Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) is worried his own party will repeat mistakes from the 1930s — and warned about it in an opinion piece Thursday in The New York Times.
McConnell — who endorsed former President Donald Trump's 2024 campaign in March — kicked off his piece lamenting that Europe and the United States met a "militant authoritarian with appeasement or naïve neglect" in the '30s, and said today America and its allies face "some of the gravest threats to our security since Axis forces marched across Europe and the Pacific."
While he made no mention that Trump's own rhetoric has raised alarm bells and been compared to that of authoritarian governments — as recently as this week — McConnell said some of those same forces that derailed a response in the 1930s have returned.
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McConnell pointed to problems he sees "here at home" — and took a shot at the foreign policy stances of some of the louder voices in the GOP.
"Some vocal corners of the American right are trying to resurrect the discredited brand of prewar isolationism and deny the basic value of the alliance system that has kept the postwar peace," McConnell wrote. "This dangerous proposition rivals the American left’s longstanding allergy to military spending in its potential to make America less safe."
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The Republican stalwart warned his party that it shouldn't take a major catastrophe like Pearl Harbor to "wake today’s isolationists from the delusion that regional conflicts have no consequences for the world’s most powerful and prosperous nation."
"With global power comes global interests and global responsibilities," McConnell wrote.
Other major Republican leaders have also pushed back against isolationism in history, including Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, former President Ronald Reagan, and former President George W. Bush.
McConnell's piece comes after a poll last fall from the Chicago Council on Global Affairs found that for the first time in nearly 50 years, "a majority of Republicans in 2023 said it would be best for the future of the United States to stay out of — rather than take an active part in — in world affairs."
The finding represents a major shift in public opinion in the last decade, the organization said, when Republican supporters were more likely than Democrats to "favor an active role abroad."
