The Future Is RealismThe new guard in the GOP is ready to do away with the neocons’ disastrous foreign policy of ideals.
Anthony J. Constantini
Aug 19, 2022
Recent Republican primary elections have made one thing clear: The future of Republican foreign policy is based on the world as it is, not as one wishes it to be. This may seem like an obvious concept to many normal Americans, but for decades successive administrations made policy based on what they wished reality would be instead of on reality as it was. Bill Clinton desired to “enlarge” the democratic sphere of influence, and in 2000, political scientist Kenneth Waltz wrote that he expected “the United States [would soon] take measures to enhance democracy around the world” and that the “task, one fears, will be taken up by the American military with some enthusiasm.”
He was correct, as any reader of The American Conservative knows. What followed was a series of wars of ideals, overseen by presidents from both parties. The initial invasion of Afghanistan under George W. Bush was clearly a result of 9/11, but the following 20-year occupation was bent on building a liberal democracy in a place which did not want one. The Iraq War was built just as much upon the spread of democracy as it was on finding weapons of mass destruction, and there has never been a real indication that Iraqis were desperate for democracy any more than Afghans were. When Barack Obama followed Bush into the presidency, he failed to truly repudiate the Bush Doctrine and continued a policy of interventions based on ideals in Syria and Libya—both of which proved disastrous.
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All of this, along with an inability to question it without being labeled pro-Russian, has accelerated a shift in how the GOP thinks about Ukraine and foreign policy writ large. What started over the course of the Trump administration has grown as Republican candidates across the country have increasingly rejected the idealized foreign policy of their recent party forefathers and have been rewarded for doing so. Joe Kent, who recently bested Representative Jaime Herrera Beutler in a Washington primary, campaigned explicitly against a policy of idealism on Ukraine, calling Putin’s demands in Ukraine “very reasonable” and concurring with descriptions of Zelensky as a thug. His victory over Herrera Beutler, a more doctrinaire GOPer, suggests the changes to foreign policy thinking Trump brought, far from being a blip, are here to stay.
Kent follows many other primary victors and rising elected officials who are skeptical of wanton idealism. J.D. Vance, the GOP nominee for Senate in Ohio, said that he “didn’t care” what happens in Ukraine to much media backlash—and went on to win his primary. Blake Masters, Vance’s Arizonan counterpart, tweeted that the “new liberal Doctor Strangeloves” would “get us all killed” with their ignorance of reality, and likewise won his primary. Incumbent Senator Josh Hawley, a rapidly rising star, recently explained in the National Interest why he was voting against adding Sweden and Finland to NATO, saying that America needed a “truly strategic…foreign policy—one that looks to this nation’s strategic interests now, rather than the world of years ago.” And Trump himself has said that Ukraine “should have made a deal” with Russia and should have bowed to reality over certain things like Crimea and NATO.
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Source:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/the-future-is-realism/
