Trump’s Red Scare will backfire The Republicans have rediscovered their neocon core

Trump’s new messaging marks an interesting role reversal for the two campaigns. Joe Biden, before his retreat from the contest, had repeatedly characterised Trump as a dictator-in-waiting. Democracy, he warned, was on the ballot. The Republicans, meanwhile, focused on more accessible matters, in particular the rising prices in Joe Biden’s America. Yet now, the script is flipped: Trump is the one peddling apocalyptic visions of dictatorship, while the Harris campaign has dropped the fascism rhetoric in favour of the more meme-friendly allegations of “weirdness”.

At its heart, this resurrection of the red-scare boogeyman augurs a departure from the populist principles that guided Trump to victory in 2016. For someone who won an election on the catchphrase of “drain the swamp” and the promise of pragmatic dealings abroad, Trump’s new McCarthyist message — combined with his disavowal of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 and embrace of Elon Musk — is a step backwards towards Manichean neoconservatism. In other words, his populist instincts have been smothered by a red menace — and this will be a losing strategy.

Most American voters do not believe that their government will fall to communism anytime soon, and the few who do can hardly be considered swing voters. More than three decades after the fall of the Soviet Union, red-scare rhetoric does not hold the existential resonance that it had at the peak of the Cold War. While the Chinese Communist Party acts as the greatest international rival to American supremacy, modern China is incomparable to the Soviet Union on multiple dimensions. Most obviously, the US is not drafting soldiers to fight against the forward march of communism, and 100,000 Americans have not died in a 21st-century Korea or Vietnam. We are not teaching school children to duck and cover under their desks in fear of imminent nuclear strikes. The CCP, at this time, is not advocating for a global socialist revolution.

This is not to say that the rise of an authoritarian adversary poses no threat to American interests, nor to argue that the threat of these events is impossible after the fall of Soviet communism. It is clear, however, that Americans are not experiencing such existential fears in their everyday lives.

In 2016, Trump seemed to have distinct strategies for addressing the rise of China and the deeply entrenched liberal establishment. Ordinary Americans were not voting based on their allegiance to market capitalism. China was not an ideological rival, but an economic one. In response, faced with the deindustrialisation of the American heartland, Trump managed to channel the frustration of the working class into a straightforward message: the US was getting cheated, and American jobs were being replaced with foreign workers. With the establishment of both parties maintaining their commitment to free trade, Trump’s promise to get a “better deal” for American industry resonated with those who felt abandoned by elites. And crucially, when Trump did attack the “Radical Left Agenda”, it was on those issues that affected voters’ daily lives: immigration, crime, and threats to free speech. Now that populism appears to have been lost, and recent polls reflect Trump’s failure to connect with the interests of ordinary Americans.

But, you might say, talk is cheap. Does this apparent shift in campaign strategy to an apocalyptic narrative say anything about the policies of a potential second Trump administration? Yes and no.

As we saw following his election in 2016, the shapeshifting nature of Trump’s rhetoric allowed his supporters to project their desired foreign policies onto him, giving him appeal to hawks and restrainers alike. In the same vein, the personnel of the first Trump administration experienced chaotic turnover as the president attempted to purge the disloyal. This instability led to different factions within the administration gaining influence over policy, only for their desired policies to be discarded the next week. Even if Trump had a grand strategy, then, internal dysfunction would have likely prevented its implementation.

However, this does not mean the foreign policy of a second Trump term will emerge at random. While figures advocating for a “realist” reappraisal of American interests abroad had gained a foothold in the previous Republican administration, Trump’s recent rhetoric is illustrative of the people he has surrounded himself with. Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who has remained in Trump’s good graces, has consistently called for escalation in Ukraine. Likewise, former national security advisor Robert O’Brien recently wrote promised in Foreign Affairs that a second Trump term will “thwart and deter the new Beijing-Moscow-Tehran axis” and that “doing so will also require strong alliances among the free countries of the world”. O’Brien went on to claim that “a second Trump term would see stepped-up presidential-level attention to dissidents and political forces that can challenge U.S. adversaries”, making an exception for “open and liberal” Arab monarchies such as Saudi Arabia, with whom O’Brien would continue to engage.

This strategy of “conservative primacy” espoused by Trump’s presumptive cabinet selections portends a dangerous and disappointing return to interventionist conventions. O’Brien’s suggestion that China, Russia, and Iran have formed an axis of evil which must be opposed by a united “free world” exemplifies the simplistic Cold Warrior talking points that now flow from Trump’s mouth. If anything, a second Trump administration appears to be trending towards a return to form for the Republican Party, threatening more crusading abroad against the phantom threat of all-or-nothing ideological conflict. Rather than draining the swamp, Trump is being consumed by it.

What, then, is the alternative? More of the same, it seems. At the recent Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Kamala Harris’s speech was preceded by a surprise appearance by former CIA Director and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, the Democratic darling of Bush-era neocons. And when the vice president did finally speak, she promised to “ensure America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world”, before adding that her administration would “strengthen, not abdicate, our global leadership”. While Harris herself has yet to articulate any specific proposals on foreign policy, she affirmed the ongoing support for both Ukraine and Israel. Meanwhile, the Democrats’ 2020 vow to “end forever wars” has seemingly been erased from its national platform.

For many, this was only a matter of time. Much has been written about the vice president’s current national security advisor, Phil Gordon, who is likely to be central to a future Harris administration. Having served in the Obama administration — first as assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, and then as the White House’s point man on the Syrian Civil War — Gordon is frequently described as an “Atlanticist” or “Europeanist”. And indeed, American and European statesmen alike laud his prioritisation of Europe. While Gordon has been occasionally characterised as being a “restrainer” due to his reluctance to deploy military force, he appears to share very little with the actual grand strategy of restraint, as articulated by academic realists. Instead, he seems to endorse continuing or even increasing support to Europe, and has affirmed Harris’s opposition to an arms embargo on Israel, while saying little about China.

The candidates of both major parties, then, appear to have similar visions for America’s role in the world. Although a Trump presidency may lean more hawkish on China and a Harris administration might be more committed to Ukraine, both seem committed to continued military engagement around the world without any plans to substantially change American grand strategy.

Of course, of the two, this is least surprising with the Democrats, whose fondness for foreign intervention in recent decades has filled entire books. But the turn of the Republicans is more pronounced. After a brief flirtation, the party appears to have been recaptured by its neoconservative core, with foreign policy reverting to its post-Cold War monoculture. The red menace has returned, and nothing good can come from it. Expect continued engagement overseas for years to come.

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Heather Penatzer is a doctoral candidate in politics at Princeton University.

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