GOP presidential candidate Carly Fiorina told the Wall Street Journal’s Opinion Journal Monday that when the United States is “not leading, the world is a more dangerous and a more tragic place, and unfortunately we are not leading.”
Fiorina said that America needs to stand by its allies in the Middle East – Israel and our Arab allies in their fight against ISIS — and that doing so does not mean we are “rushing off to war.” She added that the United States should stand by Ukraine, and also Japan and Australia, as China grows more aggressive.
The former Hewlett-Packard president and CEO took another jab at Democrat presidential candidate and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, stating that America needs to “confront our adversaries, we need to confront Vladimir Putin, not with a gimmicky red reset button, but by rebuilding the Sixth Fleet, rebuilding the missile defense program, conducting regular military exercises in the Baltics, and arming the Ukrainians.”
“President Obama has violated every rule of negotiation,” Fiorina asserted regarding the Iran nuclear deal.
To hold Iran accountable, Fiorina said that on Day One of her presidency, she would make a phone call to the Supreme Leader of Iran, giving the message that “unless you are prepared to open every nuclear facility you have and every uranium enrichment facility you have to full and unfettered inspections, we will make it as difficult as possible for you to move money around the global financial system.”
Asked how she would deal with the Islamic state since President Obama’s failure to set a strategy, Fiorina said that she personally knows America’s Arab allies and believes they know “this is their fight.” She added that, if elected president, she would immediately hold a Camp David summit with those allies and ask them what specifically they would need from America to fight ISIS.
“The truth is they’ve asked us for very specific things… we haven’t provided it,” she added.
With regard to China, Fiorina said that we must accept China is “clearly becoming an adversary.”
“Once again, we have allies in that region who can help us contain China, but we need to give them the support that they’ve asked for,” she said. “We cannot permit them [the Chinese] to take control of international waters, we cannot permit them to build military bases right where so much of the world’s trade flows.”
Fiorina maintained that the United States has “leverage over China. We have leverage over how fast their economy grows, we have leverage in terms of the role our companies play in that economy, and we really haven’t used that leverage very effectively.”
Observing that in China the government has grown the economy just enough to pull people out of poverty while still keeping in place “a totalitarian regime that forcibly relocates people,” Fiorina said, “Economic growth is at the core of how the Chinese think about their self-interests.”
“So, something I might do, for example, is begin a conversation that says, ‘You know, we’re going to ask you to play by the same rules in our country as you force us to play by in your country,’” she explained. “It would change their calculation dramatically – we haven’t done that.”
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