Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., pushed back against President-elect Donald Trump and other GOP lawmakers’ embrace of geopolitical isolationism, in an op-ed on Foreign Affairs published on Monday, in a rare public rebuke of the incoming administration’s apparent foreign policy stances on Ukraine and America’s involvement in NATO.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-KY, called out the isolationists in his own party.
In the op-ed, McConnell also criticized the Biden administration’s foreign policy approach and wrote that Trump will “inherit a world far more hostile to U.S. interests than the one he left behind four years ago.”
However, the Senate minority leader warned that “the response to four years of weakness must not be four years of isolation,” as he criticizes the “right-wing flirtation with isolation and decline.”
McConnell—who is stepping down as the GOP Senate leader—criticized calls from within his party to “give up on American primacy,” and, in an apparent direct message to the President-elect, added: “America will not be made great again by those who simply want to manage its decline.”
The op-ed urges Trump to embrace the U.S.’s “hard power” by increasing defense spending and repeatedly calls on him to stand up to China—who McConnell argued has “intensified its efforts to expand its military, political, and economic influence worldwide.”
McConnell also warns against abandoning Ukraine, saying a Russian victory in the war would damage the U.S.’s interests in Europe and “also compound the threats from China, Iran, and North Korea.”
McConnell also urged Trump to embrace NATO, pointing out that many of the alliance’s members have surged their defense spending—something Trump demanded during his first term—and more than two-thirds of them now meet or exceed the agreed-to target of spending at least 2% of their GDP on it.
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McConnell gave the president-elect credit for certain tough policies against Russia during his first term, like “reversing the Obama administration’s limitations on assistance to Ukraine” and using force against Russia’s ally Syria. But noted that Trump himself undermined some of this “through his words and deeds.” The Senate minority leader noted that Trump “courted Putin, he treated allies and alliance commitments erratically and sometimes with hostility, and in 2019 he withheld $400 million in security assistance to Ukraine.” According to McConnell, these actions “raised doubts about whether the United States was committed to standing up to Russian aggression, even when it actually did so.”
McConnell also took a shot at Biden’s and Trump’s use of tariffs “that have strained relationships with allies and tested the patience of American consumers,” and said they serve as an “invitation for China to expand its economic influence in Asia at the United States’ expense.”