On the Coming Foreign Policy Fight

As the acrimony over Republican losses sorts itself out, there’s going to be a pretense that the battle of ideas can be settled easily and cleanly through primaries and other forms of debate and combat. Most of it will be senseless. In these kinds of battles, everyone remembers their own wounds and forgets those they inflicted. In wipeout elections, everyone is wrong about the problems.

At least in the intellectual space, the battle will be dominated by foreign policy.

“My dream race is JD versus Marco, and the reason is because I firmly believe that the Republican Party needs this battle,” says Pete Seat, former White House spokesperson for President George W. Bush.

“That’s the debate that we need to have—is whether we really, truly go to… pic.twitter.com/GRY0LejIW7

— Council on Foreign Relations (@CFR_org) November 4, 2026

This speaker says that it’s a battle of “isolationists versus engagement” — which might as well be saying it’s a debate between absolute evil and prudent virtue. Drained of emotion, these are debates about matching the will and resources of the American people to America’s commitments. They are about whether the post-Cold War momentum and structure of foreign policy is mainly a force multiplier offering us protection, or a mechanism for draining our resources and attention, allowing ourselves to be chain-ganged into tertiary conflicts.

The foreign policy debate is the hottest one because for people influencing foreign policy decisions, the imagined glory is greatest and the actual responsibility is near zero. There’s also the fact that every side has convinced itself that the other side is not just wrong, but motivated wickedly or at least deluded.

Given the immense munitions and military constraints the current administration leaves its successor, I think some restraint, retrenchment, and burden-shifting is inevitable no matter how grandiose the rhetoric and self-regard is.