A Rift in the Conservative Foreign-Policy World

W hile Donald Trump’s presidency realigned the foreign-policy debate on the right, that realignment hasn’t fulfilled predictions of an isolationist renaissance. Trump did inject heterodox, anti-interventionist views into the mainstream of the conservative movement, but the lion’s share of his foreign-policy successes were crafted by hawkish officials from the very establishment he campaigned against — people who worked to counter the Chinese Communist Party, contain Iran, forge Middle-East peace deals, and deter Russian aggression.

In the wake of Trump’s defeat, a network of conservative foreign-policy experts have been free to mingle with those who chose not to associate with the former president’s administration, and a number of conservative institutions — the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and the Hudson Institute, to name two — bulked up with the addition of officials who recently served in the last administration. In these corners, the result has been somewhat of a restoration of a traditional Republican outlook in foreign affairs.

But one longstanding bastion of mainstream conservative thought, the American Enterprise Institute, has been moving in a different direction, according to hawkish foreign-policy hands. Under the think tank’s new foreign-policy director, they say, AEI has distanced itself from the rest of the movement’s approach.

Kori Schake, a former State Department and Pentagon official, took the reins of the think tank’s storied foreign- and defense-policy arm in 2019 amid a period of change. She took the job under then-newly appointed AEI president Robert Doar, a welfare-policy expert without a foreign-policy background, following a successful stint at the International Institute for Strategic Studies. Around Washington, she is a generally well-regarded expert on defense issues.

But two years into her tenure, hostility to Schake’s stances is percolating in some conservative circles. The critics take issue with her defenses of the Iran nuclear deal, opposition to sanctions to kill Russia’s Nord Stream 2 pipeline, and criticism of Republicans for speaking out against critical race theory in the military. “What she’s done is genuinely made the Hill ambivalent about AEI,” a senior congressional Republican staffer told National Review. “No one pays attention to their events, and no one reads their newsletters.” Several other Republican aides echoed that sentiment during interviews about their interactions with AEI, with one senior staffer saying that AEI research gets a “presumption of denial” when it comes across his desk.

Schake, however, doesn’t see things that way, telling NR, “I think we’re doing a ton of good stuff with conservatives on the Hill.” She cited seven AEI scholars whom she points out work regularly with congressional Republicans on everything from China to Afghanistan to defense budgeting. Within AEI, she said, there’s a “commonality of conservative principles,” but different scholars have different views on a range of policy issues. “I mean, we’re having an internal argument right now about whether there is a near-term military threat to Taiwan, or not. And our China scholars are of a diversity of views on that. And we not only respect their academic freedom, we celebrate it.”

Of course, rather than allying itself institutionally with the Republican Party, AEI has long promoted a core set of values, including U.S. strength and leadership in the world. In practice, those ideological commitments historically lent themselves to intellectual influence within conservative coalitions and over elected Republicans. The primary example of this is AEI’s leading role in crafting the Bush administration’s 2007 Iraq surge strategy, where aspects of a report by AEI’s Fred Kagan, “Choosing Victory,” were implemented by commanders on the ground. But it wasn’t just when Republicans were in power that AEI had influence. When the GOP was banished to the wilderness in the Obama era, AEI’s foreign-policy experts marshaled conservative opposition to the Iran deal and the White House’s soft-on-Russia approach. It’s not an exaggeration to say that AEI was at the vanguard of Republican foreign policy.

But that began to change in the Trump era, when AEI experts spoke out against the former president’s anti-intervention instincts; meanwhile, the White House was populated with fewer AEI alums than during the Bush administration. Over time, however, some of AEI’s leading foreign-policy voices praised Trump’s foreign-policy successes. Former Bush speechwriter Marc Thiessen became a generally pro-Trump voice in the Washington Post’s opinion pages, and Danielle Pletka, Schake’s predecessor, started to pen op-eds hailing some of those policy victories. She even publicly explained why she was considering voting for him in 2020 — something she could not stomach in 2016.

Schake, by contrast, has gone beyond temporal differences with Trump, signaling her objections to some core tenets of conservative foreign-policy doctrine. One recent example that piqued close observers of Schake’s tenure at AEI came when, last month, she said on a podcast that “tolerating [Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons] is actually a better choice than war.” Isolationist-minded foreign-policy experts celebrated the comments as a signal that the traditionally hawkish AEI wants to let Iran develop nuclear weapons. But Schake, who has endorsed the 2015 Iran nuclear deal and opposed the U.S. withdrawal from it, told NR that’s not what she meant. “I just think our current policy isn’t credible, and we need to come up with more credible ways, more credible threats that we make. Because I think we have this policy, the Iranians are continuing to make progress, and we need to find ways to diminish the value to them of the progress that they’re making.”

Meanwhile, the debate over wokeness in the military has turned into another flash point. She has publicly criticized Senator Tom Cotton, Senator Ted Cruz, and others for supposedly politicizing the military by railing against critical race theory. “Politicians like Senator Cruz are disgracefully trying to draw the military into culture wars that are terrible for cohesion in our military,” she told Politico. Her stance has deepened divisions with Republicans on the Hill. “Pretty much all GOP senators are concerned about wokeness in the military. It’s a consensus issue across the party and the movement. Why would any GOP staffer take anything from AEI, especially on issues where they just know the basics, when they know AEI is totally on the wrong side of a consensus issue?” a Senate GOP staffer said.

But Schake defended the stances that GOP aides say have damaged AEI’s reputation. “It is my very strong view that it is bad for the United States to pull our military into politicized debates, and there has been some of that going on on both sides of the aisle.” She also faulted General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, for “wading into the conversation about critical race theory,” thus igniting a political controversy.

As Schake prefaced an explanation to NR about why she opposes Nord Stream 2 sanctions (arguing they needlessly antagonize an ally, Germany), she maintained, “The first thing is that I’m entitled to my view.” Republicans, however, worry that Schake has made AEI’s brand on the Hill politically unpalatable.

Another concern is that she’s using her perch to reopen the conservative foreign-policy world to advocates of isolationist policies. Primarily, this includes the network of foreign-policy experts cultivated by the Charles Koch Institute, including a constellation of groups that push for U.S. retrenchment amid global conflicts and oppose confronting America’s authoritarian adversaries. This year, Schake raised eyebrows by speaking at a conference sponsored by CKI and by participating in events with experts from the Quincy Institute, a controversial think tank funded by Koch and George Soros’s Open Society Foundations.

Quincy in particular has raised eyebrows by advocating diplomatic cooperation with the Chinese Communist Party, and some of its scholars have downplayed — and in at least one case repeated Beijing’s denials of — the Uyghur genocide. But Quincy’s rising prominence and its wrongheaded stances, Schake said, are precisely why she favors engagement despite disagreement within her shop. “There is a diversity of views, with some folks feeling that the Quincy Institute’s behavior to this point is sufficient that we shouldn’t give them a platform, that we shouldn’t engage with them, and others that feel, as I do, that our arguments can easily defeat the positions that they’re trying to get purchase from,” she said. “And if we don’t engage in the argument, they will get more traction on ideas that we think are dangerous to the country.”

AEI’s direction is not yet settled. While Schake represents the face of the think tank’s foreign-policy and defense initiatives, conservative Hill staffers pointed to longtime AEI scholars who they still think are doing important work, primarily on China and Iran. And Schake has made a number of interesting new hires, including scholars looking at cutting-edge defense-policy topics relating to Beijing’s use of tech companies to advance its national objectives and how the Party is thinking through a potential invasion of Taiwan.

Conservative hawks’ general disaffection with AEI could easily be dismissed as D.C. intrigue of interest to only a small circle of foreign-policy experts. For now, perhaps that’s what it is. But, as AEI charts its next steps, potentially inching away from mainstream GOP circles, it could leave an intellectual vacuum on the right that other organizations have yet to fill. Few have AEI’s heft.