Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., issued a rare public critique of President-elect Donald Trump and other GOP lawmakers in an op-ed published in Foreign Affairs.
McConnell pushed back against the growing embrace of what he sees as geopolitical isolationism within the party, specifically criticizing the incoming administration’s apparent foreign policy positions on Ukraine and America’s role in NATO, though Trump and his supporters claim their opposition is to endless foreign wars where the U.S. has no significant national security interests.
McConnell also criticized the Biden administration’s foreign policy approach and wrote that Trump will “inherit a world far more hostile to U.S. interests than the one he left behind four years ago.”
The former Senate GOP leader also claimed that “the response to four years of weakness must not be four years of isolation,” as he criticizes the “right-wing flirtation with isolation and decline.”
He criticized calls from within his party to “give up on American primacy,” and, in what appeared to be a direct message to the President-elect.
“The [Trump] administration will face calls from within the Republican Party to give up on American primacy,” McConnell wrote. “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 op-ed calls on Trump to embrace what he describes as the U.S.’s “hard power” by, once again, boosting defense spending while also calling on the president-elect on him to stand up to China—who McConnell argued has “intensified its efforts to expand its military, political, and economic influence worldwide.”
