Dems, GOP form familiar divide over foreign policy

from skeptic of Ukraine spending to supporter of a big aid package, resembles the switch that the leading Republican senator, Arthur Vandenberg, made across the 1940s, from isolationist to cold warrior.

Of course history doesn’t repeat that neatly, especially when you move from America’s internal divides to foreign policy challenges. Vladimir Putin’s Russia isn’t Adolf Hitler’s Germany or Josef Stalin’s Soviet Union, Israel isn’t like South Vietnam, and U.S. troops are not committed to either conflict yet.

Moreover, seeing continuities across different eras doesn’t tell you who’s correct in this one or reveal how today’s crises will ultimately end.

Especially when the crises are concurrent, and others loom ahead. One interesting aspect of the current situation is that each intraparty debate feels somewhat separate from the other. You could imagine right-wing noninterventionism undermining Republican support for Israel as well as for Ukraine, but so far right-wing critics of Israel like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens don’t have a big constituency in Congress. Likewise, you could imagine anti-war activism on Israel-Palestine encouraging a left-wing case for making peace with Russia. (If Israel is expected to bargain with Hamas, why not Kyiv with Moscow?) But those arguments aren’t a big part of Democratic politics at the moment.

Perhaps there will be more crosspollination if the two conflicts drag on. Or maybe debates will be superseded by events in Asia. For now, anxiety about our position vis-à-vis China offers potential common ground for the Republican factions, with Vance and his hawkish foes at least notionally agreeing that we need to be doing more to deter Beijing. In the Democratic coalition, meanwhile, the China question isn’t getting much attention.

But that could change quickly, especially if you believe that the current period of global conflict is only “hardening” the Chinese regime’s “intent to execute an act of aggression similar to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine” (to quote a new analysis from Mike Studeman, a former commander of the Office of Naval Intelligence).

In that case China will go from occupying a second-order role in our debates to rewriting them entirely — maybe by discrediting both left-wing and right-wing skepticism about American overseas commitments, the way isolationism was abandoned when the simmering crises of the 1930s gave way to World War II.

Or maybe by heightening and shaking up today’s divisions, so they feel less like reruns and more like the new debates of an era when the American empire may be fighting for its life.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.