The NPR Politics Podcast
How Trump's 'Don-roe Doctrine' is different than Bush-era GOP foreign policy
12 Jan 2026
Chapter 1: 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.
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Chapter 2: 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. Well, it turns out it was really hard to do that. So even Republicans had soured on the U.S.
being involved in Iraq. Now, it's not that neocons disappeared over the coming years, but they just got a little less loud. And isolationists like former Texas Representative Ron Paul got a bit louder of a voice. So fast forward to Trump. Trump was considered a real rejection of neoconservatism because, as you heard him in that debate clip we heard at the top, he talked a lot about racism.
We don't want the U.S. to be spending its treasure and sending its people overseas. We want to keep that here. That is what America first is. Now, there is quite a bit of debate about how isolationist Trump ever was, but he certainly did push the idea that the U.S. needs to be less involved overseas.
I mean, just looking at what happened here in Venezuela and Nicolas Maduro, you know, Venezuela's most recent presidential election was considered to be marred by fraud, that this is somebody who was clinging on to power against democratic values. America came in. Is that neoconservative?
But not because he rejected the results of an election. America came in and said, we're going to topple this guy because, well, he's been indicted in the United States for drug crimes, but they didn't go in there because he refused to accept the results of a democratic election. They went in there to get Maduro and to get the oil.
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Chapter 3: How did neoconservatism shape U.S. foreign policy during the Bush era?
That's the difference between Trump and neoconservatives, except I will say there is one big exception. And as Danielle says, you know, Parties are made up of many different people with many different approaches to foreign policy. But there is one big former neoconservative. Some people would say he still is one in the Trump administration, and that's Marco Rubio.
And he does have an ideological motive for wanting to get rid of left-wing dictators in – South and Central America. He's a Cuban-American. He grew up in the Cuban diaspora. And, you know, you could say he was born this way to devote his life to trying to topple dictators, left-wing dictators, and restore democracy and human rights to countries like Venezuela and Cuba.
So when we're talking about Donald Trump's foreign policy ideology, it is easy to think that, huh, his view of the world and his role in it must have changed from term one to term two. Term one, when he really ran in 2015 and 16 on saying we need to stop getting involved in all of these foreign places, foreign issues. But. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
People like Rex Tillerson, who was secretary of state, Jim Mattis, who was secretary of defense, people who curbed Donald Trump's instincts. And now he has people who are willing to enable him. And so Trump has really just gotten better at using the levers of power, and he's just doing a lot more.
Yeah, I totally agree with that. He can now do what he wants. And he has a very different approach to foreign policy than I can think of a modern example in the Republican Party that's like Trump in his view of the way the U.S. should wield its power overseas.
All right. We're going to take a quick break and more on all of this in just a second. And we're back. And we've been talking about a shift in the foreign policy of the Republican Party with Donald Trump as president. And I'm curious about Republicans in Congress. What has the response been from them on the actions in Venezuela?
Well, in large part, it's been pretty quiet. But you have had a bit of pushback, which during this Trump administration is notable because Republicans in Congress, as we all know, have been remarkably acquiescent to Donald Trump.
So there was a vote in the Senate last week to advance legislation that would force Trump to seek approval from Congress to authorize any further military action against Venezuela. And that passed 52 to 47. And it included five Republicans, Rand Paul of Kentucky, Lisa Murkowski in Alaska, Susan Collins from Maine, Todd Young in Indiana, and Josh Hawley of Missouri.
So certainly by no means a majority of Republicans. But five in this Republican era is not nothing. And it really shows that there is at least some real concerns about what Trump is doing here.
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Chapter 4: What are the differences between Trump’s and Bush’s foreign policy approaches?
He doesn't see any limits. on his ability to exercise U.S. force abroad, except that he doesn't seem to want to do this to other big superpowers. According to the Trump doctrine, the three big aggressive superpowers, China, Russia, and the U.S., can pretty much do what they want in their own sphere of influence or neighborhood. In the U.S. case, it's the Western Hemisphere.
Even though he seems very willing to use military force against smaller, weaker countries like Venezuela or maybe Greenland, He is extremely reluctant to confront the other two superpowers. He has not put pressure on Vladimir Putin to reverse his invasion of Ukraine. And he doesn't seem to be talking about doing anything to defend Taiwan against a potential Chinese takeover.
Right. Yeah. I mean, as Trump told The New York Times in that long interview they recently did, a reporter asked him if there are any checks on his power. And here's what he said.
There's one thing, my own morality, my own mind.
Which gets back to that whole thing we were talking about at the start of this episode about schools of thought in international relations. You know, the idea of realism or neoconservatism, imperialism, anything like that. And here you have Trump being very, you could call individualist, personalist, but saying it's all about me. It's all about what I'm thinking. Right.
He went on to say, I don't need international law. Right. Yeah.
Right.
Which also begs the question, I guess, for me, looking ahead, he is not going to be in office forever. And so I guess I do wonder where the Republican Party more broadly when it comes to foreign policy, where does it go from here post-Trump?
Depends on who Republicans decide they want to nominate next time around. I mean, if it's Marco Rubio, like Mara said earlier, he has much more of a neoconservative leaning than plenty of other Republicans. I mean, J.D. Vance. I mean, I'm not sure what J.D. Vance, how he would articulate his foreign policy if he were at the top of the ticket. So I think it's very person dependent.
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