Two decades ago, Bush and the Republicans were nearly united in their embrace of a brash militarism that sought to topple Saddam and transform Iraq and the broader Middle East in the process. Iraq, after paying a terrible price in the death of hundreds of thousands and disruption of millions of lives, was indeed transformed. But so, too, was American politics, where the backlash to the conflict arguably gave rise to the Presidencies of both Barack Obama—who first rose to fame as an antiwar state legislator—and Donald Trump. Trump is a Bush-basher of long standing, and he often framed his takeover of the Republican Party as an explicit repudiation of the extended Bush family and its internationalist legacy. Trump has said Bush “lied” to start the war, that he should have been impeached for how badly it was conducted, and that, over all, Bush had a “failed and uninspiring Presidency.”
Seven years after Trump won the White House by attacking the last Republican to hold the office, his views of foreign policy are now ascendant, if not yet dominant, in the G.O.P. Indeed, I cannot imagine the Party’s present state of inward-looking populism without the twin Bush shocks of the 2008 government bailout of Wall Street and the global overreach of the invasion of Iraq. Much as the Vietnam War did for a previous generation, the failures in Iraq shattered American confidence, shaped future debates over the use of military force, made the concept of democracy promotion itself suspect, distracted from rising threats posed by the revisionist great powers Russia and China, and splintered the previously unquestioned Republican commitment to a robustly internationalist American foreign policy.
If the country survives the Trump era’s assault on democracy and its recklessly inchoate foreign policy, this may turn out to have a silver lining in that breaking the GOP’s blind, rabid militarism is a positive development. Today’s so-called America Firsters are anything but pacifist, of course, and the first chance they get to wreak violence on non-white adversaries, they will jump at it. They love war. But dividing the party on these issues is still a good thing. We had 60 years of lockstep right wing anti-communism that led us down a terribly destructive path and that coalition had to be broken before we could go forward and debate these issues sanely. Will this lead us to a saner foreign policy? At this point it’s hard to see it with the GOP going completely batshit. But at least we’ve stopped fighting the last war.