80 Years of GOP Foreign Policy Debates

For the past decade, since the dawn of the Trump era, Republicans have been consumed with unrelenting internecine foreign policy debates. These include differences over specific policies, such as whether or not to support Ukraine or station military forces in the Middle East, and over first principles, such as the relative merits of alliances, free trade, or promotion of human rights and democracy. 

For those immersed in these debates, it has felt like an unusually acrimonious time. Yet when viewed over the longer span of the post-war era, these intra-party debates of the past decade are more the norm than an anomaly. America’s debut as a global superpower at the end of World War II also birthed a series of rifts within the GOP. While the particulars have varied in each decade, these debates and divisions have persisted up to the present day. 

The consuming issues at the dawn of the Cold War included:­­­­­ whether to support the Marshall Plan, whether to form treaty alliances with European and Asian nations, whether to station troops abroad in permanent bases, how much to spend on defense, whether to prioritize Europe or Asia as the Cold War’s primary theater, and so forth. Iconic statesmen personified these debates. Republican Senator Robert Taft of Ohio led the more isolationist vanguard, skeptical of a large national security establishment at home and of overseas commitments abroad, which he saw as threats to domestic tranquility and limited government. On the other side stood Republican Senator Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan, leader on the Foreign Relations Committee who partnered with the Truman Administration to bring bipartisan support for the creation of the post-war international architecture and initiatives such as the Marshall Plan and NATO. 

A few years later Taft squared off against General Dwight Eisenhower for leadership of the GOP—and thus the nation. Eisenhower entered the 1952 Republican presidential primary to thwart Taft’s campaign for the nomination and preserve American international leadership and a strong Cold War posture. 

Eisenhower’s defeat of Taft in the GOP primary and subsequent two terms as president cemented for a season the ascent of the internationalist wing of the Republican Party. Here it bears reinforcing that though Eisenhower’s foreign policy resists simplified summaries, the latter-day efforts by contemporary neo-isolationists to claim Eisenhower as a progenitor are wrong. Eisenhower’s bedrock principles included a deep commitment to allies and to using military strength to deter communist aggression. He spoke often of the importance of democratic values to American strength and sought to forge partnerships with other nations on the basis of shared values. As the nation’s most eminent World War II veteran, he knew well the dreadful costs of war, yet combined a caution about deploying military troops with a shrewd willingness to threaten the use of force to achieve political and diplomatic goals.   

After leaving office in 1961, Eisenhower became one of the first Republican leaders to encourage Ronald Reagan to run for the California governorship, which Reagan did in 1966. On securing the GOP nomination, Reagan visited Eisenhower at the former president’s home in Gettysburg. They discussed national security, particularly the escalating American involvement in the Vietnam War. Dismissing the Johnson Administration’s calibrated troop increases, Eisenhower complained, “Johnson’s greatest error in prosecuting the war was not using more power at the outset. Gradual escalation will not work.” 

After Reagan won the governorship, he maintained his dialogue with Eisenhower. America’s troubled entanglement in Vietnam remained a focus of their discussions. Eisenhower told Reagan that he worried LBJ was disregarding the lessons from how early in Eisenhower’s presidency he had ended the war in Korea. In Eisenhower’s words, “I believe in winning wars, or settling them as soon as we can on an honorable basis, but not in a position of weakness.” He also redoubled his praise for Reagan’s political future, saying, “There are a number of men who would make fine presidents in our party. Governor Reagan is one of the men I admire most in this world.”¹   

Reagan paid heed to Eisenhower’s counsel and would remember it years later as president—especially about the relationship between military force and strategic goals and the imperative of a strong economy as a backbone for a strong national security strategy. 

Richard Nixon’s victory in the 1968 presidential election seemed at first to ameliorate intra-GOP foreign policy debates. But by the end of Nixon’s first-term, party rifts soon enough re-emerged. Nixon’s bold policies were as controversial as they were consequential, including combining an escalation in force with negotiated withdrawal in Vietnam, a strategic opening to China, and détente with the Soviet Union, the latter culminating in Nixon becoming the first U.S. president to visit Moscow for his 1972 summit meeting with Soviet premier Leonid Brezhnev. 

Détente with the Kremlin produced some policy benefits, including a reduction in bilateral tensions, slowing of the arms race, and alleviation of America’s overstretched global commitments. However, détente at its core had a strategic deficiency. It lacked a clear end goal beyond stable co-existence between the two superpowers—and thus it conveniently disregarded the Kremlin’s unrelenting expansionist ambitions and communism’s ideological pretentions to global supremacy. In the words of historian John Lewis Gaddis, détente’s goal “was nothing less than to change the Soviet Union’s conception of international relations, to integrate it as a stable element into the existing world order, and to build on the existing equilibrium a ‘structure of peace’.” Such hopes for better Soviet behavior and reduced American ambitions came at a serious cost—including growing Soviet aggression and weakened American influence. As Gaddis notes, détente elicited criticisms by Reagan among others “that Nixon, Ford, and Kissinger… acquiesced in the emergence, for the first time since World War II, of a serious rival to the United States in virtually all categories of military competition.² Or as Reagan put it more pungently: Détente is “what a farmer has with his turkey—until Thanksgiving Day.” 

Nixon’s embrace of China provoked opposition from conservatives as well. William F. Buckley, Jr. joined Nixon’s China delegation as a journalist in his role as editor-in-chief of National Review, and from Beijing he unleashed a steady stream of lacerating criticisms of Nixon and Kissinger’s embrace of Communist China. Buckley’s lament that “we have lost—irretrievably—any remaining sense of moral mission in the world” summed up his verdict.³ Reagan shared many of these misgivings and found America’s diminished commitment to its ally Taiwan particularly troubling. 

The brilliance of Nixon’s statecraft cannot be denied. Yet besides its policy deficiencies, his strategic genius brought with it another constraint. Nixon doubted the American people’s ability to understand the elite realm of international policy. He and his National Security Advisor, Henry Kissinger, considered their statecraft too complex to be explained to or comprehended by the public. Partly as a consequence, they sought to keep their realpolitik unencumbered by American values and ideals—and with their centralization of power and addiction to secrecy, they often sought to keep their foreign policy ambitions hidden even from their own State Department, Pentagon, and CIA. 

Part of the conservative critique of the Nixon-Kissinger foreign policy, whether towards China or the Soviet Union, was that it rejected  moral principles in its strategic calculations. This in part explains why conservatives such as Buckley and Reagan devoted so much time to communicating their views on American foreign policy to the American public. They believed that a policy’s legitimacy depended in part on popular support, and thus that popular support bolstered American power and legitimacy. They wanted a foreign policy that included values the American people believed in—and would rally behind. 

A half-century ago in July, on a sweltering summer night in Kansas City, this debate erupted before a national audience. At the GOP national convention, Ronald Reagan’s months-long battle with incumbent Gerald Ford for the presidential nomination came down to a tight fight for delegates. National security formed the core of their differences. Reagan and his team had supported a plank in the Republican platform restoring “morality in foreign policy” —a thinly-veiled critique of Ford and Kissinger’s détente policies and their refusal to draw an ideological contrast with Soviet communism or to criticize Moscow and Beijing’s brutal oppression of their own citizens. Reagan had been particularly appalled over Ford’s refusal to meet with famed Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn in the White House, based on Kissinger’s counsel that such a meeting would offend the Kremlin. 

In the end, Reagan narrowly lost the nomination, but he captured the hearts of the Republican base with his inspiring concession speech. In it, he envisioned Americans a century later looking back on 1976: 

• Whether they have the freedoms that we have known up until now will depend on what we do here. Will they look back with appreciation and say, ‘Thank God for those people of 1976 who headed off that loss of freedom, who kept our world from nuclear destruction?’ 

Reagan’s speech marked the unofficial launch of his next campaign for the 1980 election, centered on his strategic vision of something Ford and most other Republicans could not imagine at the time: winning a peaceful victory in the Cold War. 

The foreign policy successes of Reagan’s presidency are well-known—and more abundant than space permits to recount here. Highlights include the rebuilding and modernization of the American military, the remarkable expansion of human freedom and electoral democracies in Asia and Latin America, the international prosperity led by America’s economic boom and leadership of an open trading order, the revitalization of America’s alliances, the rebalancing of America’s posture in the Indo-Pacific centered on Japan, and especially the collapse of the Iron Curtain and Soviet Union and peaceful victory in the Cold War. 

What is less remembered is the opposition Reagan’s foreign policies faced throughout his presidency from many fellow Republicans. Hard-liners such as Senator Jesse Helms fiercely resisted Reagan’s efforts to promote democracy and human rights in right-wing military dictatorships; realists such as Nixon and Kissinger tried to block his arms control agreements with Gorbachev to eliminate intermediate range nuclear weapons; quasi-protectionists such as Senator John Danforth opposed his commitment to free trade. Ultimately Reagan still won over a critical mass of Republican voters and elected officials for two reasons: he made a persuasive case for his policies, and those policies succeeded in protecting the nation’s security and prosperity.   

The post-Reagan era did not bring the end of these debates. Pat Buchanan based his 1992 primary challenge to President George H.W. Bush on appeals to trade protectionism and foreign policy isolationism, in themes that had historical echoes of the 1930s and antecedents of the 2020s. President George W. Bush initially enjoyed strong Republican unity behind his counterterrorism policies post-September 11th—until the travails in Iraq during his second term bought new fractures within the conservative coalition and new debates over what conservative foreign policy principles even were. 

Turning to the Trump era, the most consequential successes of the first Trump Administration’s foreign policy came when President Trump followed conservative internationalist tenets. Examples include: bringing more economic and military pressure on China, including a Pentagon modernization and more assertive force deployments in the Indo-Pacific; the “maximum pressure” campaign against Iran and liquidation of Qassem Soleimani; the Abraham Accords that midwifed formal diplomatic ties between Israel and some of its erstwhile Arab adversaries; and increased arms supplies to Ukraine to equip it to resist Russian aggression. Trump policies that did not succeed, on the other hand, generally stemmed from the restraint or neo-isolationist camp—such as the unconditional embrace of Kim Jong Eun of North Korea or the  scramble to conciliate the Taliban and withdraw from Afghanistan (an unfortunate  policy soon after fulfilled by President Biden). 

It is too early into the second Trump administration to render any verdicts at the time of this writing, decisive or even provisional. Though it bears noting that President Trump’s decision to have the United States join Israel in its 12-day bombing campaign against Iran appears to have succeeded in significantly degrading Iran’s nuclear program.  Rather, I close with some general observations. Debates over foreign policy can take place at many levels. First, there is the conceptual level, such as the relationship between force and diplomacy, the benefits or liabilities of alliances, the virtue or folly of democracy promotion, the merits or demerits of free trade. Second, there is the historical level: What does the past teach us about policy successes and failures? Did the isolationism and protectionism of the 1930s produce good or bad outcomes? Was Vietnam the wrong war to fight or the right war that was wrongly fought? Did American policy cause the collapse of the Soviet Union and peaceful end of the Cold War? Did American policy after September 11th succeed or fail? Finally, there is the level of practice and contemporary policies: What if anything should the United States do about Iran’s nuclear ambitions and regional aggression? How should the United States respond to China’s rise and growing assertiveness? Should America support Ukraine or not? Should the United States promote free trade or adopt protectionism? 

It is that third dimension of policies in practice that matters most in our present moment. The prospects for a return to conservative internationalism in the Reagan tradition may depend not so much on the eloquence and persuasiveness of its proponents—important though those are—but on the grim realities of world events. The most significant vulnerability of the restraint or neo-isolationist posture is that in the long run it does not work. It may at times offer a potent critique of the occasional deficiencies of conservative internationalism, but as a policy framework in its own right, it has a track record of failure. It fails to deliver sustained security and prosperity for the American people.