Politics
The Revolutionary Change in the RNC Platform
While social and economic points carried the news cycle, it is the GOP’s fresh foreign policy that shows the party’s new direction.
When I caught an early morning flight from Boise, Idaho to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, I had one goal in mind: to help craft a Republican Party platform that reflected an America First foreign policy.
A lot of ink has been spilled in the past week about changes in the party platform related to social issues, along with discussions about how the GOP under Donald Trump has modified positions like trade and entitlements. But too little has been said about the policy program the president has the most control over—functionally more than the Constitution permits—and the decisions that’ll be life or death for Americans in uniform.
This year, in a reversal of standard practice, the Republican National Committee presented delegates with a finished product. The platform committee approved the document in less than an hour with no amendments and only a few minutes of debate.
Written in Donald Trump’s familiar style, the entire platform cover to cover is a mere sixteen pages, fifty shorter than the most recent 2016 platform. But its brevity matches its clarity.
The 2016 platform reads like a warmed-over Weekly Standard editorial circa 2002, with the same apologia for the crimes of the Bush administration and the wayward wishful thinking that has defined our post-Cold War policymakers. In sharp contrast, the new 2024 platform, with MAGA gusto, promises to use “that great [military] strength sparingly, and only in clear instances where our National Interests are threatened…” Furthermore, it acknowledges the wisdom that “War breeds inflation,” and that the goal of a second Trump term is to “PREVENT WORLD WAR THREE, RESTORE PEACE IN EUROPE AND IN THE MIDDLE EAST….”
I unequivocally support these beliefs, and that’s why I voted in favor of adopting the platform.
Traditionally, a national party platform is more than the president’s personal pitch to voters; it is meant to be a detailed document that local and state candidates can utilize to guide campaigns and shape policy.
As a delegate to the platform committee, I had planned to introduce and argue for specific planks in the foreign policy section to bolster conservatives fighting on the ground and provide auxiliary support for Donald Trump’s stated goals.
That is what I already accomplished last month at the Idaho Republican State Convention, where I successfully led a movement among delegates to include in our party platform a demand that Congress declare war before our state’s National Guard is deployed into combat and defined the governor’s duty to use the National Guard to repel the invasion at our border.
The following prescriptions don’t carry formal weight from the RNC, but they are the views of one veteran and lifelong Republican, and are representative of millions of other veterans and conservatives who seek to restore a semblance of the old, humble republic of our Founding Fathers.
With an invasion at our southern border threatening the territorial integrity of our nation, a national debt growing by billions every second, and deaths of despair sapping away the moral fiber of the American people, we must turn our eyes and our faith back to our own country before it is too late.
America First is not a new or untried idea. It was advocated by George Washington. It was incorporated in the Monroe Doctrine. It was consummated in Donald Trump’s first term. Under its banner, the United States became the strongest and most independent nation in the world.
The Republican Party, under the direction of the president acting as commander-in-chief, will mobilize the National Guard to repel the invasion at our southern border, including defending American land and citizens from cartels and other hostile adversaries.
For almost seventy-five years the American public has been subjected to the odium and infamy of undeclared warfare. Offensive wars of choice must be authorized with a declaration of war by Congress and signed by the president. The people must give informed consent through their elected representatives before America spills blood and treasure on foreign soil. Undeclared wars by unilateral executive decision are antithetical to America First.
The imperial project of neoconservatism and liberal globalism was permanently discredited when empty formulae met reality in the sands of Iraq and the mountains of Afghanistan.
The Republican Party rejects the spreading of American policy through alien methods; we are unwilling to tyrannize this country in a vain project to de-tyrannize the rest of the world.
From a military standpoint, the United States’ natural geography makes it better situated than any other nation in the world. Even in the Biden administration’s present condition of unpreparedness, no foreign power is able to diminish the political or economic independence of the American people. If we concentrate on our own defense and build the strength that this nation should maintain on its own border and in its own hemisphere, no foreign nation will ever be able to displace us economically or militarily.
The Republican Party earnestly condemns the policy of the present administration in Ukraine as reckless, provocative, and avoidable.
The resuscitation and expansion of the NATO alliance at the direction of the Biden White House invites the United States back to Old Europe, with its lack of political resolve and inability to meet defense spending parameters, in a policy where the American people are asked to furnish their money, their means, and their men to defend a wealthy continent.
If an administration may with impunity ignore the crisis which most animates the public—the unrestricted invasion of the U.S. southern border—and deliberately create a condition of war anywhere on the globe, organize a censorship campaign to suppress the truth, and demand of all citizens a suspension of good judgment and their unanimous support while it chooses to continue a fight undeclared by Congress, then representative government itself is imperiled.
Much as we abhor Russia’s criminal war against Ukraine, and greatly as we regret the blood spilled in Eastern Europe, we more deeply resent the betrayal of American institutions at home. The real firing line is not in the suburbs of Kiev. The foe is in our own household. The Democratic attempt of 1861 was to divide the country. The Democratic attempt of 2024 is to destroy its fundamental principles and domestic security in pursuit of globalism and endless war.
We denounce the mercenary system of foreign policy under the current administration and its indulgence of the military-industrial complex identified by President Dwight D. Eisenhower and reprimanded by President Donald Trump. The exploitation of the U.S. Armed Forces by high finance and politically-connected government contractors degrades their moral standing while a program of military Keynesianism disrupts the economy. Under a return to a Republican administration, patriotism will be given precedence over swollen profits.
As Donald Trump is set to receive the Republican nomination for a third time—only the second man to accomplish that feat, after Richard Nixon—I hope that the American people are given this election season a thorough treatment of our country’s role in the world, accountability for the past two decades of disaster, and a thoughtful alternative of America First.
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