Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) scored a victory Wednesday when the Senate — including 48 of the chamber’s 50 Republicans — voted overwhelmingly to admit Finland and Sweden to NATO.
The resolution, which cleared the chamber on a bipartisan 95-1 vote, was a top priority for the GOP leader, who wanted to send a signal about the direction of a GOP that had drifted toward isolationism under former President Trump.
Throughout his presidency, Trump has been a critic of NATO. It was part of the “America First” agenda that resonated with parts of the GOP base after the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also divided Republican officials.
McConnell visited war-torn Ukraine with a congressional delegation in May and visited Finland and Sweden during that trip. During the debate over these countries joining NATO, he argued that it made the US stronger, not weaker.
The GOP leader definitely won the battle, even if he lost Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), the only member of either party in the Senate to vote no.
Most strikingly, Sens. Mike Lee (R-Utah) and Rand Paul (R-Ky.) both changed their votes. The two were the only senators to vote against resolutions in 2017 and 2019 adding Montenegro and North Macedonia to NATO, respectively.
As for Finland and Sweden, the two libertarian lawmakers took a different stance, with Lee voting for the resolution and Paul voting absent.
“There’s a real and dangerous world out there, and it’s very easy to talk about US isolationism or US restraint or US disengagement from the world, and then it’s another matter entirely to vote for that.” And I think that’s, you know, what we saw when Senator Paul and Senator Lee didn’t vote against Sweden and Finland joining NATO,” Luke Coffey, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank, told The Hill.
Hawley argued on the Senate floor and in an op-ed that the U.S. should not focus on expanding its security commitments in Europe because the “biggest external adversary” America faces is China. He supported the accession of North Macedonia to NATO in 2019.
Trump repeatedly criticized McConnell, who criticized the former president for his actions that led to the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, in a speech at the podium shortly after the president’s impeachment trial. McConnell has avoided publicly criticizing Trump, but there’s no doubting the different views the two have on various policy issues — even if there are some ways in which they agree.
NATO and foreign policy in general is one area of division.
Trump has voiced complaints about the 30-nation NATO bloc, calling it “outdated” and repeatedly grumbling that the countries are not giving enough money to shared defense spending. At one point during his presidency, he advocated withdrawing the US from NATO.
Before Wednesday’s vote, McConnell openly admitted he was worried about the isolationist wing of the party fueled by Trump.
“The one thing I was concerned about, especially at this point, was this kind of growing isolationist sentiment in the party, to some extent, expressed by President Trump,” he told The Associated Press in an interview.
In his remarks on the Senate floor that day, the Republican leader did not hold back on addressing potential opposition to the resolution.
“If any senator is looking for a defensible excuse to vote no, I wish them luck,” McConnell said. “This is a blow to national security that deserves unanimous bipartisan support.”
A separate amendment clarifying congressional military powers in the context of NATO’s collective defense clause also failed to gain broad GOP support.
Only 10 Republicans, including his sponsor Paul, voted for the revision, stressing that Article 5 does not abrogate Congress’s constitutional powers to declare war.
Not all Republicans see the vote as a sign that the GOP is moving away from the MAGA movement’s “America First” mantra.
Republican strategist Doug Hay told The Hill that while the NATO vote was “encouraging,” existing cracks in GOP support for Ukraine could deepen as Russia’s invasion drags on.
“I still don’t think we know where the Republican Party is going on foreign policy,” Haye said.
“Even though that vote was overwhelming, there were other votes, you know, on funding for Ukraine or threats of the next funding vote for Ukraine that suggest there are cracks there,” he added.
In May, the Senate passed a $40 billion aid package for Ukraine by an 86-11 vote, with all opposition coming from the Republican Party. Hawley, Paul and Lee were among those who voted no. On the House side, 57 Republicans opposed the supplemental proposal.
Hay said that while the coalition of Republicans who have opposed funding for Ukraine in the past is not large enough to “sway the vote,” the group’s existence and the potential for it to take a stand against future issues is enough to stop forecasts the foreign policy trajectory of the Republican Party.
He is far from the only Republican with this view.
“I don’t think it’s growing, I don’t think it’s shrinking. I think it’s always been there,” James Carafano, the Heritage Foundation’s vice president for foreign policy and national security, told The Hill.
He argued that Trump’s “America First” philosophy is linked to the anti-interventionist movement, arguing that Trump’s creed is based on the belief that US foreign policy should be rooted in the interests of the country.
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“It just shows that it’s there because you had one senator who had a personal commitment to it and he wanted to express that,” Carafano said of the isolationist wing of the party. “This is part of the mosaic of the republican movement. It always will be.”
At the same time, the bipartisan vote for Finland and Sweden to join NATO defied this philosophy and was a victory for McConnell.
This “reflects the general bipartisan consensus that NATO is a critical part of American foreign policy,” Carafano said.
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