Trump, Russia, NATO: How GOP moved on from Reagan’s confident view

Republicans in Congress hold up military assistance for a besieged Ukraine, while expressing admiration for the strongman leadership style of Vladimir Putin.

Former President Donald Trump, the Republican standard-bearer and the party’s increasingly likely presidential nominee, boasts at a weekend campaign rally that he would “encourage” Russia to attack any NATO allies that aren’t meeting the alliance’s financial targets.

And a growing number of Republican officials employ Mr. Trump’s isolationist and xenophobic rhetoric in the ongoing immigration debate.

With the party’s traditional internationalist outlook nowhere in sight, one has to wonder: What happened to the foreign policy of Ronald Reagan’s Republican Party?

President Reagan embodied the confident and cheerful America that would defeat the Soviet Union and welcome Eastern European countries into the family of democracies. He was the last president to succeed at immigration reform, with legislation that legalized nearly 3 million unauthorized immigrants.

When he left office in 1989, Mr. Reagan signed off with his vision of America as the “shining city upon a hill” that would have no walls, only doors for admitting those seeking freedom and prosperity. By contrast, today’s Republicans are more likely to say they prefer walls, view migrants as a threat – and dismiss Ukraine’s freedom and security as having little relevance for America.

Foreign policy ebb and flow

What happened?

A shift in the Republican Party’s base – from the business and chamber-of-commerce set that benefited from international engagement, to a more rural and working-class demographic more skeptical about the world and America’s leadership role in it – is one factor, foreign policy analysts say.

But some experts who have worked in Republican administrations as far back as President Reagan’s say that since President George W. Bush’s administration, there has been a growing sense that the United States was trying to do too much while ignoring problems at home. And that sense found its embodiment in Mr. Trump’s aggrieved populism.

Moreover, these experts say, the Republican Party has long been subject to an ebb and flow of the key strains of foreign policy approach marking American history. These range from a Wilsonian international idealism to a Jacksonian populist and isolationist vision of American global engagement.

And while Mr. Trump’s inward-oriented populism may be ascendant right now, some say the right leader with a compelling vision of global engagement could shift the party back to something closer to Mr. Reagan’s optimistic sense of America’s role in the world.

AP/File

Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev (left) shakes hands with President Ronald Reagan at a conference in Geneva in November 1985.

“The American foreign policy establishment broadly had these grand visions of remaking other societies, but they were too ambitious, they didn’t work, they took too long, and the American people got very frustrated with it,” says Paul Saunders, who served in the State Department under George W. Bush.

“Trump was very effective at capitalizing on the public rejection of that leadership approach, but he didn’t really define a vision for American foreign and security policy,” adds Mr. Saunders, now president of the Center for the National Interest, a Washington foreign and security policy think tank. Instead, he says, “the Republicans are left with all of these different influences and concerns that give us this swirling mix we have right now.”

Mr. Saunders notes, for example, that there is a not-insignificant libertarian streak in the party that views an active U.S. role in the world, based on a big military and an extensive “security state”, as “ultimately making us less free here at home.”

Ukraine aid package

The Republican isolationist turn in foreign policy is on particularly stark display in the debate over additional military assistance for Ukraine. Despite increasingly dire reports of Ukraine’s depleted munitions stocks and faltering ability to repel Russian ground assaults and drone attacks, congressional Republicans prefer to highlight an assault they say is going unanswered on the U.S. southern border.

Why help Ukraine secure its borders, many say, if we can’t first secure our own borders?

A Ukraine package could finally pass in the Senate this week, but prospects are much dimmer in the Republican-controlled House.

“Once they had a Reagan who cared very much about the freedom of the Eastern European countries shackled by Soviet rule, but now you hear Republicans saying, ‘Putin wants to take Ukraine? Who cares, we have our own problems,’” says Lawrence Korb, a former assistant secretary of defense during the Reagan administration.

The Republican Party’s isolationist strain was resurgent in the 1996 presidential bid of Pat Buchanan, but it gained momentum in reaction to Mr. Bush’s ambitious and idealistic foreign policy vision, some say.

“The sense of overreach really set in with the second President Bush, who overextended himself in Iraq and Afghanistan and who had this vision of using 9/11 to reform the Middle East,” says Mr. Korb, now a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress in Washington. “That’s when many in the American public started feeling like things were going too far at America’s expense.”

Just how far the Republican Party and indeed the U.S. will swing in the isolationist direction will be determined to some extent by elections in November – and not just in the likely clash between the internationalist, America-as-global-democracy-champion vision of President Joe Biden and the “America First” stance of former President Trump.

The extent of the swing will also depend on what Congress emerges from the November voting.

“It’s the Democrats and Biden who are more worried about the world now and America’s role in it,” says Mr. Korb, “but we’ll see [in the elections] where the American people are on these questions.”

Looking at the Republican trajectory from Mr. Reagan to Mr. Trump, Mr. Saunders says he believes the party will at some point return to a robust internationalist foreign policy – but that it will take a leader who can articulate a compelling vision of America in the world.

“It’s a mistake to hope we can return to some previous consensus or a particular leadership that responded to an earlier era. The past is the past and we’ve moved beyond that,” he says.

Yet he adds, “The internationalist wing of the party may be in the minority right now, but I don’t think it’s impossible at all to imagine someone with real leadership skills defining a new internationalist American role that could appeal even to the decidedly less internationalist wing of the party.”