Which Way Does the GOP Go on Foreign Policy Now?
Levan Ramishvili
President Biden’s inept execution of his—and his predecessor’s—policy of withdrawal from Afghanistan was a political gift to the GOP. It has made foreign policy, at least temporarily, a unifying issue on the right. For conservatives, whether you supported or opposed withdrawal, Biden’s shambolic implementation has something for everybody to attack.
But there is a real divide on the right about foreign policy. It splits party leaders and right-wing pundits from rank-and-file voters, who are significantly more coherent and unified on foreign policy.
This fact has been obscured by the overriding imperative to support Donald Trump among conservative elites. Trump has been a passionate advocate of bugging out of Afghanistan and the Middle East generally, in and out of office.
But as Dina Smeltz of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and Jordan Tama of American University noted in May, when it came to “America’s largest military deployments of recent years, Afghanistan and Iraq, there’s no sign that Trump substantially influenced Republican attitudes.”
In fact, the belief that the Iraq and Afghanistan efforts were worth the costs not only increased during Trump’s presidency, it’s actually strongest among pro-Trump Republicans. Some 55 percent of “strong Republicans” said the wars were worth it compared with only 43 percent of less committed Republicans. The same Chicago Council on Global Affairs poll found that durable majorities of Republicans favored “long-term U.S. military bases in Afghanistan (61 percent), Iraq (69 percent) and Kuwait (71 percent).”
But given a choice of supporting Trump or supporting the policies preferred by Republican voters, elected Republicans and many pro-Trump pundits opted for the former.
Even if Trump’s influence shrinks over time, the GOP’s foreign policy approach is unlikely to return to that of the Bush era. Presidential partisanship often overpowers foreign policy attitudes. One need only remember how many anti-interventionist Democrats did a 180 in favor of military action in Libya under President Obama to understand that. If a Republican is elected president in 2024, we’ll likely see the party faithful rally to whatever foreign policy he or she pursues.
That said, what constitutes “conservative foreign policy” among elites is a more open question these days (beyond a unifying commitment to checking China’s ambitions).
This, too, has a lot to do with Trump. People can debate whether Trump’s version of “America First” was meaningfully isolationist, but what’s clear is that it had little in common with the “America First” movement of the late 1930s or the non-interventionist tradition going back to George Washington’s warning about foreign entanglements in his farewell address.
The old isolationism (on the left and the right), as flawed as it was, was premised on two ideas: that America was too special to lower itself into the muck of European politics, and that foreign wars would erode democracy and cherished liberties here at home. “Nothing is more likely than that the United States would go fascist through the very process of organizing to defeat the fascist nations,” The New Republic editorialized in 1937.
World War II and the Cold War effectively killed the second argument. As for the first? It’s complicated.
Trump viewed our foreign alliances in an entirely transactional way, believing we were “suckers” to support NATO, to protect South Korea or, if reports are true, even to fight in World War I.
But very few advocates of a new nationalist or America First foreign policy (the labels are all in flux) talk this way. Rather, as with so many issues during the Trump era, champions of a “new” conservative approach to foreign policy try to graft the populism on the right to their own ideology or partisan agenda. That’s why Biden’s stumble is so useful. Sen. Ted Cruz, for instance, supported Trump’s withdrawal policy but now has a free hand to attack its implementation. For others, Afghanistan’s implosion has become a stand-in for anti-immigration extremism or simply one more example of American decline.
With the exception of partisan attacks on Biden, which are well-deserved, these ideas don’t have much purchase in mainstream politics. That’s because most conservative voters may like the adornments of old-fashioned nationalist politics—everything from calls to support the troops to military flyovers at football games after the national anthem—and they certainly like to praise Trump. But true conservatives still have a deeper commitment to American national security and America’s role as the leader of the free world. That commitment may too often take a back seat to partisan politics, but it survived the Trump presidency. Let’s hope it will endure going forward as well.
Levan Ramishvili
"America First" Trumpists may be the party’s loudest voices. But the data show that the pre-Trump Republican view of the world is largely intact.
by DINA SMELTZ and JORDAN TAMA
When President Joe Biden announced his decision to withdraw all U.S. troops from Afghanistan, the Republican reaction was notable for what didn’t happen. The party didn’t circle the wagons to attack Biden’s cowardice; it didn’t collectively accuse him of leaving unfinished business, or being soft on terror. Instead, Republicans were split. While some, like Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Sen. Lindsey Graham (S.C.), denounced Biden’s decision, the more Trumpist “America First” nationalists, including Sens. Ted Cruz (Texas) and Josh Hawley (Mo.) as well as former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, lauded it.
A set of politically ambitious Republicans endorsing a progressive decision by a Democratic president? It seemed the perfect embodiment of how Donald Trump changed the party, pushing the GOP away from its more traditional, muscular approach to foreign policy.
Headlines throughout Trump’s presidency highlighted how the 45th president was “Remaking Republican Foreign Policy” or “Remaking the Republican Party.” But how much did he really change? Was Trump an influencer, or just a weathervane? A look back at decades of polling by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs suggests the latter: that Trump actually didn’t change Republican attitudes as much as it might seem. While Trump may have influenced the views of his strongest supporters on a few foreign policy issues, he had surprisingly little impact overall on how Republicans see the world. It’s become conventional wisdom to see the Republican electorate as in thrall to Trump. But on foreign policy at least, the door is more open than it might seem for a vigorous GOP debate.
On America’s largest military deployments of recent years, Afghanistan and Iraq, there’s no sign that Trump substantially influenced Republican attitudes. Though he negotiated with the Taliban to remove U.S. troops from Afghanistan by 2021, a Chicago Council survey of nationally representative samples of self-described Republicans found that more thought the war had been worth the costs in January 2020 (50 percent) than in 2014 (34 percent). Similarly, half of Republicans (51 percent) thought the war in Iraq was worth the costs in January 2020, up from 40 percent in 2014. Perhaps even more surprisingly, those who identified as strong Republicans — who were more apt to describe themselves as very conservative and expressed greater support for Trump — were actually more likely than less committed Republicans to say the wars in Afghanistan and in Iraq were worth it (55 percent strong Republicans vs. 43 percent less committed Republicans for Afghanistan, and nearly identical figures for Iraq). The same January 2020 poll showed that solid majorities of Republicans also supported long-term U.S. military bases in Afghanistan (61 percent), Iraq (69 percent), and Kuwait (71 percent).
Trump similarly failed to change GOP views regarding the military campaign against ISIS, an issue on which he himself equivocated while in office. Trump, who pledged on the campaign trail to “bomb the shit out of” ISIS, initially continued President Barack Obama’s efforts against the group, but later sought to declare victory and pull U.S. troops out of Iraq and Syria. Yet in the last year of his presidency, the vast majority of Republicans continued to favor the use of force against extremists in those countries (66 percent in 2020, exactly the same percentage that supported it in 2015). More generally, a majority of Republican voters have consistently favored an active U.S. role in the world over the past few decades, with two-thirds — sometimes even more — endorsing an active role since 2016.
Even on Trump’s signature issue of immigration, his nativism has not taken strong hold. While a majority of Republicans regularly characterize immigration as a critical threat to the United States (61 percent in 2020, similar to earlier results), during the Trump years Republicans actually became more open to offering a path to citizenship to undocumented immigrants (52 percent in support in 2020, up from 37 percent in 2015). This trend applied to both strong and less committed Republicans. Among strong Republicans, support for a path to citizenship increased from 32 percent in 2015 to 45 percent in 2020. For less committed Republicans, it increased from 43 percent in 2015 to 60 percent in 2020. At the same time, overall Republican support for deportation steadily dropped between 2015 and 2020 (from 45 percent to 34 percent).
On trade, a crossover issue that straddles foreign and domestic policy, the picture is slightly more mixed. With strong support from the business community, a majority of Republican lawmakers has voted for every major trade agreement over the past several decades, from the North American Free Trade Agreement negotiated by Bill Clinton to Trump’s U.S.-Mexico-Canada agreement. And despite Trump’s sharp attacks on many trade agreements and inclination to impose protectionist tariffs, Chicago Council polling showed that Republican support for international trade actually skyrocketed from 51 percent in 2016 to 87 percent in 2019. At the same time, a majority of Republicans in 2019 supported Trump’s more protectionist trade stance toward Beijing, with seven in 10 in favor of increasing tariffs on products from China. Taken together, the findings suggest that Republicans largely support international trade, but had faith in Trump’s ability to deliver trade deals that would benefit the United States.
Trump does appear to have had some impact on Republican views toward U.S. alliances, fueled by his disdain for NATO and for America’s alliance commitments to Japan and South Korea. Chicago Council polling found that between 2019 and 2020, the percentage of Republican party supporters who believed the United States should maintain or increase its commitment to NATO dropped, from 71 percent to 60 percent (the lowest figure for Republicans since just after the Vietnam War in 1974). The decline in commitment to NATO was somewhat steeper for strong Republicans (moving from 69 percent in 2019 to 54 percent in 2020) than for less committed Republicans (73 percent to 67 percent).
But this skepticism didn’t originate with Trump. Republican Party supporters have been divided for years on the role of the U.S. military in protecting American allies. Between 2014 and 2020, Republicans were fairly divided on whether the United States should defend NATO’s Baltic allies. And in the Pacific, party supporters were almost equally split on whether the United States should deploy troops if North Korea attacked South Korea. Support grew during the next few years, after Pyongyang successfully launched an intercontinental ballistic missile and Trump threatened it with “fire and fury”: A majority of Republicans favored coming to South Korea’s defense (69 percent in 2017 and 2018, and 63 percent in 2019). But this figure soon reverted closer to historical levels in 2020 (57 percent).
On China, Republicans have increased their hawkishness over the past few years. A group of GOP lawmakers has even introduced legislation authorizing the president to defend Taiwan against a Chinese attack. Like the American public in general, however, rank-and-file Republican Party supporters are reluctant to confront China if it invades Taiwan, even though support for defending the island has increased in recent surveys from 25 percent in 2014 to a high point of 43 percent in 2020.
Finally, Trump has not pushed the party toward a more unilateral approach to world affairs. Most Republicans do not think the United States should compromise its policy positions in order to achieve agreement at the United Nations, and in fact the percentage favoring compromise dropped between 2019 and 2020 (from 44 percent to 37 percent, and the decline was even sharper among strong Republicans). But the shift is not unprecedented. The data show similar drops among strong Republicans in 2008 and 2010, which may have reflected a reaction against the multilateralism of Obama. Moreover, Republicans have been somewhat more supportive of compromising America’s preferred policies when it comes to making decisions alongside allies (57 percent in 2020). In short, notwithstanding Trump’s influence, not all Republicans believe the United States should always put “America First.”
Republicans have been split for decades over the use of the military, immigration, trade, international cooperation and overseas engagement — and Trump hasn’t succeeded in bridging that divide. As far back as the 1990s, this debate played out over the Balkans. In a series of votes on intervention there, Republican lawmakers were all over the map: While hawks, such as then-Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole, urged the use of U.S. military power, other Republicans, such as former Sen. Phil Gramm, argued that the United States should not get involved in messy conflicts. The same basic intraparty division has separated hawks like Graham from libertarians like Mike Lee (R-Utah) and Rand Paul (R-Ky.) — and, more recently, Trumpist nationalists like Hawley — in debates over U.S. intervention in Libya, Syria and Afghanistan.
The divided reaction to Biden’s Afghanistan decision is just the latest sign that the future of Republican foreign policy is up for grabs. Trump clearly retains tremendous influence in the GOP, and Trumpists remain the party’s loudest voices. But their hold over the party on foreign policy is tenuous at best, and there remains a large Republican constituency that does not share their views.
These findings lend credence to the predictions of some Republicans who expect the party’s pendulum will swing back in an internationalist direction. Public opinion certainly suggests that there is an opening for Republicans to return to the support for free trade, immigration, and a strong overseas military presence that characterized the foreign policies of Presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush.
Republican divisions on foreign policy have persisted through many presidencies before Donald Trump. Trump’s rhetoric may have fired up anti-immigration and unilateralist sentiments inside the party. But he failed to fundamentally alter the fact that the GOP has never been united on internationalism or on a hard-edged brand of nationalism. Heading into 2024, it will be up to Republican elites and influencers to decide whether they want to double down on Trump’s America First vision or pivot to the more outward-looking perspective that remains surprisingly prevalent in the Republican electorate.