Since Donald Trump’s rise within Republican ranks, conservatives have divided into two competing foreign policy camps. One contends that Trump’s approach suits the world in which we live and supersedes previous GOP national security and foreign affairs outlooks. A smaller contingent contends that Ronald Reagan’s understanding of America and his conduct of diplomacy remain the gold standard for U.S. foreign policy.

Atlantic Council colleagues Matthew Kroenig (also a Georgetown professor of government and international relations) and Dan Negrea contend that considerably more agreement about foreign affairs prevails among conservatives than they themselves realize. When fleshed out, a Trump-Reagan fusion represents, they persuasively maintain in their new book, “the foreign policy synthesis around which the Republican Party can coalesce.”

Taking their title from Ronald Reagan’s succinct 1977 statement of his stance toward the Cold War, Kroenig and Negrea argue in “We Win, They Lose: Republican Foreign Policy and the New Cold War” (the acknowledgements thank me although I contributed at most encouragement), that the United States has been thrust into the New Cold War by the People’s Republic of China. Trump administration veterans – Kroenig in the Defense Department and Negrea in the State Department – the authors maintain that Trump’s 2017 National Security Strategy rightly recognized that America had already entered an era of great-power competition with Russia as well as with China.

Notwithstanding “real divisions within the party,” argue Kroenig and Negrea, recognition of “[t]he existential threat posed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)” provides conservatives “a central, unifying theme.” By combining Reagan’s characteristic “commitment to individual liberty, free markets, and a strong national defense” with Trump’s emphasis “on the interests of all Americans and confronting countries, such as China, whose economic policies harm American interests,” Kroenig and Negrea contend, conservatives can fashion a strategy for winning the New Cold War.

The authors start from the basics. Foreign policy, they argue, stems from fundamental views about human beings, political life, and the world. Following the late Harvard professor Samuel Huntington, Kroenig and Negrea state that conservatives typically see the world as dangerous, respect tradition, recognize religion as an essential social bond, appreciate that political communities inevitably contain a hierarchical dimension, and grasp that peoples and nations tend to regard their shared values and beliefs as superior to those of others.

Progressives place the emphasis elsewhere. They focus on opportunities for collaboration across communities, nations, and civilizations. They often believe that science and reason should liberate individuals from backward tradition and benighted faith. They seek to level hierarchies at home and abroad while stressing the equal worth of all peoples’ and nations’ values (with the exception, among woke progressives, of America’s and the West’s characteristic principles, which they deem inferior to the rest).

These divergent ideas about individuals, society, and international relations produce different opinions about the goal and conduct of foreign affairs. For most conservatives – true of both Reagan and Trump – U.S. foreign policy’s primary purpose is to secure American freedom and prosperity. Conservatives see international conflict as rooted in competing interests and clashing goals. Accordingly, they believe that hard power plays an ineliminable role in world affairs. While appreciating that international institutions can serve the nation’s interests, conservatives prefer U.S. global leadership because they think that America’s dedication to individual freedom and equality under law distinguishes it from other peoples and nations.

In contrast, the progressive outlook organizes foreign policy around the betterment of humanity. Progressives typically see conflict among nations as springing from misunderstandings. Hence, they downplay the need for hard power, even as a last resort, and often suppose that all major differences among nations can be overcome through dialogue, diplomacy, transnational courts, and international organizations. Assuming that America is no better than any other country and worse than many, progressives frequently favor the transfer of authority from sovereign nation-states, including the United States, to multilateral institutions and the United Nations…..

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Continue reading this article at Real Clear Politics.

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