What Republican Foreign Policy Gets Wrong

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

As the American presidential election swings into high gear, speculation about a second term–Trump foreign policy is also becoming more intense. Kori Schake has been one of Trump’s fiercest critics among Republican foreign policy hands. Yet even while warning of the consequences of a second Trump term, she shares the view that America’s foreign policy needs to change to align with what she calls a “new conservative internationalism” that would invest in American strength without neglecting the rest of the world.

Kori, thank you so much for joining me. This is very long overdue.

KORI SCHAKE

It is such a great pleasure, my friend.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

I want to start with an essay that you wrote in our January/February issue, which is particularly interesting to reread in the context of a Republican presidential ticket—that is, I’m sorry to say, pretty frequently rejecting the prescription you lay out in that piece. That piece was called “The Case for Conservative Internationalism,” and in it you note that, and I’m quoting you here, “for decades, since 1952, the Republican Party had a fairly clear international vision: promote American security and economic power while supporting the expansion of democracy around the world.”

That does not seem to be the way that this particular Republican Party or the Republican Party that is in power now is talking about the issue, but I want to try to give the critique that I think Donald Trump or JD Vance supporters would make of the kind of consensus that was predominant really both parties in the post–Cold War era and the administrations that you worked in and I worked in, which is that the use of American power in those years did not exactly go well. It got us into these failed wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It allowed China and Russia to arise without liberalizing. It gutted the manufacturing base in the United States. I mean, you could go on and on. What do you think that the critique of that post–Cold War American foreign policy gets wrong and what do you think it gets right?

KORI SCHAKE

So, I think it gets right that the United States at the zenith of its international power made quite a number of mistakes—but mistakes in foreign and security policy aren’t unique to the period of American dominance in the international order, because these problems are legitimately difficult to get right; and they often look different, as Harry Truman’s presidency looks different, with space and time.

So I think the critique lumps a whole bunch of stuff together. For example, it savages free trade; that is, the expansion of open markets on equal terms throughout countries, whereas—that has been not only a great engine of American and other countries’ prosperities. But Americans themselves understand that, right? So it’s not an elite notion that’s being imposed. The mistake about free trade—and that I think has done great damage to the general argument on free trade—was allowing China to participate in the system of international trade without playing by the rules. So I think the solution is in, don’t stop trade internationally, but negotiate agreements that ensure that the rules that constrain us also constrain others.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

What about the use of force? Because I think that’s become a very central part of the critique, again, of American foreign policy from the end of the Cold War until 2017 or so, and you could look at Iraq, or Afghanistan, or Libya, or other examples. How do you reflect back on those interventions and those wars in the context of this debate now?

KORI SCHAKE

In two ways. The first is that I think it’s hard to make a case that the Iraq war wasn’t a tragic mistake—and even within the context of the breakdown of the sanctions regime, I think you can’t understand the Bush administration’s decision to go to war in Iraq in 2003 without appreciating just how scared everyone still was because of the 2001 attacks. And so they made a choice out of fear, and they managed that choice. We managed that choice poorly and that’s going to cast a long shadow in American national security policy—and it should, right? It’s an enormously consequential mistake. It should have big consequences. It’s almost impossible for me to imagine you could get American public support for a preventative strike on North Korea’s nuclear program when, in fact, that’s probably a good policy to have in place. And in fact, in a sloppy way, American policy towards North Korea has basically embodied that for the last four administrations, but it’s hard to see that they would actually carry that policy out. So there’s the credibility problem.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Because we did it erroneously in Iraq. I just want to make sure I understand this point. Because we did that, we cried wolf in Iraq, and it became such a calamitous mistake, we can no longer run that play in North Korea when it might make more sense.

KORI SCHAKE

Exactly. I think that’s exactly right, Dan.

And the second thing I would say about the use of force is that in both of those wars, and particularly in Iraq before the surge in 2006, the gap between our political objectives and the resources we were willing to put to bear to achieve those—in particular in Afghanistan, right, with such ambitious political objectives, taking a country that was, what, 285th on a UN Human Development Index, and rapidly transitioning it to a free economy and a politically free environment pushed from the top down? I mean, that would take a quintupling, probably, of the military, political, and economic resources we’ve put to it. And so again, the public is skeptical that military force can achieve important things because of the gap, and it continues in our objectives for the war in Ukraine versus the resources and risk we’re willing to put against it, and the way that President Biden so blithely talks about committing U.S. troops to the defense of Taiwan without buying and training a military to do that.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

So you have a great line in that same piece, quoting you here: “Voters do not need Republicans to pander to Trumpism or to polls that suggest soft support for internationalism. They do need Republicans to advance a theory for what is happening in the world and how the party intends to protect the country and secure Americans’ prosperity.” How would you articulate that theory of the case if you were dealing with a somewhat different Republican candidate and could kind of lay out a theory in this particular context? What would that theory say?

KORI SCHAKE

Well, I think the argument that changed Republican minds, and Republican votes in the House of Representatives to support supplemental assistance to Ukraine, Taiwan, and Israel, was explaining that the majority of assistance that was being provided to Ukraine was actually benefiting American companies that build the weapons and provide the training that Ukraine needs.

A second piece of the argument was that Ukraine is serving the function now that aid to Britain served in the run-up to World War II. Ukraine’s war is demonstrating to the United States how badly we have underfunded our military and how much we have leached away from the American defense industry the ability to quickly produce the war materiel that we would need for any war we are fighting. So Ukraine’s a canary in the coal mine—both of what is needed from the United States, but also how emboldened countries like Russia feel in attempting to overturn an international order that has kept the United States largely safe and prosperous, that has kept the countries of the ideational West safe and prosperous; and that any alternative to it may look cheap in the short run, but it is much more difficult to return an international order to positive circumstances once you have let it be overturned. And that’s the World War II lesson.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

In terms of that case rhetorically, that does seem like the kind of thing senior Biden administration officials articulate. You can imagine—I mean, it’s not exactly the president that gives that speech, but Secretary of State Tony Blinken does. Others do. Is that a fair characterization?

KORI SCHAKE

Yeah. Here’s the thing though: the president didn’t make the case. And what I know from the surveys that Jim Mattis and I did for our book on civil-military relations, Warriors and Citizens, the single thing that has the biggest effect on American attitudes about the willingness to engage in the world and to use military force is the president’s willingness to expend political capital to explain it to Americans again and again until it gets through. I agree with you that the Biden administration should be making those argument—and, very belatedly, more than two years into the war, they started to—but the president hasn’t, and that leaves open space for civil society like my terrific team at the American Enterprise Institute to make the case. But the American public responds much quicker and more powerfully if the president makes that case.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Moving from the foreign policy debate that we wish we were having to the one that is actually playing out in American politics right now, you mention Jim Mattis, the former Secretary of Defense, which is a good segue to the Trump administration. Last time around, you were a close observer; you wrote about it in Foreign Affairs, in The Atlantic, and elsewhere. One theory of the Trump administration, and what might be in store if he does come back, is that you had a number of what were called the adults in the room: more establishment figures, more traditional figures that took on key posts in the administration including Jim Mattis and H.R. McMaster at the White House; Mike Pompeo to some degree; General John F. Kelly. So, a number of military figures and others with profiles and credibility of their own who constrained some of Trump’s instincts. Do you think that’s the right read of what happened, the right way to understand Trump’s first term? And by extension, do you think that we’d be in store for something much more radical and disruptive this time around if he’s learned the lesson and will not put the same kinds of figures in key posts?

KORI SCHAKE

So, I think President Trump was hiding behind the credibility and the public popularity that American high-ranking veterans and high-ranking military leaders have. And he’s by no means unique in that. There’s a very strong tendency by politicians of both stripes towards hiding behind uniforms. What I think President Trump didn’t understand—he thought military leaders were knife in the teeth killer-torturers, and mostly what they are are great teachers, great strategists, and great logisticians. And so I think his frustration that high-ranking military veterans in his administration were most often impediments to what he was trying to achieve means you won’t see that kind of built-in restraint in a second term. And incidentally, a president elected in this country deserves a cabinet that’s committed to his or her political agenda and willing to use the legal means and constitutional means to carry it out.

So I always get uncomfortable about the “adults in the room” argument because it seems to me anybody that the Senate will confirm into the role deserves to have the right to try and carry out what the American public elected people for. I think we will all pay an enormous chaos premium in a second Trump term because I think he will have people committed to a political agenda that civil society and perhaps the Congress, at least Democrats in the Congress. will be working very hard to constrain. Former President Trump is, to say the least, erratic. And so it’s just going to be exhausting. And the bumper sticker I want for my car this election cycle is “Boring competence.” I’m homesick for boring competence.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

I totally take the point and sympathize with the challenge of trying to anticipate what Trump-Vance foreign policy would look like just because of the volatility and the erratic quality of these figures. But if you did imagine a fully-fledged “America First” foreign policy that was implemented in a relatively systematic way, what do you think that would look like and what do you think the consequences would be?

KORI SCHAKE

I think it would look like, if not the outright repudiation of America’s security alliances with NATO, with South Korea, with Japan, with Australia, if not the outright repudiation of them, the bare-knuckled financial disputes and questions about whether the United States would actually carry out its treaty obligations will make much more unstable the international environment and will be an encouragement to our adversaries to test those commitments. So I think that would be profoundly destabilizing and very dangerous not just to our allies, but also to American interests.

The second thing I think would be characteristic of a Trump-Vance administration would be trade wars and trade barriers of the kind we haven’t seen since the 1930s. I mean, they’re talking about a 60 percent tariff on all imports, so that’s a 60 percent plus to the cost of everything Americans purchase. It would be impoverishing to the United States, and all of us would get a very quick education on where medications are produced, on where essential elements of American military equipment are produced, on where silicon chips are produced. So again, just an upheaval economically, and one that would be terrible for the American economy and for the economies of other countries.

I think a third major element would be a mean-spiritedness in American foreign and defense policy that makes it harder for countries to help us do what we’re trying to achieve in the world. I mean, it would be very difficult for leaders to make the case within their own countries for helping the United States, for example, in the way Germany and Turkey and other countries just helped us arrange the prisoner and dissident release from Russia.

The fourth thing that I think will be a major consequence is, first of all, I don’t see any consistent belief on the part of Donald Trump or JD Vance for the kind of spending necessary to produce the American military that they say they want, and their commitment not to cut a penny from entitlement programs, and to cut the deficit. Those three things are impossible simultaneously. One or more of them has to give. And so I think that too will be in upheaval.

The thing that Trump and Vance don’t seem to realize is just how beneficial it is to the United States for people to want us to succeed. The magnetism of American power makes everything cheaper and easier that we try and do in the world, and they are both, almost on a daily basis, doing damage to that.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

One policy area where they have been quite consistent in their articulation of their preferences, at least, is the war in Ukraine—where JD Vance has been, I think, one of the leading voices arguing that we are sending too many weapons and devoting too many resources and too much attention to Ukraine at the expense of which should be higher priorities in the Pacific, and Trump has said he’ll end the war in a day and made various other suggestions to that effect. Do you think it would be as dire for Ukraine as it sounds? I mean, how do you think that would play out in practice?

KORI SCHAKE

I do. I think the only way you get to the war ending in a day is one or other side capitulating. And we can’t, without a major direct involvement in the war, we can’t force Russian capitulation, so that means they’re going to have to force Ukrainian capitulation. Fred Kagan and Elaine McCusker are doing a terrific piece of research right now costing out what Ukraine losing this war will mean for America’s necessity of defending our NATO allies. And it’s actually a lot more expensive to ramp up the defense of NATO territory than it is to help Ukraine succeed at restoring its sovereignty.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

What do you anticipate in terms of changes to foreign policy if Kamala Harris is elected? Do you see major shifts from the Biden administration? Is there anything to suggest that we have some idea of what a Harris doctrine would look like and how that would differ from Biden?

KORI SCHAKE

I actually don’t have much of an idea because I don’t think she has much of a profile on foreign policy, with the exception of the work she did on the border, which I don’t think amounted to much. It’s reasonable to assume it will largely be a continuation of Biden policy; but I think it’s too soon to tell.

However, what I will say in support of Vice President Harris—I think her reflexes are not the reflexes of abandoning America’s security commitments internationally. She could well be as bad on trade policy as President Biden is on trade policy, but I don’t think she’s as bad as 60 percent tariffs. And I suspect she’s likely to be terrible on defense spending. But Congress has a major role to play in those things, as they’ve demonstrated in the Biden administration by adding tens of billions of dollars to every defense budget that President Biden has put forward.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Let’s focus in on that defense spending question. I think that the average voter looks at this and says we’re spending $900 billion or so every year. The next competitor, even if you accept relatively high estimates of Chinese defense spending, is still a ways below us. And yet you, in your critique of the Biden administration and I think your analysis of American strategy more broadly, have really focused on this gap between ends and means. In a recent piece, you noted that in 1953, US defense spending was 11.3 percent of our GDP. This year, it is about 3.7 percent. Where do you think it needs to be—and how, when engaging skeptics, do you respond to questions about how it’s possible that we need to spend upwards of a trillion dollars on defense at this moment?

KORI SCHAKE

Yeah, so I realize 900 billion or a trillion dollars sounds like a lot of money and it is a lot of money; but it’s not a lot of money compared to the risks that are emergent to America’s security and to America’s interests. I personally would set the defense budget right now at about 6 percent of GDP. That’s what I think it would cost to produce a military capable of fighting two wars simultaneously, which I think is the right standard, given the way China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, and potentially other bad guy countries are behaving.

The most important question you raised, Dan, is how do we afford it? And it is dishonest to suggest that a country as prosperous as ours cannot afford to protect itself and protect its interests. What is necessary is actually developing the political consensus for putting entitlement programs on a stable and affordable footing. Because the genesis of the argument that we can’t afford it is that entitlement spending is crowding out all discretionary spending from the federal budget, entitlement spending and interest on the national debt. We’ve got to get the debt under control. We got to get entitlement spending put on a sustainable and affordable path. We need to do those things irrespective of what we spend on defense; but doing those things will create the space for discretionary spending, both domestic spending and defense spending that the country needs.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

I was struck by the recent report from the commission on the National Defense Strategy, the bipartisan commission. It, as you just did, noted quite crisply that the U.S. military does not now have the ability to fight two wars at the same time, which was long a kind of minimum standard in our defense strategy. Why does that worry you, and what would it take to get back to that standard?

KORI SCHAKE

I think it was a reasonable set of decisions in the 1990s for the United States to constrict its force-sizing concept to a single war, right, because the war looked a lot safer in the 1990s than it does right now. You didn’t have an aggressive China challenging the sovereignty of all of its neighbors and threatening the security of the territorial United States. You didn’t have a Russia that was invading its neighbors and threatening nuclear war. You didn’t have an Iranian nuclear program weeks away from a weapon. And you didn’t have a North Korea with, I don’t know, 35, 70, what’s your guess, nuclear weapons and working assiduously to be able to have the ability to strike the United States. You didn’t have a China looking to triple the size of its nuclear weapons force and develop hypersonic weapons. So the world is more dangerous than it was, and I think our defense strategy, our defense spending, and our defense force need to expand in order to manage those challenges.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

The argument you hear from JD Vance—Elbridge Colby has articulated it in our pages and elsewhere—is essentially that we’re not going to get $1.5 trillion in annual defense spending, so we do need to make hard choices between different priorities. The hard choice they would make is rapidly cutting off support to Ukraine and forcing Ukraine to negotiate some kind of armistice in the near term so that we can focus on priorities in the Pacific, especially deterring China and the Taiwan Strait. How do you respond to the arguments you hear from Vance and Colby and others in that camp?

KORI SCHAKE

I think it’s a fundamental mistake if we let Germany, France, Britain, Poland feel endangered without being willing to put our shoulder to the wheel beside them. I don’t see how there’s any credibility for the defense of Taiwan or anything else.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

You have also been quite critical of the Biden administration in Ukraine at various points. What would you change about the Biden policy and what do you think that would mean for the trajectory of the war at this point?

KORI SCHAKE

I think the Biden administration’s biggest mistake is their intolerance of risk. They’re right to be worried about escalation, either an expansion of the war to NATO territory or a what we call a vertical escalation to nuclear use. It would be irresponsible not to be concerned about that. But I think they’re about four times more concerned about it than they should be, because two and a half years into the war, Russia has established at least a half dozen redlines that we have been pulled across by our interest in seeing Ukraine reestablish its sovereign territory, and it has not produced the catastrophe the Biden administration worried about. That doesn’t mean it’ll never produce that catastrophe. But I think the weight of concern they have put on risk avoidance has actually done an enormous amount to keep Russia fighting.

So I think the first thing I would do is relax the restriction on Ukraine’s ability to use American-provided weapons to strike Russian territory. If the Russians can strike a Ukrainian hospital from a location, that makes that Russian location a legitimate target of war. I think that’s what the standard should be. And you can reduce risk by telegraphing the standard well in advance, putting it into practice. I think that’s a better way to manage the risk than being as fearful of it as I assess the Biden administration to be.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Let me turn to one other theater at this point, and that’s the Middle East. As we’re having this conversation, we’re all kind of waiting to see how Iran responds to the Israeli assassination of the Hamas leader in Tehran a few days ago and wondering whether we’ll see a truly full-fledged regional war. How do you assess U.S. policy toward the conflict in the Middle East since October 7 and the start of the war in Gaza? And looking forward, would you imagine major changes in policy towards Israel and the war in Gaza in a Trump administration?

KORI SCHAKE

It’s a great question about the Trump administration—and I honestly don’t know. President Trump moved the embassy to Jerusalem. I think the great foreign policy success of the Trump administration was the Abraham Accords, which have produced the foundation for cooperation between Israel and several of its Arab neighbors. And yet, former President Trump seems unduly vituperative not just about Prime Minister Netanyahu, but about lots of figures in the Israeli government, and personal vendettas seem to be the most reliable basis on which to judge potential Trump actions. So I honestly can’t tell.

To your bigger, broader question about judging the war over Gaza, I am extremely sympathetic to the Israeli position, even while acknowledging that I wish we were a lot more sympathetic to the suffering Palestinians are enduring. But at the end of the day, Hamas is responsible for this. Hamas is responsible for the attacks in Israel. They are responsible for making Palestinian civilians legitimate targets of war by hiding amongst them, not wearing uniforms. No country is good at urban warfare, and the Israelis look to me to be doing a pretty good job of it. I worry that in our sanctimoniousness and innocence about warfare that we are setting standards for the Israeli military that the American military and other militaries will be unable to meet when our national security requires us to use violence. And I think the Israeli recourse to targeted killings to assassinations of leaders in order to demonstrate that they too can produce strategic depth in the way Iran has by gray-zone tactics. It’s definitely raising the stakes—but again, Iran is to blame for this and Hamas is to blame for this.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

We could spend much more time on any one of these crises, but I want to get to a couple of the wonkier defense policy questions that I think end up being the real constraints and underlying factors in a lot of these policy debates, even if they don’t get the same attention. The first is something that you have spent a lot of time thinking about, but I think most of us in the foreign policy world had not given adequate thought to before the last year or two, and that’s the defense industrial base, our ability to produce the stuff that we are sending to these active wars and using to deter China in the Pacific.

I’m struck that when you travel now in these geographies, you’ll hear from Ukrainian officials or Taiwanese officials over and over again about their concerns about the defense industrial base, that there are things that they have been sold or said they’re going to get from the United States that we just don’t have the capacity to produce, and that’s everything from very, very basic artillery shells to much more sophisticated systems. So we can talk about policy and strategy all we want, but if we can’t really deliver, it doesn’t really matter what the answers to those questions are. What has gone wrong with the defense industrial base, and as you look at the prospects for really changing its trajectory in years ahead, do you see any cause for optimism, anything that’s starting to get traction that would put us in a better place?

KORI SCHAKE

Well, what’s gone wrong is we’re not buying enough equipment. In 1990, there were 54 major defense companies in the United States. Now, there are five, and it’s not that they don’t want to do this kind of work; it’s that we are not spending the money on our defense that would make them viable as companies. And the most recent infuriating example is the Biden administration signed the AUKUS agreement with Australia and the United Kingdom to provide submarines to Australia that they did not put money in the budget for. So you would have to be able to produce more submarines than we are producing in order for this signature foreign policy accomplishment of the Biden administration to come into being. And they did not put the money for it in the defense budget. And when challenged, DOD throws their hands up and says, “Well, industry can’t produce it, so why should we budget the money?” As though there were no connection between the signal you send to industry and their willingness to train people, build plants, and take a risk on the commercial viability of a line of operations.

So I’m almost to the point of thinking that just dump wheelbarrows of money off the roof of the Pentagon and see if it makes any difference, because we are in genuine dire straits in the defense industrial base. It is the biggest vulnerability of our country in defense policy—and we are very fortunate that we seemingly have a window to correct it, and we really ought to correct it before we start getting Americans killed and have tragic consequences.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

One other topic that you have focused on quite a bit—and you’re, of course, writing a book on this moment and you’ve written on for FA in the past—is the civ-mil relationship. There was hand-wringing about civ-mil relations in the Trump administration. There has been, for different reasons, concern in the Biden administration, the Obama administration before that. What are your concerns about the civ-mil dynamic as you see it now?

KORI SCHAKE

Civil-military relations tends to be a proxy for the general level of anxiety about American politics. And I think the American civil-military relationship is fundamentally strong and fundamentally healthy. I think there are only two important tests of civil-military relations.

One is, can the president fire anybody they want? And I can think of a half dozen just in the last 15 years, right; McKiernan, McChrystal, Mattis, Fallon, you can just go down the list. So that norm is comfortably enshrined.

And the second test of civil-military relations in the United States is, will the military carry out policies they don’t agree with? And there, I mean, I think the record’s solid going back as far as the Korean War, right. I mean, not since Truman had to relieve MacArthur. There was a lot of concern about the war in Iraq; there were a lot of concerns about the war plans for Iraq and the subsequent occupation. There was an enormous amount of concern about the abandonment of Afghanistan. And yet the American military provides its advice and gets on with doing the job. And I think those are two incredibly wonderful things because in almost no other free society is the military as influential and yet as comfortably subordinate to elected and appointed leadership as the American military. And the reason they are is the military’s own professionalism and restraint.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Well, Kori, I’m going to take the opportunity to end on an optimistic note, which I was not expecting after the tenor of most of this conversation. So thank you so much for joining me today. And I would highly recommend that people go back and read your most recent essay for Foreign Affairs, which was called “The Case for Conservative Internationalism,” in our January/February issue. We will look forward to the next one. In the meantime, thank you so much.

KORI SCHAKE

Thank you, my friend.