The Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, nestled atop a majestic peak in the southern California mountains near Los Angeles, hosts many monuments to Reagan’s politics and achievements. Statues portray him riding a horse in triumph or genially waving to the tour groups waiting to see his museum. An actual Air Force One plane is on permanent display. Children play on a concrete barrier freshened up by graffiti of a butterfly with pink wings, once a piece of the Berlin Wall.



On Saturday, the library hosted a more bizarre monument to newer conservative politics: the Reagan National Defense Forum, a conference that provided subtle eulogies for the failed movement to stop Donald Trump.

Once, the national-security wing of the Republican party formed the core of the #NeverTrump coalition, issuing open letters that denounced the businessman’s geopolitical recklessness or ignorance. Now Trump will be president, and that wing is coming to terms with it. At the Reagan library, it appeared most comfortable reframing Trump within familiar Republican approaches to foreign affairs, no matter how much rhetorical finesse the task required.

Buck McKeon, a former California congressman, had finesse to spare. Outside a private conference room, he agreed to an on-camera interview about Trump and set to work disputing the premises of each question. Hasn’t Trump shown himself to be hostile to free trade, a central aspect of the Reagan catechism?

“I don’t think you pull away from trade,” he said, “but I think he’s setting an open stance for negotiation. That’s what a businessman does.”

What about Trump’s seeming penchant for isolationism? “Isolationist?” scoffed McKeon, a former chairman of the House armed services committee whom Saudi Arabia recently hired as a lobbyist. “He just talked to the president of Taiwan.”

That conversation, a disruption of nearly 40 years of diplomatic protocol designed to reassure China, caused no shortage of awkwardness among conference attendees. To many in Washington and around the world, it reaffirmed fears that Trump will blunder his way into international crisis. No one at the Reagan library defended the Trump-Tsai Ing-wen call outright.

But some prominent attendees were content to brush it aside. The South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham, who barely conceals his loathing for a man he on Saturday often called simply “Trump”, insisted the US had not backed away from the longstanding one-China policy, which does not challenge Beijing’s insistence that Taiwan is a breakaway province. Dan Sullivan, a Republican senator from Alaska, said the Chinese reaction seemed muted, and suggested Congress had a well of support for Taiwan.

Such was the tenor of the conference: reinterpreting Trump to position him within the traditional modes of US foreign policy and Republican politics. His inconsistencies have given attendees enough to work with. Whereas on the campaign trail Trump called Nato “obsolete” and suggested conditioning the defense of allies on their ability to pay for it, now even Barack Obama says Trump doesn’t actually mean it.

Yet some of Trump’s departures can’t be spun away. Russia, the bête noire of this year’s conference, is chief among them. Dick Cheney, the former vice-president, called Vladimir Putin, to whom Trump has been warm, “a very dangerous man”. Without attempting to reconcile his perspective and Trump’s – “I’m not here today to advise Mr Trump,” he said – Cheney urged Trump to “reassert US leadership in the world”. Left unanswered was what version of US leadership Trump, who is as charmed by the Russians as Reagan was hostile to them, would present.

One Republican official with a national security profile described the affair as a coping mechanism. Uncertainty over Trump reigns, yet conservatives face the exciting prospect of unified GOP control of the US government. Many hold a sincere belief that foreign policy has suffered significantly under Obama and want to help fix it, even if it means coming to terms with Trump.

Careerism also plays its role. “When there’s an assistant secretaryship at stake, a lot of principles get thrown out,” conceded the official, who asked for anonymity.

‘Some course corrections’

Gen Joseph Dunford said he wanted ‘a consensus on national security’. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

Senior military officers, whose relationship to Trump is fixed by the constitution, also endeavored to fit Trump into their standard ways of doing business.

Asked about Trump’s fixation on the military virtues of unpredictability, the chief of staff of the air force, Gen David Goldfein, said that as long as he provides Trump with a menu of tactical options, “if there’s an unpredictability in that, I’ve done my job”. The chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, the marine general Joseph Dunford, met Trump’s transition team on Wednesday and said to expect “some course corrections” on military strategy against the Islamic State – though Dunford did not address specific Trump suggestions, such as killing the families of Isis fighters or stealing oil from Iraq.

Without ever criticising their incoming commander-in-chief, the officers tiptoed around the departure from traditional foreign policy that Trump represents. Asked what he wanted more than anything else to address global threats, Dunford said “a consensus on national security”. Gen Mark Milley, the chief of staff of the army, echoed Dunford on a need to re-establish first principles.

“We need to be clear. What is America’s role in the world?” Milley said.

If Trump’s conversation with the Taiwanese president caused the Reagan forum attendees to cringe, his selection of Dunford’s fellow marine Jim Mattis as defense secretary caused them to exhale. Enthusiasm for Mattis echoed from every panelist who spoke his name. Speaking for many, Cheney praised the Mattis appointment as a critical step to blunting Trump’s excesses.

It fell to some of the foreigners at the conference to raise an alarm about Trump, however diplomatically.

Norway’s minister of defense, Ine Eriksen Soreide, presented her country as nervous and vulnerable to a resurgent Russia and warned: “You can really not take European security for granted.” She implored the American public to see Nato as a collection of 27 stalwart friends, rather than a burden, and said the alliance needed clarity on how Trump views Russia.

“It is paramount that the new administration comes out with a clear, consistent, firm, predictable stance on Russia early,” she said.

Similarly, Ng Eng Hen, Singapore’s minister of defense, warned against adopting a hostile posture against China, which is deepening its economic ties with south-east Asia at a time when the region sees the US as abandoning the field. Containing China is “neither necessary or desirable”, he said, while making security the prime feature of the US approach to Asia would leave Washington with a “brittle” policy.

‘You trade with your friends’

Of all the prominent US politicians at the conference, Graham seemed to have the hardest time coming to terms with Trump.

A traditional Republican defense and trade hawk, his exasperation was often on display. Beyond the Taiwan call, China was “licking [its] chops” at the US abandonment of the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal, he said. US standing in Asia was the “big loser of 2016”. He vowed to do “all I can to get the Republican party back to where it was: you trade with your friends”.

Graham also raised his voice in objection to the notion Trump advanced that the US’s Asian allies were taking advantage of its defense umbrella: “South Korea and Japan have paid a lot.” Then he reeled himself in. Trump will have a “lot of problems”, he said. “We all have to help him.”

“If you’re unsure what’s going to happen, so am I,” Graham continued, addressing US allies. “But we’ll be friends through the process.”