Opinion: Nikki Haley has abandoned Trump’s foreign policy

Foreign policy can be confusing and complicated. Especially in campaigns, pundits try to simplify it, putting labels on candidates. Some are hawks, others doves.

In this menagerie, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley sounds like a caricature of a hawk. She uses Manichean language about a “moral” struggle between “good and evil,” in which the U.

S. is good and Russia, China, North Korea, Iran and others are evil and must be opposed, not “appeased. ” Foreigners tend to regard such framing as naïve and superficial, if not hypocritical.

But it’s not necessarily wrong; in many ways it’s standard campaign hyperbole. More pertinently, it comes out of a worldview that not so long ago lay at the center of American as well as Republican foreign policy. If you ask foreign-policy wonks, the dichotomy that matters isn’t hawks versus doves — it’s often not clear what those terms even mean — but the spectrum bounded by isolationism and internationalism.

Advocates for the isolationist side argue for “strategic restraint” in world affairs and selective retrenchment from America’s many foreign entanglements. Those on the internationalist side support continued engagement with allies and multilateral institutions, even “hegemonic” leadership, with the U. S.

in effect acting as a global policeman to preserve a minimum of order. In the grand sweep of American history, U. S.

foreign policy has mostly been isolationist, as Charles Kupchan at Georgetown University has documented. But from World War II onward, there was a bipartisan consensus that favored internationalism. The U.

S. was seen as the indispensable power to enforce systems of trade, finance and security that were based on rules, and the belief was that this system especially benefited smaller countries. During the presidency of Barack Obama, however, the pendulum started to swing back toward retrenchment.

The U. S. was seen as overstretched and in need of “nation building here at home.

” And then came Donald Trump — who, as is his wont, took a wrecking ball to whatever was left of any bipartisan consensus on the need for U. S. leadership.

His “America First” favored transactionalism over strategy, nationalism over multilateralism, and isolationism over leadership. Trump showed contempt for U. S.

alliances, disdained institutions such as the U. N. that the U.

S. once helped build, and coddled autocrats such as Russian President Vladimir Putin while harassing democratic leaders such as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. In short, he had the world upside down.

MAGA Republicans seem to have accepted Trump’s worldview, or are at least indulging it. But there are rank-and-file Republicans in Congress and elsewhere who still hew to the older notions about the U. S.

responsibility to preserve international order. The party is genuinely split and could go either way. When Haley was Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations, she had no choice but to be his bullhorn.

But for a top diplomat, she was also notably undiplomatic in clashing with the Trump administration. Her time at the U. N.

, moreover, seems to have made her thoughtful. That already sets her apart from the likes of Trump and Ramaswamy. Haley the presidential candidate, as distinct from Haley the U.

N. envoy, now seems squarely in the internationalist camp. All the Republican contenders talk tough on China, because that’s in vogue.

But Haley is equally clear on the need to keep supporting Ukraine against Russia’s genocidal war of aggression, and about the U. S. role in the world’s other conflicts and crises.

Which brings us back to that other spectrum in American politics — not the one between hawks and doves, realists and idealists, isolationists and internationalists. It’s the one between nuanced and dumb, intellectually humble and populist, thoughtful and brutalist. Every nation gets the foreign policy it deserves, to paraphrase a famous insight.

If moderators ask bad questions, they’ll get platitudes. If primary voters want sound bites, they’ll be served bilge. And if Americans reward answers that are simplistic while punishing those that are subtle, they’ll be less secure.

Right now, it’s Republicans who are facing this choice between subtle and brute. On foreign policy at least, Haley may be their last best hope. .