In a rapidly changing geopolitical situation, the United States must have a better grand strategy.
Republican voters are ready to make a clean split from the neoconservative consensus that has dominated the party’s foreign policy for decades, and shift toward a grand strategy of realism grounded in America’s national interest. The two leading candidates in the Republican presidential primary have proven this, and Washington should follow suit sooner rather than later.
This new alignment reflects a major directional shift in the Republican Party. Poll after poll shows that Americans in general, and particularly Republican voters, no longer want to protect a wealthy continent that free-rides off their hard earned tax dollars.
This urgent debate about the future of our nation’s foreign policy is absent elsewhere. As is tradition, when a Democrat is in the White House, the supposedly anti-war progressives in Congress disappear from the conversation. In addition, the mainstream media, which always stands ready to beat the drums of war, has compared Republican realists to Chamberlain in Munich in 1938.
Despite what the neoconservatives, Democrats, and the mainstream media say, our government’s current foreign policy is unsustainable.
We, as elected representatives, welcome a debate and the opportunity to demonstrate why realism is ascendant and reflects the growing majority in the Republican Party, challenging a quarter-century neoconservative consensus.
In the context of the rapidly changing geopolitical situation and the emergence of an unbalanced multipolarity, the United States must have a better grand strategy. In the wake of the Cold War, China updated its strategic vision and America has not. While we do not call for a total retrenchment from Europe, it is clear the post-Cold War-era worldview of institutionalizing peace typified by a bipartisan faith in the progressive “arc of history” and the doctrinal dogma of promoting democracy through either institutions or force has ensured three unsustainable outcomes.
By Warren Davidson and Anna Paulina Luna
