This should be an awkward week for Republicans, shouldn’t it? Their president, having plagiarized Ronald Reagan’s slogan of “peace through strength,” kept promising during the campaign that he’d end the war in Ukraine in one day.

Yet here he is passing his hundredth in office with the conflict still raging. What, if anything, can and will Republicans do about President Donald Trump’s looming failure?

And loom it does. Trump’s approach to making peace so far has amounted to sidelining those in his administration (such as Keith Kellogg, originally slated to deal with the conflict) who would have met Russian President Vladimir Putin bearing sticks as well as carrots, and instead promoting those (such as special envoy Steve Witkoff) who offer only carrots to the Kremlin and reserve the sticks for Ukraine.

At this rate, Trump seems to hope that he can force Kyiv to capitulate in all but name and call the result peace, the better to forge a new and tight bond with Putin that would recognize Russia’s conquests and reward its aggression. It would be Reaganism upside down: peace through surrender.

Alternatively, Trump may at any moment panic about looking weak and walk away in a huff. That would be one psychologically plausible reaction to pleading “Vladimir, STOP!” and then discovering that Vladimir isn’t stopping but bombing. Trump’s secretary of state, Marco Rubio, has already hinted that the administration has “other priorities” and may decide within days to leave Russians, Ukrainians and Europeans to sort out their own mess. That outcome would amount to the American superpower rage-quitting.

But the Grand Old Party behind Trump would never allow that, would it? Surely too many old-style hawks still stride through the halls of Congress and the White House, people who came of age when Reagan stared down the “evil empire” and saw America as a “shining city on a hill.”

If memory serves, they include powerful counselors who have the president’s ear, such as Rubio or Michael Waltz, the national security advisor, and senators such as Lindsey Graham, who used to go around with the late John McCain preaching fire and brimstone to the world’s dictators in general, and Putin in particular.

Well, no. Rubio and Waltz, like all apparatchiks in the Trump machine, checked their old opinions, values and principles at the door when they enlisted in the administration. Waltz may still have hawkish gut feelings, but when he tries to act on them — by hiring like-minded experts, say — he gets shut down by the MAGA blowhards surrounding the president. Rubio, ever articulate to the point of being glib, justifies whichever whim the president expressed most recently, even if the one at lunch contradicts the version at breakfast.

Senator Graham, meanwhile, kissed Trump’s ring long ago, and now, running with difficulty for a fifth term in his deep-red South Carolina, depends on the president’s endorsement and approval not just to win but, as he has said, to “stay relevant.” In the first year of Putin’s full-scale invasion, Graham and Rubio, along with other Republicans and Democrats, co-sponsored a bill to ban U.S. recognition of any Russian annexation claims. These days, both enthusiastically toe the Trump line whatever that is, even if that means recognizing Crimea and other occupied lands as Russian.

Foreign-policy wonks still twist themselves into pretzels as they look for coherence in this confusion. The latter-day GOP now subsumes at least three competing schools, or tribes, of geopolitical thinking. One consists of old-school Reaganites who believe in America’s continued primacy and its concomitant responsibility to police the international system, by standing up for the sovereignty of minor powers such as Ukraine, say.

Those contrast with the “prioritizers,” who agree that the U.S. has a disproportionate role in the system but feel that it is overstretched and must withdraw from Europe and the Middle East to focus on Asia.

And both of those tribes are at loggerheads with the third, sometimes called the restrainers or isolationists, and increasingly just America First. They reject the premise that America has any exceptional responsibility in and for the international system. Instead, they believe that the U.S. should stay out of foreign wars and use its power to pursue national interests as conceived narrowly and transactionally — by demanding, say, that American ships, unlike all others, transit through the Panama and Suez canals free of charge. Vice President JD Vance is in this camp, as are many die-hard MAGA types.

The infighting among these factions could explain the reigning chaos in foreign policy, according to analysts like Emma Ashford at the Stimson Center, a think tank in Washington. It certainly plays a part, as the president sometimes sides with one camp, then another. But that cerebral framing into an intellectual contest among rival “isms” risks overlooking a bigger and more ominous phenomenon.

Namely: The degeneration of Republican thinking on geopolitics (among other things) from the level of controversial but high-minded ideas to that of a primitive personality cult. The exceptions prove the rule. Don Bacon, a congressman from Nebraska, is the rare and brave Republican who still dares to call out Trump for treating Putin “with velvet gloves” and warning that “this is a Ronald Reagan moment,” when America must show that it “will not appease or condone the violent conquest of the weak by the strong.” Alas, Bacon is isolated in his party and will change nothing.

One of the gravest dangers to America and the whole world is that rot inside the Old but no-longer-Grand Party: the herd mentality and cowardice that prevent a storied American political institution from speaking truth to a wannabe king in its own ranks.

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This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Andreas Kluth is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering U.S. diplomacy, national security and geopolitics. Previously, he was editor-in-chief of Handelsblatt Global and a writer for the Economist.

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