It’s been a bad year for the isolationist right. From Tehran to Caracas, President Donald Trump is flexing U.S. military might on the world stage. This clearly is not the foreign policy they expected when Trump returned to the White House.
When Trump first ran in 2016, he campaigned against the interventionist policies of both his Republican and Democratic predecessors, so many GOP isolationists were taken aback by his aggressive national security decisions once in office — from bombing Syria (twice) to eliminating the Islamic State’s caliphate and killing Iran’s terrorist mastermind Qasem Soleimani. They concluded that Trump’s muscular foreign policy was the work of so-called globalists on his national security team. So, for his second term, they worked to screen out alleged “warmongers” and staff the White House with “America First” loyalists. Anyone deemed too interventionist who made it through, such as national security adviser Mike Waltz, was targeted for purging.
Result? In his second term, Trump has presided over an even bolder foreign policy. He has bombed Houthi terrorists in Yemen. He obliterated Iran’s nuclear program and then warned the regime he would subject its supreme leader to “A VERY UGLY AND IGNOMINIOUS DEATH” if Iran killed a single American in retaliation. He has bombed Islamic State terrorists in Syria and Boko Haram terrorists in Nigeria. He has bombed dozens of alleged drug boats off Venezuela’s coast, imposed a “total and complete blockade” on sanctioned oil tankers entering or leaving the country, and sent U.S. Special Forces to topple narco-terrorist dictator Nicolás Maduro. He has seized a Russian-flagged ship in the North Atlantic. In Ukraine — bête noire of the GOP isolationists — he is giving Kyiv more weapons than President Joe Biden ever did (paid for by NATO allies, not U.S. taxpayers), providing intelligence for strikes deep inside Russia and offering Ukraine a NATO-style Article 5 security commitment.
It turns out Trump wasn’t being manipulated by a cabal of globalists in his first term. It was Trump all along. Indeed, the president has flexed U.S. military muscle more vigorously in the past 12 months than he did in all four years of his first term.
Trump is not, and never was, an isolationist. And neither are the vast majority of his supporters, who multiple polls from the Ronald Reagan Institute, the Vandenberg Coalition and others show overwhelmingly back his robust exercise of military power across the world.
So, I’ve got news for the isolationist right: This is MAGA foreign policy.
Trump is not rejecting conservative international leadership, as the isolationists had hoped. Instead, he is redefining it. His situation is similar to Reagan’s when he took office in 1981. In the wake of the Vietnam War, Americans had soured on sending U.S. troops to fight in distant lands, and Reagan had to pioneer a new way of leading on the world stage. Today, after the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, there is similarly no popular appetite for putting U.S. boots on the ground in foreign hot spots. So, Trump, too, is pioneering a new way to lead without doing so — using a combination of military force, sanctions, tariffs, diplomacy and other forms of coercion to impose America’s will on its adversaries.
In Iran, he has made clear that if the regime tries to reconstitute its nuclear program, he will strike it again. He is isolating Tehran through the reimposition of sanctions, but has also held out the possibility of toppling the regime, declaring on Truth Social, “It’s not politically correct to use the term, ‘Regime Change,’ but if the current Iranian Regime is unable to MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN, why wouldn’t there be a Regime change??? MIGA!!!” He was not suggesting sending 160,000 U.S. troops into the country; he was talking about a decapitation strike that would leave what came next to the Iranian people.
In Venezuela, Trump sent U.S. forces to capture Maduro and bring him to the United States to stand trial, much as President George H.W. Bush launched a mission to capture Panamanian strongman Manuel Antonio Noriega in 1989. But unlike Bush, Trump did not send ground troops to occupy the country. Instead, he has warned Venezuela’s interim leader, Delcy Rodríguez, that “if she doesn’t do what’s right, she is going to pay a very big price, probably bigger than Maduro.” Some are criticizing him for not installing opposition leader María Corina Machado. How is he supposed to do that without sending U.S. forces to occupy Caracas? Instead, he took out the regime and is coercing Rodríguez through control of Venezuela’s oil exports and the threat of doing it again.
It is important that Trump succeed, because the alternative isn’t to go back to the old-fashioned way of doing things, with massive deployments of U.S. ground forces. The alternative is to do nothing. The isolationist right did not want Trump to bomb Iran, arm Ukraine, protect Christians in Nigeria or overthrow narco-terrorists in Venezuela. If it had its way, Trump would not be spending time or resources on these priorities.
So conservatives who believe in American global leadership should be rooting for him. Because if he succeeds, he will solidify a new era of bold conservative leadership in the world. If he fails, the isolationist right will be emboldened. The future of conservative foreign policy hangs in the balance.
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