Conservatives are divided into three camps: A guide to how the post-Trump party order could resolve.
Conservatives are divided into three camps: A guide to how the post-Trump party order could resolve.
O n hearing of Joseph Biden’s foreign-policy team, Senator Marco Rubio (R., Fla.) critiqued them as “polite and orderly caretakers of America’s decline.” Senator Josh Hawley (R., Mo.), meanwhile, dismissed the very same team as a group of “war enthusiasts.” What’s going on here?
The great majority of Republican voters have supported President Trump’s foreign policy, for as long as he’s been commander in chief. But beneath the surface, on a range of international issues, there is less underlying agreement within the GOP. Instead, there are some very basic differences over the future of American foreign policy. If anything, the Trump era exposed those differences, and — without a Republican president to rally around — they are about to come to the fore.
Conservatives and Republicans around the country are — and have long been — divided into three distinct groupings or tendencies: foreign-policy activists, foreign-policy hardliners, and foreign-policy non-interventionists.
Republican foreign-policy activists support U.S. overseas bases, foreign-assistance programs, and a strong American military. They back the idea that the U.S. stands at the head of an American-led order of partnerships overseas. They are open to working through international organizations and are generally unyielding toward American adversaries. They tend to favor open trading arrangements with U.S. allies. Republican foreign-policy activists played the leading role in their party’s foreign policy, at the presidential level, from the great debates of World War II up until 2015–16. Prominent examples in the Senate today include Rubio, Senator Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.), and Senator Mitt Romney (R., Utah). Former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley is also a leading figure in this group.
Republican foreign-policy non-interventionists oppose armed engagements overseas, view American military alliances as more trouble than they’re worth, and are open to diplomatic accommodations with selected U.S. adversaries. They call for dismantling America’s military commitments abroad, and for cutting U.S. defense spending. This group does not form a majority of Republican voters, but it is a large minority — considerably larger than one would think from its limited representation in Congress. Non-interventionists dominated Republican foreign policy in the 1920s and 1930s. They then lost the great debates of the 1940s and were marginalized as the party subsequently embraced anti-Communist containment. Twenty-first-century frustrations in Iraq and Afghanistan finally gave non-interventionists the opportunity to make their case and to reassert themselves, though not in a way that most of them would have predicted.
Non-interventionists can be further subdivided into two main strains: the libertarian and the populist. Libertarians are enthusiastic about free trade and view broad U.S. military commitments as anathema to civil liberties and limited government at home. Populist non-interventionists are much more likely to be protectionist and open to some tough policies on specific U.S. competitors. But they share the libertarian concern regarding “endless wars.” The leading foreign-policy libertarian in the GOP remains Senator Rand Paul (R., Ky). The leading spokesman for the non-interventionist populist view — apart from Trump himself — is arguably Tucker Carlson of Fox News. Tucker isn’t taken very seriously by most D.C. foreign-policy fixtures, but most D.C. foreign-policy fixtures don’t have over 4 million viewers every night. Tucker does.
What most observers miss, however, is that the plurality of grassroots GOP voters are neither strict activists nor strict non-interventionists on foreign-policy matters. Rather, the plurality of GOP voters are part of a third group: Republican or conservative hardliners.
Republican foreign-policy hardliners favor a robust U.S. military and strong presidential leadership together with aggressive counterterrorism. They have no difficulty believing that a dangerous international environment requires a punitive attitude against numerous threats. At the same time, they recoil from global governance projects, multilateral pieties, and extended nation-building missions overseas. This distinct combination, so different from liberals, means that hardliners have never been especially well understood by most U.S. foreign-policy analysts. And yet, of the three broad groupings mentioned, they are the most numerous at the base of the party among heartland conservatives in rural, exurban, and small-town counties. Leading examples in the U.S. Senate include Senators Tom Cotton (R., Ark.), Ted Cruz (R., Texas), and Josh Hawley (R., Mo.). There are also some important differences within this group. Cotton, for example, is more hawkish in the Middle East than is Hawley. Hawley is more open to the use of protective tariffs against various U.S. trade partners than is Cruz.
Within the GOP, conservative foreign-policy hardliners are the key pivot group in between activists on the one hand and non-Interventionists on the other. This has been true for generations. Hardliners are not catalyzed into support for assertive international approaches by talk of rules-based liberal world order. Rather their natural instinct on U.S. foreign relations, as on so many other matters, is better expressed by the slogan of Scotland’s Black Watch: “Nobody insults me unharmed.”
Hardliners can be catalyzed into support for an assertive foreign policy — and often have been — once convinced of some concrete external threat to the interests and values of their community. And once convinced, they are relentless. For this reason, conservative GOP hardliners were historically among the fiercest advocates for robust U.S. policies against the Axis powers, Soviet-backed Communism, and al-Qaeda.
Donald Trump’s political achievement in 2016 was to sense the possibility for a new GOP coalition unseen since before World War II. He did this not by reiterating libertarian foreign-policy preferences. Rather, he combined non-interventionist criticism of “endless wars” with hardline stands on China, jihadist terrorism, anti-American dictatorships in Latin America, and U.S. defense spending. He further bundled this combination, crucially, with a ferociously anti-establishment personality, a protectionist position on trade, and a more restrictive stance on immigration. As it turned out, this combination was enough to tilt upside down earlier assumptions about what was possible with regard to Republican foreign policy. Or to put it another way, he brought together non-interventionists and hardliners against the activist GOP policy that dominated the party, at the presidential level, after 1940. Establishment Republicans viewed this as revolutionary for good reason — because it was.
In the end, most Republican voters with traditionally activist foreign-policy views got enough from the Trump administration to feel satisfied. And in reality, there has been more continuity in GOP foreign-policy opinion than is commonly recognized by the press. The average Republican voter is by no means “isolationist.” According to public-opinion polls taken over the past four years — including a poll by the Chicago Council this September — most Republicans still support key U.S. alliances overseas, such as NATO. Most GOP voters do not have warm feelings toward Vladimir Putin’s Russia. And most Republican voters have not suddenly turned from being pure free traders to pure protectionists. Rather, among the GOP base, as in the country as a whole, there is — and has long been — a certain ambivalence toward economic globalization. Trump recognized and reflected this ambivalence.
Having said that, there really have been some recent changes in Republican foreign-policy opinion, and these build on long-term shifts within the GOP. To a considerably greater extent than was true during the Cold War, today’s Republican Party relies on working-class and non-college-educated voters for its support. Compared with its country-club ancestry, it has become a more populist and culturally conservative party over time. Heartland conservatives in rural, small-town, and blue-collar suburban counties are more likely than metropolitan postgraduates to feel sidelined by globalization. That above-mentioned Chicago Council poll from September also found that in the wake of COVID-19, most Republicans believe it’s best for the U.S. to “be self-sufficient as a nation so we don’t need to depend on others.” Trump tapped into that feeling, and he encouraged it. He also demonstrated, at least initially, that a more populist-nationalist GOP could break through the Democrats’ dominance of the Rust Belt and win Electoral College majorities in unexpected ways. Ambitious Republican politicians will not fail to notice this possibility, looking ahead.
So what’s next?
The GOP’s non-interventionists — more numerous outside Congress than in it — feel the wind is at their backs. To be sure, Trump didn’t go nearly as far as they would have liked in dismantling U.S. strategic commitments overseas. But he blew the lid off existing orthodoxies and obviously sympathized with a good many non-interventionist concerns.
Still, libertarians will continue to have a hard time building majority GOP support for their exact foreign-policy preferences. As Trump intuited, most voters are not pure libertarians. If he had run as one, he never would have secured the nomination.
One possible coalition in the future is an implicit alliance between non-Interventionists and hardliners. Of course, this alliance contains certain inevitable tensions. But there is at least one leading Republican who has recently built such a coalition. His name is Donald J. Trump. He demonstrates no readiness to fade into dignified silence, quietly writing his presidential memoirs. Rather, he will continue to weigh in loudly on all things Republican, whether political or policy-related. He may even try to pull a Grover Cleveland and run for two non-consecutive terms as president. The prospect of this, combined with his undeniable popularity at the base of the GOP, means that prospective 2024 contenders will consider the Trump factor as they fashion their own agendas. And this is likely to have some impact on Republican foreign-policy debates as well.
GOP national-security activists might make a comeback by joining with hardliners on issues of common interest. The most obvious such issue is China. In fact, at the congressional level, a working alliance between Republican hardliners and Republican foreign-policy activists is already well under way. Over the past couple of years, both groups have labored to pass legislation looking to counteract Communist China’s economic, political, and militarily expansionist programs, along with its human-right violations. These measures have even gathered support from some GOP non-interventionists as well as from Democrats on the Hill. The issue of China has the potential to re-create new Republican coalitions on national-security matters, just as those coalitions have occasionally been reformulated in the past. Other worthwhile measures regarding U.S. diplomacy, overseas alliances, national defense, and foreign economic policy can then be built around the broad necessity of pushing back against China. For conservative voters, this has the great benefit of avoiding unwelcome abstractions. The challenge is not so much promoting what internationalists call rules-based liberal world order. The challenge is China.
Some may believe that, with Trump exiting the presidency, the past four or five years may be viewed as a sort of one-off aberration in GOP foreign-policy traditions, and that we may now return to regularly scheduled programming as if those years had never happened. I think this would be delusional. An exceptionally robust sense of American nationalism has been a central feature of the Republican Party from its beginning. This very much includes an emphasis on America’s freedom of action and sovereignty in world affairs. The specific policy implications of all this, as we look ahead, should certainly be open to debate. But the phenomenon is much bigger than Donald Trump. And for that very reason, it’s here to stay.
For conservatives, time in opposition is also time to reflect on public-policy priorities: what has worked, and what hasn’t. That’s what effective political parties do. A great deal will depend on the foreign-policy decisions taken by Joe Biden as president. Let’s see what he does.
The coming Republican foreign-policy debate will also necessarily be characterized by the coalition-building among these three conservative groupings. No one group is going to get its way all the time. The most probable future will be a hybrid model. But the particular way Republicans do this — in terms of character, style, and specific issues — will be up to future leaders. Domestic and international contingencies or events will provide opportunities as yet unrecognized by each faction. For foreign-policy conservatives of all kinds, the possibilities are now wide open.
Liberal critics will of course weigh in, with unintended comical effect, on what they think conservative U.S. foreign-policy aims should be, even though those same critics would never dream of voting Republican. But we have two major parties in this country, one more liberal, and the other more conservative. For the more liberal party to dictate the terms of division to the more conservative one would defeat the point of having a two-party system. To our liberal friends: This is a family fight. We’ll let you know how it ends.