Haley’s Policy Pitch Recalls a Bygone Era Before Trump’s Rise

Nikki Haley’s calls for muscular international engagement and cuts to future Social Security benefits have elicited withering attacks from Donald J. Trump. They used to be Republican orthodoxy.

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Nikki Haley’s call to stand by NATO and support Ukraine echo the foreign policies of every president since the Second World War, but particularly the Republicans, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.

Nikki Haley is pitching voters on policies that recall an era when the Republican Party stood for a fiscal conscience and foreign policy leadership, at a time when the most sacred of federal programs and the international alliances that built the post-World War II era are under enormous strain.

But the voice of contemporary Republican politics, Donald J. Trump, has been there to attack those appeals virtually ever day. On Tuesday, the voters of New Hampshire may decide whether the party can find a path back from Mr. Trump’s big government domestic policy and his isolationism abroad.

Ms. Haley’s proposals to raise the retirement age for young workers and trim benefits for the wealthy while protecting Social Security and Medicare benefits for those at or near retirement may sound familiar to voters with any historical memory. They’re the essentially same plans pitched by Mitt Romney and his running mate Paul D. Ryan in the losing presidential campaign of 2012, and of a piece with then-President George W. Bush’s failed efforts to transform Social Security from a federally guaranteed pension system to something more akin to a private 401(k) plan.

Mr. Romney’s 2012 proposals were taken from the bipartisan commission assembled to address the budget deficit during Barack Obama’s presidency. The recommendations went nowhere.

Ms. Haley’s calls to stand by NATO and support Ukraine echo the foreign policies of every president since the Second World War, but particularly the Republicans, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.

But Mr. Trump has been relentless in his attacks on all those policies. His constant suggestions that he could withdraw the United States from NATO prompted President Biden last month to sign legislation barring the president from unilaterally dropping the North Atlantic alliance.

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