DAILY CALLER NEWS FOUNDATION—A notable critic of President-elect Donald Trump appears to be gearing up to oppose key parts of the incoming administration’s foreign policy agenda, despite the electoral mandate of Trump’s “America First” slogan.
Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., is going on offense against Trump’s foreign policy worldview, calling on him Monday in a published essay to reject America First’s “flirtation with isolation and decline.”
McConnell, the longtime Senate Republican leader, is also urging the incoming second Trump administration to embrace many foreign policy positions that Trump notably rejected during the campaign, including support for additional foreign aid and free trade agreements, solidarity with NATO, and more weapons transfers to Ukraine.
“The [Trump] administration will face calls from within the Republican Party to give up on American primacy,” McConnell wrote in the essay for Foreign Affairs. “It must reject them. To pretend that the United States can focus on just one threat at a time, that its credibility is divisible, or that it can afford to shrug off faraway chaos as irrelevant is to ignore its global interests and its adversaries’ global designs. America will not be made great again by those who simply want to manage its decline.”
“The response to four years of weakness must not be four years of isolation,” McConnell added.
[Fellow GOP senators have chosen Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., to become Senate majority leader when the new Congress convenes Jan. 3.]
McConnell’s remarks advocating an interventionist foreign policy reminiscent of the George W. Bush administration and a larger defense budget to deter multiple adversaries raise questions over how far the Kentucky Republican is willing to go in opposing the president-elect’s nominees and agenda.
“We’re in a very, very dangerous world right now, reminiscent of before World War II,” McConnell told the Financial Times in an interview published Dec. 11. “Even the slogan is the same. ‘America First.’ That was what they said in the ’30s.”
The former Senate Republican leader appears to be most at odds with Trump over the Ukraine issue. McConnell claims that Trump’s deterrence of aggression by China cannot be achieved without preventing a Russian victory in Ukraine.
“Standing up to China will require Trump to reject the myopic advice that he prioritize that challenge by abandoning Ukraine,” McConnell wrote in Foreign Affairs. “A Russian victory would not only damage the United States’ interest in European security and increase U.S. military requirements in Europe; it would also compound the threats from China, Iran, and North Korea.”
Trump, who has promised to bring a quick end to the Russia-Ukraine war, has criticized President Joe Biden’s decision to escalate tensions with Russian President Vladimir Putin during the final months of his presidency.
“It’s crazy what’s taking place. It’s crazy. I disagree very vehemently with sending missiles hundreds of miles into Russia,” Trump told Time magazine during his interview as its 2024 Person of the Year, published Thursday. “Why are we doing that? We’re just escalating this war and making it worse. That should not have been allowed to be done. Now they’re doing not only missiles, but they’re doing other types of weapons. And I think that’s a very big mistake.”
McConnell’s critique of Trump’s foreign policy record and worldview follows the president-elect’s decisive electoral victory against Democrats’ presidential nominee, Kamala Harris, which marked the first time a Republican candidate won the so-called popular vote since 2004.
McConnell was reportedly one of four senators who tanked Trump’s nomination of former Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., as attorney general and has yet to meet with Pete Hegseth or Tulsi Gabbard, his nominees for defense secretary and director of national intelligence.
Though McConnell has stepped down from Senate GOP leadership, he has pledged to spend the remainder of his time in the Senate pushing back against Trump’s foreign policy worldview. The Kentucky Republican will be the incoming chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee’s defense subcommittee, giving him a high profile to advocate a larger defense budget and additional military aid for Ukraine.
“Members of my own party now contend that, somehow, the stability of markets and the deterrence of adversaries are achievable without tending to the requirements of American hard power,” McConnell said during a keynote speech Nov. 12 at an American Enterprise Institute event celebrating the Kentucky Republican’s foreign policy views.
“Confronting this particular challenge is where I now place my focus,” McConnell said. “Shoring up American primacy, combatting the dangerous tendency toward isolationism, and urgently restoring America’s hard power: This is how I will spend a great deal of the time I have left in public life.”
McConnell, who is up for reelection in 2026, has not commented on whether he plans to seek an eighth term.