Will 2024 Bring the Return of the Neocons?

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—outpolling 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.

Trump’s more intellectual supporters praised “his ability to identify America’s national interest clearly and pursue it without regard to outdated ideological investments,” as Modern Age editor Daniel McCarthy put it in The American Conservative. This proved a generous way of describing a chaotic and contradictory approach to foreign affairs. Trump didn’t end any wars—even the exit from Afghanistan his administration sought was left incomplete when he exited the Oval Office—and his diplomatic achievements were far more discussed than realized.

Thus, Republicans come to the 2024 race as a party without a dominant foreign policy. The pre-Trump GOP establishment, with its neoconservative lean, has diminished. Yet a coherent Trumpist approach never fully took root. The party remains at a crossroads on this issue, and the 2024 presidential nominee may become its new navigator for years or generations to come.

The Old Guard

Our first faction will be the most familiar. These are Republicans whose foreign policy is more consonant than not with the interventionist model of the Bush-era GOP. Circumstances are different, but the basic standpoint is about the same: The U.S. is the leader of the free world and has not just the right but the responsibility to guide the international order, including through military intervention.

Members of the old guard “support U.S. overseas bases, foreign-assistance programs, and a strong American military,” as George Mason University political scientist Colin Dueck put it in an article for the American Enterprise Institute. “They back the idea that the U.S. stands at the head of an American-led order of partnerships overseas. They are open to working through international organizations and are generally unyielding toward American adversaries. They tend to favor open trading arrangements with U.S. allies.”

In the Republican rift over U.S. aid to Ukraine, then, this is the faction eager to keep the guns and dollars flowing east. It is critical of Russia, in continuation of Cold War–era habits and in sharp contrast to Trump, who last year called Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine “pretty smart.” China is seen as a rising problem with which America must actively contend to retain worldwide dominance. But Beijing isn’t given quite the priority in the hierarchy of foreign threats it tends to receive from Trump and the Republicans attempting to systematize his impulses, nor is the threat from China so often linked to “globalization” and the culture war.

Crucially, the old guard does not join the majority of Americans in regretting the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Some may venture a few tactical criticisms, but more often their reflections on the post-9/11 years blame a lack of “resolve” or “credibility” or “commitment to victory.” The U.S. failed in the Middle East, in this telling, not because our projects of regime change, nation building, and long-term asymmetric warfare were doomed from the beginning, but because we did not try hard enough to win, did not spend enough money, did not surge in enough troops.

Though rather sprightly by the standards of American gerontocracy, at 75, Sen. Mitt Romney (R–Utah) seems unlikely to reprise his 2012 campaign. But if he did, he’d land in this camp. So would former Sen. Ben Sasse (R–Neb.), who resigned from representing Nebraska to be a university president in Florida, and so would Sen. Marco Rubio (R–Fla.), should he decide to seek the White House again. Sen. Tim Scott (R–S.C.), who has launched a presidential exploratory committee and traveled to early primary states, has a fairly thin foreign policy record. (His 2022 campaign website, for example, featured only domestic topics in its issues section.) Yet details such as his charge that the Biden administration has been too slow and stingy in its aid to Ukraine and his history of opposing U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan suggest he may be best located here, too.

Most likely to represent the old guard on a debate stage in 2024 are former Vice President Mike Pence and former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley. Though both were members of the Trump administration, their foreign policy records aren’t really in a Trumpian vein.

Pence is the more characteristically old guard of the two, as observers in venues from National Review to Slate have noted, despite his longer tenure in Trump’s retinue. “Pence was a George W. Bush neoconservative in the mid-2000s,” the Stimson Center’s Emma Ashford recalled at Foreign Policy in 2020. “In fact, he was