The GOP is just doubling down on Obama–Biden’s strategy of being half in and half out.
The GOP is just doubling down on Obama–Biden’s strategy of being half in and half out.
R epublicans have been on quite a foreign-policy journey in the last two decades. They show one instinct to withdraw, to let the world police itself, and then events and a reputation for toughness move them toward a desire for action and the desire to firm up America’s global leadership.
George W. Bush ran on implementing a “humble foreign policy,” which he meant to be a corrective to Clinton-era adventurism and high-handedness. The shock of the September 11 terrorist attacks sent Bush searching for a new worldview. By his second inaugural, he was vowing to make America the leader of a global democratic revolution against tyranny just about everywhere. The extremely predictable waxing of Iranian influence in Iraq, and Sunni lashing out at being deposed as the top group in their nation, led to historic defeats for Republicans.
Barack Obama vowed not to do “stupid s***.” It was a promise he could not keep. His CIA and Department of Defense intervened in Syria before he allowed Congress to decline to endorse a war there. He “led from behind” in Libya, creating a playground for ISIS and a paradise of human smuggling. He spent billions on a surge in Afghanistan to push back the Taliban and create a functioning Afghan National Army, which began its slow march to defeat with every bit of responsibility it took over from the Americans. Republicans, brain-dead as usual, wanted to say he was a weakling doing too little to defend America (their preferred narrative). But the truth was that he was allying America with every radical Sunni group who saw a path toward their theocracy in elections, or American air power. Obama’s wars, extended by America’s half-in, half-out involvement, led to a refugee crisis that destabilized European politics and led directly to Brexit in the United Kingdom and Donald Trump in the U.S. The policy in Syria was to just hang around and hang around in the hopes of improving positions ahead of negotiations.
Donald Trump had the genius of running against George W. Bush’s wars and for saying that Americans had invested trillions of dollars and many thousands of lives in order to get nothing in return. He exemplified both instincts — promising to “bomb the s***” out of ISIS on one day, to take the oil from Iraq on another, and to bring the boys home the day after that. Trump’s genius was to constantly appeal to both instincts, as Nixon did before him. Want peace? Here’s your man. Bloodymindedness? He’s got that, too. Just want finality, to be done with all this — he’ll write up a deal with the Taliban and let Joe Biden look like the fool. His presidency drove most of the foreign-policy idealists out of the GOP and into peace terms with Biden’s Democrats.
All this history leads us to now. Conservative commentator Ben Domenech believes that in all this time, Republicans have always faced a false choice. To his eyes, Republicans were pulled too far toward Wilsonian idealism under Bush. But the corrective on offer has been the Jeffersonian quietism of Rand Paul. He writes:
It’s now increasingly clear that the Republican Party is finding a compromise position over how they approach the world, even as they drive out the last vestiges of those who advanced utopian visions of a democratic peace under George W. Bush. They have come to grips with much, if not all, of the mistakes of the Clinton–Bush years, and are reorienting themselves toward a clear-eyed view of obligations, goals, and the giant needs of a military that can meet the moment. This brings them closer to the priorities of the median American voter. It’s a positive development for the next generation of serious policy leadership.
The reason for this suddenly rosy assessment is near-unanimous Republican support for the addition of Sweden and Finland to NATO, and the elected GOP’s general support of Ukraine. This, for Domenech, is the return of a sensible, if not always abstractly coherent, Jacksonian foreign policy.
Forgive me, but I just don’t see it. The idea that Andrew Jackson would take a keen interest in any other Georgia but the one north of Florida seems obviously untrue.
Republicans are just copying the Obama–Biden foreign policy of being half in, and half out — of trying to manage events in countries that we have no solemn commitments to protect. And trying to do so without a deep commitment from the American people to effect victory. Instead, conservatives are doubling down on a strategy in which we spend billions, and Ukraine loses slowly.
Conservatives have dinged the Biden administration for the bungled withdrawal from Afghanistan but haven’t reckoned with the fact that the Afghan National Army’s casualty rates and battlefield effectiveness against the Taliban were already unsustainable years ago. They had not reckoned with the fact that trillions of dollars had bequeathed Afghanistan an Afghan government whose state capacity was almost entirely the product of foreign contractors; Afghans were just there to collect and distribute bribes.
This is not a party ready to make tough decisions about the limited resources it has to deploy around the world. It’s a party careening from one news cycle to the next, afraid of consulting its own voters, and unable to come up with a framework for organizing the United States’ friendships and enmities.
There is no Goldilocks Republican foreign policy right now — neither too hot, nor too cold, but just right. We’re just waiting for the next big fright before jumping out the window into the next disaster.