Republican foreign policy has gotten interesting since Donald Trump arrived on the scene. Before Trump, there was a consistent dynamic: the party rank and file were fairly noninterventionist, while the party establishment was very interventionist.
In some ways, this GOP-elite hawkishness was a carryover from the late Cold War. Ronald Reagan was elected in part because people believed that Reagan would win the Cold War while Democrats such as Jimmy Carter, Ted Kennedy, and Walter Mondale would surrender. Reagan and George H.W. Bush built up the U.S. military over the objections of Democrats and the liberal media, and this helped sink the Soviet Union.
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But the fall of the Berlin Wall changed things. A more bellicose United States since then means a United States that goes abroad in search of monsters to destroy, to borrow the phrasing of former President and Secretary of State John Quincy Adams.
Donald Trump, I often say, was the guy at the end of the bar. He lacks any clear policy views or first principles. But he kind of has an intuition. The average American, including the average Republican voter, has foreign policy views that amount to: We shouldn’t be the world’s policeman, but if you mess with us, we will bomb you into oblivion.
In 2016 Sens. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Rand Paul (R-KY) came close to this position, but Donald Trump, being unburdened by intellectualism or a demand for clarity, may have expressed this view best. Trump then got elected and pulled off something no president had managed since Carter: he went four years without initiating a new U.S. war.
Trump has dramatically reshaped the GOP in many ways — most of them bad. But Trump’s effect on foreign policy has been salutary. Republicans now actually have a debate on foreign policy.
When Russia invaded Ukraine last year, this set the table for an interesting debate on the Right and among the GOP.
It’s a given that Russia’s invasion is evil, and that the U.S. should support Ukraine. The question is how much we should support Ukraine, in what ways, and to what end.
Underlying these questions is a prior question: What is the U.S. interest in this war?
And that’s the question tonight’s debate moderators should ask all the Republican candidates: What is at stake for the U.S. in the Ukraine-Russia war?
Some may say nothing. (I would disagree.) Some would say everything. (That’s clearly wrong.)
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In between there are many debatable answers. Maybe we need to enforce the idea of national sovereignty. Maybe we need to weaken Putin. Maybe we should expand NATO. Maybe somehow our involvement provides a check on China.
It’s not simple. That’s exactly the sort of thing serious candidates should debate.