Can Republicans Find Consensus on Foreign Policy?

The current wars between Russia and Ukraine and between Israel and Hamas have sharpened some startling new global realities. China and Russia’s friendship has deepened. The profiles of Iran and North Korea as regional troublemakers and weapons exporters are rising. The world’s great powers are competing for influence in the global South. And in the United States, a long-simmering conflict between nationalism and internationalism within the Republican Party has reached a boil.

This is the most consequential moment for Republican foreign policy since 1952, when Dwight Eisenhower defeated his isolationist challengers to secure the party’s presidential nomination. Eisenhower would make an active U.S. role in global affairs a central tenet of Republicanism. In later years, a consensus formed around President Ronald Reagan’s muscular internationalism, advocacy of free trade, and belief in the virtues of immigration. But for much of the last decade, those principles have been giving way to an “America first” populism that is critical of globalization and inclined to pull back from the world. Former President Donald Trump, again a leading presidential candidate, has driven skepticism of international engagement into the heart of the party. These ideas will not simply melt away should Trump lose this year’s election, but they also do not yet represent a new consensus. As Republican politicians spar over foreign policy in the coming months, the key question is whether they can blend elements of Reagan-era internationalism and Trump-era “America first” impulses into a coherent strategy and view of the world.

The clash between these two strands of foreign policy thinking is playing out most clearly in Congress, where aid to Ukraine has become a topic of fierce debate. Although Republican leaders in the Senate continue to support military assistance in principle, in December they conditioned additional funds for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan on concessions from Democrats on immigration policy, effectively stalling passage of a new aid package. Many of their counterparts in the House, meanwhile, oppose further funding for Ukraine. In September, 104 House Republicans voted to strip military aid for Ukraine from a spending bill.

But the Republican foreign policy drift is not limited to Ukraine, and it is not happening only in Congress. In an August interview on Fox Business News, Trump proposed a ten percent tariff on “everybody” who exports products to the United States—and a steeper one on countries that impose higher tariffs themselves. That position is a decisive move away from Republican orthodoxy under Reagan, who once declared that “[U.S.] trade policy rests firmly on the foundation of free and open markets.” Other Republican hopefuls are following Trump’s lead. One of Trump’s challengers for the Republican presidential nomination, Vivek Ramaswamy, has thrust himself into the vanguard of a new, less interventionist Republican foreign policy and has adopted elements of Trump’s “America first” approach. Ramaswamy has insisted that the United States defend Taiwan only as long as American industries are dependent on the island’s semiconductor industry. Like many other Republicans, he has questioned the logic of Washington’s support for Kyiv and decried “the useful idiots who preach a no-win war in Ukraine.”

Still, many of the Republican Party’s leading foreign policy thinkers—its national security establishment—believe that an amalgam of the party’s current, conflicting impulses is both necessary and possible. In conversations I have had with members of this group, including past national security advisers and former secretaries of state and defense, most argued that common ground exists and that rank-and-file Republicans are less inclined to neo-isolationism than some of their leaders’ public statements suggest.

Former Vice President Mike Pence, for example, told me that support for the policies of “appeasement” and “even isolationism” are rising within the party, but he insisted that such views, loud as they may be, “are not in the majority.” Stephen Hadley, who served as national security adviser under President George W. Bush, contended that Republicans’ competing ideas “can be squared, and there can be a dialogue between the wings” of the party. Similarly, Senator Tom Cotton, Republican of Arkansas, argued that although there is “strong tension” between the Reagan and Trump approaches, “to the extent that there’s a synthesis to be had, Ronald Reagan’s foreign policy, taking into account changed circumstances and changed times, is what most Republicans would follow and subscribe to.”

Achieving this synthesis requires consensus on a set of core issues. The formula that emerged from my conversations includes a more hardheaded view of China and a steady commitment to helping Taiwan defend itself, a strategy and a defense budget designed to meet the new Chinese-Russian axis, free-trade arrangements that exclude Beijing, a clear recognition of the economic benefits of legal immigration, and requests for greater burden sharing by U.S. allies. For this new Republican foreign policy consensus to be politically viable, the party must make a persuasive case that the United States needs to maintain an active role in the world. Republicans must consistently explain to voters the economic and security benefits that Americans reap from engagement—a rhetorical shift whose execution will require leadership and courage within the party.

THE AGE OF INTERNATIONALISM

Tensions among Republicans over U.S. international commitments are hardly new. In 1941, when President Franklin Roosevelt pushed the Lend-Lease Act through Congress to provide military supplies to the United Kingdom during World War II, a majority of Republican lawmakers opposed the move. Republicans rallied around Roosevelt and his successor, President Harry Truman, after the United States entered the war, but the party’s isolationist wing began to reassert itself once the hostilities were over. When the Senate voted on the United States’ entry into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in 1949, Senator Robert Taft of Ohio, a party elder and a long-standing skeptic of foreign entanglements, voted against ratification along with ten other Republican senators.

Skeptics of international engagement remained a powerful force in the party and might have become dominant were it not for one man: Eisenhower. By the 1952 presidential campaign, Eisenhower was, by dint of his success as the supreme Allied commander in World War II, both an avowed internationalist and a hot political property. He succumbed to pressure to enter the race—and chose to run as a Republican. In the book Eisenhower 1956, the historian David Nichols asserts that “a major reason Ike had decided to run for president was to defeat the isolationist wing of the Republican Party.”

The Republican primary became a struggle between Eisenhower and Taft, the leader of the isolationist forces. When Eisenhower prevailed, the Republican Party platform at the nominating convention unapologetically declared the United States’ intent to be an engaged global leader. It pledged support for the United Nations and free trade, vowed to roll back the Soviet Union, and promised that the United States would “become again the dynamic, moral and spiritual force which was the despair of despots and the hope of the oppressed.”

Similar thinking guided the Republican mainstream for more than six decades. The party’s subsequent leaders included President Richard Nixon, the ultimate internationalist and the engineer of the United States’ opening to China, and Reagan, whose anticommunist impulses translated into vigorous engagement with allies and action against perceived Soviet proxies around the globe. Moreover, Reagan held and often articulated a view of the United States as a model of freedom and democracy—a “shining city upon a hill”—that should both spread its gospel and welcome immigrants who could enrich the American experience.

International engagement served important Republican constituencies, too. Establishing relations with China was hugely beneficial to the party’s business wing, which gained both a giant export market and a source of components and manufactured goods. Economic globalization also opened markets, including China’s, for American farmers in the Republican-dominated states of the Midwest. Voters who held strong anticommunist feelings saw the party’s aggressive stance toward the Soviet Union—and support for anticommunists across Central America and Africa—as both a moral imperative and a strategic necessity.

THE RISE OF “AMERICA FIRST”

By the 1990s, however, support for internationalism began to erode. When the communist and Soviet threats dissipated, so did the glue that held Republicans together on national security matters. China’s entry into the World Trade Organization—which leaders of both parties backed—caused the U.S. manufacturing base to shrink and American manufacturing jobs to disappear. In his presidential campaigns of 1992 and 1996, the longtime Republican political adviser and commentator Patrick Buchanan questioned the virtues of engagement and advanced his own version of “America first” trade and immigration barriers.

Still, the desire for a muscular U.S. presence in the world remained. In an example of the prevailing ideas of the time, then Nebraska Senator (and later Defense Secretary) Chuck Hagel wrote an essay in Foreign Affairs in 2004 outlining the pillars of a Republican foreign policy. His list included supporting alliances, expanding free trade, backing the diplomatic corps, promoting democratic reform in the Middle East, deepening relations with China, and strengthening energy security.

With the exception of energy security, Republicans have shifted away from all those tenets in the years since. In particular, fatigue over long and unsatisfying wars in Afghanistan and Iraq—both initiated by a Republican president—turned nation building and democracy promotion from principled aspirations to dubious propositions.

Thus was a door opened for Trump. “Americanism, not globalism, will be our credo,” he declared in 2016, on accepting the Republican presidential nomination. Trump openly questioned the value of the United States’ alliances, even suggesting that Washington would not honor its treaty commitment to defend its NATO partners if they were attacked. At a NATO summit in Brussels in 2018, he nearly withdrew the United States from the alliance but was dissuaded at the last minute by his chief of staff, John Kelly. Trump sought to build a physical wall along the United States’ southern border and a virtual wall around its economy, introducing tariffs and trade restrictions that targeted friends and foes alike.

Trump and his party’s lingering skepticism of foreign engagement is obvious. In a video released last year, Trump said that, if reelected, he would “clean house of all of the war-mongers” in the Pentagon and State Department. A notable exception to this general attitude, however, is the Republican Party’s strong support for Israel in its fight against Hamas, driven in part by the deep bond that many in the party’s large evangelical Christian wing feel toward the Jewish state. Even as they declined to pass military aid for Ukraine in late 2023, House Republicans overwhelmingly approved aid for Israel—although, in a break with tradition, they insisted on budget cuts elsewhere to fund the assistance. Trump, after initially criticizing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu following Hamas’s October 7 attack and calling the leaders of Hezbollah, the Iranian-supported militant group based in Lebanon, “very smart,” soon changed his tune. “I will defend our friend and ally the state of Israel like nobody has ever defended,” Trump told Jewish donors in late October.

A NEW PLAYBOOK

It is not clear to what extent Republican lawmakers shape their foreign policy positions in direct response to Trump. Populist impulses might fade if he were no longer dominating the party, but they could also now be baked into Republican thinking. There is no way to know for sure as long as Trump remains in the picture. Even so, the party’s most experienced leaders believe it is possible to temper populist attitudes and prevent a more substantial drift toward isolationism.

The first task is to convince Republican voters—and by extension all Americans—that international engagement is not merely an altruistic idea but a strategy with tangible benefits. “We need to adopt the Reagan philosophy that says the world depends on America, and that’s a good thing,” Mike Pompeo told me. Pompeo, who served as secretary of state under Trump, argued that the U.S. dollar dominates global finance as “a direct result of American leadership” and is by itself “sufficient justification for America to lead.” Moreover, he asserted, to sell an active role in the world to the public, political leaders must articulate clear goals for U.S. policies—the kinds of objectives that “can be communicated to the American people in a way that, whether they’re sitting in Arizona, Alabama, or Vermont, they can say, ‘I get that.’”

A new foreign policy consensus must also grapple with the consequences of the emerging Chinese-Russian axis. “We’re in a new era of foreign policy,” said John Bolton, who served as Trump’s national security adviser. “The post–Cold War era is over, and I think it ended with Xi Jinping’s visit to Moscow [in 2023].” That trip helped crystallize an emerging, if still loose, alignment among China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia, all operating in opposition to the United States. In this changed global equation, U.S. alliances become more important, not less. But getting allies to contribute more to the collective defense of the West and of democratic systems—and advertising to voters the extent of allies’ actual contributions—is also essential to retaining public support for overseas missions and to refuting isolationist arguments.

Updating the Republican formula also means recognizing the biggest change of the last two decades: China is not what Reagan-era Republicans hoped it would become. Former Secretary of State James Baker, who served under Reagan and his successor, President George H. W. Bush, was blunt about the effects of incorporating China into the world economy, including its membership in the World Trade Organization. “We thought it would ameliorate their behavior,” Baker told me. “And we were totally wrong.” A new approach need not eschew engagement with Beijing in all areas, but it does have to be hard-nosed in challenging Chinese aggression. “We need to stand up to them and stop letting them take advantage of us,” Baker argued. “And remember that peace through strength is the way to get there. That means minding your defense budget.”

“America first” populism is critical of globalization and inclined to pull back from the world.

The new wariness of China calls for a renewed commitment to Taiwan. There is already broad support for continuing to help Taiwan build its own defenses. Beyond such aid, there is some disagreement on how best to avoid conflict. Baker advised that Republicans stick with “strategic ambiguity” regarding Taiwan. That strategy, which has guided U.S. policy for years, entails avoiding a flat declaration of how the United States would respond if China were to attack Taiwan. An open security guarantee, the theory goes, could embolden Taiwan to be more provocative, and declining to protect Taiwan could encourage a Chinese takeover. Cotton, meanwhile, argued that Washington should end the ambiguity and make clear to Beijing that the United States would not stand by if China were to take military action: “I think, as usual, the simplest way to deter conflict is to be absolutely clear about our commitment should conflict occur.”

On economics, reaching a new consensus should not require abandoning the free-trade principles that have long been a hallmark of Republican foreign policy. But those principles do need refreshing. Primarily, Republican policymakers should seek to work around China by crafting bilateral or regional trade agreements with partners also wary of Chinese economic coercion. Cotton pointed out that even Reagan was not the free-trade absolutist that many remember him to be. “Reagan slapped a bunch of tariffs and quotas on things like automobiles, motorcycles, electronics, and steel to protect American jobs and to protect production and vital American industries,” Cotton noted. Only after Reagan’s term did Republican trade policies turn more toward economic libertarianism—which means there is space to revive certain protective policies without rejecting free trade entirely.

Immigration poses a particular challenge for Republican internationalists. Long before Trump, the sunny Reagan-era view of the economic benefits that immigrants bring to the United States was becoming difficult to sustain as the number of undocumented immigrants in the country more than doubled in the 1990s. But even as views of immigration have hardened, there is precedent for Republican leaders offering solutions. Under both Reagan and George W. Bush, Republicans proposed comprehensive reforms to secure the United States’ southern border and discourage employers from hiring undocumented immigrants while also updating and even expanding legal avenues for immigrants to enter the American workforce. But the border security element of the Reagan-era policy was never really implemented, and Bush was unable to get his party behind his administration’s plan. Today, with immigration policy snared in crisis, renewing efforts to overhaul the system is the best—and perhaps the only—way forward. A politically feasible reform effort would likely need to include a combination of tough border security and a more sensible system of legal immigration that addresses workplace needs.

THE CHALLENGES AHEAD

The real crucible for internationalist Republicans may be the debate over sustaining aid to Ukraine. Some Republicans made their opposition to additional funding clear when Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky visited Congress in September. Kansas Senator Roger Marshall released a statement saying he would not support sending “another cent” to help Ukraine fight off Russia’s invasion—and he skipped the meeting with Zelensky, remarking, “My priority is securing our American homeland, not sitting through another charade.” Republican leaders must contend with war fatigue among their voters, too. A Wall Street Journal poll in August found that 65 percent of self-identified Republicans agreed with the idea that the United States is doing too much to help Ukraine. Just 12 percent of Democrats thought the same.

“There are a lot narratives out in social media and cable that average Americans are listening to that feed this notion that [supporting Ukraine] is a waste of money, that it risks war with Russia, and I don’t think the Republican leadership does a very good job of countering those narratives,” asserted Robert Gates, who was deputy national security adviser under President George H. W. Bush and later served as head of the Central Intelligence Agency and the Pentagon. But Gates also sees a sufficient reservoir of support for Kyiv within Republican ranks. Although “the ones who are the most radical get the most attention,” he said, “there still are a lot of House Republicans who believe in American international leadership” on Ukraine.

Making the case to Republican voters is possible. The conservative commentator Marc Thiessen has laid out perhaps the most comprehensive “America first” argument for supporting Ukraine, writing in The Washington Post that helping Ukraine will, among other things, deter China from aggressive action, deter the United States’ enemies from threatening the West, and restore the Reagan Doctrine of fighting foreign aggressors not by deploying the U.S. military but by assisting like-minded forces far from American shores.

Republican leaders must contend with war fatigue among their voters.

But even if persuasive arguments blending the Republican Party’s nationalism and internationalism can be made, it is not clear who can act as their public champion. Many of the party elders who normally would constitute the GOP national security establishment walked away or were pushed away during Trump’s presidency, and they remain on the peripheries as the 2024 presidential campaign begins. And it is not just senior figures who are in a diminished position. “The Trump era created a gap in experience for a younger generation of Republican policymakers who were unwilling to work in his administration,” said Robert Zoellick, a former deputy secretary of state and U.S. trade representative. Many foreign policy specialists with an internationalist bent fall into this category, and many missed the usual tour inside the government that would have burnished their credentials and set them up for higher-ranking positions today.

That leaves Republican congressional leaders and the crop of presidential candidates. So far, the primary campaign has done more to sow confusion than to create clarity about where the party is headed on foreign policy. Trump has questioned U.S. support for Ukraine, and Ramaswamy has echoed Trump’s nationalist views. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, long considered Trump’s main rival in the field, has straddled the nationalist and internationalist positions on Ukraine and trade. Former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley and former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, meanwhile, have made forceful cases for international engagement more or less in the Reagan mold.

There is no assurance that Republicans will coalesce around a new approach—and the outcome of the debate depends heavily on who emerges as the party’s leader in 2024. If Trump is reelected president, the party may be in for what the analyst Walter Russell Mead has called a “Trumpier” second term in foreign policy, with less fealty to traditional alliances and international organizations and diminished concern for climate issues. But if Haley were to win the Republican primary, for example, a far different path for the party would open up. A loss to President Joe Biden could also lead to a broad reexamination of Trump’s “America first” impulses.

Then comes the challenge of putting the pieces together. As a starting point for a new Republican internationalism that includes engaging with allies and standing up to despots abroad, Bolton suggested starting with the most basic of Reagan’s tenets. “I think we know what the formula is,” Bolton said. “It’s peace through strength.”