Foreign Policy: A Divided America
In 2024, foreign policy does not so much pit Republicans against Democrats as it does Republicans against Republicans and Democrats against Democrats. For President Biden’s party, Israel is the fault line, with Democrats split between supporters of the Jewish state and those of Palestinian sympathies. For the party of Donald Trump, the internal conflict is over Ukraine, and the bitterness of the battle risks costing Mike Johnson his speakership.
These crises in the Middle East and on NATO’s frontier are catalysts for tensions that have been growing in both parties’ coalitions since the Cold War’s end.
The United States is the most powerful nation in the world, by far – what obligations does that impose on us for using our power to promote our values? And what are those values anyway?
The anti-colonialist left thinks America is too wicked to do good on the world stage. The anti-interventionist right thinks the world is too unlike us to benefit from our crusading – which instead only undermines what makes us special and strong at home.
The more internationalist right, on the other hand, sees greater danger to our institutions and way of life arising from insufficient engagement with a dangerous world, which will turn away from our values and interests if we don’t actively promote them. That requires, they say, supporting friends and allies around the globe and confronting hostile states, ultimately, if necessary, with military force and by every means short of that in the meantime.
The interventionist left, for its part, has the same confidence in government’s ability to improve the world outside our borders as it has in the competence of government at home. And if engaging with the world erodes American distinctiveness, as some on the right fear, that’s a benefit rather than a drawback as far as these progressives are concerned.
These are basic dispositions. They’re complicated by several hard realities that can’t be avoided no matter what one’s ideal policy might be – external threats, for one thing, and the limits of America’s unprecedented but not unlimited wealth and power for another, as well as the limits of national morale and political will in support of any long-term project.
There are serious debates to be had both on the left and the right.
