Republicans may accomplish a major shift in foreign policy in 2024.

The GOP is preparing to have a second round of its most important foreign policy primary debate in 2024. Only this time, the outcomes might be different.

Sen. Robert Taft, a sceptic of international alliances who wanted to shift America's focus from defending Europe towards confronting communist China, was defeated by Dwight Eisenhower, a champion of internationalism and alliance with Europe to contain the Soviet Union, in the 1952 GOP presidential nomination contest, which proved to be a turning point in the party's history.

Similar divisions are now emerging inside the Republicans. The race's two front-runners, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and former President Donald Trump, have both stated that protecting Ukraine from Russia is not an American "vital interest" and "distracts" (to use DeSantis' words) from the more crucial challenge of tackling China. Other potential 2024 candidates, like former Vice President Mike Pence and former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley, are more likely to support Dwight D. According to Eisenhower, giving up on Ukraine would empower China and other possible US enemies and undermine the US' commitment to defending Europe against Russian aggression.

Every Republican candidate for president for the following six decades, from Richard Nixon through Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush, John McCain, and Mitt Romney, identified more with the internationalist than the isolationist wing of the party after Eisenhower's historic triumph over Taft in 1952.

But when Trump secured the nomination in 2016 on the back of a rhetoric of harsh economic nationalism and cynicism towards global alliances, he ended that streak. Currently, the GOP seems to be headed towards a 2024 nomination contest, which might show how Trump's ascent permanently altered the party's balance of power in foreign policy and put an end to the lengthy period of GOP internationalism that Eisenhower's win had ushered in.

The governor's attempt to win over Trump's supporters with his controversial words was furthered by the fact that DeSantis shared his opinions on Ukraine with Fox News personality Tucker Carlson, a fervent opponent of American engagement with friends. After receiving strong criticism from Republican internationalists for several days, DeSantis changed his mind last week and referred to Russian President Vladimir Putin as "a war criminal," using considerably harsher terminology than Trump has ever used. Yet, DeSantis also expressed his doubt about unwavering US backing for Ukraine in an interview with British journalist Piers Morgan for a different Fox network. The governor replied, "I just don't think that's a significant desire for us to escalate greater engagement."

DeSantis' scepticism about Ukraine, notwithstanding his qualifiers from last week, demonstrates the magnetic effect Trump has had on his party, pulling it away from the Eisenhower tradition.

According to Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations and a former director of policy planning at the State Department under George W. Bush, Trump-ism, which is isolationist, unilateralist, and immoral, is the dominant attitude in Republican foreign policy. Haass, who served in foreign policy positions under Ronald Reagan, and George H.W. Bush administrations, claimed that the "conventional institutional approach to the world [which was]... the dominant Republican strategy since World War II... has definitely been overshadowed for now."

The former US permanent representative to NATO under Barack Obama and current head of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, Ivo Daalder, concurs. He said that the potential that Republican "internationalists have not only failed in '16 and '20" when Trump headed the GOP ticket, "but have lost the party permanently," is increased by the fact that both of the 2024 GOP front-runners are expressing a broad cynicism about American engagement abroad.

Contrarily, the 1952 presidential contest was the time when GOP internationalists appeared to have the party in their hands for good. The party had been sharply divided before World War II between an internationalist side anxious to oppose Adolf Hitler and imperial Japan and an isolationist minority unwilling to become involved in the escalating struggle against fascism, especially in Europe. The ideological and geographic divide pitted more conservative isolationist forces based in the small towns and independent businesses of the Midwest and the far West against generally more moderate internationalist East Coast Republicans (many of whom were connected to Wall Street and international finance).

A completely isolationist attitude was no longer politically viable once the US entered World War II as a result of the Japanese surprise attack.

According to Joyce Mao, an associate professor of history at Middlebury College and the author of the book "Asia First," which describes the GOP foreign policy debates of the time, "After Pearl Harbor there was no way to be a pure isolationist and a national political [person]."

Following World War II, Republican internationalists worked alongside Democratic presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman to establish the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the Marshall Plan to restore Europe's economy, and the United Nations in order to avert another global conflict. Eisenhower, who was firmly in this camp and had organised the Allied invasion of Europe on D-Day in 1944. In fact, he later went back to the continent in 1951 to take on the role of NATO's first supreme commander.

Yet, Robert Taft was the head of a group of congressional Republicans known as the "old guard" who were far more dubious of European commitments. Before Pearl Harbor, William Howard Taft's son, a senator from Ohio, had largely opposed American help to Europe. Even after the war, he fought to scale back the Marshall Plan and voted against the foundation of NATO. Mao pointed out that Robert Taft, like many of the Republicans who initially opposed participation in World War II, sought to distance himself from both his earlier isolationism and the post-war priorities of GOP internationalists like Eisenhower by advocating for a "Asia First" foreign policy that would shift resources and emphasis away from defending Europe to combating the Communists who had taken control of China.

Taft and his associates thought Eisenhower was far too moderate, according to Mao. The party's conservative wing believed that his focus on Europe was overly similar to that of the liberal Democrats. China offered the perfect platform for conservatism to establish itself at this time, not just against liberalism but also against the moderates in the Republican Party.

The pivotal contest for the 1952 GOP presidential nominee brought all these tensions to a head. The Republican leader in the Senate, Taft, was a fervent favourite of conservatives. In many ways, Eisenhower was a hesitant candidate because he was still serving as NATO's supreme commander in Europe. Eisenhower, however, felt compelled to flee largely out of concern that Taft would take the US out of NATO while also running the prospect of a devastating catastrophe in China, as Stephen Ambrose demonstrated in his classic biography. (Eisenhower felt the same way about Truman's leadership.) Following his resignation from NATO, Eisenhower returned to the US, rallied enough support from the internationalist faction of the GOP to defeat Taft at the 1952 Republican convention, and went on to win the election for president by a wide margin in November. According to Peter Feaver, a Duke University political scientist who worked as a senior consultant for strategic planning on the National Security Council under George W. Bush, Eisenhower was elected president specifically because he did not trust Taft's version of isolationism.

Eisenhower made an effort to keep his public disputes with his party's "old guard" to a minimum both as a general election candidate and as president. Nonetheless, he unmistakably led the party (and the country) in the direction of accepting American global leadership inside a strong multilateral alliance framework. That evolved into the GOP's preeminent foreign policy doctrine throughout the ensuing 60 years under Presidents Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, and George H.W. Bush, with only minor variations. Later during that time, George W. Bush provided a different emphasis by emphasising American action taken unilaterally rather than in concert with allies, although even he underlined the need for the US to continue engaging with the rest of the world. Geoffrey Kabaservice, author of "Rule and Ruin," a history of the conflicts between GOP extremists and moderates, called it "a very unbroken run."

With the long-shot presidential runs of conservative writer Patrick J. Buchanan in 1992 and 1996, Taft-like isolationism, along with nativist hostility to immigration and protectionist opposition to free trade, first reemerged as a prominent force in the GOP. Twenty years later, in his successful campaign for the 2016 GOP nomination, Trump recreated the same trifecta of nationalism, protectionism, and isolationism - what academics sometimes refer to as "defensive nationalism."

Even while some staunchly internationalist members of the GOP had hoped that Trump's election would temper these tendencies, as president he continued down all of these paths, frequently at odds with long-standing allies. Now, DeSantis' decision to support Trump's devaluation of Ukraine – in response to calls from numerous House conservatives to scale back US involvement there – is dash another hope of the GOP's beleaguered internationalist wing: that Trump's rise represented a temporary detour and the party would return to its traditional support for international engagement once he left office.

According to Haass, "Trump-ism has to be treated seriously" as a long-term influence on GOP worldview. He continued: "A much more constrained or minimum American interaction with the world, [with] not a lot of interest in contributing to global responses to crises like climate change or pandemics" is where the Republican Party's foreign policy centre of gravity has shifted.

Feaver said DeSantis was already attempting to find a middle ground on Ukraine between Trump's unequivocal scepticism and Sens. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Mitch McConnell of Kentucky's unequivocal backing before he qualified his remarks in the interview with Morgan. Yet, according to Feaver, DeSantis highlighted the dangers of adopting such a "triangulation" policy by using such incendiary rhetoric as "territorial dispute" in his opening remarks.

Triangulation is a dangerous game because, if the terminology is incorrect, you may pledge yourself during a campaign to a position that is incoherent while you are in office, according to Feaver. This is one of the most challenging topics for outsiders and opponents while campaigning for president. They can commit themselves to unsound policy stances if they utilise applause lines that appeal to the small groups of ideologically entrenched factions that they are aiming to win over for the primary.

For instance, Feaver argued that DeSantis' claim that the US should focus more on limiting China than on opposing Russia was nonsensical because "abandoning Ukraine benefits China's most significant friend, Russia." Haley made a similar case in a recent Wall Street Journal column while criticising DeSantis (albeit not explicitly for his comments to Carlson). It is naïve, according to Haley, to believe that we can defeat China by ignoring Russia.

Another logical issue in the new "Asia First" arguments from DeSantis and Trump is brought out by Daalder. "Our allies in Asia will ask, 'What's to say they are not going to do the same with reference to China?' if the US were to leave its partners in Europe." stated Daalder. "By demonstrating your readiness to confront Russia, you are also enhancing the perception in Asia that we will be there to support them when they need us."

Nonetheless, polls show that the modern Robert Taft position, which advocates for the US to diminish its ties to multilateral alliances centred on Europe and strengthen its opposition to China, has a sizable base of support among the current Republican coalition. Republican supporters were more inclined to choose China than Russia as the main US foe in the world, according to a Gallup poll issued earlier this month, by a lopsided margin of 76% to 12%. Russia was chosen by more Democrats than China. Republican support for US aid to Ukraine has also been steadily declining, according to polls. This year, the Pew Research Center and Quinnipiac University found that the proportion of GOP voters who believe the US is doing too much now equals the proportion who think it is doing the right amount or too little. (Quinnipiac discovered that significant majorities of Democrats and independents continue to view that the US is either doing too little or too much.)

The most recent Chicago Council on Global Affairs annual survey likewise documents a further alienation of GOP voters from the outside world. The percentage of Republicans who said the US should play a more active role in foreign affairs dropped to 55% in that poll, which was conducted in November, marking the lowest percentage ever found in the study. Republicans in the poll were slightly more likely than Democrats to believe that the costs of an active American foreign role now outweigh the advantages, underscoring this decline.

According to the Pew study, opinions within the Republicans on how much more or less the US should intervene in Ukraine don't differ significantly based on age or educational attainment. Nonetheless, these polls often reveal that two separate groups of Republicans—those who are younger and those without college degrees—are most strongly opposed to taking a global leadership role. For instance, a majority of Republicans without a college degree disagreed with the strong three-fifths of Republicans who stated the advantages of US leadership outweigh the disadvantages. Republicans under 60 were likewise considerably more inclined to believe that the costs outweigh the advantages than Republicans over 60.

The fact that Republicans without a college degree and younger Republicans have repeatedly registered as Trump's greatest supporters in early surveys on the 2024 election is definitely not a coincidence.

Trump is indicating that if he wins a second term, he will likely advance his isolationist and protectionist policies even further. Former national security adviser to Trump, John Bolton, has claimed that if elected to a second term, the former president would probably pull the US from NATO. In a recent campaign video, Trump made the statement, "we have to finish the process we began under my administration of fundamentally reevaluating NATO's purpose and NATO's mission." He certainly made a hint at that possibility. A four-year plan "to phase out all Chinese imports of key products, everything from electronics to steel to pharmaceuticals," according to Trump, would be implemented. That would cause a devastating shift in the world economy.

In all these respects, Donald Trump pledges to carry out Robert Taft's agenda from seven decades ago and undo Eisenhower's decisive triumph in determining the GOP's course. DeSantis doesn't seem to be fully on board the Trump train, but he also isn't blocking the tracks to stop it either. It appears quite likely that the GOP in 2024 will continue to move away from Eisenhower-style international collaboration towards a combustible combination of isolationism and unilateralism with these two individuals far ahead of any prospective competitor. And that might cause severe turbulence to spread around the world.

Daalder pointed out that the world order and traditional US relationships saw chaos during Trump's first term. But Daalder continued, "You haven't seen nothing yet. If an isolationist leader is elected president in 2024, you haven't seen anything yet."