WASHINGTON—They think pulling out of Syria and Afghanistan would be a debacle. They think North Korea cannot be trusted. They think the Daesh is still a threat to America. They think Russia is bad and NATO is good.

The trouble is their president does not agree.

More than two years into his administration, the disconnect between U.S. President Donald Trump and the Republican establishment on foreign policy has rarely been as stark. In recent days, the president’s own advisers and allies have been pushing back, challenging his view of the world and his prescription for its problems.

The growing discontent among Republican national security hawks was most evident on Tuesday when Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Senate majority leader and perhaps Trump’s most important partner in Congress, effectively rebuked the president by introducing a measure denouncing “a precipitous withdrawal” of American troops from Syria and Afghanistan.

The senator’s repudiation came on the same day that Trump’s own intelligence chiefs gave Congress a radically different assessment of international threats facing the United States from the president’s own. They warned about fresh Russian efforts to interfere in U.S. elections, predicted that North Korea would never agree to give up its nuclear weapons and made clear that the Daesh is still plotting attacks around the world. They made no mention of Trump’s top security priority of building a wall along the southwestern border.

Nearly two weeks ago, more than two-thirds of House Republicans voted to overturn the Trump administration’s move to ease sanctions on Russian companies linked to a prominent oligarch, Oleg V. Deripaska. And last week even more House Republicans voted to bar Trump from withdrawing from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, as he privately suggested to aides several times last year.

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“Perhaps as we now pivot to the presidential elections, the Republicans may finally be thinking, well, maybe we ought to recalibrate a little here and understand there are real risks and we have to provide a check and balance on the commander in chief in whatever ways we can,” said Wendy Sherman, an undersecretary of state under President Barack Obama.

Many traditional Republicans have been uneasy about Trump’s foreign policy since the beginning and from time to time have pushed back, most notably in 2017 when Congress nearly unanimously passed sanctions on Russia over the president’s objections. But the rupture of recent days comes amid disgruntlement over the 35-day partial government shutdown that ultimately failed to achieve Trump’s goal of extracting money for his border wall.

“We’ve had a couple of rapid-fire shocks to the system,” said Eric S. Edelman, undersecretary of defence under President George W. Bush now at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.

In addition to the shutdown, he cited Trump’s abruptly announced decision to pull U.S. forces from Syria, resulting in the resignation of Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and quickly followed by the president vowing to withdraw half of U.S. troops from Afghanistan.

“There’s no dearth of evidence of the disconnect between the president and Republican orthodoxy,” said Edelman, a long-standing critic of Trump. But Edelman noted that the disagreement has been rooted in Congress. “As you look at the Republican Party in the electorate, I think it’s lining up a little more with the president because I think he’s shifting Republican voters more on things like trade and Russia, maybe on Syria and Afghanistan.”

Indeed, many of Trump’s supporters have cheered his more protectionist stance on trade and the tariff wars with China as well as U.S. allies. Likewise, many Trump supporters have grown weary of overseas military ventures that never seem to end and therefore applaud his moves to bring home U.S. troops. Polls have even detected a shift in Republican views on Russia, which throughout the Cold War was a unifying force in the party.

In Republican circles in Washington, however, the unease coincides with a critical juncture in Trump’s foreign policy. His pullouts from Syria and Afghanistan come as trade talks with China head toward a climactic deadline and Trump prepares to get together next month with North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong Un, for their second summit meeting after an initial encounter in Singapore last year.

Olivia Enos, a policy scholar on Asia at the Heritage Foundation, said doubts had grown about Trump’s negotiations with North Korea to eliminate its nuclear program.

“Many initially welcomed the president’s pursuit of diplomacy in North Korea,” she said. “But after Singapore, many questioned whether North Korea was sincere in coming to the negotiating table. Since that time, North Korea has continued to play hard to get, calling its sincerity to denuclearize into further question.”

Some analysts said it was the way Trump makes his decisions as much as the decisions themselves that rattle the foreign policy establishment. Announcing the Syria pullout by Twitter without preparing the allies or framing the public explanations left even some of the president’s strongest supporters in Washington unnerved.

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“I don’t think Leader McConnell or anyone else wants to take the wheel from the president or even give him rudder direction,” said Frederic C. Hof, a former State Department official who worked on Syria and is now diplomat in residence at Bard College. “They want to be sure he’s at the helm and he knows he has a crew. They want real deliberation to take place on these tough issues. They want the president to be part of it.”

The administration has yet to even agree with itself on the state of affairs in Syria. At first, Trump declared the Daesh defeated, then said it was not but could be finished off by others.

Patrick M. Shanahan, the acting defence secretary who took over for Mattis, predicted on Tuesday that the terrorist group would lose its final stronghold in Syria by next month. “Ninety-nine-point-five per cent plus of the Daesh-controlled territory has been returned to the Syrians,” he said. “Within a couple of weeks, it’ll be 100 per cent.”

McConnell seemed less than convinced. In a speech introducing his measure on Tuesday, he took on Trump’s approach to the Middle East. “Simply put, while it is tempting to retreat to the comfort and security of our shores, there is still a great deal of work to be done,” he said. “And we do know that left untended, these conflicts will reverberate in our own cities.”

While not mentioning Trump by name, McConnell directly rebutted the president’s argument about the limits of U.S. responsibility for patrolling the globe. “We are not the world’s police man,” the senator said. “But we are the leader of the free world. And it is incumbent upon the United States to lead.”

The White House declined to comment on Tuesday.

McConnell attached the amendment to a bill intended to extend aid to Israel and offer protections to state and local governments that refuse to do business with companies that boycott Israel. The Senate advanced the main bill on Tuesday on a 76-22 vote, with all the negative votes coming from Democrats.

About a half-dozen announced or possible Democratic presidential candidates voted against the bill, defying their party leaders, who favoured it; just one of the potential candidates, Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, voted for it.

McConnell’s decision to offer his measure on Syria and Afghanistan, which has no binding force, was notable in part because he has sought to avoid open rifts with the president. Unlike current or former Republican senators like Jeff Flake of Arizona or Mitt Romney of Utah, McConnell rarely speaks out against Trump, preferring to keep focused on mutual priorities like judicial appointments.

But from time to time, he has made a point of staking out the more traditional Republican position. “Look, Sen. McConnell has a different world view than the president does,” said Antonia Ferrier, a former adviser. “He’s a national security hawk who believes American strength in the world is critical.”

“It’s pretty clear,” she added, “he wanted to send a message to both our enemies and our allies with this amendment that many in America continue to view Daesh and Al Qaeda as a threat in Syria and Afghanistan.”

And pretty clearly a message to the White House as well.

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