Talking to John King, a GOP candidate for Senate against Democrat Jon Ossoff, you can tell top-of-the-ticket politics are new to him. Landing a line about Ossoff being “California’s third senator” is a little clunky. And King posing for photos with Trump family members at Mar-a-Lago seems horribly forced.
But talk to King about foreign policy, military operations or what he sees as the appropriate use of American military force, and you’re off to the races.
That’s because before King was a novice politician or Gov. Brian Kemp’s appointee as Georgia insurance commissioner, he was fighting wars and responding to crises around the world as a fast-rising leader in the Georgia Army National Guard.
With the United States now peering over the edge of yet another war in the Middle East, King’s military background has become suddenly relevant in the race to challenge Ossoff. That experience, hard fought with scars to show, also factors heavily into the way King thinks about war and peace.
“There’s a whole cottage industry of both Republicans and Democrats that want to continue conflict, and it makes the world more insecure,” he said in an interview this week.
“As somebody that’s had to suffer as a result of an unclear foreign policy for a good portion of my adult life, I like clarity … if we deploy Americans, we need to understand the task and the purpose before we put young Georgians and lives at stake.”
King joined the Army National Guard when he was a 17-year-old in Albany. It was a way, he said, to give back to the country he moved to from Mexico in high school.
Credit: AJC file photo
Credit: AJC file photo
He later became an Atlanta police officer and then the longtime police chief in Doraville. But through it all, he was on and off active duty deployment for the National Guard.
King retired as a major general in 2023 after multiple combat deployments, including in Iraq and Afghanistan. So it makes sense that when the early conversation in the Georgia Senate campaign turned from who-is-endorsing-whom (that’s a long story) to why the U.S. just bombed Iran, King was back in his comfort zone.
I reached out to King to talk about the United States’ role in the Middle East about the same time Ossoff was taking heat in some quarters for staying silent for nearly a week after the Israel-Iran war broke out.
On the other side of the spectrum: U.S. Rep. Buddy Carter, another GOP candidate for Senate, had just nominated President Donald Trump for a Nobel Peace Prize, despite the fact that an early U.S. intelligence assessment showed Iran was set back by months — not years — in its pursuit of a nuclear weapon.
For his part, King said he thinks Trump is not just doing his job well, but that he might be the person best positioned to achieve Middle East peace.
“President Trump has been the first president in seven presidents who has taken decisive action to change the status quo of waiting for Iran to develop a nuclear weapon and drop it on either Israel or one of the one of those countries in the region,” King said. “He’s changed that dynamic in 20 minutes, and now we have an opportunity to have a real conversation about how we provide a stability in the region.”
The United States has a pattern of sending troops into countries it started off bombing. Could King ever envision American troops being sent into Iran, too?
“No, not at all,” he said, “That is not in our interest … We never knew what the goal was in Afghanistan and we spent 20-plus years there. So there’s no appetite for anybody that seriously looks at this to go into Iran.”
How about “regime change” since that term has been tossed around, too, including once by Trump, who later backed off.
“I think it’s preposterous. I think it’s ridiculous,” he said. “As an Afghan veteran, as an Iraqi veteran, we don’t do regime change as well.” The future of Iran belongs to the Iranian people, he said.
Israel factors heavily into King’s views of the Middle East, too, since he has spent time in Israel on police exchange programs. He was baptized in the Jordan River and may return during the Senate campaign.
“I’m passionate about Israel’s ability to be able to raise their families and peace without having the threat of nuclear annihilation over their heads,” he said.
For every question about what the United States’ role should be in the region, King said it should meet America’s national interests.
“The American interest is stability in the region, because that region is essential for the world economy,” he said. Ideally, he’d like to see a peaceful Iran, a protected Israel and a region focused on commerce instead of conflict — even if it takes a U.S. strike to make it happen.
Before I reached out to King to talk about Iran, I reached out to Ossoff to do the same. Ossoff’s office did not make him available, and instead sent video of him at a Senate hearing saying, “Iran must not build or acquire a nuclear weapon.”
King called Ossoff’s response so far to the Israel-Iran war “very distant and weak.”
“I like clarity. I think Americans and Georgians deserve clarity, not a political doublespeak that looks like a Harvard term paper.”
Looking ahead to the Senate campaign, it’s hard to say if GOP voters care about a candidate’s military service, despite all the chants of “U-S-A!” at Trump rallies. Latham Saddler and Kelvin King never got out of the single digits in the 2022 GOP Senate primary, despite being a former Navy SEAL and Air Force Academy graduate, respectively. Once Herschel Walker showed up, the race was over.
But if Republicans are looking for a primary candidate who has served in uniform, and if they care whether their senator knows what he’s talking about when the United States is dropping bombs in the Middle East, they’ve got that candidate in John King.
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