The US divide on foreign policy

Ivo Daalder, former U.S. ambassador to NATO, is CEO of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and host of the weekly podcast “World Review with Ivo Daalder.” He writes POLITICO’s Across the Pond column.
As Democrats gather in Chicago this week for their quadrennial convention, the mood is markedly different than it was just a month ago. At that time, the party’s presidential candidate was dropping in the polls after a disastrous debate performance and facing the prospect of defeat. Now, their candidate is riding a wave of enthusiasm, improving polling numbers and almost smelling victory in November.
However, though President Joe Biden’s decision to drop out of the race and endorse Vice President Kamala Harris has fundamentally altered the electoral contest, much remains the same. This is still a close election where a few thousand votes in a few battleground states will likely determine the outcome — and the country itself remains deeply divided and polarized.
This division concerns not only voter preferences for parties and their candidates but also major issues like foreign and security policy — long an area of much greater agreement across the political spectrum.
The change is especially apparent among Republican voters. The views of Reagan Republicans, who favor strong alliances, free markets and support democracy and freedom abroad, are now increasingly scarce among the party’s supporters. And the latest annual survey by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, conducted in late June, affirms this remarkable gap in how Republicans and Democrats see the world and America’s role in it.
The survey question most indicative of this division, whether “it will be better for the future of the country if we take an active part in world affairs or if we stay out of world affairs,” shows that a bare majority of Republicans (54 percent) currently favor an active role, as opposed to the two-thirds (68 percent) of Democrats who do. And though an improvement over last year, Republican support for an active U.S. role was the second lowest it’s been over the last 50 years — including 20 percent lower than in 2004 and 18 percent lower than in 1974.
Consistent with this change, only 13 percent of Republicans believe that as the strongest and richest country, the U.S. “has the responsibility to take a leading role in world affairs,” while 57 percent think “it needs to reduce its involvement in world affairs” because the country has limited resources and its own problems at home. By contrast, 65 percent of Democrats support the U.S. taking a leading role on the world stage while also taking care of problems at home.
On issue after issue, Republicans now favor less engagement in world affairs than Democrats do — which is a sharp shift from the Reagan era. For example, just one-in-five Republicans that took part in our survey think it’s very important to protect weaker nations against aggression, or promote and defend human rights in another country. And only one-in-seven think it’s very important to limit climate change.
By comparison, 44 percent of participating Democrats believe it’s very important to protect weaker nations, 47 percent support promoting human rights, 57 percent think strengthening the U.N. is very important and 74 percent see limiting climate change as a very important goal of U.S. foreign policy.
When it comes to alliances — long the centerpiece of American foreign policy — Republicans are increasingly souring on security commitments. Four-in-10 believe alliances “mostly benefit our allies,” mainly because allies don’t pay their fair share, whereas three-quarters of Democrats believe alliances either benefit the U.S. (16 percent) most, or benefit both the U.S. and its allies (56 percent).
Finally, while support for free trade has long been a moniker of Republicanism, today a majority (55 percent) actually favor reducing trade and seeking “greater self-sufficiency in all areas.” Just 20 percent of Republican respondents prefer pursuing free trade globally, and only 21 percent prefer creating a trading bloc with friends and partners. Interestingly, free trade currently has much stronger support among Democrats, with two-thirds favoring either global trade (43 percent) or a trade bloc with friends (24 percent).
These diverging perspectives on America’s global role and the extent of its engagement in the rest of the world naturally result in stark differences over how the U.S. should approach the two major ongoing wars in Ukraine and Israel as well.
Today, a small majority (51 percent) of Republicans oppose sending further economic and military aid to Ukraine, with about one-third preferring to maintain the current level of overall support (37 percent) and a similar number (33 percent) supporting withdrawing it altogether. Democrats, meanwhile, remain much more supportive, with nearly three-quarters favoring economic assistance (72 percent) and sending additional military supplies (71 percent). Overall, that means more than eight-in-10 Democrats favor either maintaining current aid levels (56 percent) or intervening directly with allies in order to ensure a favorable outcome to the war (26 percent).
Then, there’s the Middle East, where it’s Republicans who are far more supportive of Israel and U.S. engagement than Democrats are. As part of our survey, we found that 53 percent of Republicans think Israel’s military actions are justified, whereas half of Democrats (51 percent) think the country’s gone too far. So, while nearly six-in-10 Democrats favor exerting diplomatic pressure (19 percent) or reducing military aid to Israel (38 percent), half of Republicans (49 percent) think the U.S. should let Israel pursue whatever policy it thinks is best.
This gap between Democrats and Republicans on foreign policy — and America’s role in the world — is one that’s been steadily evolving over the past decade. It’s a shift that reflects a fundamental change in the Republican Party, which has largely abandoned its Reaganite influence to return to its more isolationist pre-World War II roots. And the change is now apparent at the top of the Republican ticket, with both former U.S. President Donald Trump and his running mate JD Vance echoing the narrow nationalism of their predecessors from nearly a century ago.
However, now that the party’s voters have also bought into this perspective, the debate over the direction of U.S. foreign policy is bound to extend well beyond November.