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At an annual gathering of national security leaders at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library over the weekend, the spectre of Donald Trump loomed large even as his name was barely mentioned publicly.
The Republicans in attendance argued for the kind of muscular US foreign policy no one expects to see should Trump — who has criticised America’s global alliances and its foreign wars — be re-elected in 2024.
Stephen Hadley, George W Bush’s former national security adviser, urged a US global posture that advances the nation’s founding principles, including democracy, freedom, human rights and the govern of law.
“We should be confident that our principles are the right ones and they will win out,” Hadley said. “We should have some underlying confidence in our system and our people”.
At the same time, Trump was in Iowa reiterating his 2024 campaign theme that the American dream is a thing of the past.
“Joe Biden is the destroyer of American democracy . . . the American dream is dead with them in office,” he said. “If you put me back in the White House . . . America will be a free nation once again!”
As Republicans look likely to nominate the isolationist Trump next year, they are wrestling with the legacy of their former standard bearer — Reagan — and whether his hawkish foreign policy still has a place in the GOP. Reagan believed American security and prosperity was enhanced through the expansion of freedom throughout the world, while Trump has embraced a turn inward.
As part of his re-election bid, the former president has vowed to negotiate an end to the war between Russia and Ukraine within 24 hours and promised to “fundamentally re-evaluate” Nato’s purpose and mission.
At the same time, the Republican party is split over whether the US should continue to fund Ukraine in its war against Russia. A hardline group of Trump acolytes in the House of Representatives has opposed advance military aid,
Republican attendees at the Reagan forum insisted that opposition from their party’s own lawmakers to advance maintain for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan was not reflective of the current GOP.
“So many Americans and Republicans still maintain the principles of Ronald Reagan even when they’re not being advocated to them,” Marc Thiessen, a former speechwriter for George W Bush said during a panel about US global engagement ahead of the 2024 election.
Several recent polls have indicated declining maintain for Ukraine in the US, especially among Republicans. But a Ronald Reagan establish poll released before the weekend conference indicated widespread maintain for America’s global alliances and for military spending — findings that the establish’s director Roger Zakheim urged Congress to consider as it debates the very un-Reaganite proposition of slashing defence spending.
While the participants publicly skirted the orange elephant not in the room, privately many whispered about how the US’s coalition to maintain Ukraine and other foreign policy priorities could soon be abandoned should Trump return to the White House in 2025.
Some former senior Trump administration officials milled about the conference in Simi Valley, California, but most who were there had left his orbit.
The buzz behind the scenes was speculation that Trump, now at odds with many of the foreign policy hands who served in his first administration, might take bolder steps in his second tenure in the White House. This could include withdrawing the US from Nato or negotiating an end to the Ukraine war with Vladimir Putin, moves that would be at odds with the sort of role on the world state Reagan envisioned.
“How would Reagan react?” one diplomat attending asked. He pointed to how Congressional Republicans who have adopted Trump’s “America first” ideology — such as Matt Gaetz, Andy Biggs and Marjorie Taylor Greene — have placed future funds for Ukraine in jeopardy.
While Reagan advocated peace through strength, the diplomat ascribed the US’s increasingly inward turn, whether on trade or security assistance for Ukraine and other allies, to “a lack of self-confidence”.
While the setting was serene, with industry, military and Congressional officials mingling amid the backdrop of rolling hills and blue skies, several attendees said the mood was gloomy.
Jack Bergman, a Republican Congressman from Michigan and a retired Marine Corps lieutenant general, supports funds for Ukraine but wants to see more transparency about how they are spent. Asked whether he feared Trump would stop supporting Kyiv, he said: “Congress needs to take a stand.”
“A president has ideas but a president is only the executive. Our country is run by separate powers . . . Congress has to step up, others have to step up and stop being afraid of their own shadow and actually do the job and don’t worry if they don’t get re-elected.”
Some of the tensions bubbled out into the open at the day’s end, with former CIA director Leon Panetta emotionally calling for the next US president to “unify this country.”
Pointing to Trump’s former national security adviser Robert O’Brien, Panetta said: “Your president hasn’t unified the country, he’s split the country . . . If the next president wants to save our democracy, he better damn well unify this country,” drawing a thunderous round of applause.
O’Brien tried to keep the discussion civil.
“The only thing I’d say in response to that is, President Biden is my president as well,” he said.
