It was a moment as surreal as it feels long ago.

Rep. Tim Ryan of Ohio and Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii, would-be populists both as well as combatants for the presidency, got into it. Long before anyone had heard of “COVID-19,” the duo debated, along with a score of others, in Miami.  

In his mid-to-late forties, Ryan is a young man, as far a modern American politics goes, but he cited his near two decades on the Hill in formulating his view on Afghanistan: “The lesson that I’ve learned, over the years, is that you have to stay engaged in these situations.” He played the part of the ultimate realist: “Nobody likes it. It’s long. It’s tedious,” but a U.S. military presence is necessary fare, Ryan said. “Engagement” was Ryan’s watchword, before he attempted to pivot to denouncing Donald Trump.  

Gabbard wasn’t having it. She cited a then-recent Taliban slaying of two U.S. soldiers in the graveyard of empires. “Is that what you will tell the parents of two soldiers who were just killed, in Afghanistan? ‘Well, we just have to be engaged.’” said the representative from the Aloha State. Herself a combat veteran, Gabbard said: “As a soldier, I will tell you that answer is unacceptable.” Gabbard declared: “We have to bring our troops home from Afghanistan.”

“When we weren’t in there, they started flying planes into our buildings,” Ryan said, in likely honestly vague language. “The Taliban didn’t attack us on 9/11, al-Qaeda did,” Gabbard quickly shot back. “I understand that,” Ryan said. “The Taliban was protecting those people who were plotting against us.”

The exchange faded into history, as both congressmen failed to get far in the contest. It was a flashpoint tussle between two candidates trying to conjure anti-establishment momentum, an ideological inflection point in intraparty debate, such as when Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky told former New Jersey Chris Christie to get a warrant. That is, it was interesting, but not conclusive.  

Because the day would be won by a former vice president who declared at another debate that December: “I got in a big fight with the Pentagon, because I strongly opposed the nation-building notion we set about. Rebuilding that country as a whole nation is beyond our capacity.”   

The former vice president now sits in the Oval, and Congressman Ryan is leaving the seat he’s held since 2003, when he succeeded the wildman James Traficant. Pleasing Ryan’s breed of Blue Dog Democrat was once a lynchpin of the party’s national strategy. Indeed, Ryan had no quibbles honoring Traficant upon his death in 2011, which had been presaged with a stint in prison. Ryan heralded Traficant’s ability to “connect to people” and “really touch them.” In a moment removed from today’s seeming criminalization of politics, Ryan said: “Everybody knew who he was and remembered that moment when they met him.”  

But Ryan also has long belonged to the hawkish wing of Blue Dog Democrats, whose ranks have dwindled. But the foundation of “Democrats for Santorum,” which once tried to save the senatorial career of a man who would later run for president as a “blue collar conservative,” by President George W. Bush’s Democratic keynote speaker, didn’t come out of nowhere. Ryan comes out of that school.

Which is a problem for Ryan, as President Biden signals exit from Kabul is nigh.

Perhaps because Ryan occupies such peculiar political terrain accounts for why he has struggled to climb the ladder. Ryan hasn’t just tried and failed for the presidency, but also in 2016, vaingloriously attempted to defrock Nancy Pelosi, the once-and-future speaker. Now he is trying for the Senate, where he is favored for his party’s nomination, if only because many elite Democrats have written off “The Heart of It All” as newly, but certainly blood-red Republican. 

Indeed, Ryan’s party affiliation and brand of populism would seem positively pre-Trump, when the GOP hadn’t secured the state it needs to win White Houses in a decade. Even Ryan’s email blasts — “help the damn workers” read one from earlier this month — now feel out of step with the new party of capital.     

His Republican opponent will doubtless call Congressman Ryan out of touch. Yet, it will be revealing just how so. President Biden barely touched on foreign policy in his address to Congress on Wednesday, but by fall, the U.S. will have presumably left Afghanistan, the prudent decision, but will have to accept any and all consequences of that. Already, proposals to go back, if needed, aren’t exactly farfetched, if reluctant stuff, to the chagrin of hardline champions of restraint. 

Ryan could face one of a pair of former Marines or a former state party chairman. 

Josh Mandel, the 2012 GOP Senate nominee who is running again, cuts a relatively neoconservative profile. In 2012, Mandel went out of his way to warn against snap judgement in the case of a massacre of sixteen Afghans by a U.S. serviceman, and in 2017, then gearing up for another Senate run (which he eventually passed on for personal reasons), Mandel wrote in the Cincinnati Enquirer that America is at “war with radical Islam,” linking that view with his support for then-President Trump’s sanctuary city position.  

Jane Timkin, the state party chair, has the least known foreign policy record of the three. But earlier this month, she wrote, also in the Enquirer, that Biden’s potential moves on Iran were of pre-eminent concern. 

“There are so many disastrous things happening with the Biden administration’s domestic policy agenda – reckless spending, higher taxes, instituting a Green New Deal takeover and more – that we are often not hearing about the international policies that Biden is unraveling. None are as consequential as Biden’s steps to return the U.S. to Obama’s disastrous 2015 nuclear deal with Tehran.” Timken warned any deal with Iran would mean “an emboldened Tehran government and a volatile Middle East,” as if the U.S. invented volatility in the region. Timken is known for her mentorship of Rep. Anthony Gonzalez, who voted for Trump’s impeachment, which Timken did not support. But the penchant for the anti-Trump wing of the Republican Party for a more status quo foreign policy appoarch is well-known. 

Perhaps it is author and entrepreneur J.D. Vance who could shake the race on foreign policy grounds. Vance has run a decidedly domestically-minded shadow campaign thus far, but his bedfellows are clear. From regular appearances on Tucker Carlson’s paleoconservative primetime television program, to financial backing from Peter Thiel (who once told the Republican National Convention, “it’s time to end the era of stupid wars and rebuild our country”), a possible Vance nomination would mean the specter of a hawkish Democrat competing against a restraint-curious Republican.