His speech includes plenty of attacks on the foreign policy record of Barack Obama. Jindal to urge larger defense budget

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal will call Monday for the United States to spend at least 4 percent of its gross domestic product on the military going forward.

The Republican is staking out territory as one of the most hawkish 2016 Republican presidential candidates in a morning speech at the American Enterprise Institute and then a Tuesday trip to the Citadel in South Carolina, the first Southern state that will hold a primary.


Jindal advisers on Sunday previewed the 11 a.m. AEI speech, which includes plenty of red meat attacks on the foreign policy record of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

Under the umbrella of America Next, his policy-focused nonprofit, the governor co-authored an accompanying 28-page white paper with former Missouri Republican Sen. Jim Talent, a senior adviser for Mitt Romney’s 2008 and 2012 campaigns. Jindal’s group has already released plans for replacing Obamacare and producing more energy.

The United States spent a total of around 3.8 percent of its GDP on defense last year, or $618.7 billion, according to statistics compiled by the World Bank. That’s down from 4.2 percent in 2012, 4.6 percent in 2011 and 4.7 percent in 2010. The governor is more focused on a baseline number, which excludes temporary war funding for Afghanistan but covers long-term investment.

“We must undo the president’s harmful spending cuts and ensure that our fighting men and women always have the tools they need to succeed,” Jindal plans to say, according to excerpts obtained first by POLITICO.

With the crisis in the Middle East, Jindal’s team knows there will be a heated debate within the Republican Party next year about America’s role in the world. Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, for instance, has been trying to walk the balancing act of wooing libertarians who think the U.S. should not be the world’s policeman while reassuring conservatives who want a strong military that he is not actually an isolationist. Florida Sen. Marco Rubio has staked out hawkish positions on foreign policy from his perch on the Senate Intelligence Committee, but South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham — a leading hawk from a key primary state — told the Weekly Standard last week that he doesn’t think the freshman Republican is “quite ready” to be president.

“The reality is that there this is less need to use the military when it is feared and respected, and the best approach to reducing the level of global risk would be to move decisively to rebuild the tools of military power,” Jindal will say in his speech. “Without a strong defense, our allies will not trust our promises, and our adversaries will not believe our threats.”

Jindal plans on referring to Leon Panetta’s new book, in which the former Defense Secretary recalls advising the president to negotiate a Status of Forces agreement with Iraq that he thinks could have forestalled the rise of ISIL. He will also quote former Ambassador to Iraq Chris Hill, who wrote a piece for POLITICO Magazine on Thursday saying he felt ignored by Clinton. And he’ll quote the outgoing chief of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Michael Flynn, saying that the world today is more chaotic than any time since the 1930s.

After ripping Obama on foreign policy through a series of examples, Jindal plans to say: “If only he’d had the help of a wise steady hand, a policy expert in dealing with foreign affairs, he’d have come up with better answers. But, instead, he just had Hillary Clinton.”

“Today, we are living with the consequences of the Obama-Clinton ideas when it comes to foreign, domestic, and defense policy,” Jindal will say. “And those ideas have set America on a path that will create more chaos, more conflict and more wars.”