Paul Wolfowitz in the wilderness

WASHINGTON — It’s an uncomfortable time to be Paul Wolfowitz. For more than four decades, the former World Bank president and U.S. deputy secretary of defense bent the ears of the most powerful people in Washington with his assertive advice.

But these days, like many Republican foreign policy experts and former military officials, Wolfowitz finds himself with what must surely feel like a disagreeable choice. Come November, he will have to choose between Donald Trump, the Republican presidential candidate whose unlikely rise is in no small part a repudiation of Wolfowitz’s neoconservative approach to foreign policy, and Hillary Clinton, a Democrat he can’t quite bring himself to support — at least in public.

“I wish there was somebody I could vote for with a good conscience,” he told POLITICO in the offices of the American Enterprise Institute, where he is a visiting scholar. “They’re both so far from what I believe in. There’s a little bit of hope for Hillary. With Trump, you just have to make this incredible bet that he doesn’t believe anything he says, and once he really sees the situation he’ll be different. But it’s an incredible gamble.”

Despite his political isolation, Wolfowitz has lost none of his professorial self-assurance. At 72, his hair is more gray than black, and as he talks he picks his words carefully, preferring a long pause to a question rather than an answer he might come to regret.

On nearly every recent question of foreign policy Wolfowitz is swimming directly against the prevailing currents in his own Republican party.

Never mind that Wolfowitz is most famous for his role in promoting the 2003 invasion of Iraq, a decision that cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, destabilized the entire Middle East, ultimately unleashed the Islamic State, triggered the largest refugee crisis since World War II and led to the rise of populism in Europe and the United States.

On nearly every recent question of foreign policy (Syria, Libya, Russia, refugees) Wolfowitz is swimming directly against the prevailing currents — even, with the rise of Trump, in his own Republican party.

Missed opportunities

In the eight years that Barack Obama has been president, Wolfowitz has watched from the sidelines as the U.S. carried out what he sees as a destabilizing “retreat.”

“It encourages aggressive powers to try and expand, and it discourages our friends from having trust and confidence in us,” he said.

Among the times he believes the U.S. should have taken a harder stance, he lists the 2009 Iranian uprising, the decision that year to scrap the missile defense program in central Europe, the gradual drawdown of American troops in Iraq, and, most recently, Obama’s choice not to provide weapons to Ukraine in its fight against pro-Russian rebels.

U.S. President Barack Obama with Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2013 | Jewel Samad/AFP via Getty Images

“I think [Russian President Vladimir] Putin would be more cautious if he faced the risk of more Russians getting killed in Ukraine,” he said. “And we’ve actually lowered that risk for him considerably.”

The civil war and humanitarian catastrophe in Syria too, is, in Wolfowitz’s view, a result of Obama’s decision not to get overly involved. The outcome was a vacuum that was quickly filled by extremists. Characteristically, the only recent foreign policy he cites as sensible is one of the most disparaged on both sides of the aisle.

“People will say that we should not have stood up to [Libyan strongman Muammar] Gaddafi,” he said. “They ignore the fact that if we had not at least done that, Libya today would look even worse. It would look like Syria.”

In the unlikely event that the next U.S. president would listen to him (Wolfowitz served as a foreign policy adviser to Jeb Bush’s failed primary campaign), he would advise him or her to reverse the retreat, beginning by addressing the issue of refugees.

“It’s a moral and humanitarian issue as well, but it has huge strategic consequences,” he said.

To begin with, he would suggest establishing a protected area for civilians, modeled on what was done for the Kurds in northern Iraq after the first Gulf War.

“I think it may need to be more than a no-fly zone, but the important thing is that a protected zone, a zone in which people can be safe without fleeing to Greece,” he said.

Then, he would advise that the refugees slowly be resettled, in a system similar to what was established for those who fled Vietnam after the war, in which refugees were sheltered in neighboring countries and then gradually provided asylum in Europe and North America. Over more than 30 years following the fall of Saigon, some 1.3 million Vietnamese refugees were relocated to the United States.

“I suspect that we could do a better job broadcasting to the Russian people what their government really is” — Paul Wolfowitz

“The resettlement process was a slow, drawn-out process, which in this case would have the additional advantage that you can seriously find out who’s a threat and who isn’t,” he said. “[Militants belonging to the Islamic State] aren’t going to want to spend two years in a refugee camp, especially not in Saudi Arabia.”

In the meantime, he would address the crisis in Ukraine by stepping up pressure on Putin. “I suspect that defensive arms to the Ukrainians would make a difference,” he said. “I suspect that tougher sanctions are available if we wanted them. I suspect that we could do a better job broadcasting to the Russian people what their government really is.”

Marginalized

As the situation in Iraq degraded and then quickly spiraled out of control, many expected (or at least hoped) Wolfowitz would follow in the footsteps of Robert McNamara, who served as secretary of defense during the Vietnam War and later confessed that the U.S. had been “wrong, terribly wrong” in its pursuit of the conflict. Instead, perhaps unsurprisingly, Wolfowitz has refused to retreat.

“Look, it was a long and painful and unfortunate experience — unfortunate in the sense that if we had the right strategy from the beginning … Iraq would be a completely different story,” he said.

Former U.S. Defence Secretary Robert McNamara | Pool Photo/AFP via Getty Images

Wolfowitz dislikes being referred to as the Iraq War’s architect, as he often is, not because he regrets the invasion, but because he believes the aftermath was mishandled. Advice to move quickly into counterinsurgency, he says, went unheeded.

“If things had been done the way I would have liked them done, they would have been done very differently,” he said.

That failure, Wolfowitz acknowledged, is at the root of his political marginalization today.

“If we had taken two years to get to where we got finally after four or five years, the whole story would be different,” he said. “I mean the political story of the United States would be different.”

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