Days after the United States acted against the
Assad government in Syria, Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., is speaking out
against Washington's direction in foreign affairs.
"The political establishment fawns over Syria
strike. Trump notices. Administration ramps up war talk on Syria, North
Korea. Buckle up," Murphy tweeted Tuesday morning.
The 43-year old senator is being watched as a possible future opponent against Trump, a presidential contender in 2020.
On Monday, he laid into the effectiveness of the Syria strikes, penning an op-ed in the Huffington Post.
"The speed and precision of Thursday night's
military strike on Shayrat Air Base in Syria was as impressive as it was
predictable," Murphy wrote. "And on Friday morning, no one was
surprised when the attack did nothing to change the reality of
dystopia-creating civil war that has killed 400,000."
Murphy charges that a political solution is "still a billion miles away," under the current course.
"President Trump's medieval view of the world,
in which the United States can protect itself with a big army and a
bigger moat, is wrong and it is dangerous," Murphy wrote in HuffPo.
Speaking at the Council on Foreign Relations,
Murphy pushed back against the administration's proposed cuts to
foreign aid and the State Department, combined with increased hikes in
defense spending.
"We cannot continue playing the role of global
fire department, responding to crisises only after they've developed,"
Murphy told the Washington crowd.
Murphy wants to go in the other direction: doubling the foreign affairs budget -- a "new Marshall Plan," as the senator calls it. Murphy points out that his proposal, "Rethinking the Battlefield," has been praised by Madeline Albright,
secretary of State and U.N. ambassador during the Clinton
administration. She has criticized the "reckless and misguided cuts to
national security institutions proposed by the Trump administration."
The administration, including Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, has defended its approach, though Tillerson reportedly did successfully lobby for the cuts to State to be smaller than was originally planned.
"Clearly the level of spending that the State
Department has been undertaking, particularly in this past year, is
simply not sustainable," Tillerson said in March,
defending the cuts that were proposed. "I'm confident that with the
input of the men and women of the State Department we are going to
construct a way forward that allows us to… be able to do a lot with
fewer dollars."
In his late February address to Congress,
President Trump hailed his proposed budget "that rebuilds the military,
eliminates the defense sequester and calls for one of the largest
increases in national defense spending in American history."
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