How Trump's 'Don-roe Doctrine' is different than Bush-era GOP foreign policy
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hi, this is Juliana Plews in Benito Juarez Airport in Mexico City. After spending four months studying abroad in Mexico, I'm finally about to head home to the U.S. This podcast was recorded at 12.17 p.m.
on Monday, January 12, 2026.
Things may have changed by the time you hear it, but I'll probably be back in the U.S. missing my tacos al pastor. Okay, here's the show.
Man, I went to Mexico City like two years ago and I still think about the tacos on an almost weekly basis.
I'm going in February. So I'll tell you about the tacos.
Send reports back, please. Actually, can you just send us tacos? Yeah, mail. Like put them in dry ice or something? You don't want that.
Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Myles Parks. I cover voting.
I'm Danielle Kurtzleben. I cover the White House. And I'm Mara Liason, senior national political correspondent.
And today on the podcast, Donald Trump is the America first president. He started his political career campaigning against the neoconservative policies that brought years-long conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. Here he is talking at a Republican presidential debate in 2016.
Obviously, it was a mistake. So George Bush made a mistake. We can make mistakes. But that one was a beauty. We should have never been in Iraq. We have destabilized the Middle East.
But how does that square with what looks to be a little bit like nation building in Venezuela right now? Danielle, I want to start with you. Give a little bit of context here. When we talk about the neoconservative values of the George W. Bush era, what do we mean by that?
So we're going to talk here about neoconservatism specifically in the context of foreign policy, which is how it is largely known in the US right now. And it is largely remembered for its role in the George W. Bush era. Now, during that time, neoconservatism is the ideology that. sent the U.S. into Iraq and kept the U.S. there to try to build a democracy there. The idea behind neoconservatism is not only that you go intervene in foreign countries, but also that you're trying to export American values like democracy, like free speech, like all of the sort of bedrock things that we think of as being part of the USA. So for example, former Vice President Dick Cheney is considered a leading voice from back then of neoconservatism.
And here he was talking in 2003, talking to CBS about why the US should go into Iraq.
I think our goal is an objective. And I think the objective of any of the Iraqi people in the opposition as well, too, is to establish a a broadly representative government in Iraq that has due regard for the various groups and for the human rights, protects the territorial integrity of Iraq. All of those kinds of considerations would go into what comes next.
He's not really talking there about we're doing this for us. We have some real fundamental reasons to protect the U.S.
What is the significance of Trump's 'America First' foreign policy?
going in there. Yes, this administration did promote the idea of WMDs. But when they were selling this idea, they said, no, this is also about human rights, as Cheney said there. This is about building democracy there. So that is what neoconservatism was.
So neoconservative fundamentally was about exporting values, nation-building, meaning that the Iraqis were going to embrace the kind of democratic values and human rights that Americans had. It didn't work out so well, and it's very, very different than the kind of interventionism we're seeing now with Donald Trump.
Well, I want to walk through because I do think this evolution over the last 25 years is fascinating. Danielle, kind of walk through how we end up in the 2015 era then where Donald Trump kind of opens his political career by being very America first, by being what seems to me to be almost isolationist.
Yeah. So let's start with the end of the George W. Bush era, right? By then, the view of what the U.S. had done and was doing in Iraq was slipping. People were just getting really sick of having U.S. soldiers in Iraq, having sent them there and thinking that they were going to improve things and get out.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–2:58
2
What is the significance of Trump's 'America First' foreign policy?
2:58–5:40
3
How did neoconservatism shape U.S. foreign policy during the Bush era?
5:40–14:39
4
What are the differences between Trump’s and Bush’s foreign policy approaches?
14:39–17:15