THE 2024 REPUBLICAN presidential primary has largely been framed as a referendum on former President Donald Trump. He’s expected to face at least half a dozen serious rivals, with one possible contender, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, sometimes—but not always—out-polling him in head-to-head matchups.
But Trump’s fate isn’t the only big question this primary could settle for Republicans. Arguably more important is the future of the party’s foreign policy. No consensus has emerged since Trump’s surprise 2016 victory, the drawdown of America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the turn toward great power conflict, which was accelerated in 2022 by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the pattern of reciprocal provocations around Taiwan by Beijing and Washington.
Two decades ago, the Republican perspective on military engagement abroad was unified and clear. Then-President George W. Bush had come to office promising a “humble” foreign policy, saying during the 2000 campaign that he was “not so sure the role of the United States is to go around the world and say, ‘This is the way it’s got to be.’” But in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, he swiftly dropped the humility talk to govern as if, in fact, that were exactly the United States’ role.
Neoconservatism—or at least an interventionist mindset contiguous with longstanding right-wing assumptions about the American prerogative to serve as a virtuous hyperpower—became the prevailing stance. In his 2002 State of the Union address, Bush named Iran, Iraq, North Korea, “and their terrorist allies” as a new “axis of evil.”
At that point U.S. boots were on the ground in Afghanistan already, and soon the U.S. would invade Iraq as well. The global war on terror was underway, understood to be a project unbounded by chronological or geographic limits. There was a real optimism about the United States’ ability to militarily dominate distant societies and remake them in our democratic image. Iraq, recall, would be a “cakewalk,” advocates of the invasion told us at the time.
With the added insight of 20-odd years, such optimism is hard to come by even in Republican circles. Then-Rep. Ron Paul’s opposition to the post-9/11 wars failed to win over most GOP voters in 2008 and 2012, but in 2016 Trump found a receptive audience for his critique of those poorly aging occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
