Shortly after he announced his intention to relinquish his role as leader of the Senate Republican Conference, Mitch McConnell pledged to devote the remainder of his career in Congress to “fighting back against the isolationist movement in my own party.” McConnell has been joined in his fight by a powerful ally in House Speaker Mike Johnson.
In his recent appearance at the Hudson Institute, Johnson did not just make plain the critical U.S. interests that are threatened by those who advocate American retrenchment. He also made the case for America’s fundamental goodness, its ideals as universal human values, and its expressions of power abroad as the acts of a liberty-loving people protecting and promoting the same.
Johnson began by explicating the threat posed by the emerging axis of anti-American great powers, rogue nations, and the stateless terrorists in orbit around them all. “Thanks to America’s policy of peace through strength,” Johnson said, “those sounds of war — the interconnected global conflict — had mostly been silent.” But thanks to weak and indecisive leadership, the threat environment is deteriorating. Today, “the survival of liberty in the free world” is in the balance. “Absent American leadership,” he noted, “we’re looking at a future that could well be defined by communism and tyranny.”
Johnson defended Donald Trump against the charge that his instincts are isolationist. It was Trump, he reminded his speech’s attendees, who provided lethal arms to Ukraine, neutralized Qasem Soleimani, scuttled arms agreements that no one but the United States observed, compelled NATO allies to increase defense expenditures, and constructed a solid security architecture among America’s allies. The GOP is not a party “of nation builders or careless interventionists,” he insisted, but “nor are we idealists who think we can placate tyrants.”
Still, Johnson made his own appeals to the universality and manifest virtue of the fundamental American civic compact. He lingered on the Jeffersonian vision of the rights of all mankind. He repeatedly quoted Ronald Reagan and the late Charles Krauthammer, whose famous speech outlining why “Decline is a Choice” is a full-throated endorsement of America’s post–World War II project abroad.
Johnson was not such a vigorous advocate of active support of our allies as a House backbencher. His response to his elevation to leadership is worth applauding, but the contrary incentives still tug at much of his caucus. His balancing act was apparent when he attempted to square his vision for American foreign policy with the popular understanding of what Trumpism prescribes. America, he said, should set out to construct a “U.S.-led, America First coalition that advances the security interests of Americans and engages abroad with the interests of working families here at home.”
Of course, these are parochial American interests, of no importance to Ukrainian conscripts on the front lines, Israelis under siege from Hezbollah rockets, or Taiwanese constructing hardened shelters for their families. But they are ours, and Americans have always had sound reasons of politics to keep our foreign policy in harmony with the interests of our own people. What matters is what we offer our besieged partners abroad. They are moved to their own defense and, therefore, to the advancement of U.S. interests vis-à-vis America’s adversaries by recognizing that they are protecting their own sovereignty, national interest, and liberty. On such common interests are alliances built.
Johnson communicated urgency about the changes that need to happen for the U.S. to maintain its preeminence. America’s defense–industrial base is not equipped to meet these challenges, he noted. Our arms- and naval-manufacturing sectors must be revivified. The U.S. must “reshore or safe-shore” vital defense-related industries. NATO’s free riders, most of whom are far removed from the Russian threat, must commit more material resources to our collective security. “Unleashing the energy sector” and “protecting our borders” are vital aspects of this national project. And because “our biggest national security challenge is our national debt,” Johnson observed, “Congress has to work to grow our economy and significantly reduce our overall spending.”
Johnson recalled the gratitude he received when the GOP-led House passed a bill providing lethal aid to Ukraine. That was a “Churchill or Chamberlain moment,” he recounted. It will not be the last America will face.
There is a big fight within the GOP over whether America should adopt an assertive and proactive posture abroad or whether it should retrench as entitlement spending and debt-servicing obligations begin to crowd out other more important priorities. We now know which side of that fight Speaker Johnson is on.