as an adviser to a string of GOP presidential candidates. He supported Mitt Romney in both his 2008 and 2012 campaigns, and served as a foreign policy adviser to the former Massachusetts governor’s 2012 bid. More recently, Talent was a member of Sen. Ted Cruz‘s 2016 presidential campaign’s foreign policy advisory team, or “national security coalition,” joining a host of other foreign policy hawks like Elliott Abrams, Michael Ledeen, and Frank Gaffney. [2]
After the election of Donald Trump, Talent was mentioned as a possible contender for Defense Secretary despite his disagreements with Trump. During the election campaign, Talent criticized Trump’s Middle East policies, in particular his stance on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. In a March 2016 opinion piece for the National Review he criticized Trump for arguing that the United States should be a “neutral broker” in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. While Talent had no doubt that Trump was adept at “making deals,” he argued that “the Israeli–Palestinian dispute is not about money. … It’s about whether there should be a Jewish state. On that subject, the United States cannot be neutral, and cannot sound as if it is.”
Although ultimately Talent was passed over for a cabinet post, he has proved a vocal booster of the Trump administration, in particular praising Trump’s stances on foreign affairs. After the Trump administration’s April 2017 surprise missile strike on Syria, Talent boasted that the attack was proof that the president could change his mind and “do what he thinks will protect American national interests regardless of what people are saying about him politically.”
As a key Romney surrogate on defense-spending issues during the 2012 campaign, Talent helped take the lead in responding to the Obama administration’s proposed defense budget for 2013, which slowed the growth of defense spending and advocated a “leaner and meaner” military, Talent told Foreign Policy, “One of the amazing things about it is that it’s explicitly a budget-driven decision, in other words there’s no pretense that this is a change based on strategic analysis. … [I]t encourages other countries to believe that they can provoke and challenge us, and it will end up costing us more money. It’s so much an explicit confession of bankruptcy in terms of defense policy, I almost don’t know how to respond to it.”[5]
In February 2012, Talent and fellow Romney adviser John Lehman issued a joint press release for the Romney campaign accusing President Barack Obama of “placing our Navy—and our national security—in a precarious position” and calling for substantial new investments in navy shipbuilding and weaponry.[6]
In December 2010, Talent penned an op-ed for the neoconservative Weekly Standard criticizing outgoing Defense Secretary Robert Gates for what Talent considered the secretary’s shortcomings on a host of security issues. “A review of Gates’s record on issues other than Afghanistan and Iraq,” wrote Talent, “shows he has made some key mistakes that have worsened the trend” of declining American power. Talent criticized Gates for “using ’resource constraints’ as an excuse for cutting defense programs,” for “fail[ing] to stand up for missile defense,” and for neglecting naval upgrades and other programs “to ensure the United States will be able to contain Russia, Iran, and especially the growing power of China.”[7]
As the vice chair of the WMD Terrorism Research Center, Talent invoked the specter of “rogue states” to argue for increased U.S. spending on bioterrorism readiness. Talent, reported the St. Louis Beacon in October 2011, “warned about the possibility that ‘a nation-state would empower one of those [terrorist] groups to launch an attack’ using biological weapons. ‘And if you cannot attribute’ such an attack, ‘deterrents don’t work. So there is a huge need’ for better science to be able to trace a germ warfare attack.”[8]
Talent is hawkish on Iran, arguing that the historic 2015 nuclear deal should be withdrawn. He has endeavored to paint Iran as an a dangerous and isolated power in the Middle East, once writing that “One of the few good things to come from the despicable WikiLeaks of U.S. diplomatic cables is that they demonstrate that Muslim leaders who are closest to the Iranian regime—and who know it best—are emphatic that Iran is an aggressive and ongoing state sponsor of terrorism, that it must not be allowed to obtain nuclear weapons capability and that it cannot be trusted.”[9] The “Muslim leaders” Talent was referring to were the monarchs of the conservative Sunni regimes in the Gulf, who have long had a simmering rivalry with the Shiite and anti-monarchical Iran.
Talent was a loyal ally of the George W. Bush administration during his tenure in the Senate. During his 2006 reelection race, which he narrowly lost to Democrat Claire McCaskill, Talent called McCaskill’s opposition to the Bush administration’s detainee treatment and warrantless wiretapping programs “weak.” And though he hadn’t yet entered the Senate when the body voted to authorize President Bush to strike Iraq, Talent said during the 2006 campaign that he would have authorized the war even knowing that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction, since “it was the only possible strategic choice.”[10]