Rep. Michael McCaul, foreign policy hawk in an increasingly isolationist GOP, recounts 20 years in Congress

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Rep. Michael McCaul’s Washington office is full of relics from far-flung places, mementos from his years of travel as one of Congress’ top national security and foreign policy legislators.

There’s a photo of him with the Dalai Lama in Tibet. A birthday card hand-drawn by Bono when the two attended the Munich Security Conference. And one item from overseas that he didn’t receive from a world leader or foreign dignitary — the Army uniform his father wore fighting in World War II as a B-17 bombardier, laid out and framed above his desk.

McCaul’s office decor is an embodiment of his politics, increasingly rare in the Republican Party — an indefatigable believer in the necessity of American global leadership, a willing partner in bipartisanship and a Bush-era congressman whose worldview was deeply shaped by the failures of pre-World War II appeasement.

A child of the Cold War, McCaul, an Austin Republican, first came to Congress in 2005 after running on a platform of counterterrorism. In his 20 years in office, he rose to chair the House’s Homeland Security Committee and then the Foreign Affairs Committee, becoming one of most powerful Republican voices on foreign policy as his party moved more towards isolationism.

On Sunday, McCaul, 63, announced he would retire at the end of this term — his 11th representing Central Texas — and pursue opportunities in the national security and foreign policy space outside Congress. Never shy about speaking his mind on anything from Ukraine to the Middle East to domestic terrorism, McCaul said he wants to continue advocating for American engagement in the world, even — and especially because — fewer people in his party are listening.

“To say that America is not going to be the leader of the free world, and to abdicate from that responsibility and shrink from that, I think weakens America, and it leaves a vacuum for adversaries to fill — like China, Russia, North Korea,” McCaul said in an interview. “I'm going to continue to be a very strong voice on that. And it didn't work in 1939.”

McCaul will leave behind a lengthy and recognizable legislative legacy. He spearheaded investigations into the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, the U.S. military’s Afghanistan withdrawal and the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic. He helped drive Congress to deliver significant aid to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan, and led legislation that organized cybersecurity, expanded TSA Precheck and Global Entry and drove billions of dollars of investment to Texas’ semiconductor industry.

His retirement will leave the Texas delegation without one of its most influential voices and the House down a prominent foreign policy hawk. Among Texas’ 38 House members, only three have served longer.

But having term-limited out of chairing both committees he had already led, McCaul said next year is the right time to leave.

“Some members just don’t know how to let go of power — and they’re not happy either,” McCaul said. “I don’t really want to go down that road.

“There are four ways to leave,” he continued. “You die, you lose, you can get indicted or you can go out on top on your own terms.”

A career spanning Iraq to Ukraine

Born in Dallas, McCaul began his career as a federal prosecutor before going on to work for then-Texas Attorney General John Cornyn. After 9/11, he did federal counterterrorism work. McCaul first ran for Congress in 2004 in a district that stretched from Austin to the western edge of Harris County, which he won and has represented ever since, recently surviving close elections and changing boundaries.

He got his first taste of committee power when he was named Homeland Security chair in 2013. Just a few months into his tenure, the Boston bombing occurred, a terrorist attack that killed three and injured hundreds. Running the hearings into what happened, including how law enforcement responded, McCaul was quickly thrust into the national spotlight, becoming a regular on Sunday shows. During his chairmanship from 2013 to 2019, he contended with everything from the rise of ISIS to an increase in online radicalization of Americans to the heightened prominence of border and immigration issues.

After his three terms atop the Homeland Security panel, McCaul became the top Republican on the Foreign Affairs Committee, as ranking member from 2019 to 2023 and then chair for the last two years of the Biden era. In that role, he traveled extensively confronting a series of mounting crises, from the fallout of the Afghanistan withdrawal to the Russia-Ukraine war to the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel.

McCaul was one of the first U.S. lawmakers to visit Ukraine at the onset of the war, spending time at a logistics depot on the Polish border. He went to Taiwan to visit newly elected President Lai Ching-te in 2024 and saw Chinese war game exercises. (McCaul said he gave Lai a cowboy hat during the visit.) And he was involved in the drone strike against Iranian General Qasem Soleimani with Trump officials in 2020, drawing himself an indictment from the Iranian government.

Over the years, McCaul has made his fair share of enemies, from Iran to China. And though his focus has been on foreign adversaries, he’s increasingly worried about what he hears closer to home. On some level, he said understands the trend towards isolationism, especially among younger people who grew up in an era of endless war. During the Bush era, McCaul voted against withdrawing troops from Iraq. But he now says the post-9/11 wars were mishandled.

“We should probably never have gone into Iraq,” McCaul said. “And I think we had Bin Laden in our sights in Tora Bora, and [then-Secretary of State Donald] Rumsfeld would not approve Title 10 troops to go in. And that was a huge mistake. It's very, very unfortunate.”

But as a student of World War II, McCaul’s goal has been to avoid the mistakes of the era, through hawkishness and demonstrating peace through strength. His support for Ukraine is a key pillar of his worldview.

Getting Republicans to agree to provide aid to Ukraine — one of his chief aims as Foreign Affairs chair — became an increasingly difficult exercise. Right after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Congress passed the Ukraine Lend-Lease Act nearly unanimously. But 57 House Republicans voted against Ukraine aid later that year; by 2023, 117 Republicans voted against another aid package.

In April 2024, with Ukrainian military supplies dwindling, Speaker Mike Johnson put a foreign aid package on the House floor at great risk to his speakership. McCaul gave a dramatic floor speech summoning the full weight of history, asking members if they would rather be Winston Churchill or Neville Chamberlain. The majority of the Republican caucus — 112 members — voted against it, but the Ukraine package passed with the support of Democrats and ultimately became law.

“I worked very closely with Johnson, and he really put his speakership on the line putting that on the floor,” McCaul said. “In fact, he told me when we were in Israel recently that he thought he was gone. But if we had not passed that bill, there's no question in my mind that Russia would be occupying Ukraine today, and Moldova and Georgia and threatening the Baltics.”

McCaul’s outspoken support of Ukraine has put him in direct opposition to many fellow Republicans; it’s one of the reasons he did not run for speaker when the job was open after then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy was ousted in October 2023.

“[The Texas delegation] wanted me to run for speaker … but I felt like my role as chairman of Foreign Affairs was, at that critical time, more important and more interesting,” McCaul said. “And I wouldn't have to kowtow to eight members that would want to hang me the next day over my position on Ukraine.”

A hole in the Texas delegation

When McCaul first came to Congress, Rep. Tom DeLay, a Houston-area Republican, was House majority leader. At one point during his tenure atop the Homeland Security Committee, he was one of seven Texas Republicans to chair a committee.

But the Texas delegation today is far less powerful and more fractured, with few senior members. McCaul said he planned to discuss the need for Texas Republicans to join the party’s leadership ranks at the delegation’s lunch this week, adding that he does think Texas’ political clout will rebound. He cited Reps. Jodey Arrington, R-Lubbock, Nathaniel Moran, R-Tyler, and August Pfluger, R-San Angelo, as younger members he believes have bright futures.

But he also said Congress has become meaner in the 20 years he’s spent on Capitol Hill, with a decline in the bipartisan civility that drives legislative success. Bills like the CHIPS Act, which McCaul worked on with Democrats during Trump’s first term and into Biden’s presidency, and which has driven microchip and semiconductor investment to Central Texas, are proof of concept, he said.

“The fiery rhetoric plays to the base, but it's not really constructive up here,” McCaul said. “I didn’t run to yell and scream and get on the TV and be a jackass. I actually ran to get things done for the American people.”

McCaul said the angry nature of today’s political climate is a direct contrast to the Bush era in which he began his political career. Bush, McCaul said, governed Texas in a bipartisan way, spoke Spanish as part of his Hispanic outreach and emphasized civility. While Texas is now a comfortably red state, he said party leaders need to remember that Democrats had controlled the governor’s mansion for most of the state’s history until Bush.

“I think some in our party forget that there was a time when we weren't the dominant party,” McCaul said. “If the pendulum swings too far to the right, it's going to swing back. So I just think you have to be careful.”

With 16 months left in his term, McCaul still has legislation to pass and a perspective to impart on his colleagues and the White House. He’s currently pushing for a major sanctions bill on Russia and has been vocal about his concerns with Trump’s foreign policy, including saying that Putin was manipulating the president. He told the Tribune he is also worried about the Trump administration’s decision to grant export licenses to Nvidia and AMD to sell semiconductors to China so long as they share 15% of their revenue with the U.S. Doing so has “the optics of selling our national security” and is a dangerous path, McCaul warned.

But soon, the mementos and artifacts in his office will be boxed up and Texas’ 10th Congressional District will have a new representative for the first time in 22 years. Congressional delegation trips will go on without him, and the incivility that bothers him will likely deepen.

“I won’t miss the circus,” he said. “But I’ll miss the clowns.”

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