McConnell Warns Trump against Adopting a Democratic Foreign Policy

By Noah Rothman

Monday, December 16, 2024

 

Axios reporter Hans Nichols seems to have applied a little critical deconstructivism to Mitch McConnell’s outstanding essay in Foreign Affairs. Even if it sounds like McConnell is being critical of Democrats and their conventional outlook toward foreign affairs, the reporter submits that he is, in fact, cleverly admonishing Republicans.

 

Nichols notes that the piece is “full of appeals to Trump, who he once called ‘stupid’ and ‘despicable.’” McConnell “reserves some of his harshest criticism for Democrats in an attempt to convince Trump that isolationism can have consequences,” Nichols adds. Indeed, even if the senator is “clearly concerned about the number of threats America faces,” “McConnell appears to be writing with an eye on future fights in addition to his own legacy.”

 

It’s not irrational to interpret McConnell’s must-read on the emerging axis of anti-American great powers, rogue states, and their terrorist proxies all engaged in one coordinated campaign to overthrow the U.S.-led world order as an attack on intellectual trend on the right toward retrenchment. But McConnell did not savage Trump’s record in office because there’s less to criticize. Trump 1.0 did not govern as a defeatist (or was eventually convinced of the error in that outlook). Barack Obama and Joe Biden did.

 

It was team Obama that convinced itself of the need to “pivot to Asia” at the expense of America’s hegemonic obligations elsewhere on the globe. It was that instinct that led that administration to pursue the Iran nuclear deal and lean on Iran-backed Shiite militias in Iraq to fill the security gaps the U.S. would leave after the full withdrawal of U.S. troops, which paved the way for the rise of ISIS and America’s return to Iraq.

 

It was that impulse that led Obama to seek accommodations with Moscow, scuttling a plan to provide Poland and Czechia with radar and missile interceptor installations and draw down U.S. troops and eliminate the presence of American armored divisions in Europe — a project that was completed just months prior to the Kremlin’s first invasion of Ukraine. And as the body armor and night-vision goggles Obama sent Ukraine in response to its desperate requests for lethal defensive arms attests, team Obama simply refused to revisit the assumptions that were rapidly making the world a more dangerous place.

 

It was the 44th president who declared great power competition a thing of the past. The threats of the future are “terrorist threats” and “failed states,” because “there’s been a recognition that neither country benefits from that kind of great power conflict,” he said in 2013. Just months earlier, Obama abandoned America’s doctrinal commitment to standing up a military capable of fighting two major wars in two theaters simultaneously.

 

As McConnell observed in his Foreign Affairs essay, the logic that convinced Obama that America could only do one thing at one time all but ensures that the U.S. will not be able to do anything effectively. He’s especially incisive on this point when illustrating the folly of this logic as it relates to Taiwanese security:

 

The unwillingness of the “Asia first” crowd to welcome European allies’ progress is curious. They ignore a glaring need to work with allies to counter Chinese threats to shared interests, raising the question of whether they are really interested in contesting China after all. Some even seem to have seized on the need to counter China as a rationale for the United States to abdicate leadership everywhere else, suggesting that “Asia first” is merely an excuse for underlying isolationism.

 

McConnell does not reserve all his venom for Obama’s spent intellectual project. Biden earned plenty for himself.

 

The 46th president deserves the opprobrium he received for misusing the Defense Production Act to compel the fabrication of solar panels, for deprioritizing defense spending, and for engaging in only a half-hearted effort to reform the Pentagon’s procurement process.

 

McConnell excoriates Biden for his halting and conflicted support for Ukraine’s defense against Russian aggression — a fecklessness that is sometimes “drowned out” by the attention paid to the few Republicans who wanted Biden to be more feckless still.

 

The ill-considered effort by the Bidenites to revive the Iran nuclear deal “allowed it to become a more powerful partner to China and Russia,” McConnell observed. Only when Iranian terrorist proxies exploded in a spasm of omnidirectional violence after the 10/7 massacre did it occur to the Biden brain trust that the Islamic Republic and its proxies cannot be appeased.

 

“The situation is grave,” McConnell’s prophetic warning concludes. China’s military spending is approaching parity with our own, and its capabilities are growing. The Russo-Iranian alliance is weakened by contact with Western-backed militaries but hardly defeated. Tertiary members of this alliance like North Korea, Cuba, and Venezuela threaten to allow America’s great power competitors access to theaters in Northeast Asia and the Caribbean.

 

America cannot take on this threat alone. America will need strong partners on the front lines of these conflicts, to say nothing of “basing, access, and overflight rights,” the senator wrote, “yet another argument for strengthening U.S. alliances globally.”

 

McConnell’s disquisition can read like a work of subtle obsequiousness to those who just want to hear the outgoing Republican leader excoriate Trump. But if McConnell is critical of his fellow Republicans, and he is, that criticism is reserved for advocates of retrenchment in Trump’s orbit whose influence over the president-elect is the subject of debate. Trump himself did not preside over the diminution of American power abroad because, in large measure, that would have been the result of Democratic policy prescriptions the GOP appointees in his administration rejected. The incoming president would be wise to stay that course.