By Jenna Ellis for THE CHRISTIAN POST
For more than a generation, the American Right maintained a foreign-policy consensus that included unwavering support for Israel. From Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump, support for Israel was a connective tissue binding together a sometimes-loose coalition. Now, the consensus is breaking, though for reasons having little to do with Israel itself.
The new opposition to Israel by figures like Tucker Carlson, Matt Gaetz and Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene is not driven by theological dispute or reasoned critique. It is a byproduct of the New Right effort to redefine the conservative movement for the post-Trump era. Israel is simply a symbol of the old Republican order that the New Right hopes to displace.
For decades, the GOP rested on three pillars made up of Evangelical Christians, the Reagan-Bush foreign-policy establishment and free-market institutionalists. Support for Israel was the one position all three embraced. That consensus is the target.
The New Right — populist, isolationist, and led by personalities who know how to milk new political platforms for money and attention — has created its own incentives to challenge the pro-Israel consensus. Personal brands in the movement rely on always-escalating contrarianism toward Republican tradition. They are chasing a younger online generation of conservatives who are deeply skeptical of foreign entanglements, domestic institutions, and unmoved by the moral frameworks of the Old Right. They have even made hostility to conservative mega-donors central to their message, and Israel policy in the GOP has long been associated with donor commitment. This is resulting in a New Right definition of “America First” as “America Only” and based not on the evolution of traditional nationalist arguments, but on the demand for near-total disengagement from global commitments.
