‘America First’ Anti-Interventionists Suffer a Big Defeat in the House

Y ou might have heard that a grand political realignment is upon us. The coalitions that make up the Democratic and Republican bases are shifting, as are their political priorities.

When it comes to the conduct of American affairs abroad, the political dynamic is most unsettled. Once skeptical of foreign entanglements, Democrats and their elected representatives are now increasingly inclined toward a more extroverted American presence on the world stage. The opposite is said to be true of Republicans: Not only has the GOP abandoned doctrinal commitments to preemption and proactivity in foreign affairs, but the party’s loudest champions also promise to hunt down and excommunicate any remaining dissenters from their new orthodoxy.

Donald Trump is surrounded by advisers besotted with the idea that they are the vanguard of a new, less-interventionist Right, and he exudes the same sort of confidence as they do. “We are never going back to a party that wants to give unlimited money to fight foreign wars that are endless wars, that are stupid wars,” Trump boomed in a March 6 speech to the audience at CPAC. “We will expel the warmongers!”

But such talk of purges is gradually replacing the idea of a wholesale ideological renovation out of necessity. As the GOP House majority — a caucus supposedly recast in Trump’s image — indicated on Wednesday, the grand anti-interventionist realignment has been a spectacular dud.

“Congress has never authorized the use of military force in Syria. The United States is currently not in a war with or against Syria, so why are we conducting dangerous military operations there?” Representative Matt Gaetz (R., Fla.) asked in a late-February floor speech in support of the concurrent resolution he’d introduced, which would have compelled Joe Biden to withdraw the roughly 900 U.S. troops stationed in Syria. “President Biden must remove all U.S. Armed Forces from Syria. ‘America First’ means actually putting the people of our country first — not the interests of the military–industrial complex.”

This has become a recurring theme for Gaetz. In an interview with Donald Trump Jr. last week, the congressman indicted the “deep state” for maintaining a U.S. presence in Syria over President Trump’s objections. The mission in the Levant “is indicative of this neoconservative worldview,” he insisted. He blamed “the Bush Republicans, the Boltonistas, the Cheneyites,” Nikki Haley, and even congressional Republican leaders for failing to recognize that No True Republican disagrees with him. This itemization of the forces arrayed against Gaetz’s policy preferences cautioned against the triumphalism he displayed in his floor speech. But Gaetz still wanted to test the proposition with a vote, which proved clarifying.

Gaetz’s resolution failed on Wednesday, with 321 members, including 171 Republicans and 150 Democrats, voting no. Insofar as this vote was at all indicative of a political realignment, the evidence for that can be found in the fact that more Democratic members voted with Gaetz than Republicans, and most of those Democrats are members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.

“America First” Republicans frequently cast their critics as hopeless ideologues who would sacrifice the nation’s practical interests in the pursuit of highly theoretical goals. But the Republicans who spoke out against Gaetz’s resolution objected primarily to the impracticality of his preferences. “Even though ISIS no longer controls significant territory, there are still tens of thousands of hardened terrorist fighters in Iraq and Syria who are hellbent on establishing their terror state,” warned the House Foreign Affairs Committee chairman, Representative Mike McCaul (R., Fla.). “Either we fight and defeat them in Syria, or we’ll fight them in the streets of our nation,” said Representative Ryan Zinke (R., Mont.). To this, freshman representative Anna Paulina Luna (R., Fla.) objected, insisting that ISIS “has been destroyed” and “a few hundred troops will not stop the next terrorist.com, and that’s never going to end.”

But ISIS has not, in fact, “been destroyed.” “Terrorist.com” is a domain that is presently available, if you’re foolish enough to purchase it. And it’s hard to think up a more defeatist proposition than the idea that transnational Islamist terrorism cannot be disrupted proactively, the failure of international Islamist organizations to execute another spectacular attack on U.S. soil since 9/11 notwithstanding.

Every U.S. president since George W. Bush has campaigned against the Global War on Terror’s open-ended defense commitments, and every U.S. president since George W. Bush has prosecuted the war with gusto while in office. Gaetz and company may be tired of terrorism, but the threat persists.

As Jay Nordlinger chronicled in late January, the U.S.-led counterterrorism operations that we know about are regularly producing headlines that anyone invested in neutralizing the threat posed by Islamist radicalism should welcome.

“U.S. Special Operations commandos killed a senior Islamic State leader in an early-morning helicopter raid in a remote area of northern Somalia on Thursday,” the New York Times reported in late January. That coup followed the Islamic State’s announcement in November of last year that its new leader — the figure who replaced Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi after a Donald Trump-approved operation took him off the battlefield in 2019 — had been killed in battle by Syria’s “anti-government rebels.”

The GOP’s Matt Gaetzes and Anna Paulina Lunas have put themselves in a precarious position. They disapprove of America’s commitments abroad but welcome the successes those commitments produce. Indeed, they promise more, similar successes, even as they argue for relinquishing the tools needed to secure them. They cast aspersions on the proxy forces that serve as America’s partners — and, therefore, limit the American footprint necessary to achieve our operational goals — while at the same time celebrating those forces’ battlefield efficacy. The contradictions are mounting.

And yet, while this faction of the GOP has a distorted view of its primacy within the Republican coalition, their criticisms of the status quo are not entirely ill-considered. As Roll Call reported yesterday, “even many critics of the specific concurrent resolution on the floor said it was time for a broader review” of the post-9/11 resolution authorizing the use of military force against al-Qaeda and its allies. The AUMF provides legal authority to execute kinetic operations against designated terrorist entities and proactive deployments to places such as Iraq. Democratic and Republican lawmakers alike, even those who aren’t skeptical of the War on Terror, increasingly believe it needs to be retired.

“However,” Representative Abigail Spanberger (D., Va.), one such lawmaker, said, “that does not mean that we should abandon ongoing operations that keep the United States safe, that are authorized under the 2001 AUMF.” This logic should lead lawmakers to conclude that the 2001 AUMF, if it was repealed, would have to be quickly replaced with something that provided similar legal authority for the ongoing operations they support. In a statement provided to the Washington Post’s Olivier Knox, Joe Biden’s National Security Council endorsed a congressional effort “to ensure that outdated authorizations for the use of military force are replaced with a narrow and specific framework that will ensure that we can continue to protect Americans from terrorist threats.”

Here, the “America First” GOP enjoys the advantage of consistency. The coalition of lawmakers who support the operations authorized by the 2001 AUMF also want to replace that legislation with something “narrow and specific,” even as the scope of the terror war has broadened. The legal authority that resolution bestowed on the president to strike al-Qaeda targets has since been applied to organizations as divergent as the Islamic State, Somalia’s al-Shabaab, and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. A new resolution could replace the 2001 AUMF’s references to “al-Qaeda” with references to “designated terrorist groups,” but that would hardly be more “narrow and specific.”

So, the Syria vote provided some clarity about the extent to which the vaunted rise of inward-looking populist nationalism has been overblown — but that was all the clarity we got.