The three foreign policy factions fighting for Trump’s ear

Generally speaking, for many of the officials who served him during his first term, advising Donald Trump on foreign policy and national security does not appear to have been a very pleasant experience. Numerous former Trump officials have described him variously as a threat to the Constitution, either “a fascist” or “not capable” of having an ideology as coherent as fascism, and “the most dangerous person ever.”

These criticisms, as much as they were played up by Kamala Harris, do not appear to have resonated with voters. Trump was arguably able to use them to his advantage, portraying himself as a “candidate of peace” who would push back against the hawkish foreign-policy establishment and extract the US from costly foreign entanglements like the war in Ukraine. While Trump’s repeated claims that there were “no wars” during his first term were misleading at best, the raging conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza that broke out during the Biden administration undoubtedly made it easier for Trump to make this case. 

During his first term, Trump initially stacked his administration with former generals like H.R. McMaster and James Mattis — whom Trump loved to refer to by his nickname “Mad Dog,” much to Mattis’s chagrin —  as well as hawks like John Bolton. But he often clashed with them on issues ranging from keeping troops in Afghanistan or Syria to his unconventional courtship of North Korea’s Kim Jong Un. The presence of seasoned veterans like Mattis also reassured some of Trump’s critics, who hoped they would rein in his most erratic instincts. By the end of his first term, though, the president clearly felt he was being undermined.  

Just two weeks after the election, it’s already clear that this time will be different. 

“None of the so-called ‘adults in the room’ from the first term survived,” said Peter Feaver, a former national security staffer in the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush administrations, who now teaches at Duke University. Though there was some speculation immediately after the election that Trump might include figures like former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo or former national security adviser Robert O’Brien on his new team — the rare establishment figures from the first term who did not publicly break with Trump — the president-elect has largely opted for new faces this time around. 

Those include some picks that are deeply unconventional, to say the least, like Fox News host Pete Hegseth for secretary of defense and former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard for director of national intelligence, leavened by a few more GOP mainstream figures like Rep. Mike Waltz for national security adviser and Sen. Marco Rubio for secretary of state.

It’s still early days, and the Trump II team is still taking shape. As several experts told Vox, the department deputies who will eventually be selected can often be as important as the principals when it comes to actually designing and implementing foreign policy. 

But a few things do stand out about the names already picked. What they have in common is that they seem far less likely to push back against Trump’s ideas than his initial first-term team. 

“In his first term, he made a series of senior appointments on the ‘Team of Rivals’ theory of building a Cabinet out of people with different views, so that they can thrash out the alternatives within the decision-making process,” said Kori Schake, director of foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute. “And I think what we’re seeing now is a pattern of choosing people who already agree with the president or who are willing to agree with him.”

What that means is that we’re more likely to get a purely Trumpian foreign policy this time around. Given how mercurial Trump can be — and given how different the picks are in experience and outlook, beyond simply loyalty — that doesn’t mean we know what that will look like in practice. But we can map out the loose ideological groups that will compete for Trump’s ear on foreign policy and defense.

The three tribes of Republican foreign policy

In a 2022 article for the European Council on Foreign Relations, the policy analysts Majda Ruge and Jeremy Shapiro sketched out a model — which has since become widely used and cited — of the three “tribes” of Republican foreign policy in the Trump era.

First, there are the “primacists,” who hold more traditionally hawkish views on the importance of US global leadership and the use of military force. They believe in increased military spending, continuing US military support for Ukraine, and preparation for a potential conflict with China. First-term Trump figures like Pompeo, Bolton, and former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley would fall into this category. Some primacists are people who were once described as “neoconservatives in the post-9/11 years,” though that’s become something of a pejorative on both sides of the aisle, and very few people now describe themselves that way.  

Then there are the “restrainers,” such as Sens. Rand Paul or Mike Lee, who want to limit US military commitments abroad and are more skeptical about alliances like NATO. In a classic example of the “horseshoe” theory of politics, their views sometimes overlap with left-wing critics of intervention and the military-industrial complex. 

The third group are the “prioritizers,” who have some characteristics of the two others. They want to reduce US commitments in Europe (including support for Ukraine) and the Middle East like the restrainers, but they want to use that shift to focus on what they see as the real threat: great power competition with China, a concern they share with the primacists. 

Examples of this camp could include Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley and Vice President-elect JD Vance. Arguably, such a prioritization has been a goal of the last few US presidents: Barack Obama, at a time when the war on terror was still hot, promised a foreign policy “pivot” to Asia, while President Joe Biden described China as America’s “pacing challenge.” The prioritizers would say making the pivot an actual reality, as opposed to just tough rhetoric, requires difficult choices about how America spends its finite military and political resources — prioritization they believe these administrations largely failed to make. 

The conflict between the camps has been playing out as Trump’s team has come together, with the president’s choices reportedly influenced to some extent by his increasingly central son Donald Trump Jr., pundit Tucker Carlson, and billionaire backer David Sacks, all of whom have pushed to keep out the primacists from the first administration. “There were at least 25 people who called the president and said: ‘It’s got to be Mike Pompeo,’” one Republican official told the Free Press. “And none of it mattered.”

Carlson publicly touted Elbridge Colby, an influential Pentagon official and China specialist during the first Trump administration and perhaps the purest prioritizer in Washington, for a position on the new team, but other officials criticized his more dovish views on Iran. As one critic put it anonymously to the Jewish Insider: “I don’t know how you put a man who says he’s okay with Iran having a nuclear weapon in charge of any serious defense or national security job.” (Colby has said it would be possible to contain and manage a nuclear-armed Iran.) Colby has so far not been appointed to a position, though that could very well change in the coming days. 

The purest restrainer of the group is undoubtedly Gabbard, an ex-Democrat turned Trump loyalist who has denounced her former party as an “elitist cabal of warmongers.” Gabbard has blamed the war in Ukraine on the US ignoring Russia’s “legitimate security concerns” and even traveled to Syria and met with dictator Bashar al-Assad at the height of that country’s civil war. 

Gabbard’s pro-Russia (even by Trumpwold standards) views have led to questions from some intelligence community insiders about whether her appointment could pose a security risk. Gabbard’s views could also potentially clash with her new boss’s: In 2020, she denounced the surprise drone strike ordered by Trump that killed senior Iranian General Qasem Soleimani as an “unconstitutional act of war” with no justification.   

As for Hegseth, the secretary of defense nominee, he has described himself as a “recovering neocon” who began his career in politics leading a pro-Iraq War veterans group but has since changed his views. “The hubris of the Pentagon is they want to now tell other countries how to do counterinsurgency based on what we did in Iraq and Afghanistan,” Hegseth said recently on the Shawn Ryan Show podcast. “The trust that our political leaders and our generals would have our best interests in mind is totally broken.” In the same interview, Hegseth questioned US support for Ukraine and the value of the NATO alliance. 

Dan Caldwell, public policy adviser at Defense Priorities, a pro-restraint advocacy group, told Vox that Hegseth is not alone in having gone through an ideological transition like this. “Like a lot of veterans, including myself, his foreign policy views have evolved as the wars have dragged on,” he said. It’s worth noting that while Trump stacked his first Cabinet with what he called “my generals,” this time around he’s opting more for younger figures like Gabbard, Hegseth, and Waltz who served as mid-level officers during the war on terror. 

Despite his criticism of the Pentagon, Hegseth is not quite a restrainer. He has said the US might need to take military action against Mexican cartels — perhaps Trump’s most radical foreign policy proposal. 

Ultimately, the Hegseth pick may have been less about his foreign policy views — and certainly wasn’t about his ability to oversee the nearly 3 million employees at the Defense Department, given his near total lack of management experience — than his very public opposition to “wokeness” and DEI initiatives in the military. That would set him up for a potential clash with Joint Chiefs chair Gen. C.Q. Brown, who Hegseth has suggested may have gotten the job because he is Black. The Trump transition team has reportedly been preparing a plan to review senior military commanders for potential removal. Though it’s not unprecedented for a president to fire senior generals, even if it’s become rarer in recent decades, doing so for political reasons would be a cause for concern given Trump’s very public clashes with former Joint Chiefs chair Gen. Mark Milley. 

(Since Hegseth’s nomination, accusations have also surfaced that he committed sexual assault and that he was flagged as an “insider threat” by a fellow service member because of a tattoo associated with white nationalism, but so far, Trump is sticking with his pick. Hegseth has denied these allegations.)

Waltz and Rubio could both fairly be described as primacists for most of their careers, but Caldwell says that may no longer be the case. “I think it’s lazy to call any of these picks pure primacists or neocons,” he said. “These are people whose views have evolved over the past few years and are continuing to evolve.”

Both have recently seemed at least prioritizer-curious. Waltz, for instance, initially criticized the Biden administration for not providing enough aid to Ukraine following Russia’s invasion, but has since said that this support should be reassessed. “Is it in America’s interest, are we going to put in the time, the treasure, the resources that we need in the Pacific right now badly?” he said at an event last month.

Rubio was once a textbook primacist, arguing for using American power and military might to spread democracy, but in a recent essay he criticized what he called the “outdated foreign policy blob” for failing to “reprioritize and focus on America’s most pressing threat: the Chinese Communist Party.” He was among the senators who voted against aid to Ukraine earlier this year. 

“I’m not going to sit here and pretend that Senator Rubio agrees with me on everything, but I don’t think it is fair to call him a neoconservative anymore,” Caldwell said. 

Shapiro, author of the original “three tribes” article, takes a more cynical view. “If you look at Rubio, you see someone who has a foreign policy ideology but who has been willing to be flexible in order to fit in with wherever he needs to be, be that with Trump or be that with the Republican base,” he told Vox.

One area to watch for Rubio’s influence may be Latin America policy. During Trump’s first term, the senator was nicknamed the “secretary of state for Latin America” for the amount of influence he had over policy toward the region. This generally meant taking a much harder line on left-wing authoritarian regimes in countries like Cuba (where his parents were born) and Venezuela, and included supporting opposition groups in those countries. It’s not out of the question that the Trump administration could be facing a crisis involving one or both of those countries early in its tenure.

But what does the big guy think?

It’s always difficult to predict what a president’s foreign policy will be like based on campaign statements or personnel appointments, given that so much of foreign policy consists of responding to crises. Biden certainly didn’t anticipate that a major land war in Europe or a catastrophe in the Middle East would largely define his foreign policy legacy. 

The task is even harder with a president as altogether unpredictable as Trump, who clearly has some consistent impulses: He’s skeptical of defense alliances, security commitments, and long-term military deployments. He has next to no interest in promoting democracy or human rights globally or defending the so-called rules-based international order.

These views would align him generally with the restrainer camp, but his actual record doesn’t fall neatly into any of the tribes. Trump is hardly a dove. In Syria, he ordered airstrikes against Assad’s regime in response to the use of chemical weapons — a step the Obama administration, despite its “red line,” famously did not take — and oversaw what was arguably the deadliest ever direct clash between US and Russian forces. US military involvement in places like Somalia, to fight jihadist groups, increased under Trump. 

Though it’s true that Trump negotiated the deal with the Taliban that led to the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, he has since said that if he had been president, the US would have held on to Bagram Air Base in order to keep pressure on China. (Keeping Bagram was not part of the original agreement.) Trump is also likely to increase defense budgets in his second term. 

Trump’s rhetoric on China has been consistently hawkish but has generally focused more on economics and trade than security issues. He was willing to tamp down US criticism of Beijing on issues like the crackdown in Hong Kong, persecution of the Uighurs, and the early handling of Covid while in pursuit of a trade deal with Beijing. Though military and diplomatic support for Taiwan increased under Trump’s tenure, he has also questioned whether the island is worth defending. 

When it comes to the Middle East, all the names selected so far — with the exception of Gabbard — are staunch defenders of Israel and would qualify as Iran hawks. The selection of Christian Zionist former Gov. Mike Huckabee as ambassador to Israel and the staunchly pro-Israel real estate mogul Steve Witkoff as Middle East envoy do not suggest he plans to scale back US support for Israel, even if Trump is not as fond of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as he once was. 

Iran is a more complicated question. Trump ordered the strike that killed Soleimani, but then did not respond when Iran then retaliated with an attack on US troops. Though Trump cultivated close ties with Saudi Arabia, he angered his allies in Riyadh by not responding to Iranian attacks on Saudi oil infrastructure in 2019. And while Tehran has not ruled out new negotiations with the incoming administration, it does seem unlikely that Trump would pursue a Kim Jong Un-style beautiful romance with the government that allegedly tried to kill him. 

It’s not clear what Trump would do if Israel and Iran ended up in an all-out shooting war. Vance, for one, has said that despite US support for Israel, the two countries have diverging interests at times and that war with Iran would not be in American interests. 

On Ukraine, Trump will likely pursue his promised deal to end the war, presumably by pressuring Ukraine to accept territorial concessions. The question is what happens if Russian President Vladimir Putin, having realized recent success on the battlefield, doesn’t want to accept. Waltz, despite his recent prioritizer turn, has argued that if Putin fails to accept a peace deal, the US should “provide more weapons to Ukraine with fewer restrictions on their use.” Trump has made similar threats. A Trump administration that ends up escalating US involvement in Ukraine would be an ironic outcome of the last election, but it doesn’t seem totally out of the question.

If you don’t like this Cabinet, just wait

However you might classify Trump’s coming foreign policy advisers, there’s no guarantee they’ll be in their positions for long. Trump went through two Senate-confirmed secretaries of state and four acting ones as well as four national security advisers. (Biden, for better or worse, has stuck with his core national security team through thick and thin.) Any talk of whether certain candidates for high jobs or foreign policy factions are being snubbed should be taken with a grain of salt, or at least patience. “It’s very possible that some of these figures may reappear, and that may be why they haven’t publicly announced or indicated their displeasure with the choices,” said Duke’s Feaver. 

Two things seem certain: The clash between the GOP foreign policy tribes will continue to play out over the next few years, and the Trump administration we have on day one may not be the one we have six months later.