A majority of the conference voted to reject defense budget amendments that would have stripped military assistance from America’s frontline partners.
An oft-retailed narrative about congressional Republicans is that they have grown isolationist over the last decade, aligning themselves with President Trump’s general aversion to international commitments. We are told the party has all but abandoned Ronald Reagan’s brand of conservative internationalism, opting instead for restraint and retrenchment. On Friday night, Republicans in the House of Representatives demonstrated that their party’s supposed transformation on foreign policy has been overblown — much to the disappointment of those members who despise the use of American power.
While advancing the 2026 U.S. defense budget, House leadership allowed the chamber to vote on several amendments, introduced by Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R., Georgia), that would have stricken military assistance to various countries. The security aid she targeted was set to flow to allied governments resisting aggression in the world’s three most perilous theaters: Taiwan in the Pacific, Ukraine in Eastern Europe, and Israel and Jordan in the Middle East.
If isolationism had truly captured the GOP, Greene’s amendments should have received broad support from its members. Yet the majority of her Republican colleagues chose differently, voting to reject every cut to foreign military assistance. Greene’s most popular amendment — to bar defense funds to Ukraine — was defeated 76–353, with 141 Republicans opposed. Two more of Greene’s offerings — to halt military assistance to Taiwan and Israel, respectively — attracted merely six yes votes apiece.
Many more Republicans could have voted for Greene’s amendments without any consequences. With Democrats united in opposition, only a handful of House Republicans needed to vote no to keep the foreign aid cuts out of the defense bill. But most Republicans voted to rebuke Greene’s grand strategy of retreat anyway. She later fumed on social media, “Tonight all of my amendments to cut $1.6 billion of foreign aid out of our Defense budget failed because both Republicans and Democrats refuse to stop sending your hard earned tax dollars to foreign countries.”
Perhaps Greene has forgotten, but sending “tax dollars to foreign countries” was once considered a radical conservative policy to frustrate and roll back communist advancements around the world. The cornerstone of President Reagan’s foreign policy — famously termed the “Reagan doctrine” by the late columnist Charles Krauthammer — was to lend out American hard power to those resisting the Soviet Union’s grip in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Winning the Cold War did not require direct military engagement with the enemy. It required supplying anti-communists on the front line, across multiple theaters, with the materiel to fight their own battles.
The countries that Greene wants to cut off are currently resisting aggression of their own — no longer from a single Evil Empire, but from a new axis of upheaval. The objective of the aggressors — China, Russia, and Iran — is to tear away at the American-led order that upholds, however imperfectly, territorial integrity and national sovereignty around the globe. For America to support those nations standing in their way isn’t charity; it’s a strategic imperative. Indeed, containment comes at a financial cost, but the costs of letting containment fail are sure to be much greater.
If the votes on Greene’s amendments were a referendum for Republicans on whether to embrace isolationism, then Reagan’s confident internationalism remains undefeated. America’s frontline partners will continue to receive military assistance to repel the urgent threats they face, and that America faces through them.