4 Foreign Policy Takeaways From the Latest Republican Presidential Debate

By Robbie Gramer and Jack Detsch

Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s SitRep! Robbie and Jack here. What’s something innocent and better than revenge? How about Taylor Swift winning Time’s Person of the Year over the likes of Russian President Vladimir Putin, Chinese President Xi Jinping, and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un? This may not bode well for an Eras Tour concert in Pyongyang.

Alright, here’s what’s on tap for the day: Republican presidential candidates trade blows in Alabama primary debate, what an endgame could look like in the Israel-Hamas war, a former U.S. ambassador accused of spying for Cuba, and more.

4 Takeaways From the Republican Presidential Primary Debate

At long last, the throngs of Calvin Coolidge fans have their day in the sun. At last night’s fiery Republican presidential debate, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said he takes inspiration from the 30th U.S. president, who served from 1923 to 1929. (As we all know, things famously went great for the United States and the world after Coolidge left office.)

Didn’t watch? Don’t worry; we have you covered.

First, why does this debate matter? Good question, especially because there was a glaring absence from the stage: Donald Trump, who is polling well ahead of everyone else but is skipping all the debates.

The top line is the debate was a bit of a mess and much lighter on policy—let alone foreign policy—than previous debates, as pointed questions from the moderators regularly devolved into personal attacks and squabbles.

Still, even sans Trump, the debate offered a good barometer of where these candidates stand on foreign-policy issues and served as a bellwether of where the center of gravity on Republican foreign policy could be in 2024 at a time when the party is going through what we’ll kindly call a bit of an identity crisis.

Here are the top SitRep takeaways from the debate:

1. The old school and new school of GOP foreign policy are still brawling. And it’s not clear who will come out on top.

The old school, represented by former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley and former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, has advocated for continued U.S. support for Ukraine against Russia and a more traditional Republican foreign-policy platform focused on active global engagement and a muscular U.S. military.

“Iran, Russia, and China want to destroy the West,” Haley warned in the debate.

Even with the rise of the MAGA wing of the GOP, this side still has the most mass and influence in the party now—from top members of powerful congressional committees and former top Trump administration officials such as Mike Pompeo. But that could soon change.

Then there’s the other side, much more skeptical of U.S. support for Ukraine and traditional U.S. alliance structures.

Rabble-rousing tech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy personifies this side, as do some—but not all—Trump campaign surrogates. Ramaswamy took a sexist swipe at Haley, calling her hard-power policies “lipstick on a Dick Cheney.”

“One thing that Joe Biden and Nikki Haley have in common is that neither of them could even state for you three provinces in eastern Ukraine that they actually want to send our troops to fight for,” Ramaswamy said. Haley then named three Ukrainian provinces. (Worth noting that the second half of Ramaswamy’s assertion here is false: No senior Republican or Democratic Party official has ever advocated for sending U.S. troops into Ukraine.)

DeSantis, whose momentum has ebbed in recent months, is somewhere in the middle of these two sides, akin to a first-term Trump presidency with both MAGA strains of foreign policy and the backing of more traditional conservative foreign-policy bigwigs. He argued he would “reorient” U.S. foreign policy to focus on China as the top foreign-policy challenge, but hasn’t gone as far as Ramaswamy or other populists in the party on abandoning Ukraine.

2. Border security will be a top issue in 2024. “It’s the economy, stupid” was a famous political catchphrase that summed up Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential win against George H.W. Bush. Republicans are now effectively testing Biden ahead of 2024 on “it’s the border, stupid.” The U.S. southern border has become a top campaign issue for Republicans to hammer Biden on, and the debate showed this will be a central feature of Republican campaigning next year.

Haley and Ramaswamy linked the China challenge to border security, citing the flow of Chinese-produced fentanyl, a deadly synthetic opioid, across Mexico’s border to the United States. DeSantis doubled down on a pledge to shoot smugglers at the U.S.-Mexico border in a bid to curb the flow of drugs, as well as to designate drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations. Back in Washington, Ukraine funding in Congress is stalled over Republicans’ demands for sweeping changes to U.S. border policy (more on that later) in a sign of just how big an issue this will be in the election cycle.

3. Is all this irrelevant without Trump? Polls after the debate last night showed Haley surging in the Republican primaries—to 15 percent. Compared to Trump’s 59 percent. So these debates all may simply be futile political sideshows if Trump can maintain his momentum.

Trump’s second-term foreign policy could look a lot different from his first term, surrounding himself by pre-vetted loyalists on the far right more than the so-called adults in the room of foreign-policy heavyweights who later came to disavow him. But it’s hard to talk about the foreign-policy takeaways from a presidential primary debate when The Donald isn’t on the stage. Hopefully, he’ll be giving more speeches in the future outlining what a second-term foreign policy could look like. If he does so, we here at SitRep will have it covered.

4. Foreign policy will actually matter a lot in 2024. OK, yes, we reporters at Foreign Policy would love for foreign policy to be a top issue for every voter in election cycles, but we also acknowledge that can be wishful thinking in some years. Except, maybe, this time for real?

The debate was bookended by foreign policy, and almost every issue came back to events beyond U.S. borders, from the Israel-Hamas war to China to Mexican drug cartels.

“Overall, the Republican debates have emphasized foreign policy a lot more than is typical at this stage in an election cycle,” Carrie Filipetti, a former Trump administration official and head of the conservative Vandenberg Coalition, told SitRep.

“Even those candidates who hold less traditional Republican views on America’s role in the world, like Vivek Ramaswamy, still spend a significant amount of time speaking about foreign-policy issues,” Filipetti said. “They have really been front and center this entire race, and I suspect the primary itself will be partially a referendum on America’s ideal role in the world.”

Let’s Get Personnel

Wastin’ away in Tommy’s holdaville. After 10 long months, the unprecedented blockade on Pentagon nominees languishing in limbo has finally broken. Republican Sen. Tommy Tuberville has released his holds on 425 military nominees that had stymied Pentagon business for most of the year.

Some people claim there’s a coach to blame. Tuberville, who likes to go by Coach Tuberville, bowed to mounting pressure from increasingly exasperated Senate Republicans who said that his blockade was hamstringing the readiness of U.S. troops. The Senate promptly confirmed all 425 picks in a voice vote.

But… Tuberville still has holds on about a dozen of the Pentagon’s senior-most military nominees vying to be promoted or reconfirmed as four-star U.S. admirals and generals.

Tuberville first put down the holds in March over a dispute against the Biden administration’s abortion policies for U.S. service members.

In other personnel news, Biden has nominated Kris Sarri, the former president and CEO of the National Marine Sanctuary Foundation, to serve as the State Department’s assistant secretary of state for oceans and international environmental and scientific affairs. Biden has also tapped a business consultant, Juan Carlos Iturregui, to be his next ambassador to the Dominican Republic.

Over at the Pentagon, Douglas Craig Schmidt, a Vanderbilt University computer science professor, is Biden’s pick to be the director of operational test and evaluation.

Biden is also tapping growth equity investment maven Deven Parekh to be a member of the U.S. Development Finance Corporation Board of Directors.

On the Button 

What should be high on your radar, if it isn’t already.

An end in sight? Foreign Policy asked former Israeli prime ministers, top Palestinian negotiators, U.S. ambassadors, and leading human rights experts for their thoughts on two key questions surrounding the devastating Israel-Hamas war: How will this war end? How will the next one be prevented? These are existential questions for the future of the region. We recommend reading their responses in full here.

Nail biting. Ukraine needs a steady flow of U.S. economic and military aid to keep up its fight against Russia. That aid is starting to dry up, and Congress can’t agree on how to get it started again. We spoke to a dozen top officials and Congressional aides on the thorny political headache that the Biden administration now finds itself in over a major new national security funding bill to keep the aid to Ukraine flowing, all over an impasse on U.S. southern border policy. Their warning is stark: If U.S. aid doesn’t start flowing again, Putin could win the war.

Wrong dirección. For four decades, Victor Manuel Rocha climbed the ranks of the State Department as a career diplomat, serving on the National Security Council, as ambassador to Bolivia, and as a top advisor to the chief of U.S. Southern Command. Also for those four decades, Rocha was secretly a spy for Cuba, the Justice Department now alleges. In a bombshell indictment dropped this week, the Justice Department accused Rocha of secretly operating for Cuban intelligence services, known as the Dirección, since at least 1981, in what amounts to a colossal counterintelligence failure for the U.S. government if he’s proved guilty. “This action exposes one of the highest-reaching and longest-lasting infiltrations of the United States government by a foreign agent,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement.

Snapshot 

Troops from the Gulf Cooperation Council countries participate in a joint military exercise at the Udari range northwest of Kuwait City, Kuwait, on Dec. 6. Yasser Al-Zayyat/AFP via Getty Images

Put on Your Radar

Today: U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and British Foreign Secretary David Cameron meet in Washington.

Friday, Dec. 8: Blinken meets with a joint Arab League and Organization of Islamic Cooperation delegation of foreign ministers from Turkey, Egypt, Qatar, Palestine, Jordan, Indonesia, and Nigeria.

Sunday, Dec. 10: Javier Milei is inaugurated as president of Argentina after winning a runoff election last month. Seventy-fifth anniversary of the signing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Paris. Egypt begins a three-day election to determine its next president, with incumbent Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, who took power in a coup in 2013, running for a third term in office.

Wednesday, Dec. 13: EU-Western Balkans summit takes place in Brussels.

Quote of the Week

“People will literally become a member of Congress instead of going to therapy.”

—Senior policy analyst Sam Peak of Americans for Prosperity tweets in response to the news that South Carolina Rep. Nancy Mace lost three senior staff in a week due to a reportedly toxic work environment.

This Week’s Most Read

• Chinese Hospitals Are Housing Another Deadly Outbreak by Annie Sparrow
• What Ridley Scott’s ‘Napoleon’ Gets Wrong About War by Franz-Stefan Gady
• America Is a Heartbeat Away From a War It Could Lose by A. Wess Mitchell

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

Chip jams. How does European Commissioner for Internal Market Thierry Breton get hyped up to talk about the 27-nation bloc’s Chips Act to incentivize the growth of Europe’s semiconductor industry? With a themed Spotify playlist, of course! Breton’s “EU Chips Act” playlist reveals that Europe’s markets czar is a fan of Stereo MC’s, Gary Numan, and aughts-vintage American rapper Trey Songz.

Haven’t had enough? Breton also has themed playlists for the EU’s Vaccine Task Force, the bloc’s Critical Raw Materials Act, and its Digital Markets Act. Kudos to Emily Benson of the Center for Strategic and International Studies for the find.

Average joe. Were you curious what Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was doing when he canceled at the last minute on classified briefings to U.S. House and Senate lawmakers? Yeah, us, too. Turns out Zelensky, seemingly no longer as worried about death threats from Russian assassins 21 months into the Kremlin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, was just being your average everyday Kyiv Volodia, taking his daily social media update to the streets of the Ukrainian capital and saying hi to the locals.