Last
week, the Biden administration’s mouthpieces kicked into gear with two
nearly identical stories touting the threat that a few high-profile
Republican heretics pose to the American proxy war in Ukraine.
On March 15, the
Washington Post reported on “A Republican ‘civil war’ on Ukraine,” while the following day
Politico published a story headlined, “Wanted: A GOP presidential contender who supports Ukraine.”
These
stories come in the wake of — and no doubt as a response to — a recent
Tucker Carlson segment that asked a dozen or so possible Republican
presidential candidates several questions about American involvement in
Ukraine. Of those who answered, Florida governor Ron DeSantis made the
most waves (and clearly agitated the foreign policy establishment in the
process)
by saying: “While
the US has many vital national interests — securing our borders,
addressing the crisis of readiness within our military, achieving energy
security and independence, and checking the economic, cultural, and
military power of the Chinese Communist Party — becoming further
entangled in a territorial dispute between Ukraine and Russia is not one
of them.”
But
even a cursory look at the potential 2024 GOP presidential field belies
the “unpatriotic Republicans abandon Ukraine” narrative. Right now, the
field’s major candidates are Donald Trump and Nikki Haley. The field
will likely also include Ron DeSantis, Mike Pence, Mike Pompeo, John
Bolton, Chris Sununu, Tim Scott, Asa Hutchinson, Glenn Youngkin and Liz
Cheney.
Yet all of the above are basically Mitt Romney-style hawks — except for Trump.
And for DeSantis to fit the imagined role of some kind of foreign policy maverick, one must ignore his
actual record. As the estimable Daniel Larison
notes, “DeSantis’s overall
record is that of a hardliner (and hardliners
love him), and even his criticisms of Biden on Ukraine are framed in hawkish terms.”
The wild card as ever remains The Donald.
And
what — as of this writing — is said to be the imminent arrest of the
45th president may be the final nail in the coffin for a foreign policy
of restraint within the GOP. As the philosopher and media entrepreneur
Darren Beattie recently noted, “Trump-ism without Trump” is nothing more
than a ploy by the Republican establishment to rid itself of both.
Which
is not to say that Trump’s foreign policy judgment when he was
president should inspire much confidence: the illegal occupation of
northeastern Syria; the self-defeating “special relationships” with
Israel and Taiwan; the support for Saudi Arabia’s grotesque war on
Yemeni civilians; the arming of far-right battalions in Ukraine — all
occurred or were continued under Trump’s watch. Even worse, any good
things Trump attempted (pulling troops out of Afghanistan and Syria;
nominating Douglas Macgregor to be ambassador to Germany; forcing
several well-off NATO states to pay their fair share for their defense)
were undermined by opposition from within his own party on the Hill
and/or by the very advisors he himself ostensibly appointed.
All
of which is to say, before one gets overexcited over Trump’s promise to
dismantle, in his words, “the entire globalist neocon establishment
that is perpetually dragging us into endless wars,” we should remember
his record of appointing the most sanguinary war hawks (John Bolton,
Mike Pompeo, Mark Esper, HR McMaster, Eliot Abrams) to high office.
Look at who controls what and see if you detect any evidence of a Republican Party rebellion against the Bipartisan War Party.
On
the Hill, hawks Michael McCaul and Mike Rogers hold the gavels on the
House Foreign Affairs and Armed Services Committees, respectively. On
the Senate side, the GOP ranking members on Foreign Relations and Armed
Services are
Jim Risch and
Jim Inhofe,
not exactly widely known as voices of realism and restraint. The
oft-stated worry among Ukrainian partisans over the alleged threat
Speaker Kevin McCarthy poses to US funding for Ukraine seems likewise
overstated; after all, closing the money spigot to Ukraine comes down to
putting an end to all those blank checks to McCarthy’s funders in the
defense industry in Northern Virginia. Meantime, McCarthy’s counterpart
in the Senate, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, has been busy pushing
for
more aid to Ukraine.
Among
the national media, Republican voices calling for American restraint
are basically limited to Fox News’s Tucker Carlson and the very
occasional column by Ross Douthat at the New York Times. In
Washington’s Think Tank Land, there’s the Koch Brothers-funded network
of “mini-Catos” staffed by five or six people who seem content enough to
talk among themselves. Change agents? A challenge to the established
order? Please.
The Washington Post and Politico stories
show that any deviation from the bipartisan foreign policy orthodoxy,
no matter how small, will always trigger some amount of
hyperventilating and hand-wringing from the establishment. Because in
the end, the business of Washington is war. And that business has
nothing to fear from the Grand Old Party.