If Trump is attacked for being insufficiently pro-war, he will win
Timothy P. Carney
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Nikki Haley is Donald Trump’s first opponent in the 2024 Republican presidential field. She was Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations, but she has made her foreign policy differences with him clear.
Haley has a more expansive and bellicose view than Trump does of America’s role in the world. She sees as central to America’s role the “advocacy of freedom and human dignity abroad.” She warns against “retreating from the world.”
NIKKI HALEY TAKES THE PLUNGE — WILL RON DESANTIS?
My colleague Jim Antle points out that three other possible Trump challengers — Mike Pence, Mike Pompeo, and John Bolton — are also much more hawkish and adventurist than Trump.
Trump’s harshest critics within the GOP are also the most hawkish. Former Rep. Adam Kinzinger tried to start a war between the United States and Russia. Former Rep. Liz Cheney is arguably the most neoconservative recent member of Congress.
Trump was different. He was notable as the only president in the life of most living Americans not to involve the U.S. in a new war — and the U.S. was better for it.
Antle notes: “Trump is the lone top-tier Republican candidate to have broken with Biden on the war in Ukraine, which he has vowed to resolve diplomatically. Trump warns that Biden is risking nuclear war with Russia.”
I am biased here, and I am aware that commentators often assume that their own views are politically popular. I try to guard against this error, but I believe that Trump has positioned himself in the large center of America on foreign policy.
His foreign policy philosophy basically amounted to “if you mess with us, we blow you up, but we’re not the world’s policemen, and we’re not global angels of democracy.”
In fact, Trump got a lot of mileage out of pinning the disastrous Iraq War on the Bush family. (Trump’s inconsistency on this war in the aughts didn’t seem to weigh him down in 2016.)
If the 2024 Republican debate stage is a bunch of old-guard Republicans calling for the U.S. to spread democracy throughout the world at gunpoint, then Trump will have an easy time retaking control of the party.