ROB SCHMITZ, HOST:
Donald Trump first won the presidency championing America First and railing against the Bush-era neoconservatism that mired the U.S. in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But with Nicolás Maduro's forceful removal in Venezuela and now threats against Iran and Colombia, Trump has pushed the U.S. into a new interventionist style of foreign policy. NPR's Danielle Kurtzleben reports on how the GOP went from Bush-era regime changes to Trump's current philosophy - what he's calling the Donroe Doctrine.
DANIELLE KURTZLEBEN, BYLINE: On a Republican debate stage in 2016, Donald Trump took aim at opponent Jeb Bush by slamming the war in Iraq, a war started by Jeb's brother, George.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Obviously, it was a mistake.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: So...
TRUMP: George Bush made a mistake. We can make mistakes, but that one was a beauty. We should have never been in Iraq. We have destabilized...
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: I...
TRUMP: ...The Middle East.
KURTZLEBEN: By then, Americans' beliefs that the war in Iraq was positive had fallen off, including among Republicans. Trump represented not just a gradual move away from past Republican foreign policy, but a full break.
SAMUEL MOYN: Donald Trump's candidacy within the Republican Party represented, above all, in foreign policy a rejection of neoconservatism.
KURTZLEBEN: Samuel Moyn is a professor of law and history at Yale University. Here's how he sums up a central neoconservative tenet.
MOYN: The neocons spoke and speak in terms of high idealism, and they think America's an exceptional nation that has universal values and brings democracy where it goes.
KURTZLEBEN: The idea was that exporting those values justified interventions, including regime change. Vice President Dick Cheney foregrounded democracy in making the case for invading Iraq in 2003, speaking to CBS' "Face The Nation."
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "FACE THE NATION")
DICK CHENEY: I think our goal and objective, and I think the objective of many of the Iraqi people and the opposition as well, too, is to establish a broadly representative government in Iraq that has due regard for the various groups and for the human rights.
KURTZLEBEN: Post-Bush, neoconservatism remained prominent within the party, but the door was open to something new. Max Boot advised John McCain's candidacy in 2008 and once considered himself a neocon.
MAX BOOT: There was frustration with interventionism and with nation-building. And then, you know, Donald Trump came along with this very idiosyncratic view where, you know, he's revived the America First motto of the pre-World War II isolationists.
KURTZLEBEN: There's broad disagreement as to how isolationist Trump ever was. In his first term, for example, he continued some aspects of the war on terror, like assassinating Iranian General Qassem Soleimani, but he certainly didn't attempt any regime changes. James Lindsay, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, sees a shift during Trump 2.0.
JAMES LINDSAY: Rather than picking people who saw their job as being guardrails to his actions, he picked people who see their job as enabling Trump to be Trump.
KURTZLEBEN: In his estimation, Trump's abilities to enact his policies have changed, but his world view hasn't.
LINDSAY: President Trump is a nationalist. He's a unilateralist. He's sounding more and more like an imperialist. But at his core, President Trump is what we might call an ultrarealist.
KURTZLEBEN: The interventions that have come from that hard-power-focused realism have sometimes pleased the neocons he once rejected. Indeed, there have been echoes of early 2000s nation-building. Last week, Secretary of State Marco Rubio spoke of rebuilding civil society in Venezuela. But Trump has now articulated what you might call that ultrarealist world view in a recent interview with The New York Times.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
KATIE ROGERS: Do you see any checks on your power on the world stage? Is there anything that could stop you if you wanted to...
TRUMP: Yeah, there's one thing - my own morality, my own mind.
KURTZLEBEN: Trump has suggested the U.S. may oversee Venezuela for years and isn't ruling out boots on the ground. And Trump has now threatened Greenland and Colombia. It might feel surprising, but as Lindsay adds, the U.S. appetite for interventionism is cyclical.
LINDSAY: I'm old enough to remember Vietnam had left everyone thinking that the United States wouldn't become involved in military interventions overseas, and then we got Iraq.
KURTZLEBEN: Over the weekend, Trump said he is also considering military action against Iran after hundreds of protesters there have been killed and that he may meet with Iranian officials. Danielle Kurtzleben, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
