There are two poles in Republican foreign-policy thought, represented by the two most recent GOP presidents, George W. Bush and Donald Trump.

The Bush pole favors intervention around the world in support of regime-change and democracy-promotion.

The Trump pole is less interventionist and less idealistic. It is also more successful: the Trump years were marked by diplomatic advances in the Middle East, in contrast to the chaos unleashed by Bush's war in Iraq and the futility of the 20-year occupation of Afghanistan that ended with the repossession of that country by the Taliban.

Which pole is Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis closer to?

DeSantis is the most likely contender other than Trump to be the GOP's 2024 presidential nominee. His supporters believe he has a better chance of winning a general election.

And many DeSantis enthusiasts see him as a younger, fresher, more competent conservative than Trump. Perhaps DeSantis could even fulfill more of Trump's agenda than Trump himself could deliver.

But that assumes DeSantis has the same inclinations as Trump.

What some populist conservatives fear, and what many anti-populists hope, is that DeSantis ultimately leans more toward the GOP's pre-Trump consensus, including on foreign policy.

DeSantis had a career on the national stage before Trump. He was elected to Congress in 2012 and served there until 2018. He served on the House Committee on Foreign Affairs and was chairman of the Subcommittee on National Security.

DeSantis is no stranger to foreign policy. So where does the evidence say he stands?

The short answer is that he stands with the Republican Party. DeSantis' record on foreign policy holds few surprises.

As a Florida Republican, he was a reliable vote for resolutions condemning the leftist regimes of Cuba and Venezuela.

DeSantis was also a consistent supporter of resolutions in support of Israel and critical of Iran and the Palestinian Authority.

He was an opponent of Obama's Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action "Iran deal." Of course, so was Trump, who as president took the U.S. out of the JCPOA framework.

There is little to distinguish DeSantis from Trump on policy toward Latin America, Israel or Iran.

During the Obama years, DeSantis supported recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and moving America's embassy there, a change that Trump subsequently implemented.

Some on the non-interventionist right are quick to criticize Republicans like DeSantis and Trump for a supposedly reckless willingness to recognize Israel's capital as its capital and place the U.S. embassy there.

But this policy simply does not correlate with the demonstrated recklessness of earlier Republican administrations. (The George W. Bush administration never dared to relocate the embassy, a point that is worth remembering.)

Nor does support for the JCPOA indicate a disposition toward peace — the same Obama administration that fathered the Iran Deal also pursued regime change in Libya.

The Trump administration that withdrew from the JCPOA, on the other hand, was the first administration since that of Ronald Reagan not to involve the U.S. in a new large-scale conflict.

In 2013, during DeSantis' first year in Congress, President Obama seriously contemplated a military intervention in Syria against the regime of Bashar al-Assad.

The Bush pole of the Republican Party, represented in the Senate by John McCain, was in favor of the war.

DeSantis was not. He said in a statement on Facebook:

"The Obama administration has not articulated a clear objective for using military force in Syria, much less a plan to achieve that objective. This is all the more problematic given the realities of a Syrian civil war in which Assad's dictatorship (supported by Iran and Hezbollah) is fighting so-called rebels that are populated with Sunni Islamic supremacists and Al Qaeda fighters."

"In other words, the United States does not have an interest in assisting either side of the conflict or in refereeing a civil war amongst these warring anti-American factions."

DeSantis is a firm critic of the regimes in Tehran and Havana, but he has shown less inclination toward military interventionism than Barack Obama.

If DeSantis does run for the '24 nomination, he will come under pressure to champion the anti-Trump, anti-populist wing of the party. DeSantis will pay a price if he defies the GOP's foreign-policy establishment.

He will lose a certain number of primary votes, and he will make implacable enemies of neoconservative publicists in think tanks and legacy media. Even Ronald Reagan felt their wrath when he dared pursue diplomacy with Mikhail Gorbachev.

But Reagan didn't need them, and DeSantis doesn't either.

Daniel McCarthy is the editor of Modern Age: A Conservative Review. To read more by Daniel McCarthy, visit www.creators.com

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