Nobody should mistake Liz Cheney’s expulsion from the leadership of the Republican Conference in the House of Representatives for a sign that she is headed out of her party, to some unknown, possibly moderate political destination. Cheney grew up in a firmly conservative and politically partisan household, and never noticeably rebelled. She has been in the family business—government—since she was in her twenties, and she will run next year to keep the Wyoming seat that her father, Dick Cheney, held for years.
The cause of her divorce from her House colleagues is not some incipient shift in her core identity; it is Donald Trump. Cheney has said that she voted for Trump in November, but it could not have been with enthusiasm. His florid, undisciplined style and utter lack of interest in the details of statecraft are about as unlike Cheney as you can get. So is the abject terror of most House Republicans at the prospect of incurring Trump’s displeasure. Cheney is willing to say publicly that Trump’s final innings were unacceptable, and that is to her credit.
On policy, if you had to say who’s farther to the right, Cheney or Trump, it would probably be Cheney. The difference shows up most obviously in foreign policy, where Cheney, like her father, is a committed hawk and a believer in the aggressive use of American power (and that doesn’t mean soft power) around the world. Her most recent book, which she co-wrote with him, is called “Exceptional: Why the World Needs a Powerful America.” She consistently opposed Trump’s inclination to bring home American troops who have been on long deployments abroad. A harbinger of her vote to impeach Trump in January was her vote in December to override his veto of a defense bill that would have slowed his efforts to remove American forces from Afghanistan and Germany. Trump, for his part, likes to call Cheney a warmonger.
The Republican Party has always uneasily encompassed both isolationists and interventionists. Right now, it may look as if the significance of Cheney’s ouster from the Party’s leadership is that it demonstrates Trump’s continuing dominance. In the longer run, the more important message may be that interventionists have no place in the Party anymore. Neoconservatives, the G.O.P.’s most visibly hawkish cohort in the twenty-first century, have always been deeply uncomfortable with Trump. Bill Kristol, perhaps the best-known neocon and a longtime ally of Liz Cheney’s—they co-founded an organization called Keep America Safe—endorsed Joe Biden for President.
But hawks are now homeless in both parties, actually, and that poses a challenge to Joe Biden, whose tendencies are non-isolationist but also un-Cheney-like. The Republican megadonor Charles Koch recently teamed up with George Soros to start the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, dedicated to reversing the American “pursuit of military dominance.” The voting base of each party is even less drawn to Cold War internationalism than the funding élite is. Perhaps the only thing Barack Obama and Donald Trump have in common is that public reaction against the Iraq War—of which Dick Cheney was a key architect and Liz Cheney a strong supporter—helped put both of them in the White House. Even if Trump somehow lost his grip on Republican primary voters, few G.O.P. officeholders would feel safe in espousing the kind of foreign policy that Liz Cheney likes, and the Democrats won’t find it easy to convince their voters that they can engage vigorously around the world in more productive ways.
Surely the last place the Biden Administration would have chosen for a tryout of its preferred international role is Israel and Gaza, which were engulfed in violence last week. The Middle East offers Republicans a rare opportunity to demonstrate bellicosity without straying into the Trump-era danger zone of committing American forces abroad. They can react to what looks like the beginning of a war simply by saying, as Liz Cheney did on Twitter last week, “America stands with Israel.” Biden intended to depart from the practice of his predecessors by not staging a highly public initiative in the region. He has distanced himself from Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, which Trump embraced uncritically, with the aim of showing that low-profile U.S. engagement can promote peace and justice.
You can get a sense of what the Biden Administration would like to achieve in the world from an article that Antony Blinken, the Secretary of State, co-wrote with the prominent neoconservative Robert Kagan, in 2019. They began by noting ruefully that “President Trump’s ‘America First’ foreign policy—or its progressive cousin, retrenchment—is broadly popular in both parties.” At the announcement of his appointment, Blinken told a story about how, when his late stepfather, a Holocaust survivor, was rescued by an American tank in Bavaria, in 1945, “he got down on his knees and said the only three words that he knew in English that his mother taught him before the war—God bless America.” (Blinken’s paternal grandfather, who fled Russian pogroms, was an important advocate of the creation of the state of Israel.) This is not the perspective of a retrencher.
Yet the Biden Administration, so ambitious in domestic policy, has been far quieter in foreign policy. It has clearly paid close attention to Trump’s success at tapping into the populist resentment of, to use one of his favorite terms, globalists. The Blinken-Kagan article criticized the Obama Administration, in which Blinken served, for “doing too little” in Syria, and criticized Trump for pulling out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership. But Biden has not reversed those policies, or dramatically rejected most of Trump’s other foreign-policy positions, including his intention to end the American presence in Afghanistan.
In recent years, foreign-policy-makers in both parties have engendered public mistrust, presiding over not just endless wars but also a spectacular collapse of the global economy, a poorly handled immigration crisis, and, most recently, a pandemic that didn’t have to be as devastating as it is. It’s going to be a daunting task for the Biden Administration to create a meaningfully different new role for America, one that entails neither withdrawing from the world nor vainly attempting to assert dominance. Israel has now presented itself as a test case, and it offers a good example of the limitations of the impulse to celebrate Cheney. Better to endorse her stance on Trump, and to find a part for the U.S. to play in the Middle East that involves trying to reduce bloodshed and suffering, not provoking it. ♦
