Embraced the World. Or not...

How the GOP Embraced the World—And Then Turned Away

Decades ago, Dwight Eisenhower defeated the isolationist faction of the Republican Party. Now, Trump is toppling his legacy.

By WILLIAM I. HITCHCOCK

President Donald Trump has delivered on at least one promise: He has made “America First” the guiding principle of U.S. foreign policy. At this week’s NATO summit, when he hectored allies over their defense budgets, he followed a pattern established at the June 8 Ottawa meeting of the G-7: alliances are useful only if they benefit America’s direct commercial and financial interests. For Trump, the solidarity of the West is a liberal myth. His warm embrace of North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un in Singapore on June 12, along with his upcoming Helsinki conference with Russian President Vladimir Putin, amplify the point: The old world order is dead, and Trump’s foreign policy will be driven by short-term deals, even with dictators.

It might make some Trump loyalists happy to think that the president is destroying something called “liberal internationalism.” But actually the world order he is attacking has been a core value of the Republican Party ever since Dwight D. Eisenhower turned back the dangerous isolationist faction of the GOP. Every Republican president since Ike has adhered to the basic theory of internationalism: that alliances make America stronger, safer and richer.

Isolationism has a long history in the Republican Party. Following World War I, in which over 100,000 Americans died, millions of citizens asked why the United States should remain entangled in world affairs. With a huge internal market, peaceful borders and two giant oceans on either side, the USA seemed blessed by destiny: Wars that might break out around the world could not trouble the American homeland.

Republican presidents Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover trimmed their sails to this isolationist sentiment and avoided entangling alliances with European nations. This scorn for the old world aligned with a growing chorus of domestic criticis of U.S. foreign policy, which asserted that the Great War had only benefitted a small caste of arms manufacturers and bankers. So alleged Senator Gerald P. Nye (R-ND), who chaired a Senate investigation into the munitions industry.

Under Nye’s influence, Congress passed Neutrality Acts in the 1930s to stop the export of arms and loans to any belligerent nations.

The outbreak of the Second World War in Europe in September 1939 changed few minds in the United States. On the contrary, many Americans wanted to remain neutral, even as Adolf Hitler carved up Poland and took aim at the Netherlands, Belgium, France and Britain. At the start of 1940, a Gallup poll of leading American writers was asked if America should declare war on Nazi Germany: 94 percent answered no. In September 1940, a group of Yale Law School students (including former President Gerald R. Ford, then in his third year), founded the America First Committee, which immediately enrolled 800,000 dues paying members. The aviator Charles Lindbergh, a huge celebrity in the early 1940s, articulated the basic argument of AFC. America had no national interests in European or Asian conflicts, and need only arm itself with air power and a strong navy to provide for its defense. American democracy would thrive by staying aloof from the troubles of the world; war, by contrast, would benefit powerful bankers and militarists, undermining democratic governance.

The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor shifted public sentiment decisively and brought a united people into war against Japan and, after Germany’s declaration of war on the U.S, against the Nazi regime as well. The America First Committee disbanded. During the 1940s, the Republican Party seemed to abandon its isolationist policies. The Republican candidate for president in 1940, Wendell Willkie, was an internationalist, as was New York Governor Thomas Dewey, who ran unsuccessfully in 1944 and 1948. Both supported the principle of shared sacrifice and the defense of freedom alongside other allies.

But the strain of isolationism that had animated the Republican Party in the interwar years never died. As the Cold War dawned, some Republican politicians championed a return to isolationism, none more strongly than the influential Ohio Senator Robert Taft.

Taft had come into the Senate in 1938 and earned a reputation as a classic conservative. Nicknamed “Mr. Republican,” he had fought President Franklin Roosevelt’s expansionist New Deal and strongly backed the America First Committee. In the aftermath of the war, Taft argued that multilateral institutions like the World Bank were unnecessary; he thought the Marshall Plan aid to postwar Europe wasteful; and he opposed the 1949 NATO alliance as provocative.
In 1952, Taft had his best shot at winning the Republican nomination for president. A diehard conservative and fierce opponent of big government, Taft thrilled Midwestern Republicans who wanted to turn the clock back to the 1920s.

But Taft never got to the White House because one man stood in his way: General Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Eisenhower, the commander of the allied forces that had vanquished Hitler, believed strongly that America’s national interests could not be defended by isolationism. Only a forward strategy built on coalitions of like-minded nations could bring order to an anarchic world. The cost of peace, Eisenhower claimed, was high. Peace must rest on generous aid to allies, the stationing of troops abroad and the creation of a strong military force with a global reach. But, Ike claimed, the cost of such commitments paled next to the tragedy of global war. Internationalism would bring to every American the benefits of a peaceful rules-based world order. Isolationism would create a power vacuum and tempt dictators to fill it.

Determined to fend off Taft’s isolationism, Eisenhower confronted the Ohio senator in a meeting in February 1951 in the Pentagon. Ike told Taft that if the senator would accept the principle of collective security, he would immediately announce to the press his withdrawal as a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in 1952, paving the way for Taft to become the party’s standard-bearer. Taft refused. Then and there, Eisenhower, who had long insisted on his reluctance to run, decided he would have to seize the reins of the Republican Party and compel it to accept his globe-straddling brand of internationalism.

A bitter primary fight followed in 1952, with Eisenhower narrowly beating Taft at the GOP Convention in Chicago. Against Taft’s call for a return to protectionism, small government and isolationism, Eisenhower argued that America had a moral obligation as well as a national interest in transforming the victory of World War II into a lasting global peace by building strong alliances and expanding military readiness around the world to counter the Communist threat. If it took the birth of a military-industrial complex to keep the peace, Ike felt it was a price worth paying.

For eight years, President Eisenhower worked hard to build the western alliance into a powerful bloc of like-minded states. Having been the first supreme commander of NATO, Ike wanted to share nuclear technology and weapons with U.S. allies. Before meeting Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev at summits in 1955, 1959 and 1960, he painstakingly consulted with NATO allies first. In Asia, he drew a red line in defense of Taiwan, threatening nuclear attacks on China if the Communist forces invaded that embattled island. Even when he sharply disagreed with allies, as he did over the British-French-Israeli invasion of Egypt in 1956, he worked hard to mend divisions quickly. All these actions resulted in enhancing U.S. credibility and keeping the peace in this tense decade of the Cold War. Internationalism worked.

And Ike’s Republican successors agreed. For the next six decades, Republicans embraced Eisenhower’s internationalism. From Nixon to Ford to Reagan and the two Bushes, Republican presidents have understood that alliances, robust military spending, sensible trade agreements and a rules-based international order was good for America.

Trump disagrees. In embracing America First rhetoric, Trump hearkens back in some ways to the Taft line of attack. He has argued that trade deals are rip-offs for the American worker. He sees alliances as expensive burdens on the taxpayer. He has said that joint military exercises with allies are provocative and should be halted.

But is Trump simply returning to an earlier tradition of Republican isolationism? Not exactly. After all, Taft urged isolationism because he opposed big government in all its forms, both at home and abroad. He opposed deficit spending and demanded strict restraint on the military budget. More than that, Taft was devoted to the concept of individual freedom and liberty and was profoundly hostile to the dictatorships and authoritarian regimes around the world that suppressed such freedoms. Trump, by contrast, seems unmoored from this old-school isolationist ideology. He has ballooned the federal deficit and larded the Pentagon with dollars. He has courted the favor of a vile dictator, Kim Jong Un, and solicited the friendship of Putin, whose country brazenly interfered with U.S. elections. Trump’s isolationism is not driven by a desire to make America stronger, but to create global disorder in which Trump himself might strike short-term deals on trade and nuclear disarmament—even at the expense of American values. An old-school conservative who mistrusted moneyed elites, Taft would perceive in Trump precisely the things that he fought against all his career: the urge to power, the absence of core principles and the preening self-regard of the tyrant.