Anyone who paid attention to the 2024 Republican presidential primaries or recent battles on Capitol Hill over aid to Ukraine and Israel knows that the Republican Party is having a difficult time finding a foreign policy consensus. The coalition between libertarian and national populist Republicans advocates for a foreign policy that resembles the “Old Right” isolationism of Pat Buchanan, while the Reaganite branch of the GOP continues to advocate for policies of peace through strength.
Earlier this month, the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and The American Conservative held a conference on foreign policy with Vivek Ramaswamy, along with Sens. J.D. Vance (R-OH) and Rand Paul (R-KY) to make the case for the isolationist Right. In contrast, the Hudson Institute announced that former presidential candidate Nikki Haley and former congressman Mike Gallagher had joined the think tank, with both giving talks about a more active role for the United States in the world. Comparing these events reveals how both factions approach international affairs.
The splinter between these groups is most apparent in the issue of Ukraine. Vance said that the aid to Ukraine “has no strategic end in sight, and it’s not leading anywhere. It’s not going to ultimately be good for our country.”
Haley levied similar criticisms about the strategic ambiguity of the Biden administration, saying that “while the Ukrainians have proven to be amazing fighters, Biden refuses to help them win. He gives them just enough to survive, while Russian missiles and tanks grind their country to dust.”
While Vance looked at the Biden administration’s failures and concluded that the United States should stop helping Ukraine, Haley believes that the U.S. needs to fully commit to defeating Russia. “Russia’s dictator has made it perfectly clear that he won’t stop at Kyiv. He wants to recreate the Soviet Union, and he’s threatened to attack our NATO allies. We are obligated to defend them,” Haley said.
On the Middle East, Ramaswamy expressed his belief that the U.S. was providing too much aid to Israel and that instead of providing funds, the U.S. needs to stand “diplomatically for the right of Israel to defend itself, just as we believe in the right to defend ourselves.”
Haley, on the other hand, argued that abandoning Israel would have a ripple effect, saying that “Biden has also emboldened Iran to attack the rest of our allies in the Middle East. That makes them question whether they can ever trust what America says. If we withhold help from Israel, why would the Saudis, Emiratis, or Jordanians ever feel like they could trust us as friends? This only pushes them into the arms of Russia and China.”
Recognizing the threat that China poses is where the two groups aligned the most. Ramaswamy argued that the U.S. needs to “draw a clear red line when we say the U.S. will defend Taiwan.” Gallagher similarly expressed his belief that the Chinese Communist Party’s “ambitions are global, and they, in some sense, present an existential threat to us.”
The core difference between these groups is that the isolationists view world powers such as Russia, Iran, and China as acting mostly independently of one another, while the hawks recognize that they are acting in tandem as a new “axis of evil.” Haley had harsh words for the Biden administration, saying that the fall of Afghanistan emboldened the United States’ enemies, and that “North Korea has gotten more aggressive towards South Korea and Japan, China is preparing to invade Taiwan, and of course, Iran and Russia have already started wars of their own” due to Biden’s weakness.
Another difference between the two groups is that Vance and Paul are both serving in the Senate while Ramaswamy has successfully spun his presidential campaign into long-term political relevance. On the other hand, Haley was pretty thoroughly smeared as a “RINO” while Gallagher recently resigned from Congress due to his unhappiness with the direction of the Republican Party. In other words, the isolationists are winning while advocates of peace through strength have been mostly relegated to the sidelines.
The isolationist wing of the GOP has re-arisen after the major foreign policy blunders of George W. Bush’s administration, but they have overcorrected to the point that national security would be at risk if their vision was fully realized. The hawks in the GOP need to do a better job of differentiating between the military adventurism of the Bush Administration that resulted from vaguely defined enemies and the successful deterrence of the Soviet Union by Ronald Reagan. Otherwise, the isolationists will continue to successfully call back to the failures of the early 2000s.
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It remains unclear which direction former President Donald Trump intends to take his next administration if he wins this election. While Vance and Ramaswamy have both served as top Trump surrogates, the former president has taken a noticeably less isolationist tone since he became the presumptive nominee. Even after the 2016 election, when Trump ran mostly on isolationist rhetoric, he still staffed his administration with national security experts like John Bolton, Mike Pompeo, and even Haley. Moreover, a recent report from the New York Times suggested that Tom Cotton was on Trump’s running mate short list. If Trump wins in November, his administration will likely take a foreign policy position somewhere between both camps, but the internal strife will continue in the GOP.
Ultimately, a Right-wing consensus on national defense likely will not arise again unless a threat as clear as the Soviet Union appears. China has the potential to become that threat, so Gallagher is correct in his assessment that, if Trump is elected in November, his team “needs to all be directionally aligned on China.”