Ash Carter will be in the witness hot seat at his confirmation hearing Wednesday, but it’s President Barack Obama who will really be on trial.

Republicans who now control the Senate Armed Services Committee plan to make Carter’s confirmation hearing to become defense secretary all about the commander in chief, using the daylong grilling as a forum to excoriate the president’s foreign policy and national security strategy.


“It’s an opportunity to showcase how miserable a failure his foreign policies are, and if Ash Carter doesn’t recognize it’s not working, he’s going to have a hard time,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) told POLITICO. “Clearly, it’s not working.”

Republicans have several reasons to zero in on Obama at Carter’s hearing. First, the former deputy defense secretary’s confirmation is all but certain in the Senate. He’s respected on both sides of the aisle. And he’s earned praise even from Republicans who routinely vote against the president’s nominees — and who went after Chuck Hagel’s record at his now infamous confirmation hearing two years ago.

More important, Carter’s hearing provides a high-profile venue for Republicans to detail what they see as the president’s across-the-board foreign policy failures, setting the table for the 2016 presidential race in which the GOP is eager to take back foreign policy as a winning issue.

In the 2012 campaign, Obama was a rare Democrat who could work foreign policy to his advantage following the end of the war in Iraq and the killing of Osama bin Laden.

Fast-forward two years, and things look very different.

U.S. troops are back in Iraq to help battle a new and resurgent foe, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. President Bashar Assad is still in charge in Syria, which has fallen even deeper into chaos with the rise of ISIL. And the administration’s “reset” with Russia is all but dead after Moscow’s incursions into Ukraine.

“Republicans on the Armed Services Committee are going to be very eager to lay the groundwork to make clear this president spent the last six years complaining about the legacy left to him by his predecessor, and he’s going to leave his successor with a situation that’s even worse,” said Danielle Pletka of the conservative American Enterprise Institute.

Senate Armed Services Chairman John McCain (R-Ariz.), who lost to Obama in 2008 and has been an increasingly harsh critic of the president’s national security moves, has backed an approach looking toward 2016, with his early hearings featuring luminaries like former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and retired generals such as James Mattis.

Carter is sure to face questions on Obama’s strategy against ISIL — or lack thereof, as many Republican see it — and how he believes the U.S. should deal with Assad. He’ll be pressed as well on whether he would break with Obama and support giving weapons to Ukraine, and on how he’d handle the transfer of terrorist detainees at the U.S. military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, if he believes they are still a threat.

Carter has been publicly quiet on the rise of ISIL and the U.S. strategy to battle it. But he did fight alongside then-Defense Secretary Leon Panetta in 2011 for Obama to keep U.S. troops in Iraq, according to an essay adapted from Panetta’s memoir, “Worthy Fights.”

Things won’t get any easier for Carter on the defense budget, just released Monday, as he’d effectively be asked to defend a budget that he didn’t build — not to mention explain how he plans to help stop the military from being cut under sequestration.

“It’s clear we do not have a national strategy,” said Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.). “It’s an absolute duty of the majority party in the Senate to demand that the president articulate a strategy. … I think the Senate would make a big mistake if it didn’t use that opportunity to inquire of the top defense official in America, to be, what he thinks the proper strategic policies should be.”

Sen. Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma, the committee’s former ranking Republican, said he wants to help ensure “the American people know what’s happening to our military with all the threats out there that are unprecedented in the history of this country.”

“We have to be redundant and keep driving that home,” Inhofe told POLITICO. “Ash Carter will provide a route for that.”

Still, Republicans run the risk of going too far with their criticisms of Obama, said Michael O’Hanlon, a senior fellow at The Brookings Institution, given that Carter served as a top Pentagon official for most of the president’s six years in office, first as the chief acquisition official, then as deputy defense secretary.

“The question is, how far do they push it?” O’Hanlon said. “He can’t be absolved of responsibility of all sins that they want to impart to Obama. If you took that to its logical conclusion, Republicans wouldn’t want to confirm Carter.”

Carter’s best strategy might be to tackle the criticisms country by country, O’Hanlon said, acknowledging problems in places like Syria but also contending all the blame doesn’t fall at the feet of the Obama administration.

Perhaps most difficult for Carter is the high wire he must walk to showcase his independence while still defending the president.

Over the past year, Obama has been slammed by two of his previous defense secretaries, Robert Gates and Panetta, for the White House’s incessant micromanagement of military issues — and Hagel has hinted at the same.

Indeed, when Carter was first named in December as Obama’s pick to replace Hagel, many Republicans said it didn’t matter who Obama selected if the National Security Council didn’t ease its stranglehold on the military.

So, Republicans are sure to press Carter on his willingness to be independent from the White House and speak up when he disagrees with the president.

“I don’t expect him to throw his president over, but I do expect him to speak truth to power,” said Graham, who added that sort of independence was lacking under Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in the George W. Bush administration.

Some Republicans, at least, believe Carter is someone who can finally stand up to Obama and his White House team.

“He’s totally apolitical; he’s totally capable,” Inhofe said. “I’m tired of people doing things for political purposes in this administration. It just seems like Obama is dictating things to them — but that’s not going to happen to Ash Carter.”

Democrats are expecting a foreign policy barrage from Republicans during the hearing, but they say they’re confident Carter will show he’s capable of managing the sprawling Pentagon bureaucracy and the larger foreign policy issues.

“It’s largely going to be an issue about big picture strategy rather than about whether Ash Carter is qualified to be at the helm of that very complicated organization,” said Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.). “Everybody knows he’s the guy. If anybody can manage that complicated organization, Ash Carter can.”

And Obama won’t be the only one Carter is answering for on Wednesday. Republicans — particularly 2016 presidential prospects — are likely to target Hillary Clinton as well in their foreign policy takedown of the administration, looking back to Obama’s first term when Clinton was secretary of state.

Of the 14 Republicans on the Armed Services Committee, two are already likely presidential rivals: Graham and Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas.

In fact, Cruz began gaining his outspoken Senate reputation with his line of inquiry at Hagel’s confirmation hearing, when Cruz took the unusual step of airing a video clip of Hagel, then later questioning whether the former Republican senator from Nebraska had received funding from North Korean sources.

“Certainly, there will be some early 2016 grandstanding, and probably an effort to implicate Obama’s first term,” O’Hanlon said. “I expect any potential opponents can try to drag her [Clinton] into the mess, too. There will be sharp elbows on some issues.”