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And as strategists from both sides sift through the rubble—trying to piece together some kind of coherent vision for the United States’ future global role—they’re finding that they agree on more than they’re willing to admit.

One big point of agreement, at least among many of the younger strategists in both parties, is this: Most of us are realists now, schooled in the hard-nosed realities of power geopolitics in ways that our Pollyannaish predecessors weren’t. And anybody who isn’t—who still longs for the old dream of a liberal international order where the United States benignly plays global policeman—is mired in the past.

Of course, many differences remain. What’s emerging is not yet a new consensus, such as postwar internationalism or Cold War containment—not even close. But neither is it as divisive and incoherent as the current political rhetoric would lead you to believe.

Both sides are grappling with the idea that the United States must remain the world’s dominant power—just not quite as dominant. One big operative word is “restraint”: a dramatic scaling back of U.S. global ambition and a renewed focus on domestic interests in what both sides concede is now a multipolar world. Another important term is “prioritizing” U.S. interests, reflecting a common acknowledgement that Washington is overstretched and must scale back its involvement, especially in Europe and the Middle East.

Though President Donald Trump and the Republicans are in power today, some Democratic strategists are readying their own brand of realpolitik.

“We’re not going to surrender the mantle of realism to any particular political party,” one of the leading thinkers on the Democratic side—Mira Rapp-Hooper, a former senior Biden administration staffer—said in a phone interview. “I would resist the idea that the other side should have a monopoly on admitting that we need to set priorities in foreign policy.”

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For both sides, these views have emerged from the common experience of the past couple of decades—especially the disastrous Iraq War and the economically ruinous “China shock” that exposed U.S. workers to unfair trade. Those major errors, among others made by both party establishments, led to a populist backlash, fueled by a common view that excessive wars of intervention and a feckless approach to open trade wreaked havoc on the fortunes of the average American—especially working-class communities.

The leading players in this debate tend to be a younger generation of policymakers and strategists who came of age dealing with these debacles far more than the Cold War triumph that preceded them. Among them is Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby, who told me in an email exchange last year—before he took office—that there is still too little accountability for the older, hawkish Republican generation that charged recklessly into Iraq.

“It makes me deeply angry—but even more, very fearful—that we are still led by those who think [Iraq] was a mulligan,” he said.

Since taking office, Colby has pushed hard to downgrade the Middle East—most recently fighting and losing an internal battle over whether to join Israel’s war against Iran—and to pressure U.S. allies, whether in Europe or the Indo-Pacific, to take up more burdens.

“We can’t be doing 10 times what the Germans are doing anymore, and we’ve got to be prepared to be tough with them. There’s got to be consequences,” Colby told me in a June 2024 interview. “The United States does not have enough military forces to go around.”

Colby contended that the new debate in Washington was not about isolationism, but rather about traditional U.S. “primacists” on one side versus “the new realists” on the other. He said he wanted to tap into a previous strain of Republican realism as represented by former President Dwight Eisenhower and, after him, Secretary of State James Baker and National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft under former President George H.W. Bush.

“We want NATO to be active, but we want it to be with the Europeans in the lead. That was the original idea. That was Dwight Eisenhower’s idea,” Colby said. (Since assuming office, he has not responded to several requests for comment.)

Another outspoken advocate of restraint, Dan Caldwell—who was briefly a senior advisor to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth—is another disillusioned veteran of the Iraq War whose cautious views reflect that experience. Caldwell, who was ousted from the Pentagon in April when Hegseth dismissed several in his inner circle, recently co-published a paper arguing that Washington can dramatically scale down its global military presence, especially in the Middle East, without sacrificing U.S. power.

“One of the main failures of American foreign policy the last 30 years has been pursuit of liberal hegemony, of primacy,” Caldwell said in an interview. “I think trying to become this global liberal hegemon actually makes us weaker and less safe in the long run. The reason why the United States is in the situation that it currently finds itself in, where we are facing financial challenges with our $37 trillion national debt, overextended military, and a rising competitor in China, is because we had a foreign policy that pursued liberal primacy.”

On the Democratic side are younger thinkers such as Rapp-Hooper and her longtime co-author, Rebecca Lissner, who served as a deputy national security advisor to former Vice President Kamala Harris. They also reject the idea of U.S. “primacy” or hegemony. The two recently published an article in Foreign Affairs declaring that by the time Trump leaves office, the “old order will be irreparably broken.” They called for a “zero-based review” of U.S. foreign policy—or “a clean slate from which to reevaluate and justify its long-held interests, values, and policies.”

Both Rapp-Hooper and Lissner say that no matter what happens under Trump II, there is no going back to the old system. The “increasingly obsolete post-Cold War ‘liberal international order,’” as they’ve called it, depended on international law, promotion of freedom and democracy, and agreed-upon trade norms, which have mostly gone ignored. They want Washington to discard its old “messianic” goal of transforming the world based on such norms—Washington’s main policy approach going back to Presidents Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Harry Truman. Replacing that should be a realism that relies less on values and norms to pursue U.S. interests and instead addresses how to exert U.S. power—military, economic, and technological—most effectively.

“We’re at a blank slate moment, probably similar to the one at the end of World War II,” Lissner said in an interview. “It’s clear we need a new international order. Trump has really scrambled the politics on so many of these issues … but that creates a certain opportunity. Even with the destruction he’s wreaking on the international system and the national-security bureaucracy—it’s not what I would have preferred, but there is an opportunity to turn that into creative destruction on the other side.”

Rapp-Hooper added: “What we really don’t want to do—what we don’t want to see the Democratic Party do—is simply just wait until 2028 to see what the kind of smoldering wreckage of this period looks like before we decide what we are for and what we’re against.”

U.S. President Donald Trump meets with NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte, center left, in Washington on July 14. At right are U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images

But Trump is 79 years old and—many Republicans suggest privately—a unique political quantity, someone who filters world affairs through his bizarre and virulent brand of narcissism. And even Trump seems aware that he is often in danger of betraying his longtime “America First” pledge to avoid foreign military adventures. Following the administration’s June strikes on Iran, officials emphasized that the attack was limited and targeted, merely assisting Israel in what the president triumphantly called “the 12-day war.” Meanwhile, Trump’s vice president, J.D. Vance, sought to repair his boss’s reputation by declaring that the action against Iran was evidence of a “Trump Doctrine” that means “you get the hell out of there before it ever becomes a protracted conflict.”

More importantly, the future of the Republican Party lies with a younger generation that will likely be led by, among others, Vance—who turned 41 on Aug. 2—and possibly Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who’s only 13 years older. Both Vance and Rubio are seen as potential candidates for the 2028 Republican nomination.

Like Trump, Vance and Rubio deplore the liberal internationalist postwar order—Rubio actually called it worse than obsolete in his confirmation hearing, saying that “it is now a weapon being used against us” thanks to the exploitative behavior of nations such as China.

The international system may have worked for a while, Rubio said, but “America too often prioritized the global order above our core national interest.” As a result, “an almost religious commitment to free and unfettered trade at the expense of our national economy shrunk the middle class, left the working class in crisis, collapsed our industrial capacity, and has pushed critical supply chains into the hands of adversaries and of rivals.” What’s left of that postwar system after eight decades, Rubio said, is “chaos.”

Both Rubio and Vance are, on their own, seen as advocates of restraint. Like Caldwell, they view this approach as a means of reempowering a United States that is still too encumbered by the international liberal system it virtually invented after World War II. Vance is a friend of Colby’s who also supports a lower U.S. profile in Europe and the Middle East—having once said, “I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine, one way or the other”—and who, during the notorious Signal chat debacle in March, opposed Trump’s intervention against the Houthis in Yemen, saying, “I just hate bailing Europe out again.” Rubio, meanwhile, appeared somewhat caught by surprise by Trump’s June 22 attack on Iran, having declared only a week earlier: “We are not involved.”

Others in the restraint camp include two of Colby’s proteges at the Pentagon, Austin Dahmer and Alex Velez-Green, along with Michael Dimino—the deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East—who said during a panel in February 2024 that the Middle East does “not really” matter for U.S. interests.

Most strikingly, when it comes to the challenge from China—which both political parties consider to be the biggest strategic issue facing the United States—the Trump administration appears to be adopting a more restrained view than its predecessor, one focused mostly on trade and less on the military threat to Taiwan.

“You’ve seen an administration that has not taken a reflexively hawkish approach to China,” Caldwell said. “It has made clear that militarily they are the main challenger, and this is right, but at the same time they’re not doing the same things the Biden administration did to undermine strategic ambiguity.” (President Joe Biden was sometimes criticized for openly pledging a U.S. military response to a Chinese invasion of Taiwan rather than sticking to a long-standing policy ambiguity.) “So it’s early days,” Caldwell added, “but I see a very interesting policy coming together that really could be a pragmatic and effective approach to the region.”

Trump has suffered a serious backlash in starting up a major trade war with Beijing. China is now choking off the supply of critical minerals to U.S. defense companies, and he appears to be looking for a rapprochement. In yet another concession to Beijing last month, the Trump administration prevented Taiwanese President Lai Ching-te from stopping over in New York and Dallas on his way to Latin America. That was a marked contrast to more hawkish policies adopted by Biden as well as Trump in his first term, when Trump signed the Taiwan Travel Act in 2018, which allowed reciprocal visits by U.S. and Taiwanese officials.

According to Lissner and Rapp-Hooper, policy toward China is one area where a future Democratic administration is likely to differ significantly. And in general, Democrats still want a more robust global approach to projecting U.S. power—especially when it comes to values-based issues and humanitarian crises such as Beijing’s anti-democratic practices and easing the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza. Democrats are also far more keen on forging cooperative global institutions to address major threats such as climate change, the artificial intelligence revolution, and future pandemics.

Above all, they fear that Trump’s America First approach will lead to a too-precipitous drawdown of forces.

“We agree that China is the most consequential strategic challenger facing the United States today,” Lissner said. “But I think we disagree about the extent to which what happens in Russia and Ukraine matters for the Indo-Pacific, too.” The United States, she added, can’t ignore the fact that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s aggression against Ukraine will inevitably affect China’s calculations toward Taiwan.

“Another area in which I depart from some in the restraint camp is in recognizing that the United States is not a ‘normal’ country,” Lissner said. “The scale of our power and influence, the size of our military and economy, our cultural soft power in the world, [and] our network centrality in all these alliances and institutions means we will continue to play an outsized role in global affairs. The emergent structure in the international system is probably one of a kind of lopsided multipolarity … where the United States is going to remain the most powerful country for the foreseeable future. And the United States shouldn’t wish away that position.”

Trump’s predecessor, Biden, gets little but grief from his own party for deciding to run again last year, then age 81, making him a forlorn one-term president. But the Biden administration arguably worked harder at laying a groundwork for restraint and prioritization abroad and a renewed focus at home—or as Biden advisor Jake Sullivan called it, “a foreign policy for the middle class”—than his two-term predecessors, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. At least, that was true until Putin invaded Ukraine in 2022 and Hamas attacked Israel the following year, thus pulling Washington back into conflicts that it had preferred to stay out of. Biden, for example, had earlier embraced Trump’s plan for swiftly withdrawing from Afghanistan and kept Trump’s China tariffs in place.

Many of his defenders say the former president receives too little credit for trying to shift course. “It’s very hard for an extremely powerful country like the United States to change tack on the global stage because what it has been doing has been successful for so long,” Rapp-Hooper said.

People protest the involvement of the United States in Israel’s war against Iran near the Wilshire Federal Building in Los Angeles on June 22. David McNew/Getty Images

But whether Democrat or Republican, every future president will have to reckon with the fact that “a lot of Americans quite reasonably think America has been overextended and engaged in a lot of stupid and useless wars,” said Matt Duss, the former foreign-policy advisor to Sen. Bernie Sanders who like other progressives, has applauded Trump’s neo-protectionist trade policies and mostly agrees with Lissner and Rapp-Hooper’s call for a complete rethinking. “The problem did not begin with Trump,” Duss added. “Trump is an expression of a deep rot within our political system. He’s not the cause of it.”

It’s arguable whether the United States is militarily overextended abroad—several major allies that host U.S. troops, including Japan, Kuwait, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia, pay for most of that cost, according to a 2013 Rand Corp. report—but Trump and populist politicians on the Democratic side have created the impression that Washington has been filched by its allies for decades. Polls of U.S. voters in recent years show rising opposition to overseas interventions and an increasing desire to see U.S. allies take up more of the defense burden.

As Duss added, “in every election since the end of the Cold War—with the exception of 2004—the candidate who offered a more restrained foreign policy has won.”

In June, a large group of progressive Democrats led by Rep. Ro Khanna joined with Republican renegades such as Rep. Thomas Massie to introduce a resolution that would prevent Trump from attacking Iran without congressional authorization.

“Americans are sick of endless wars in the Middle East. Trump promised to bring our troops home and put America first. We saw how his base reacted to the strikes in Iran,” Khanna told me in an email. “There is a growing consensus that we should be spending resources at home instead of on costly wars of choice.”

Even so, there may be a long way to go in establishing realism as the U.S. default in foreign policy. Even Henry Kissinger, the ultimate realist, once said that Wilsonian internationalism—or what he called “the age-old American dream of a peace achieved by the conversion of the adversary”—would continue to be the “bedrock” of U.S. foreign policy.

“An American foreign policy grounded in realism and restraint is still far from being the dominant position in either political party,” said Stephen Wertheim, the author of Tomorrow, the World: The Birth of U.S. Global Supremacy, in an interview. “There’s no question, however, that the demand for greater realism and restraint is rising, especially on the right, but also on the left, following a period of deference to the Biden administration.”

Perhaps the biggest problem on both sides will be displacing those in the older generation, many of whom still hold the levers of power and have never really been held accountable for their titanic errors of judgment in recent decades.

“Did we actually hold people responsible for the Iraq War? Did we hold people responsible for the [2008] financial crisis? We did not,” Duss said. “Those people got off scot-free. I think there is a crisis of accountability. The people who made these enormous mistakes paid zero consequences. We need to end that.”

For both parties, therefore, implementing a new foreign-policy vision “is a work in progress,” said George Beebe, the director of grand strategy at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a leading advocate of the new realism in Washington.

“To some degree, that’s why you’re seeing different tacks from Trump on different issues,” Beebe said. “Part of it is Trump himself, but part of it is [that] there’s tensions within the party being played out. … Fundamentally, the problem is if you adopt a new approach to foreign policy, then people running the show for the last 30, 40 years are not the ones you’re going to turn to. Right now, that’s the biggest challenge.”