Condoleezza Rice, a former secretary of state during the Bush administration, said on Thursday that the Republican Party has shifted away from the Reaganite views on foreign policy that dominated the Bush years and that a traditional Reaganite approach may not be “sustainable” in the present.

The GOP’s isolationist shift, driven by former President Donald Trump, was put on stark display this week by Trump’s selection of Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) as his vice presidential nominee, elevating one of the party’s most aggressive opponents of aid to Ukraine and raising concerns among more traditionally minded elements of the GOP.

Rice, speaking at the Aspen Security Forum alongside former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, said that conservative internationalists need to “start to think, what of the international position do we need to preserve in order to play the role that we always have, which is providing a balance of power.”

She said that internationalists’ push for globalization, integration with China and global free markets was “a great macro idea, but it had horrible micro effects,” which turned some Americans against international involvement.

“It’s going to be really hard to sell to the American people that we need to maintain our internationalist role,” she said. “So I feel the connection between domestic policy, education, good jobs more intensely than I’ve ever felt.”

She pushed back against those in her party who argue that the U.S. should abandon Ukraine in favor of focusing solely on countering the threat from China, arguing that the Chinese and Russian threats, as well as that from Iran, are linked, and the U.S.’ “credibility is not divisible.”

“What you do in Ukraine is actually going to matter to Xi Jinping,” Rice said. “I think that’s an argument that will carry for even those who perhaps don’t want to do what we’re currently doing in Ukraine.”

Some in the party, including Vance, have rejected that argument. 

Rice added that “we have to realize that some of these engagements are going to be hard to sustain over a long period of time”; she said specifically that the U.S. needs to help get Ukraine find a solution that guarantees Ukraine can be “secure, independent and potentially prosperous.”

“What is the intermediate game here that gets Ukraine secure?” Rice said. “That is going to be the hard discussion about what is America’s willingness to give security guarantees? And there, I am concerned about some of the elements in the party.”

Rice and Gates characterized the current geopolitical moment as highly dangerous, comparing it to the period between World War I and World War II, saying that in some ways it is more volatile than the Cold War.

Rice said that both that era and the present are marked by increasing territorial conflict between great powers, without formalized agreements to avoid war; a weakening international order; and the rise of populism, nativism, isolationism and protectionism.

Gates described the U.S.’ foreign policy as crippled by divisions, arguing that the U.S. has failed to come together in a substantive way, as it did during the Cold War, to build a durable “common view of what we think the world looks like, what our strategy ought to be and how to we go about implementing that strategy?”

“We’re all over the place right now,” Gates continued. “And so we have become unpredictable to ourselves, as well as our friends, allies and adversaries and we can’t get anything done.”

Gates said that one major gap he sees in the U.S.’ approach to its foreign adversaries, including Iran, is that it’s failing to exploit the “fragility, the brittleness” of public support in those countries.

He said the U.S. should more aggressively pursue informational programs directed at citizens of foreign adversaries, “getting the word to their people about what’s really going on in their countries.”

Gates added that adversaries are already pursuing such strategies in the U.S., and accusing the U.S. of using them already, “so I’m not getting the argument why we shouldn’t be pressing back.”