The Charles Koch Foundation isn’t exactly neutral when it comes to America’s challenges abroad. The foundation provides grants to scholars and institutions that promote “alternative visions for U.S. foreign policy” — visions that depart from a consensus in Washington that favors an extroverted American presence on the world stage. The foundation, along with George Soros’s Open Society Foundation, founded the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, which, as its name suggests, implicitly brands Americans who favor a robust U.S. footprint abroad as irresponsible. The Charles Koch Foundation has committed tens of millions of dollars to the effort to prevent Donald Trump from winning the GOP presidential nomination for a third time, and many of those funds found their way into the coffers of the activist group Americans for Prosperity. That’s part of what makes AFP Action’s endorsement of Nikki Haley’s candidacy so interesting.

Owing perhaps to the narcissism of small differences that become magnified in the minds of primary voters in the heat of an internecine campaign for a presidential nod, Haley has become the foremost advocate for a more outgoing U.S. foreign policy in the 2024 Republican nominating contest. Mind you, with the possible exception of Mexican drug cartels, she has not promoted an interventionist foreign policy. Rather, she has distinguished herself from the field merely by maintaining that it is in U.S. interests to see one of its foremost near-peer competitors, Russia, degraded to the point that it cannot credibly menace America’s European allies. That alone has set the hair on the heads of the GOP’s populists alight.

But “populist” doesn’t describe Charles Koch, his foundation, or the beneficiaries of their generosity. Instead, they support a smaller, defter, humbler American foreign policy of the sort American presidents have retailed on the campaign trail for decades — a vision that never seems to match the realities they eventually confront from behind the Resolute Desk. Reid Smith, the vice president for foreign policy at the Koch-supported organization Stand Together, put the task before libertarian-minded reformers in pugnacious terms familiar to consumers of political discourse on social media: “What went underestimated for a long time is there are different political inclinations at play than saying ‘peace through strength’ zombie Reaganism.” Particularly when it comes to support for Ukraine’s defense against Russia’s war of conquest and subjugation, Smith insisted, Republican voters are “demanding additional restraint.”

So much for that. AFP Action’s decision to join what threatens to become a stampede as the GOP donor class gravitates toward Haley leaves us with one of two conclusions. Either the organization has decided to subordinate its skepticism of Ukraine’s cause to the imperative of stopping Trump by hastening the Republican consolidation process, or Haley’s advocacy on Ukraine’s behalf was never the disqualifying deal-breaker her critics suggested it was. Perhaps “zombie Reaganism” still has a home in the Republican coalition after all.