“A Battle for the Soul of This Nation”: How Domestic Polarization Affects US Foreign Policy in Post-Trump America

Abstract

Growing polarization among the US electorate has in recent years attracted considerable attention from academic and non-academic observers. This paper examines some of the ways in which polarization affects US foreign and security policy in the post-Trump era. In particular, the paper offers an account of why bipartisan agreement over the so-called “rise of China” has prevailed in the face of powerful trends towards increased polarization, while domestic opinions over US aid to Ukraine have become much more contested. Drawing on a constructivist understanding of foreign policy as performative of a certain vision of the domestic self, this paper shows how US aid to Ukraine has become entangled with competing visions of the US, while domestic opinions of China have remained stable. While such a constructivist understanding does not necessarily challenge rationalist accounts, it is helpful in unravelling the link between national identity, domestic polarization, and foreign policy.

I ran for President because I believed we were in a battle for the soul of this nation. I still believe that to be true. I believe the soul is the breath, the life, and the essence of who we are. The soul is what makes us “us.” ¹

Joe Biden, 2022

Growing polarization among the US electorate has lately attracted considerable attention from observers. A recent longitudinal study from the Carnegie Endowment for Peace suggested that “none of the wealthy, consolidated democracies of East Asia, Oceania, or Western Europe…have faced similar levels of polarization for such an extended period,” and concluded somewhat ominously that “the United States is in uncharted and very dangerous territory.” ² Scholars and practitioners are seemingly in agreement that domestic polarization presents serious challenges in the realm of foreign and security policy. Leading IR scholar Stephen Walt has suggested that domestic polarization now poses a global credibility problem for the US. ³ Why, Walt rhetorically asks, would other states follow the lead of the US when its leadership might drastically reverse its foreign policies in a few years? And in a survey from 2018, US foreign policy professionals ranked domestic polarization as the number one threat to their country, ahead of China and Russia. ⁴ To be sure, US foreign policy has been subject to partisan contestation ever since the early days of the republic. However, a crucial question, not only for the US, but for the international system as a whole, is the extent to which accelerating polarization is spilling over into the domains of foreign, security, and defence policy—realms historically cordoned off from intense partisanship.

To understand how polarization impacts US foreign and security policy, I examine the domestic dimensions of two of the biggest issues on the contemporary US national security agenda: the US's commitment to Ukraine following the Russian invasion in February 2022, and the so-called “rise of China.” On one hand, one year after Russia's invasion of Ukraine, significant cracks appeared in what initially had been bipartisan consensus over US support to Ukraine. Among ordinary Republican voters in particular, support for continued US aid to Ukraine declined. ⁵ On the other hand, regarding how the US should respond to the rise of China, there has been no real change in bipartisan support at either the congressional or mass level. ⁶ Thus, despite both situations remaining largely the same, the two cases exhibit different outcomes. Unlike rationalist scholarship, which has grappled with the causes as well as the effects of polarization on US foreign policy, my argument uses a constructivist lens to understand the link between foreign policy, national identity, and polarization. By focusing on the struggle for US identity inherent in foreign policy discourse, such an account highlights how polarization became not only possible, but likely, in the Ukrainian case, and not in the Chinese one. Using interpretivist process-tracing, I show how Russia's invasion of Ukraine became entangled with conflicting visions of American identity. However, China and its growing power and influence did not become a target of controversy amidst, as Joe Biden put it, “the battle for the soul of this nation.” A constructivist understanding of foreign policy is helpful in accounting for the link between national identity, domestic polarization, and foreign policy, as it complements, rather than competes with, rationalist accounts.

The paper unfolds as follows. The first section examines the existing literature on the causes and consequences of domestic polarization on US foreign and security policy, and positions the article in relation to this literature. The second section presents the theoretical commitments of the paper, and the research design is briefly outlined. The third and fourth sections examine the ways in which Russia, and not China, has become entangled with highly divisive debates about US identity. The final section summarizes the paper's main argument and draws some further implications.

Domestic polarization and US foreign policy

Polarization, understood as “a state in which the opinions, feelings, behaviours, or interests of a group or society become more bimodal and the two modes move further apart,” has been on the rise in the US for several decades. ⁷ In effect, polarization in this context refers to ideological polarization, where attitudes become bimodal, or a set of contrasting opinions closely associated with the two parties and held at both mass and elite levels. What, however, does growing domestic polarization mean for US foreign, security, and defence policy? While the polarization of foreign policy can be traced back to the Vietnam War in the 1960s ⁸ and further accelerated after the end of the Cold War, ⁹ several recent studies suggest that lawmakers, as well as public opinion, have since moved further apart on issues of foreign policy, just as they have on domestic matters. ¹⁰ Views on climate change, immigration, and arms control have grown increasingly polarized. However, Democratic and Republican lawmakers continue to vote together on issues of foreign policy much more often than they do on domestic issues. ¹¹ Finally, drawing on surveys conducted by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, Dina Smeltz has argued that there is considerable variation in threat perception between Democrats and Republicans, where the latter tend to be more concerned with “hard security” issues such as China and terrorism, and the former with “soft security” issues such as climate change. ¹²

Previous literature has examined the causes and consequences of domestic polarization for US foreign policy. Using longitudinal data to identify the causes of this polarization, Gyung-Ho Jeong and Paul J. Quirk have argued that the main drivers of polarization are high-profile foreign policy events such as the end of the Cold War and the Iraq War; as well as rivalry between the two parties and, most strongly, the effects of ideological polarization. ¹³ The two conclude that “foreign policy is largely domestic politics by other means.” ¹⁴ Several scholars have argued that the end of the Cold War and the rapid shift to a unipolar international system gave the US government a considerable degree of freedom to conduct foreign policy. ¹⁵ However, casting doubt on the proposition that external threats automatically lead to less polarization on foreign policy issues, Rachel Myrick has drawn on survey experiments to argue that “new threats introduced in already polarized contexts are likely to sow greater division” than to unite the citizenry. ¹⁶ Her findings suggest, along the lines of Jeong and Quirk, that general ideological polarization on domestic issues spill over into foreign policy. ¹⁷ Overall, then, there is some scholarly consensus that polarization in the realm of foreign and security policy is largely derivative of broader domestic polarization.

The more specific consequences of polarization for foreign policy remain, as Gordon M. Friedrichs notes, understudied. ¹⁸ He observes that the “most common assumption is that domestic polarization prohibits the utilization of United States's material power to enact a liberal internationalist grand strategy based on a bipartisanship consensus that has helped in maintaining the post-World War II international order.” ¹⁹ In other words, polarization is often understood as making it harder to sustain US grand strategy over time. Indeed, a major concern that emerged during Donald Trump's presidency was whether bipartisan consensus on US grand strategy was eroding so quickly as to call into question the continued support for the liberal internationalism that has underpinned US foreign and security policy ever since the end of the Cold War. ²⁰ When it comes to the consequences of polarization, research has suggested that “polarization is making it harder for the US to contribute constructively to global problem-solving and international order maintenance.” ²¹

Virtually all existing scholarly work on polarization and US foreign policy has been implicitly or explicitly rationalist in orientation. There is, however, a particular version of constructivism that may help advance our understanding of how societal polarization carries over into the realm of foreign and security policy. More specifically, a constructivist take enables us to approach the question of foreign policy polarization as a contestation over a certain vision and identity of the US itself. The next section turns to the theoretical foundations of such an approach.

Foreign policy and the politics of national identity

In a seminal text, David Campbell argued that foreign policy could be understood as affirming, constituting, and consolidating discursive representations of domestic self and foreign other. Such a constitutive perspective on foreign policy directs our attention to how foreign policy representations establish the boundaries that constitute subjects, objects, and modes of conduct, making certain actors and events “foreign.” ²² In Richard Ashley's words, foreign policy is thereby understood as “a specific sort of boundary-producing political performance.” ²³ Drawing on a relational understanding of identity, foreign policy is in such a tradition understood as constitutive of political community, and not, as Campbell put it, “the external deployment of instrumental reason on behalf of an unproblematic internal identity situated in an anarchic realm of necessity.” ²⁴ Working empirically with such an understanding of foreign policy, Campbell argued that not only was the Soviet Union constructed as an external existential threat to the American way of life, but, just as important, communism was also understood to be an internal threat, in the form of “radical” trade unions and even, during the McCarthy era, movie directors and Hollywood actors. Such a, loosely speaking, poststructuralist understanding of foreign policy has come to occupy an important place in certain corners of IR.

While the Trump administration engaged in a number of xenophobic “othering” practices, the others referenced, such as migrants, progressives, and “the establishment” writ large, were, as in populist discourses globally, often constructed as internal rather than external dangers to the US. ²⁵ The ideational dimensions of Biden's foreign policy discourse should in part be understood as a thoroughgoing rejection of Trump's thinly veiled ethnonationalism. ²⁶ There are at least two components of this rejection. First, the Biden administration has been explicit about linking foreign policy and domestic politics—a notion that lies at the heart of the Interim National Security Strategic Guidance released in March 2021. ²⁷ The Guidance explicitly ties the importance of US domestic reform, such as tackling systemic racism, to the credibility of its foreign policy abroad. Second, for several years, leading Democrats have been arguing for a foreign policy based on a rejection of global authoritarianism and a concomitant promotion of democracy. This theme emerged among Democrats during the Trump administration and explicitly links authoritarian domestic forces in the US, which Trumpism is deemed to epitomize, to authoritarian leaders abroad such as Vladimir Putin, Xi Jingping, and Viktor Orbán. The Guidance goes so far as to proclaim that the US is “increasingly under siege” from authoritarian global trends, domestic and foreign. And in one of Biden's first major foreign policy speeches, he claimed that “in so many places, including in Europe and the United States, democratic progress is under assault.” ²⁸ Such is the ideational background against which the contemporary US domestic debate over China and Ukraine must be understood.

Research design

The paper examines the US debates on the rise of China (January 2017–March 2023) and over US aid to Ukraine (February 2022–March 2023) as two cases with known outcomes. While different in many respects, the cases share some important characteristics: both involve great powers whose relations to the US have been subject to intense domestic debate. Moreover, existing scholarship emphasizes the “Trump effect,” where the recent president's election precipitated unprecedented degrees of polarization in the US, with no signs of abating. ²⁹ The time frame for the US debate on China has been chosen since during this time, one might have expected domestic polarization to spill over into US policy on China, something that did not happen. In the first case, bipartisanship has endured and in the second case, bipartisanship has become much more contested. Thus, the paper employs a comparative case study design that combines within-case analysis with cross-case comparison. Methodologically, the paper utilizes a form of interpretivist process-tracing when accounting for the different outcomes of the cases. ³⁰ The interpretivist tradition of process-tracing could be understood as reconstructing the conditions of possibility for a certain outcome, and, as Jutta Weldes puts it, the focus is “not why a particular course of action was chosen but how it was possible.” ³¹ In other words, discourses, narratives, or imaginaries provide the conditions of possibility for state behaviour but, as such, they do not determine a certain outcome. Such a focus, as Ronald Krebs has noted, resembles the positivist notion of a necessary cause. ³²

As such, interpretivist, constructivist process-tracing does not compete with rationalist explanations, which would rather focus on how actors compete to maximize utility under conditions of strategic interaction. Instead, process-tracing seeks to reconstruct the ideational resources from which actors draw to make certain claims. Therefore, as James Fearon and Alex Wendt have suggested, rationalism and constructivism should be understood as complementary, as they account for different aspects of the social world. ³³ Ultimately, the constructivist story told below seeks to complement rather than compete with a number of rationalist hypotheses that could be generated when trying to account for the different outcomes.

The robust bipartisanship on the rise of China

Although analysts and academics have long voiced concerns over the “rise of China,” China emerged as the top foreign threat on the national security agenda during the Trump administration. The president himself primarily perceived China as engaging in unfair trade practices, and towards the end of his tenure, he also blamed the country for its lack of transparency around the coronavirus. However, a number of highly influential lower-level players in the Trump administration such as Matt Pottinger ³⁴ and others now tied to the so-called Marathon Initiative, ³⁵ as well as the national security advisor H.R. McMaster, state secretary Mike Pompeo, and secretaries of defence Jim Mattis and Mark Esper all perceived China as a wide-ranging security threat to US global primacy and/or the rules-based international order. ³⁶ From 2018, the National Defense Strategy (NDS) fundamentally shifted US defence priorities away from counter-insurgency and anti-terrorist operations to near-peer competition, primarily with China and secondarily with Russia. It soon became clear that the key players advocating for such a shift were a rather bipartisan group of experts. As early as 2019, Richard Bush and Ryan Hass at Brookings argued that a “new bipartisan consensus has emerged around a tougher, less restrained approach for challenging China's rise.” ³⁷ Moreover, when looking at public opinion polls, in February 2022, 41 percent of respondents held a “very unfavourable” view of China, as compared to just 13 percent in February 2017. ³⁸ Even though more Republicans than Democrats harbour unfavourable views of the country, solid majorities in both parties hold negative opinions of China. ³⁹ This section seeks to account for this bipartisanship by reconstructing the major identity-related constructions of China among Democrats as well as Republicans. These constructions largely avoid entanglement with contested visions of American national identity, which play a part in the lack of partisanship surrounding the issue.

After the Trump administration left the White House, it soon became apparent that the Biden administration would not reverse its predecessor's policy on China. Although the rhetoric was softened, emphasizing “competition, not conflict,” substantial policy remained. ⁴⁰ The tariffs introduced by the Trump administration were retained and export controls substantially enhanced. ⁴¹ Key players in Biden's administration shared the threat assessment from the Trump years. ⁴² Biden's National Security Strategy, which came out in late 2022, largely retained the threat prioritization of its predecessor, referring to China as “the pacing challenge” for the US, a designation aligned with that of Mark Esper's defence department. ⁴³ The Biden administration's tough stance on China enjoyed widespread support among Democrats in Congress. Former speaker Nancy Pelosi's high-profile visit to Taiwan in August 2022, while applauded by Republicans, was reported to have been discouraged by the White House. Although, to be sure, other voices in the broader Democratic foreign policy establishment harboured concerns about the rigid fault line between democracy and authoritarianism that the Biden administration emphasized in its dealings with China, and hoped for a less aggressive rhetoric where cooperation was emphasized more strongly. ⁴⁴ As Matt Duss, advisor on foreign policy to Senator Bernie Sanders, put it, “progressives are cautioning against falling into the trap of treating conflict with China as a way to build bipartisan unity.” ⁴⁵ On the whole, though, the administration's approach to China had few, if any, outspoken critics among Democrats in Congress.

Within the GOP, broad agreement on a tough stance toward China remained after Trump left office and tended to unite neo-conservatives and Trumpian populists, with the latter often exhibiting neo-isolationist proclivities. In 2021–2022 a political dynamic emerged that was reminiscent of the Cold War, where Democrats were routinely attacked for being “too soft” on the Soviet Union and often sought to pre-empt such charges by adopting more hawkish stances. This dynamic is illustrated by the so-called balloon incident in February 2023. ⁴⁶ When a Chinese balloon was spotted over the US, many Republicans criticized the Biden administration for not bringing it down earlier than it did. ⁴⁷ Within a week, the US shot down three other flying objects at high altitude, which, as later discovered, had no relation to China. Shortly afterwards, the House passed a resolution condemning China with 419 votes in favour and not a single vote of dissent.

One of the most pointed expressions of strength as well as the limits of the bipartisan consensus on China lies in the establishment of a House select committee on the CCP following the Republican capture of the House in the 2022 mid-terms. During its first hearing in March 2023, the Republican chair Mike Gallagher described China as an existential threat to the US. ⁴⁸ The Democratic members of the committee used less fiery language but called for unity since, as minority party ranking member Raja Krishnamoorthi put it, “the CCP wants us to be fractious, partisan, and prejudiced.” ⁴⁹ However, despite the different rhetoric, the bipartisan agreement on China was obvious. Establishment outlets such as The Washington Post lauded the bipartisanship on what an editorial described as “the most significant international threat” to the US. ⁵⁰ Several well-known experts, however, were concerned. Max Boot warned that a hawkish consensus may whip up “alarmism and hysteria,” which might precipitate a nuclear war with China, ⁵¹ and Fareed Zakaria called the bipartisan consensus on China “a classic example of groupthink.” ⁵² The editorial board of The New York Times also pinpointed a growing reluctance in the US to engage with China at all and the “confrontational posture” that seemed to unite the parties. ⁵³

Both establishment Republicans, such as Senator Mitch McConnell, and more populist ones, such as Senator Josh Hawley, tended to emphasize the fact that the Chinese regime is communist. ⁵⁴ Instead of recalling the divide between democracies and authoritarian states, this way of representing China drew on the divide between “the free world” and the communist one. Former secretary of state Mike Pompeo, for instance, has argued that “Americans and the world must first understand that Marxist-Leninist ideology inspires everything the CCP does,” ⁵⁵ in an explicit statement made not only out of conviction but also because, in his own telling, it infuriated Chinese leaders. ⁵⁶ Such a framing of China also harked back to traditional Republican views of the Soviet Union and was very familiar from the Cold War. For Democrats, Xi's China fitted into the authoritarian/democratic axis, which served as a normative lode star for the Biden administration. In addition, for many Democrats, including Pelosi, Chinese human rights violations had been a longstanding preoccupation ever since the Tiananmen Square massacre. ⁵⁷ When, in one of its last foreign policy acts, the Trump administration chose to designate the Chinese treatment of the Uighurs as genocide, the then nominee for secretary of state, Anthony Blinken, agreed. ⁵⁸

There is, however, at least one point of intersection between the rise of China and the domestic struggle for US identity. As part of the “racial reckoning” following the murder of George Floyd in 2020, as well as the rise in anti-Asian violence during the Covid pandemic, Democrats expressed concerns about the potential for the US-China rivalry to further inflame anti-Asian sentiments at home. ⁵⁹ At about the same time as the select committee on the CCP was launched, Democratic representative Judy Chu was attacked by Republicans over her alleged ties to the Chinese Communist Party. ⁶⁰ Krishnamoorthi argued that the committee must reject “rhetoric that could end up being discriminatory toward Chinese-origin people or Asian-origin people.” ⁶¹ Republican chairman Gallagher, however, agreed with Krishnamoorthi and said that “we should not question anybody's loyalty to the United States.” ⁶² Again, the conservative emphasis on the CCP rather than China enabled such a distinction to be made.

The steady erosion of support for US aid to Ukraine

One year after the February 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, US domestic support for aid to Ukraine had fallen considerably, despite the developments of the war itself in which the Ukrainian military greatly exceeded Western expectations in resisting Russian attacks. Throughout the first year of the war, Biden faced little criticism from progressives in his party, who tended to agree with his strong support for Ukraine. ⁶³ There was a noticeable shift among Republican voters: while in March of that year, merely 9 percent of GOP voters believed that the US was doing too much to aid Ukraine, but by September, that number rose to 32 percent. ⁶⁴ And at the beginning of 2023, a slight majority of GOP voters wanted Congress to oppose more aid to Ukraine. ⁶⁵ In addition, in March 2023, Ron DeSantis, Trump's main competitor for Republican presidential nominee, stated that protecting Ukraine's borders was not in the US national interest, and somewhat dismissively referred to the war as a “border dispute.” This position was similar to Trump's—that Ukraine should cede territory to Russia. ⁶⁶ As it was inconsistent with previous positions that DeSantis had taken on the conflict when he served on the Foreign Affairs Committee in Congress, many observers suggested that he was positioning himself for the upcoming presidential primary by following the direction of the GOP base. Hence, a rationalist account could point to DeSantis's apparent change of heart as a way of maximizing support among Republican primary voters. Another rationalist account suggests that for those voters, it is rational to support like-minded authoritarian movements abroad, since they may be expected to be more accommodating to a US president with authoritarian proclivities. Rather than refuting such explanations, this section seeks to give an account of how this shift among Republican voters became possible, which focuses on how constructions of US identity became entangled with foreign policy.

From the start of the invasion, liberal observers opined that the GOP might be divided over US aid, in part due to Trump's attempt to cultivate good relations with Putin and the former president's tendency to praise the Russian leader. ⁶⁷ In fact, when running in the 2016 GOP primary, Trump positioned himself as the most pro-Russian candidate, and investigations into alleged ties between the Trump campaign and Russian interference in the general election cast a long shadow over the Trump administration. ⁶⁸ In the beginning of the conflict, however, these concerns seemed largely unwarranted. Although many Republican politicians argued that had Trump been president, Russia would not have tried to invade Ukraine in the first place, there was overwhelming bipartisan consensus over US support for Ukraine. Some of the more populist Republicans, most notably Senator Josh Hawley, Senate candidate J.D. Vance, and Tucker Carlson, the most-watched cable news host in the US at the time, did express wariness of US involvement early on. ⁶⁹ However, in the overall response, mainstream Republican thinking on foreign and security policy dominated. ⁷⁰ Moreover, the views of the GOP elite seemed to be shared by regular voters. A Pew poll from March 2022 showed that a majority of conservative Republicans believed that Biden had not done enough to stop Russia, and only 9 percent thought that he had done too much to stop Putin. ⁷¹

For the most part, mainstream Republican skepticism to US aid was not based on warmer sentiments for Putin's Russia. When opposing the $40 billion spending bill in the spring of 2022, Senator Hawley argued that the bill “neglects priorities at home, allows Europe to freeload, short changes critical interests abroad, and comes with no meaningful oversight.” ⁷² He later argued at length that US support to Ukraine was akin to the nation-building the neo-conservatives used to engage in, and therefore doomed to fail. ⁷³ The Heritage Foundation, the most influential conservative think tank, also came out against the bill on fiscal grounds. Some Republicans also worried that the strong focus on Russia would detract from, and delay, the pivot to the Indo-Pacific—in their minds, a far more important threat to US interests. There was, however, another layer to the conservative position on Ukraine: Putin's Russia was often hailed in far-right circles as a champion of traditional values. ⁷⁴ In a series of episodes before the invasion, Tucker Carlson made several favourable remarks about Putin: “Has Putin ever called me a racist? Has he threatened to get me fired for disagreeing with him? Has he shipped every middle-class job in my town to Russia?” ⁷⁵ And Steve Bannon, who retained an important position in far-right circles, remarked approvingly that “Putin is not woke.” ⁷⁶ Perhaps the most important area of intersection had to do with trans people: while gay rights had become fairly broadly accepted across the country, trans rights had become one of the most contentious issues in the US culture wars. Russia's regime was well aware of how divisive this issue was among the American public. ⁷⁷

When justifying the US response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Democrats in general and Biden in particular returned to a central axis of Biden's presidency: the division between democracies and autocracies. Biden's inaugural speech, delivered shortly after the attack on the Capitol, began with a promise to restore and defend the nation's “fragile” democracy. ⁷⁸ Defending democracy against authoritarianism, at home and abroad, became, at least rhetorically, a foreign policy priority for the administration, with the first Summit for Democracy in December 2021 a high-profile manifestation of this commitment. Since Russia had previously been singled out as part of a global axis of autocratic states, the democratic/authoritarian divide became a central interpretive frame for the conflict, ⁷⁹ a message that was certainly not lost on conservative observers. Noticing that President Biden had extended this heuristic to the war in Ukraine, Washington Post columnist Jason Willick argued that if “Democrats’ political battle against right-wing populism is the domestic front in the global struggle for democracy, Ukrainians’ armed battle against Russian invaders is its main foreign outpost.” ⁸⁰ Moreover, Reihan Salam, head of one of the most respected conservative think-tanks in the country, the Manhattan Institute, had in 2018 argued that whether Russia or China became the “defining rival” would have important consequences, not only for US foreign relations, but also for the othering practices that defined outgroups to the US populace. ⁸¹ For “cosmopolitan liberals,” Salam argued, Russia would fit much better into domestic narratives: after all, the US intelligence community had established that Russia sought to influence the 2016 election in Trump's favour, and the “traditional values” that Putin wanted to defend were precisely the ones liberals were perceived to oppose.

The dividing line between authoritarianism and democracy should also serve as a frame for understanding the controversy over a seemingly innocuous vote in April 2022 pertaining to a symbolic resolution in the House in support of NATO in the face of the Russian onslaught of Ukraine. Thirty percent of Republican members were opposed, which led one Democratic congressman to argue that the “GOP truly is Putin's party.” ⁸² One of the sticking points of the resolution was that it included a call for Biden to establish a Centre for Democratic Resilience at NATO. ⁸³ Several Republicans who voted against the bill argued that such a centre would potentially target conservatives in Poland and Hungary. ⁸⁴ The latter country had attracted a huge amount of attention among conservatives in recent years, ⁸⁵ with Trump publicly endorsing Orbán's re-election. ⁸⁶ The president of the German Marshall Fund, Heather Conley, noticed that the US's “deep domestic polarization has now crept into foreign and security policy. There has always been strong bipartisan support for NATO, but everything now has become polarized and can be weaponized against the other side, even if it supports US national security interests.” ⁸⁷

As the temperature was heating up in the fall of 2022 ahead of the midterms, observers opined that a “Republican winter” might be coming for Ukraine. ⁸⁸ In a high-profile speech in early September, Biden went so far as to claim that “semi-fascism” underpinned MAGA ideology, which drew angry rebuke from many conservatives, including never-Trump Republicans. The existential stakes of US elections were once again raised, which tended to spill over to the question of US aid to Ukraine. In mid-October, House minority leader Kevin McCarthy claimed that a House controlled by the GOP would be tantamount to giving a “blank check” to Ukraine. ⁸⁹ The remark drew sharp rebuke from Democrats and several Republicans. Michael McCaul, the top Republican on the Foreign Affairs Committee, retorted that there was still broad bipartisan consensus in Congress over Ukraine. The mood that McCarthy's remark manifested, however, did have material consequences: it nudged the Biden administration to get highly substantial funding bills passed before the new Congress convened in 2023. Moreover, when establishment Republicans like Mitch McConnell defended US aid to Ukraine, they did so in terms of an appeal to the US national interest, typically eschewing the Biden administration's normative framework. ⁹⁰ This framing could also be understood as appealing to the GOP's political base—opinion polls have for a long time shown that Republican voters are much more supportive of a realist foreign policy than one based on explicit moral principles.

In the second half of 2022, America First conservatives grew increasingly vocal in opposing US aid. Marjorie Taylor Greene called Volodymyr Zelensky's visit to DC “absurd” ⁹¹ and declared that in a Republican-controlled House, “not another penny” would go to Ukraine. ⁹² Vance similarly argued that Americans are “at the point where we’ve given enough money [to] Ukraine.” ⁹³ Other Trumpian congressional candidates, who ended up not winning seats, such as Blake Masters, Adam Laxalt, and Don Bolduc, also harshly criticized US aid. ⁹⁴ Democrats accused critics of “repeating Russian propaganda” ⁹⁵ and asserted that “MAGA Republicans” were pro-Russian. ⁹⁶ When Zelensky spoke before Congress in December 2022, most members applauded him, but a small group of America First Republicans made a point of not applauding, and some members such as Hawley and Taylor Greene did not even attend. ⁹⁷ When DeSantis came out as a critic of US aid to Ukraine in March 2023, one could with some justification—even at the elite level—speak of a Republican “civil war” on Ukraine, ⁹⁸ even though there was still much support for Ukraine among Republican members of Congress.

Conclusion

This article has examined some of the ways in which domestic polarization spills over into the realm of foreign and security policy in the contemporary American context. In particular, by drawing on a constructivist understanding of foreign policy as constitutive of a certain vision of US identity, one may account for why there has been such a high level of bipartisan consensus surrounding the so-called rise of China, while US aid to Ukraine has been much more contested. The main interpretive framework used by conservatives on China, freedom versus communism, tended to complement rather than challenge the Biden administration's framework of democracy versus authoritarianism. Moreover, by focusing on the CCP instead of China as such, conservatives were largely able to avoid the conflation of Chinese people with the policies pursued by the Chinese state. Against the background of “racial reckoning,” Democrats were particularly attentive to such a conflation, which they thought might inflame domestic anti-Asian sentiments. In the case of Ukraine, however, conservatives resented the framing of Russia as part of the same authoritarian axis as Trump, and therefore, by implication, a substantial share of the GOP's political base. Further, at the mass level, conservative messaging tended to portray Putin's Russia as friendly to the same values perceived to be under threat domestically. When conservative members of Congress defended the US aid to Ukraine, they resorted to justifications tied to the US national interest instead of based on a set of values.

Interpretivist research examining identity construction often avoids trying to predict future events. However, one may cautiously expect that, based on the identity constructions currently at play, the bipartisan consensus on China is likely to persist, since these constructions are largely separate from culture wars relating to American identity. When it comes to Ukraine, however, the situation is clearly different, and the GOP may continue its drift away from supporting further military aid, in particular if the Biden administration continues to emphasize Russia as part of an authoritarian global axis, which implicitly or explicitly includes large chunks of the current GOP. It should also be emphasized that the account offered here is not necessarily at odds with rationalist explanations. For instance, one may certainly suspect that when DeSantis expressed reservations of US aid to Ukraine, he did so to compete for the same Republican primary voters as Trump. As a social mechanism, self-interest arguably goes a long way in explaining behaviour. However, to understand how it became rational to question US aid to Ukraine, one needs to account for the larger ideational context in which such claims were made. Therefore, rationalist and constructivist accounts of polarization should ultimately be understood as getting at different parts of the same story.