Insane Election.... Like a bad dream..

On the Lonely Island of ‘Never Trump’

Across Washington, stalwarts of the GOP foreign-policy establishment find themselves suddenly adrift. Could they really vote for—gulp—Hillary?

By Julia Ioffe

My wife said, ‘never,’” said Brian Hook, looking pained and slicing the air with a long, pale hand. He stood, tall and sandy-haired, pink tie perfectly knotted, in the cavernous foyer of the Mellon Auditorium, which, that day was hosting the Peterson Institute’s Fiscal Summit.

“Never” isn’t a word one expects to hear from a Republican lifer contemplating a possible job in a possible Republican administration. Hook has a long, distinguished conservative résumé. He was a foreign policy adviser to the Romney and Pawlenty campaigns; a special assistant to President George W. Bush, whom he also served as an assistant secretary of state and as a senior adviser to the United Nations ambassador. In any normal year, he’d be in line for a plum post.

Not this time. It was a rainy afternoon outside, one in a long chain of rainy afternoons, as if it hadn’t stopped raining since Donald Trump clinched the GOP nomination in Indiana. And Hook is one of a small, die-hard set of the Republicans who have been wandering outside this season, getting wet, locked out of their own house. "Even if you say you support him as the nominee,” Hook says, “you go down the list of his positions and you see you disagree on every one.”

Trump’s path to the Republican nomination has been littered with discarded conservative principles, and in its wake has left a party establishment bewildered by the realization that precious few Republican voters seem to care about those principles. As Trump completes his hostile takeover of the party, the GOP political class has been scrambling to find ways to coexist with a standard-bearer whom it reviles. Last week, Trump met with Speaker Paul Ryan and various other Republican leaders on the Hill, all of whom were managing, in one way or another, to cozy up to the presumptive candidate.

But for one group of Republicans, “never” has become the operative word. This is the party’s foreign policy establishment, a close-knit set of thinkers, diplomats and strategists with an internationalist ideology deeply rooted in a belief that America has a leading role to play in a changing and dangerous world. For them, Trump’s Lindbergh-style isolationism and defiant ignorance of the world’s complexities is simply too horrifying to support. They have emerged as the vanguard of the #nevertrump holdout movement—and, as their party leaves them to embrace the front-runner, they’re increasingly a cohort in search of a home. Will it be four more years of working in think tanks? Could the answer be Hillary Clinton?

Last fall, when the rest of their party was still treating Trump as a temporary nuisance, prominent Republicans in foreign policy—Robert Gates, Michael Hayden, former Bush National Security Council member Peter Feaver—began sounding the alarm over a candidate whose lack of knowledge about the world beyond America’s borders was exceeded only by his dangerous ideas about it. Trump didn’t know what a nuclear triad was; he wanted to pull out of NATO. He suggested that South Korea and Japan should develop their own nuclear weapons, casually brushing aside the generational bipartisan achievement on nonproliferation. He wanted to ban all Muslims from coming to the United States; he advocated killing the families of terrorists, in direct violation of international law. (He has since backed off that idea.) He rebuffed attempts by Republican foreign policy think experts who offered their expertise. Why would he need them?

In March, 121 of these Republican foreign policy specialists banded together and published an open letter opposing Trump, saying he would “make America less safe.” The move was intended to register their alarm and land a solid, even fatal blow by saying he’d lost the faith of a constituency whose support he’d need to govern. But it didn’t stop him. When he rolled out his foreign policy vision the following month, it was under Charles Lindbergh’s “America First” banner. He extolled America’s allies—but it was the Russian ambassador who sat front row, center. The ambassadors of Britain, France, Germany were nowhere to be seen. The Republican hawks were horrified.

Never. Republican foreign policy wonks could never, would never work with such an administration. (And even if they wanted to, a wife might veto it.) But now they’re left with a question: Where can they go?

The first and most electric question is whether to rally behind Hillary.

As horrifying as it might sound to support a Democrat, it’s not quite the extreme position in the foreign policy world as it is elsewhere. Since World War II and until the Iraq War splintered it, American foreign policy was largely a matter of bipartisan consensus. The people who signed the March letter cover a broad swath of Washington’s foreign policy thinkers and practitioners, ranging from the superideological neocon hawks that brought us the Iraq misadventure, to moderate centrists who nonetheless believe in a muscular American foreign policy. For various reasons, they have found a home under the Republican umbrella.

What unites them now is Trump: He shares their party affiliation and nothing else. He is dismissive of painstakingly earned knowledge and time-honored policies in a way they find insulting and terrifying. His foreign policy—to the extent one can be sussed out from his numerous mutually contradictory theses—is one that would have America pull back from pretty much everywhere, letting Russia, China and various other forces fill the resulting vacuum.

Faced with the prospect of having this boor in possession of the nuclear codes, many of these Republicans are doing the unthinkable. Some have openly come out for Clinton: Robert Kagan, Tom Nichols, Max Boot all say they’re voting for the former secretary of state. Their very public declarations echo the movement up and down the ranks of Republican foreign policy specialists throwing in for Clinton.

“I think that for those of us who think first and foremost about foreign policy, there’s no competition,” says Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former CIA operative in the Middle East who is now a fellow at the uber-hawkish Foundation for Defense of Democracies. “We know what Hillary Clinton more or less is, and that is easily better than what Donald Trump is.”

One finds many more Republican Hillary voters as soon as anonymity is granted. “I’m voting for Hillary,” one Republican foreign policy wonk told me the day after Trump’s Indiana win. “I think it’s a no-brainer.” For Republicans who vote primarily on foreign policy and who favor U.S. involvement in the world, Clinton is not just the lesser evil, but the best option. She is a traditional, bona fide internationalist and hawk, and, on foreign policy, she is to the right of both Obama and Trump.

“It’s not even a fucking close call,” said a senior GOP congressional staffer who works on foreign policy. “I’m struck by people who are like, ‘This is a dilemma!’ What’s the dilemma? I’m not here to tell you I love everything about Hillary Clinton, and that she’s going to be perfect, but from the point of view of someone who thinks about foreign policy and national security, it’s not even a close call.”

It could be a recruiting bonanza for Clinton, but Democratic foreign policy wonks are scratching their heads, trying to figure out what to do with their stranded Republican colleagues. “Everyone is thinking about exactly this question,” says the left-leaning wonk. “Your Republican friends are moaning and weeping. Democrats are calling each other up, saying, this is a huge resource, what can we do, we’re still in a primary, don’t talk to the campaign about it, find a way to do it outside the campaign, how do Democrats not get sucked into Republicans’ internecine warfare?”

Democratic foreign policy listservs are abuzz. “Past several days I've had about a half-dozen former Rubio, then Cruz campaign types reach out to me asking about ways they might help defeat Trump,” wrote one Democrat on a Democratic foreign policy listserv.

“Finding ways for our disaffected and motivated GOP peers to coordinate with Democrats to help defeat Trump strikes me as something this group could potentially help with,” wrote another. “We could perhaps build some loose networks, hold a couple of dinners etc., and maybe try co-authoring some op-eds etc.”

"I’ve been working over A LOT of Rs,” wrote one more. “They’re apoplectic, obviously, and yet not a single one says they’ll check the HRC box. The question for us to whiteboard is what more they can do short of that.”

One despondent former John McCain adviser told me that a few of his friends from across the aisle, outside foreign policy advisers to the Clinton campaign, have reached out, albeit vaguely. “What now, wise guy?” the adviser says of their tone of their emails. “If you’re interested in coming our way, the water’s fine.” He laughs. “I don’t know whether to interpret it as a sign of interest or sympathy, or some of both.”

But the Clinton campaign itself has yet to reach out or to develop a plan for what to do with the defecting hawks.

“What we're seeing right now is a groundswell of serious national security experts across the entire political spectrum standing up and arguing that Donald Trump can't be our next commander in chief because he's too reckless; he's too erratic; the risk is too great,” Jake Sullivan, Clinton’s longtime foreign policy adviser, said in a statement to POLITICO. “There are Americans of all persuasions who may not agree with every position Hillary Clinton espouses, but who place a premium on our national security. They know that we face complex challenges in a dangerous world, and that we need to elect a president who will bring clear-eyed, strong leadership to the White House.”

Privately, some outside advisers to the Clinton campaign are far less generous—and say there’s a good reason for the campaign not to go after them officially. “They’re toxic,” said one such adviser. “They’re a strain of conservative thinkers that are military expansionists and that’s not where Hillary Clinton is, it’s not where the party is. Democrats post-Iraq are deeply anxious about military intervention.”

Asked if these anti-Trump foreign policy conservatives could ever play any role in the Clinton campaign or a Clinton administration, the adviser guffawed. “Who is saying, ‘You know what we need to do is pick up the people who got us into the Iraq War! I mean, they’re geniuses!’ They’ve been wrong about everything!”

After the shock of Trump winning Indiana, the Bush family and Mitt Romney dug in against him, and it looked like the foreign policy Republicans might become the first settlers of a new Republican land, a conservative city upon a hill. And a few prominent Republicans, like Mark Salter and Erick Erickson, did join.

But increasingly, the party mainstream is warming to Trump, and the terrain inhabited by the Republican foreign policy establishment is looking less like a land, and more like an iceberg that has broken off a groaning glacier, and is now floating through the seas of Washington, adrift.

“I haven’t figured that out, I honestly don’t know,” said the former McCain adviser when I asked him what the future held for him. He had worked on one of the 2016 Republican primary campaigns but wasn’t sure what to do now. “You’re asking a very existential question,” he said. “If you got any good ideas, let me know.”

What, I asked, if Trump wins the presidency, and then appoints someone mainstream and palatable as his secretary of state? Say a Richard Haass or a Jon Hunstman? Might there be an acceptable job under a Secretary Huntsman?

There was a pause at the other end of the line. Many of the neocons I spoke to said they could understand the desire to serve the country and at least mitigate the damage that a President Trump would do, and some even said they could take up that cross. “He may do it anyway and then he’ll have done it without us,” says one former senior Bush staffer. “That’ll be a big concern. Maybe we can influence him, and he can be a better president.” The staffer added, “I wouldn’t take a White House job, but if there’s something useful I could do, where you feel like you’re working for the taxpayer and not the Trump court, I’d do it.” Others balk at what they see as naked careerism, seeing this is as one of those rare moments in life when one takes a bold and moral stance. It would be in bad, bad taste, Republicans say. One would be leaving all morals at the door. “People will remember that,” says Hook. The left-leaning foreign policy expert told me of the intense “existential conversations” with Republican colleagues. “The level of anxiety over the choice and what the choice is—this is a moral choice,” says the expert. “It’s much stronger claim on that than I’ve heard before.”

So what did this hawk, the former McCain adviser, think? Could he do it? “OK, well, what are you really going to be doing? Is it going it be implementing the ban on Muslims? Is it the Kill Civilians Plan?” he asked. “Or do you work on something narrow, like Bhutan? It’s not a deal that I would take. It’s not a lot of fun to work on a narrow issue where you work for an administration that you don’t agree with.”

Like Hook and Gerecht and pretty much everyone who signed the open letter, he too was looking at another four, maybe eight years on think tank row, and worried that if he ever saw the inside of an administration again, he’d be out of shape.

“That’s true either way, if either Clinton or Trump wins,” he said. “After Reagan and Bush, when Democrats spent 12 years in the wilderness, they came in rusty because they hadn’t had experience. They left government when they were in their mid-30s and came back in their 50s. They left office at the height of the Cold War, then came back and there’s no Soviet Union.”

But there’s still months to go till the elections, for the shock to pass, and for the Clinton campaign to figure out what to do with the hawkish drifters. “They’ll probably do what they need to defeat Trump,” posits Steve McMahon, a Democratic consultant who works at the bipartisan firm Purple Strategies. “If they need them to slide things under the door, they’ll slide things under the door. If they need them to be quiet, they’ll be quiet.”

In the meantime, though, the little bit of Republican iceberg floats on, unmoored. The McCain adviser, for one, is comforted by the body heat on the little chunk of ice: All his colleagues who had been dispersed across the various now-failed Republican primary campaigns are done competing with each other. All are equally marooned, equally stumped at their futures. “In a small but a significant silver lining, I admire all the people who put their principle before their careerism,” he told me. “It’s very meaningful.” As for their small chip off the iceberg, well, he doesn’t know where it’ll drift to next. “So the question is, does the iceberg melt because of global warming or are we Inuits who have been put out on the iceberg to not eat the resources of the camp?” he asked and laughed. “I don’t know.”