An image of President Ronald Reagan at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Oxon Hill, Maryland, February 2019
Kevin Lamarque / Reuters

As Republicans ponder the outcome of the midterm elections, in which a GOP rout failed to materialize, the party seems torn over national security. Such divisions are not new. Every couple of decades, the Republican Party has cycled through an internal debate over foreign policy and the United States’ role in the world. The Democratic Party has been beset with its own divisions, of course, most recently evidenced by the publication and subsequent retraction of the Congressional Progressive Caucus’s letter urging President Joe Biden to pursue direct talks with Russia to end the war in Ukraine. Some of the

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