Throughout his last 10 years in politics, President Trump has broken with a number of principles of both his own party and America as a whole. One remarkable difference between Trump and the GOP of the past few decades is his approach to foreign policy. He ran for president in 2016 criticizing overseas military interventions, “nation-building,” and vowing that “unlike other candidates for the presidency, war and aggression will not be my first instinct.”
During the 2024 campaign, the GOP promoted Trump and Vance as “the pro-peace ticket.” In this, Trump breaks with a Republican party that has been, for decades, defined by an aggressive, global foreign policy focused on building and maintaining American hegemony worldwide—think presidents like Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush.
Trump’s unorthodox foreign policy has manifested itself most sharply in his handling of the Russia-Ukraine war. He campaigned for the 2024 presidential election promising to end the war in “just one day.” He’s argued that the United States has spent too much money to wage a war that it doesn’t benefit from. Now, the President is attempting to fulfill his campaign promises.
Following an explosive televised confrontation in the White House with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine, Trump has paused all military aid to Ukraine. The CIA has
stopped intelligence sharing with the country. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has also suspended all offensive cyberoperations against Russia. More broadly, Trump has attempted to freeze foreign aid spending and has mentioned plans for the United States, Russia, and China to reduce their military spending by 50%.
Trump’s break with Republican foreign policy conventions has drawn criticism and confusion from many across the political spectrum. Mitch McConnell, longtime GOP Senate leader and vocal supporter of Ukraine, told the Associated Press that “Honestly, I think Ronald Reagan would turn over in his grave if he saw we were not going to help Ukraine.”
In her response speech to Trump’s joint address to Congress, Elissa Slotkin, freshman Democratic senator from Michigan, repeated the line that “Reagan must be rolling in his grave,” and said that “As a Cold War kid…I’m thankful it was Reagan and not Trump in office in the 1980s…Trump would have lost us the Cold War.” Former Republican president George W. Bush has also criticized the Trump-era GOP for, among other things, what he calls its “isolationist” foreign policy.
However, Trump has found throngs of voters receptive to right-wing politics accompanied by this different foreign policy. A 2023 poll from the Chicago Council of Global Affairs found that a majority of self-identified Republicans believe that the United States should stay out of world affairs, not play an active role in them. According to Pew Research Center, 42% of Republicans say that the US is providing too much support to Ukraine, and only 36% say that the US has a responsibility to help Ukraine defend itself against Russia’s invasion. In 2023, after being elected Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson received sharp criticism from some anti-establishment conservatives who commented attacks like, “Politicians are incapable of putting America First!” on X due to his support for military aid to Israel.
Trump’s populist foreign policy has also found support among political, cultural, and economic elites such as Senator-turned-Vice President JD Vance, former Fox News host and podcaster Tucker Carlson, and billionaire adviser Elon Musk, who, in addition to opposing foreign aid, recently publicly supported a US withdrawal from the United Nations and NATO.
In general discourse, many have misunderstood the origins of Trump’s foreign policy, as well as its popularity among voters. His policy toward Ukraine is often called a product of personal affinity towards Putin or blackmail from the Kremlin, while the Republican receptiveness to anti-internationalism is chalked up to being a result of Russian propaganda or Trump’s cult of personality. While all of these factors may play a role, Trump’s foreign policy is, first and foremost, a continuation of a long tradition in American politics that is sometimes xenophobic, often anti-establishment, and always nationalist: right-wing anti-interventionism. Before the hawkish, interventionist Republicans like Reagan, Nixon, and Eisenhower, there were the Republican isolationists. It is impossible to understand Trump, Vance, and their allies without understanding their ideological forebearers.
The Great War & the League of Nations
In 1918, as World War I drew to a close, President Woodrow Wilson proposed a revolutionary new system of conducting international relations: The League of Nations. The League was to be an international organization through which the nations of the world could formally resolve disputes and enforce global norms. Wilson and other global politicians and intellectuals supported the creation of the League in response to the unprecedented horror and violence of the war. In 1919, Wilson traveled to the Paris Peace Conference, where he successfully convinced European leaders to include the Covenant of the League in the Treaty of Versailles.
However, upon returning home across the Atlantic, Wilson was met with strong domestic opposition to US entry into the League of Nations. The Treaty and Covenant had to be ratified by Congress, and many Congressmen, especially Republicans, were skeptical of the League. Henry Cabot Lodge, Republican Senate Majority Leader, Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, and a leading opponent of the League of Nations said this:
“You may call me selfish if you will, conservative or reactionary, or use any other harsh adjective you see fit to apply… Internationalism, illustrated by the Bolshevik and by the men to whom all countries are alike provided they can make money out of them, is to me repulsive… If you fetter [the United States] in the interests and quarrels of other nations, if you tangle her in the intrigues of Europe, you will destroy her power for good and endanger her very existence.”
Ultimately, despite the League of Nationa being a brainchild of the president, American involvement was defeated by a 49-35 Senate vote. Nine months later, in the election of 1920, conservative Republican Warren Harding defeated liberal Democrat James Cox in a landslide, winning 404 electoral votes against 137. Harding campaigned against internationalism, the League of Nations, and Wilson’s foreign policy, and was rewarded hugely by the American electorate. Republicans dominated national politics throughout the 1920s, continuing to oppose Wilsonian foreign policy and sharing other policy goals with MAGA, such as aiming to implement high tariffs and curb immigration.
America First
Through the following years, America remained apart from global affairs even as the geopolitical situation in Europe and Asia deteriorated. In 1940, as Nazi Germany was at war with the nations of Europe, President Franklin D. Roosevelt declared that the United States must become “the arsenal of democracy” against the Axis Powers and that “Powerful enemies must be outfought and out produced.” However, that same year, polling found that only 7% of Americans thought their country should go to war with Germany. The America First Committee led anti-war organizing and protests. Future Presidents John F. Kennedy and Gerald Ford, college students at the time, supported the America First movement on their campuses. Charles Lindbergh, aviator and celebrity, was a leading voice in the America First Committee. He spoke out not only against direct military intervention in Europe, but against aid to the European Allies in general, saying, “I have been forced to the conclusion that we cannot win this war for England regardless of how much assistance we send. That is why the America First Committee has been formed.” In his day, Lindbergh was also criticized for the antisemitic overtones and alleged Nazi sympathies prominent in his arguments.
In 1941, the bombing of Pearl Harbor radically changed the political landscape. Polling found that, a week after the attack, only 7% of Americans wanted to stay out of war, an 86% decrease from the year before. The America First movement had collapsed overnight. Just one member of Congress from either house voted against American entry into the war. Ironically, Charles Lindbergh himself ended up flying in over 50 combat missions during the war.
While Trump hasn’t invoked the movement directly, he has used the “America First” slogan constantly in his policy and rhetoric, and the idea has regained popularity in the broader conservative movement.
Robert Taft
One of FDR’s chief critics in Congress was Ohio Senator Robert Taft, son of President William Howard Taft. The younger Taft’s prominence in the GOP earned him the nickname “Mr. Republican,” and he was known for his libertarian and anti-interventionist beliefs. Although he believed in social safety nets, he criticized Roosevelt’s New Deal as “socialist” government overreach. As World War II broke out, he, like many of his “America First” contemporaries, criticized Roosevelt’s hawkishness. Taft had an aversion to militarism and war, which he thought was always an “awful catastrophe.” He also believed that wartime policy concentrated power in the federal government and allowed it to encroach on the liberties of citizens.
After the Pearl Harbor attacks, Taft changed his opinion and began supporting the war effort, but continued speaking against some of Roosevelt’s war policies. For instance, he referred to the government’s imprisonment of Japanese-Americans in internment camps as “the sloppiest criminal law I have read or seen anywhere.”
After the war, Taft continued to be a bulwark of non-interventionism against the internationalist and hawkish policies of Presidents Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower. He wasn’t a total isolationist—he supported the cause of the Korean War, although he criticized President Truman for sending troops to Korea without congressional authorization. He voted against joining NATO and criticized the newly formed United Nations. He questioned the Truman Doctrine, the policy of providing military aid to countries fighting wars against communists. He even advised President Eisenhower against sending US troops into Vietnam in the ‘50s, but his suggestions went unheeded, resulting in the disastrous Vietnam War.
Taft ran for president three times and, despite having strong grassroots support from the Republican base, lost the party nomination each time to more interventionist candidates. The last was President Dwight Eisenhower.
Cold War Freeze
As Cold War tensions ramped up, non-interventionism faded from the forefront of American and conservative politics. Eisenhower served two terms with high approval ratings. His Vice President Richard Nixon, who called Robert Taft “a very stupid man,” continued a policy of launching global military interventions to fight communism.
For a time, non-interventionism seemed to have lost traction with Republican voters. In the 1976 presidential election, Republican vice presidential candidate Bob Dole referred to the two World Wars, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War as “Democrat Wars,” as they’d all been declared by Democratic presidents: “if we added up the killed and wounded in Democrat wars in this century, it would be about 1.6 million Americans, enough to fill the city of Detroit.” This line, construed as attacking Democrats for being too hawkish—although it wouldn’t have sounded out of place in campaign speeches of Harding or Taft before him, or Trump and Vance after him—sparked instant criticism and controversy, even within his own party. Dole was pressured to deny and backpedal the remark afterwards.
Pat Buchanan & Ron Paul
In the 1990s, as the Soviet Union fell, anti-interventionist sentiments began to re-emerge among Republican voters. In 1992, conservative commentator Pat Buchanan launched a primary challenge against incumbent President George H.W. Bush with an aggressive campaign. Buchanan, a hardline cultural right-winger who has been accused of racism and antisemitism, railed against immigration, “multiculturalism,” and out-of-touch elites. He also attacked the foreign policy consensus, opposing foreign aid, foreign wars, and multinational institutions like the UN and NATO. Buchanan failed to beat Bush, but he managed to win over 23% of Republican primary voters nationwide. Later, in the 2000s, he criticized George W. Bush’s administration and the Iraq War. He was also fired from MSNBC for pushing racist, antisemitic, and fascist-sympathetic arguments. More recently, Buchanan has endorsed Trump and called him “the future of the Republican party.”
Buchanan wasn’t the only anti-interventionist voice to rise on the right after the Cold War. Ron Paul, a libertarian congressman in the Republican party with hardline anti-interventionist views, became prominent in the 2000s. In 1982, he said that “our experiment with foreign policy interventionism has failed, just as our experience with domestic economic interventionism has failed.” In 2002, he was one of only six House Republicans to vote against the Iraq War. Paul launched two unsuccessful campaigns for the Republican nomination and retired from Congress in 2013. Although he is a critic of Trump, refusing to vote for him and intermittently criticizing him throughout retirement, there is clearly overlap in the two politicians’ support bases and appeal. Elon Musk recently invited Paul to join the DOGE initiative and his comment that having Paul be the chairman of the Federal Reserve is a “great idea.”
Despite neither managing to secure the presidency, the popularity of Buchanan and Paul shows that the appetite for non-interventionist policies among conservative voters predates Trump, and has been reemerging since at least the 1990s.
Today
I do not draw these comparisons to praise or condemn isolationism, but to help offer an explanation of Trump’s popularity and some current shifts in American politics. Today’s emerging populist-conservative foreign policy wasn’t conjured out of the blue by Trump, Tucker Carlson, negative polarization, or biased media coverage. After being made dormant by the Cold War, old political movements are resurfacing. Perhaps rather than being aberrations, the return of these elements in Trump’s foreign policy were inevitable.
The opinions expressed within this piece represent the views of the author alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Jefferson Independent.
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