Koch allies’ Haley endorsement raises questions about GOP foreign policy debate

A Koch-aligned political group has endorsed the most hawkish candidate for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination.

That’s one key takeaway from American for Prosperity Action throwing its weight behind former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley less than two months before the first Republican primary votes are cast.

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The Koch network and like-minded activists had signaled for months they wanted to move on from former President Donald Trump.

“When we announced our decision to engage in our first ever Republican presidential primary, we made it clear that we’d be looking for a candidate who can turn the page on our political dysfunction — and win,” Americans for Prosperity Action’s Emily Seidel said in a statement.

“Donald Trump and Joe Biden will only further perpetuate the country’s downward spiral in politics,” she wrote in a memo explaining the group’s endorsement. “Furthermore, a significant majority of voters want somebody new.”

Haley has made a generational change in leadership, a not-too-thinly veiled swipe at the 81-year-old incumbent president and 77-year-old Trump, a central pillar of her White House campaign.

Meg Kinnard/AP

The former South Carolina governor has also sung from the fiscally conservative songbook that has powered Koch-affiliated groups’ political activism since the tea party era a decade ago, including her talk of entitlement reform. Haley also takes a quieter tone on culture war issues than Trump or Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) and has largely eschewed the economic populism sweeping the GOP over the past seven years.

But billionaire Charles Koch has also been highly involved in promoting foreign-policy restraint. The early tea party was as much a rebuke of former President George W. Bush, with his bank bailouts at home and nation-building overseas, as Democratic former President Barack Obama.

Trump was a departure from Bush in one key respect. He called the Iraq War a mistake while winning the nomination in 2016. He is running on not starting any new wars during his previous term and is warning about the risks of “World War III” in the next four years. In a second term, hawks like former national security adviser John Bolton would likely be absent from his administration.

Haley supports a bigger U.S. role in the war in Ukraine, for instance, than either Trump or DeSantis. She has frequently sparred with entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy on these issues in each of the Republican debates while suggesting that DeSantis is hedging.

The phrase “foreign policy” does not appear in the Americans for Prosperity Action Haley endorsement memo.

Haley has also run a foreign policy-centric campaign, though she too has tried at times to frame some of her views as compatible with the “America First” posture of the former president who sent her to the United Nations.

“A strong America doesn’t start wars,” Haley said at one debate. “A strong America prevents wars.” Her speech at the 2020 Republican National Convention was modeled after one given by Jeane Kirkpatrick, the neoconservative tapped by Ronald Reagan to serve as United Nations ambassador, in 1984.

What impact the endorsement will have on the Republican nomination fight is unclear. The Koch network could supply Haley with a stronger grassroots organization in pivotal states where her team may currently be lacking. Trump’s commanding lead has held in the public polling for months, however.

The Haley endorsement suggests lingering tensions between populist and libertarian factions of the GOP who are frequently aligned on foreign policy. Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) has often voted with Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) on matters such as Ukraine aid and intervention abroad. Vance has nonetheless frequently complained about excessive libertarian influence on the Republican approach to domestic affairs.

Unlike in 2016, there is no Paul-like figure in the Republican presidential race who aligns with the Koch network on both free markets and foreign policy or civil liberties. The Kentucky senator has often worked with Trump on foreign policy, competing for influence with hawkish Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC).

The Haley endorsement also raises questions about where foreign policy stands as a priority in the broader Koch world on the eve of next year’s Republican primaries.

Haley has in recent weeks gotten a second look from Republicans who want a nominee other than Trump. The debates have been her breakout moment. She has momentum in both national and early-state polling. That has led some Republican operatives to view her as a stronger Trump alternative than DeSantis.

Trump nevertheless leads by 47.5 percentage points nationally, 29.7 points in Iowa, 27 points in New Hampshire, and 30.5 in Haley’s South Carolina, according to RealClearPolitics polling averages.

The former president’s myriad legal problems weeks ahead of the Iowa caucuses are why many Republican insiders see this as a race at all.

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It remains to be seen whether any Koch-allied kingmakers can alter this dynamic.

But one influential group is going to war for Nikki Haley.