Foreign policy views
Cotton, through his foreign policy views, has been characterized as a war hawk.
During a February 5, 2015, Senate Armed Services Committee hearing, Cotton called for housing more prisoners at Guantanamo Bay instead of closing it. He said of the detainees in the camp, "every last one of them can rot in hell, but as long as they don't do that they can rot in Guantanamo Bay". The following June, he was one of 21 Senate Republicans to oppose an amendment to the 2016 Defense Authorization Act that would impair any future president's ability to authorize torture. The amendment, which passed, had bipartisan support and was sponsored by John McCain and Dianne Feinstein.
In September 2016, Cotton was one of 34 senators to sign a letter to United States secretary of state John Kerry advocating that the United States use "all available tools to dissuade Russia from continuing its airstrikes in Syria" from an Iranian airbase near Hamadan "that are clearly not in our interest" and saying the US should clearly enforce the violation of "a legally binding Security Council Resolution" on Iran.
In July 2017, Cotton voted in favor of the Countering America's Adversaries Through Sanctions Act that grouped together sanctions against Russia, Iran and North Korea.
In December 2018, after Trump announced the withdrawal of American troops in Syria, Cotton was one of six senators to sign a letter expressing concern about the move and their belief "that such action at this time is a premature and costly mistake that not only threatens the safety and security of the United States, but also emboldens ISIS, Bashar al Assad, Iran, and Russia." In January 2019, Cotton was one of 11 Republican senators to vote to advance legislation intended to block Trump's intent to lift sanctions against three Russian companies.
In August 2019, it was reported that Cotton had suggested to Trump and the Danish ambassador that the U.S. should buy Greenland. Cotton supports U.S. withdrawal from the Open Skies agreement, which lets nations use special aircraft to monitor each other's military activities. In 2018, he asserted that the agreement was outdated and that it favored Russian interests.
In 2018, Cotton was a cosponsor of the Countering the Chinese Government and Communist Party's Political Influence Operations Act, a bill introduced by Marco Rubio and Catherine Cortez Masto that would grant the U.S. secretary of state and the director of national intelligence (DNI) the authority to create an interagency task force with the purpose of examining attempts by China to influence the U.S. and key allies.
In August 2018, Cotton and 16 other lawmakers urged the Trump administration to impose sanctions under the Global Magnitsky Act against Chinese officials who are responsible for human rights violations in western China's Xinjiang region targeting the Uyghur ethnic minority. They wrote in a bipartisan letter, "The detention of as many as a million or more Uyghurs and other predominantly Muslim ethnic minorities in 'political reeducation' centers or camps requires a tough, targeted, and global response".
In February 2019, Cotton was one of the group of Senate Republicans who signed a letter to Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi requesting that Pelosi invite President of Taiwan Tsai Ing-wen to address a joint meeting of Congress. The request came amid heightened tensions between the U.S. and China and was expected to anger Chinese leadership if granted.
In May 2019, when asked about the impact of tariffs on farmers in Arkansas, Cotton said there would be "some sacrifices on the part of Americans, I grant you that, but I also would say that sacrifice is pretty minimal compared to the sacrifices that our soldiers make overseas that are fallen heroes that are laid to rest in Arlington make", and that farmers were willing to make sacrifices in order for the U.S. to fend off Chinese attempts to displace the U.S. globally.
In May 2019, Cotton was a cosponsor of the South China Sea and East China Sea Sanctions Act, a bipartisan bill reintroduced by Marco Rubio and Ben Cardin that was intended to disrupt China's consolidation or expansion of its claims of jurisdiction over both the sea and air space in disputed zones in the South China Sea.
In July 2019, Cotton and Senator Chris Van Hollen were the primary sponsors of the Defending America's 5G Future Act, a bill that would prevent Huawei from being removed from the "entity list" of the Commerce Department without an act of Congress and authorize Congress to block administration waivers for U.S. companies to do business with Huawei. The bill would also codify Trump's executive order from the previous May that empowered his administration to block foreign tech companies deemed a national security threat from conducting business in the United States.
In April 2020, Cotton said that Chinese students in the United States should be restricted to studying the humanities and banned from studying science-related fields. In an interview with Fox News, he said, "It is a scandal to me that we have trained so many of the Chinese Communist Party's brightest minds."
On August 10, 2020, the Chinese government sanctioned Cotton and 10 other Americans for "behaving badly on Hong Kong-related issues".
In February 2021, Cotton released a report, "Beat China: Targeted Decoupling and the Economic Long War", that called for the U.S. to sever most economic ties with China and invest in scientific, technological, and manufacturing fields China is ahead in. The report called for economic restrictions on China despite the costs, saying the "costs of targeted decoupling with China pale in comparison to the costs of passivity"; more sanctions against theft of U.S. intellectual property, controls on U.S. technologies exported to China; barring "Chinese nationals in graduate and post-graduate programs in the United States from studying or conducting research in sensitive science, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields"; and expanded trade relations with allied countries to mitigate the impact of decoupling with China. In a speech detailing the report, Cotton said, "We need to beat this evil empire and consign the Chinese Communists ... to the ash heap of history".
In March 2023, Cotton and Senator Katie Britt introduced the Not One More Inch or Acre Act, which would ban any Chinese national or Chinese entity from owning American land. Cotton and Britt introduced the bill again in January 2025.
In July 2023, Cotton criticized President Joe Biden's efforts to diplomatically engage with China, saying: "Biden administration officials should stop chasing after their Chinese communist counterparts like lovestruck teenagers. It's embarrassing and it's pathetic".
In January 2024, Cotton questioned TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew during a Senate hearing on child safety on social media, repeatedly asking Shou whether he was a member of the Chinese Communist Party. Shou said he was not, as he was a citizen of Singapore and did not hold Chinese nationality. Cotton continued to question Shou about his nationality and politics. Shou continued to affirm his Singaporean nationality. Cotton received backlash, especially from Singaporeans, for this incident.
In February 2025, Cotton criticized Elon Musk for "chasing Chinese dollars" and having "shamefully supplicated China's Communist rulers" in his book, Seven Things You Can't Say About China.
On January 28, 2020, in the context of the emergence of COVID-19, Cotton urged the Trump administration to halt commercial flights from China to the United States. On January 31, spurred in part by Cotton's warnings, the Trump administration banned most travel from China.
In a February 16, 2020, Fox News interview, Cotton said that the coronavirus may have started at the biosafety level 4 super laboratory in Wuhan, China. "Now, we don't have evidence that this disease originated there", Cotton said, "but because of China's duplicity and dishonesty from the beginning we need to at least ask the question". Articles published by The New York Times and The Washington Post the same day reported that scientists had dismissed claims that the Chinese government created the virus. The Times said this was because of its resemblance to the SARS virus, which originated with bats. In another interview on Fox the next day, Cotton said of the two articles, "It tells you the Chinese Communist Party, just like any communist party, has a widespread propaganda effort." The Post called Cotton's comments "debunked" and "conspiracy theory" for 15 months until issuing a correction: "The term 'debunked' and The Post's use of 'conspiracy theory' have been removed because, then as now, there was no determination about the origins of the virus." Molecular biologist Richard Ebright said The Post had omitted his views supporting the lab leak hypothesis and "materially misrepresented" his views, adding, "Watching 'the first rough draft of history' being written as a partisan exercise, rather than a journalistic exercise, was dismaying."
Cotton tweeted around March 2020: "we will hold accountable those who inflicted it on the world" for what it had done. To a tweet reading "China will pay for this", he responded, "Correct." In late April 2020, Cotton said in a Fox News interview that the non-containment of the pandemic was a "deliberate" and "malevolent" attack by the Chinese government on the rest of the world. "They did not want to see their relative power and standing in the world decline because the virus was contained [in China]", he said.
In early 2023, the United States Department of Energy assessed that a "lab leak was to blame" for the emergence of COVID-19. The assessment, which mirrored a similar assessment by the FBI, was made with a "low confidence" level. In response, Cotton said, "being proven right doesn’t matter. What matters is holding the Chinese Communist Party accountable so this doesn’t happen again."
In July 2017, Cotton co-sponsored the bipartisan Israel Anti-Boycott Act (S.270), which amended existing federal law that criminalized foreign-led boycotts of U.S. allies by specifically prohibiting support for foreign governments or organizations that impose a boycott on Israel. The proposal generated controversy, as some interpreted it as a restriction on private citizens' activities and a potential violation of constitutional rights. Others viewed it as a clarification of the existing Export Administration Act of 1979 in response to the 2016 United Nations Human Rights Council resolutions that called on corporations to reassess business activities that may impact Palestinian human rights.
In October 2023, Cotton condemned Hamas's actions during the Gaza war and expressed support for Israel and its right to self-defense. He denied that Israel was committing war crimes in the Gaza Strip, saying, "If Hamas uses schools and kindergartens and mosques for military purposes, Israel has every right under the laws of war to strike back." He added: "As far as I’m concerned, Israel can bounce the rubble in Gaza. Anything that happens in Gaza is the responsibility of Hamas." On November 9, 2023, Cotton asked the Department of Justice to investigate whether journalists working for international news outlets "committed federal crimes by supporting Hamas terrorists".
On February 28, 2024, three days after United States airman Aaron Bushnell self-immolated outside the D.C. Israeli Embassy in protest of U.S. support of Israel, Cotton sent a letter to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin calling Bushnell's death "an act of horrific violence" that was "in support of a terrorist group [Hamas]." He went on to ask about internal efforts to address extremism in the military.
In April 2024, Cotton threatened to cut U.S. funding to the International Criminal Court (ICC), sanction ICC employees, and bar the employees and their families from entering the U.S. if the ICC issues arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and other Israeli officials.
After the ICC issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant on November 21, 2024, Cotton called it a "kangaroo court" and the prosecutor, Karim Khan, a "deranged fanatic." On Twitter, he called for The Hague to be invaded should Netanyahu be arrested, writing: "Woe to [Khan] and anyone who tries to enforce these outlaw warrants. Let me give them all a friendly reminder: the American law on the ICC is known as The Hague Invasion Act for a reason. Think about it."
In 2013, Cotton introduced legislative language to prohibit trade with relatives of individuals subject to U.S. sanctions against Iran. According to Cotton, this would include "a spouse and any relative to the third degree", such as "parents, children, aunts, uncles, nephews, nieces, grandparents, great grandparents, grandkids, great grandkids." After Cotton's amendment came under harsh criticism regarding its constitutionality, he withdrew it.
In March 2015, Cotton wrote and sent a letter to the leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran, signed by 47 of the Senate's 54 Republicans, that cast doubt on the Obama administration's authority to engage in nuclear-proliferation negotiations with Iran. The next president, they asserted, could reject it "with the stroke of a pen". The open letter was released in English as well as a poorly translated Persian version, which "read like a middle schooler wrote it", according to Foreign Policy. Within hours, commentators suggested that the letter prepared by Cotton constituted a violation of the Logan Act. Questions were also raised about whether it reflected a flawed interpretation of the Treaty Clause of the United States Constitution.
President Obama mocked the letter, calling it an "unusual coalition" with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as well as an interference with the ongoing negotiations of a comprehensive agreement on the Iranian nuclear program. In addition, Obama said, "I'm embarrassed for them. For them to address a letter to the Ayatollah—the Supreme Leader of Iran, who they claim is our mortal enemy—and their basic argument to them is: don't deal with our president, 'cause you can't trust him to follow through on an agreement ... That's close to unprecedented."
Cotton defended the letter amid criticism that it undermined Obama's efforts, saying, "It's so important we communicated this message straight to Iran... No regrets at all... they already control Tehran, increasingly they control Damascus and Beirut and Baghdad and now Sana'a as well." He continued to defend his action in an interview with MSNBC by saying, "There are nothing but hardliners in Iran. They've been killing Americans for 35 years. They kill hundreds of troops in Iraq. Now they control five capitals in the Middle East. There are nothing but hardliners in Tehran, and if they do all those things without a nuclear weapon, imagine what they'll do with a nuclear weapon."
Cotton received extensive financial support from pro-Israel groups due to his opposition to the Iran nuclear deal and for his hawkish stance toward Iran. Several pro-Israel Republican billionaires who contributed millions of dollars to William Kristol's Emergency Committee for Israel spent $960,000 to support Cotton.
In July 2018, Cotton introduced the Iran Hostage Taking Accountability Act, a bill that would call for the president to compose a list of Iranians that were "knowingly responsible for or complicit in...the politically-motivated harassment, abuse, extortion, arrest, trial, conviction, sentencing, or imprisonment" of Americans and have those on the list face sanctions along with enabling the president to impose sanctions on their family members and bar them from entering the United States. Cotton stated that Iran had not changed much since 1981 and called for Americans to avoid Iran and its borders as there were "many friendly countries in the region that you can visit where you'd be safer".
In May 2019, Cotton said that in the event of a war with Iran, the United States could easily win in "two strikes. The first strike and the last strike". He said there would be a "furious response" by the United States if there was any provocation from Iran.
In March 2026, Cotton called the joint U.S.-Israeli military action against Iran a necessary move to "put an end to Iran's 47-year campaign of terror and revolutionary violence once and for all".
On March 13, 2018, in an interview on conservative commentator Hugh Hewitt's radio show, Cotton said he expected Russian officials to "lie and deny" about the poisoning of Sergei Skripal, an ex-Russian spy on British soil. After Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Theresa May gave Russia 24 hours to respond to the poison, Cotton said, "I suspect the response will be the typical Russian response. They’ll lie and deny." He went on to suggest retaliatory measures that the U.K. and the U.S. could implement in response to Russia's alleged actions, including renewed sanctions on oil.
