‘World on Fire’: GOP Leans In to Overseas Chaos Argument in Sprint to November

Republicans have long been convinced that voters’ enduring concerns about inflation and illegal immigration give them an electoral edge this cycle over Democrats, who currently control the White House and the Senate.

But in the final stretch of the race, the continuing wars in the Middle East and Ukraine as well as national-security threats from American adversaries under the Biden-Harris administration give Republicans another electoral cudgel — a world on fire. 

“The economy and immigration are number one and number two, but the world on fire? That’s pretty important too,” Representative Carlos Giménez (R., Fla.), a member of the House Armed Services Committee, said in a brief interview with NR in the U.S. Capitol.

“It’s a disaster out there,” said Representative Jen Kiggans (R., Va.), another House Armed Services member and former Navy helicopter pilot whose district is home to many servicemen and veterans. “We were in a relatively stable environment until the Afghanistan withdrawal, which was chaotic and killed 13 servicemen and -women. And then after that, we saw Russia move towards Ukraine, and we saw Iran-backed proxies do things like invade Israel on October 7, and then we see China being more aggressive every single day of the week.”

“That’s because of the Biden-Harris administration’s policies,” Kiggans added.

New polling from the Institute for Global Affairs finds that the economy remains a top issue for voters, but concern over foreign affairs is on the rise: About twice as many Americans said foreign policy is a top priority in a recent survey compared with this time last year.

Vice President Kamala Harris leads Trump in IGA’s national polling as the candidate who is likeliest to pursue a foreign policy that “benefits people like you,” is less likely to send U.S. troops to an “unnecessary war,” and would improve America’s international standing. But in key battleground states — Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada — voters feel the opposite, with Trump leading on each of those questions, the poll found. 

Expect Republicans to ratchet up their criticisms of Harris’s foreign-policy record in the lead-up to October 7, which will mark the one-year anniversary of Hamas’s brutal attack on Israel. The GOP nominee has the “most sterling record on U.S.-Israel relations in the last half century,” Representative Matt Gaetz (R., Fla.), a longtime ally of Trump who helped him prepare for his early September debate against Harris, told NR. “He recognized sovereignty over the Golan Heights, he moved the embassy, and no one attacked Israel with the force and vigor that we see now.”

Even Democrats believe foreign policy — and in particular, the political fallout from the war in Gaza — could have a marginal impact on the presidential election.  

“Our country is pretty closely divided and this is an election that will be, I think, won or lost on the margins,” said Matt Duss, executive vice president at the Center for International Policy and a former senior policy adviser to senator Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.).

Put more simply, foreign policy “plays into a sense of the direction of the country,” Duss said. “Is the world safe? Is my family safe? It plays into some of the questions voters might have around which of these candidates is going to better manage America’s security and keep my family and my community safe.” 

Duss said he’s hopeful that Harris’s record as vice president, president of the Senate, and member of the Senate Intelligence Committee will play to her favor. Foreign-affairs management is a threshold question, he said: “Does this candidate pass the threshold of being able to carry out the job of commander in chief?”

For many Republicans and conservatives, the answer to that question is unequivocally “no” when it comes to Harris. Even former Trump administration officials who are now critical of the GOP nominee’s foreign policy are skeptical that the vice president would easily find her footing on the world stage if elected president. 

“As far as I can tell, she knows very little about national-security policy,” John Bolton, who served as U.N. ambassador under George W. Bush and national-security adviser under Trump, told National Review this summer. “She hasn’t made any notable foreign-policy pronouncements. She’s given speeches at places like the annual Munich Security Conference, but those are speeches probably written for her by the Biden NSC, and they state Biden-administration policy, which she’s simply repeating.”

Ever since President Joe Biden dropped out of the race in July, Trump and GOP lawmakers have sought to cast his replacement candidate as weak and inexperienced on the world stage.

“China was afraid of him, North Korea was afraid of him,” and “Russia was afraid of him,” Trump (speaking of himself in the third person) said on the debate stage earlier this month, prompting Harris to respond later on in the debate: “These dictators and autocrats are rooting for you to be president again.”

As Harris and her allies continue to characterize Trump as having dictatorial intuitions and of cozying up to autocrats, the former president and his allies continue to needle Harris for her equivocations on Israel’s defensive war against Hamas — a politically toxic issue among progressives, who have long urged the Biden administration to take a tougher stance on Israel in light of the death toll in Gaza.

Harris’s recent public remarks on the war suggest she has internalized criticisms from her party’s left-most flank. 

“Let me be clear, I will always stand up for Israel’s right to defend itself and I will always ensure Israel has the ability to defend itself,” and Israelis should “never again” face attacks like those they experienced on October 7, Harris said during her convention speech in Chicago last month. “At the same time,” she continued, “what has happened in Gaza in the past ten months is devastating. So many innocent lives lost. The scale of suffering is heartbreaking.”

Democrats who worried that Biden’s record on Israel could cost the Democratic ticket electorally by bleeding support from progressives and young voters are optimistic that Harris carries less political baggage on this front. But Republicans insist that voters distrust the current administration’s record on foreign policy, with or without Biden on the ballot.

In a statement to NR, Trump campaign senior adviser Brian Hughes said that Harris “and her sad campaign” have spent recent months trying to distract Americans from “her role in the death and destruction around the globe.” He pointed to the Biden-Harris administration’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan as well as Hamas’s attack on Israel nearly one year ago.

“As the words and actions of the Abbey Gate Gold Star families demonstrate, President Trump’s record of support for service members, veterans, and their families stands in stark contrast to the dangerously liberal and weak record of Kamala,” Hughes said. “President Trump and his campaign will continue to remind Americans that they were safer when he was in office because of the peace he secured through strength.”

On the stump, the GOP nominee likes to tell his supporters that if he is elected to a second term, he could end the war in Ukraine in 24 hours. He often speaks grandly about how he believes his populist approach to economics plays into both domestic politics and world affairs. 

Trump in recent weeks has said tariffs are the “greatest thing ever invented” and has touted tariffs as the answer to a number of issues, including global wars, the deficit, and the child-care crisis. If elected in November, he has threatened to cut business ties with any country that goes to war with a U.S. ally, or even another country that is “not friendly to us,” and to impose “100 percent tariffs” on offending countries. 

Part of the rationale in 2020 was that Democrats were “the adults in the room” when it came to foreign policy, and “we are now seeing just a world spinning off its axis,” says Matthew Bartlett, a Republican strategist who served in the State Department under the Trump administration but resigned on January 6, 2021. 

In this final stretch of the race, expect Republicans to use Biden’s own words against Harris. 

“As vice president, there wasn’t a single thing that I did that she couldn’t do,” the president said of his second-in-command during a Wednesday interview on The View. “So, I was able to delegate her responsibility on everything from foreign policy to domestic policy.”

Around NR

• Jim Geraghty outlines the tough electoral math Democrats face in maintaining their narrow grip on the Senate:

Thirty-eight Republican senators are not up for reelection this year. Eleven more Republicans either look like safe bets for Senate reelection or are running for open seats in deep-red states such as Utah and Indiana. . . . Those of you who can do math have realized that 38+ 11 = 49, meaning the absolute floor for Republicans in the Senate in January 2025 is 49 seats. But it really is 50 seats, because in West Virginia, Republican Jim Justice is ahead by more than 30 percentage points.

• That the Senate map currently favors Republicans is important, given that Kamala Harris has now “made clear that the only way to preserve the filibuster is to make sure that if she is in the White House, there is a Republican Senate,” Philip Klein writes. The presidential hopeful recently said she’s in favor of eliminating the Senate filibuster to codify Roe v. Wade.

With Manchin and Sinema leaving the Senate, were Harris to be elected and push to eliminate the filibuster to codify late-stage abortion on demand nationally, it’s hard to see who among Democrats would be standing in the way.

• Several recent surveys indicate the open race for the seat currently held by retiring Democratic senator Debbie Stabenow of Michigan may be narrowing in the run-up to Election Day, reports Audrey Fahlberg. This comes after Democratic representative Elissa Slotkin had enjoyed a consistent polling lead over Republican representative Mike Rogers for the retiring senator’s seat. 

“Mike Rogers has the momentum and for the first time in 30 years Republicans have a real opportunity to flip a Michigan U.S. Senate seat, virtually guaranteeing a Senate majority for Republicans,” campaign manager Tom Longpre wrote in a September 16 memo to interested parties, shared with NR.

• The North Carolina gubernatorial race is lost, a month and half before it is even formally set to take place, NR’s editors lament as they look back at how Republicans got themselves into this predictable situation:

It is appropriate to ask why Mark Robinson cruised to the GOP nomination in 2024 when the contents of his opposition file were already an open secret in state politics for years, so much so that he was making terrified excuses for them in private to donors well over a year ago. What was known about him by all at that point — to name but one thing, his long history of making antisemitic comments and curiously ambivalent statements about Nazi Germany — should have been more than disqualifying. 

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