Welcome back to The Argument’s poll series, where we survey Americans on the issues everyone’s fighting about. Our full crosstabs are available behind the paywall at the end of this post. Our last surveys have asked about elite perception, AI, crime, gender issues, and much more.
You can see every single poll published by The Argument here.
Our full methodology can be read here.
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Accepting his party’s nomination at the 2024 Republican National Convention, President Donald Trump promised that “the years of war, weakness, and chaos will be over” if he were elected.
He repeated some variation of this line dozens of times on the campaign trail. At a Bitcoin conference that same summer, he said, “I will end the endless wars. They never stop. Again, we had no wars. We had no new wars under your favorite president, President Trump. We had no new wars.”
Trump surrogates made the same argument frequently, as when former Democratic Rep. Tulsi Gabbard endorsed Trump, claiming that “[Trump] not only didn’t start any new wars, he took action to de-escalate and prevent wars” during his first term.
The standard story accepted by many pundits says that the GOP used to promote a more hawkish and pro-intervention foreign policy, but that Trump turned it into a more antiwar party — at least before he got bogged down in Iran (perhaps at the behest of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu). The problem with this story is that it appears not to be true.
Trump has changed the right’s understanding of what American power is for. Bush-era Republicans paired their willingness to wage war with a belief that America should spread democracy, rebuild the countries it invaded, and sustain an international order. Trump rejected those obligations but retained the appetite for force — in his view, military action should deliver concrete gains for America, without saddling the nation with responsibilities to anyone else.
In The Argument‘s new polling conducted Sept. 16-22, Republican voters share the president’s outlook: They remain enthusiastic about military action even as they distrust alliances and international institutions. That combination helps explain why a party that rejected Bush’s foreign policy still backs Trump’s war in Iran. The Republicans aren’t suddenly antiwar, they’re against liberal internationalism.
Though most Americans think the current war in Iran was a mistake, a strong majority of conservatives (61%) think it was right for the U.S. to start the war.
Whether you’re looking at 2024 Trump voters, self-identified conservatives, or Republicans, the story is roughly the same: Just over 60% support the current war in Iran. The narrative that Trump is betraying his base simply doesn’t match the polling data.
The right is also more likely than the left to approve of war in general and in a wide variety of scenarios. We asked poll respondents about past wars, and Republicans viewed America’s wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Vietnam far more favorably than Democrats did. Despite Trump’s criticism, a clear majority of Republicans still think it was correct to invade Iraq!
We also polled a number of hypothetical scenarios to decipher when voters think the U.S. is justified in taking military action. In every single scenario polled, a majority of Republicans said that military action was either always or usually justified — including a scenario where the action is just to promote America’s economic interests. And Republicans were more likely to approve of military action than Democrats in every scenario.
Trump has, of course, been more than happy to take military action in his second term. He sent special operations forces into Venezuela to kidnap the country’s dictator, Nicolas Maduro, and the administration has killed over 200 people in an ongoing series of military strikes, begun about a year ago, on alleged drug traffickers in the Caribbean and Pacific Ocean. Last spring, he began an extensive bombing campaign of Houthi rebels in Yemen, striking the group more than 1,100 times and killing hundreds. All this was before he unilaterally launched a war on Iran in an attempt to overthrow the country’s government.
Now that the Iran war is dragging into its ninth month, many onetime Trump supporters have turned on him, seeing it as a betrayal. Joe Rogan lamented that “no one thought that we were gonna go into this prolonged war with Iran,” while Tucker Carlson radiated a sense of betrayal, calling the war “absolutely disgusting and evil.”
Trump, it turns out, hasn’t changed the Republican Party in the way many people assumed he had. So how did we get here?
The anti-war presidency that wasn’t
The easiest way to unpack this paradox is to realize that Trump did change Republican foreign policy — just not in the ways that people usually assume. I think it’s true that the political right in the Trump era is considerably more skeptical of military entanglements than the old neoconservative establishment was. But they’re not skeptical at all of using force.
Former President George W. Bush didn’t invade Iraq merely to stop a threat to the United States. His administration was committed to the project of nation-building and the idea of spreading democracy abroad, which is part of how U.S. forces ended up spending so many years in both Iraq and Afghanistan. However poorly those military adventures may have turned out, Bush-era Republican leaders took seriously the idea that American power came with great obligations. They believed in rebuilding countries America invaded, supporting the new governments, and constructing an international order that would promote liberal democracy.
Trump is allergic to the very idea of such obligations. He views international affairs as a zero-sum contest. In the 2015 speech announcing his candidacy, Trump said the U.S. had spent $2 trillion on Iraq, lost thousands of lives, and gotten “nothing,” while claiming he had warned: “Don’t hit Iraq,” because it would “totally destabilize the Middle East.” He would later repeatedly criticize the war, calling it a horrible decision and a “big, fat mistake.”1
Trump’s main criticism of the war in Iraq was that it cost the U.S. an enormous amount of money and lives and we didn’t get anything out of it, which is why he often advocated for seizing Iraq’s oil. “Take the oil” was a Trump obsession for decades before he entered public office — he advocated taking Iran’s oil by force all the way back in 1987. His fixation on using foreign policy to seize resources is also why he cut an oil deal with the new Venezuelan leadership after kidnapping Maduro.
In a major 2016 speech, Trump promised that America was getting out of the nation-building business. But in that same speech, he promised unquestioned American military dominance and said that the world is most peaceful “when America is strongest.”
The Republican base seems to agree with him. For decades, Republicans were more likely than Democrats to say that the U.S. should take an active role in world affairs. But that number has reversed in recent years, with the major flip happening in 2016 as Trump was running for president. In 2023, only 47% of Republicans agreed the U.S. should take an active role, compared with 70% of Democrats.
As we can see above, that decline isn’t driven by the Republican base suddenly becoming skeptical of war overall. Instead, it appears that conservatives are simply less likely to believe in the idea of international obligations. Republican support for the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change declined after Trump’s first election, Republican support for defending South Korea has declined, and a growing share of Republicans also believe that America’s security alliances with European nations provide no benefits.
This skepticism is reflected in The Argument’s recent polling questions on attitudes toward NATO and the U.N., which finds that Republicans are far less favorably inclined towards international institutions than Democrats.
Trump doesn’t dislike military action. He just hates the idea that America might undertake such actions for any purpose higher than self-interest. If there’s a Trump doctrine, it’s a selfish war doctrine: Do what’s best for me. Show strength at all times. Don’t let allies, enemies, or anyone else take advantage of you. Don’t get bogged down by treaties or obligations, but make sure that other countries are terrified of what might happen if they cross you.
The median Republican seems to have absorbed this lesson. They’re still far more likely to favor military actions than Democrats — whether past, current, or hypothetical future actions. But they distrust our alliances, dislike international agreements, and don’t want to be burdened or constrained by formal commitments.
In the end, Trump didn’t dislodge the right’s hawkishness, but he did transform it. Republicans are now less interested in maintaining the world and more interested in dominating it, less willing to accept long-term obligations, but still eager to swing the biggest stick.
This leaves the Republican Party in a difficult position.The party’s base seems to fundamentally agree with the Trump doctrine of selfish war, but the Iran war is deeply unpopular with both liberals and moderates. And the war’s popularity continues to drop as it drags out longer and longer, leading to increases in fuel prices and the cost of living that the public directly blames on the war. Add those factors together, and it’s a major reason why the midterms are shaping up to be a disaster for the GOP.
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