On Aug. 21, I was among the more than 70 former Republican national security officials who publicly rebuffed U.S. President Donald Trump and endorsed Democratic candidate Joe Biden in an open letter published in a full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal. The previous day, I joined Victor Cha, another signatory of the open letter, in laying out our argument here in Foreign Policy as to why a second Trump term would be dangerous to U.S. security interests around the world, but especially in Asia. What’s more, in terms of character and views on foreign policy, Biden has far more in common with the other Republican presidents and presidential candidates I have worked for. That is why so many national security and foreign-policy practitioners who worked for Republican presidents over the past four decades are supporting Biden in this election.
The response from the Trumpist rump of the Republican Party and their friends on the right? Deafening silence—at least at first. This week, finally, pro-Trump columnists fired back on the Wall Street Journal editorial page, coinciding with the Republican National Convention. The Journal’s former editor in chief, Gerard Baker, cast the group of us who signed the letter as pampered in “comfortable stints in consulting firms and think tanks” and unwilling to accept Trump’s radical reorientation of U.S. foreign policy. Holman Jenkins, a member of the newspaper’s editorial board, wrote that Republican critics of Trump are stuck in “histrionic disdain” for the president. In earlier times, these columnists would have championed the same ideals as the conservative internationalists who signed the open letter, but in Trump’s America we find ourselves on different sides of the debate. On Fox, other commentators dismissed the former Republican national security officials as out-of-touch elitists and advocates of “forever wars.”
