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DC Freaks Out Over DeSantis’s Ukraine Comments; Voters Shrug
Several right-of-center politicians and commentators are outraged over Gov. Ron DeSantis’s latest statement on the war in Ukraine. The hawks accuse the Florida governor of showing American weakness. Trump accuses him of being too vague. Both claim his short statement threatens his electoral chances — a prediction which reveals a severe case of Beltway Brain.
Fox News host Tucker Carlson asked various potential presidential candidates for their positions on America’s response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. This was DeSantis’s response:
While the U.S. 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.
Previously, the governor stuck to the vague assertion that we shouldn’t send Ukraine “a blank check.” His latest statement adds slightly more detail, with a strong emphasis on “slightly.”
Neither locks him into any firm position, which is an asset since no one knows the outcome of the expected spring offensives or what American voters will think of the issue in November 2024. Yes, it’s vague, as well it should be. Our leaders should constantly follow the facts on the ground and shift accordingly. The right strategy today probably won’t be the right strategy two years from now.
DeSantis is wrong to dismiss the full-blown invasion as a mere “territorial dispute”; outside of that, there’s little to criticize, let alone be outraged about. Either way, a vague foreign policy statement made 19 months before Election Day will have zero effect on said election.
Campaigns almost never win or lose on foreign policy; post-Cold War, a slight advantage accrues to the dovish. The rest of the country is not nearly as invested in Ukraine as DC tastemakers insist they be. In general, Americans sympathize with Ukrainians, but they’re more likely to rant about the price of eggs than developments across the Transdnieper.
This upsets foreign policy wonks since voters should care more about the latter than the former. In fact, it’s a moral failing that they don’t!
Meh. The kids want eggs for breakfast, but they’re getting a Lucky Charms knockoff instead. Voters are busy with everyday life, not geopolitical strategy on the other side of the world.
I think voters should care more about the $31.5 trillion federal debt, but here we are.
In contrast, President Biden promised to back Ukraine for “as long it takes.” Sorry, Joe, forever is a very long time. The US made similar promises to our Afghan allies before chaotically abandoning the country in Biden’s first year.
While the current president’s support seems earnest, he can’t promise anything beyond his administration. Especially if the American people turn against it. Which they are.
According to the Associated Press, in May 2022, 60% of Americans supported arming Ukraine. As of January, that has dropped to 48%. This still makes up a plurality but is trending the wrong way for the forever caucus. Who knows what it will be in a year and a half?
The US has already sent $112 billion to Ukraine with little debate and less oversight. For comparison, Ukraine’s entire GDP in 2020 was about $200 billion. On his recent visit, Biden casually announced a half a billion more, along with “artillery ammunition, anti-armor systems, and air surveillance radars to help protect the Ukrainian people from aerial bombardments.”
Rah-rah, Slava Ukraini, and all that, but there’s a limit to American largesse. And people get miffed when Biden jets to Kyiv with a suitcase full of money but avoids East Palestine, Ohio.
Politicians in both parties must understand that their first responsibility is to their own nation; allies come second. Forget this, and the people will toss them on their tin ears. DeSantis makes his priority clear: the United States of America.
Reagan-era Secretary of State George Shultz asked every new US ambassador a simple question. “I’m going to spin the globe and I want you to put your hand on your country.”
When they pointed to the nation assigned to them, Shultz corrected them. “Your country is the United States.”
DeSantis has passed this test. Biden has not.
Published in Elections, Foreign Policy, Politics
That is nonsense. Who is making that argument? No one.
The argument is that I at least, don’t care. I don’t care if one corrupt nation invades another.
Every single dollar that has gone to Ukraine would have been better spent here.
This thread is an example of how the GOPe will turn on DeSantis
I agree that Russia invaded Ukraine. But I see it more as a husband (Nato) has been beating his wife (Russia) for a very long time and she finally strikes back.
Again, the warhawks simultaneously crow that Russia is so inept it can’t take Kharkiv, but also so powerful that it’s going to conquer Europe.
The math doesn’t work.
I disagree with this part, Jon, though I like most of your post.
You use the word “mere.” What does that mean? It’s a territorial dispute, but your assertion that it is not a “mere ‘territorial dispute'” suggests that it is something more. I do not think that it is.
What more could it be? A threat to world peace, if the war expands? Well, maybe it’s that, but I don’t see any indication that the Russians want to move past Ukraine, or even take all of Ukraine. They don’t have the forces to accomplish such a task anyway, so even if they wanted to, I wouldn’t really care.
The risk of escalation comes from NATO’s involvement, I think. It is possible that such involvement could lead to an escalation, either due to an error on either side, or because the NATO side could feel pressure to intervene if Ukraine begins to collapse, or because the Russians get desperate if operations go poorly.
In any of these cases, dismissing the conflict as “mere territorial dispute” is both correct, in my view, and the wise course.
I think that I’m in a small minority here. I actually find myself liking the Russians, overall, more than I like the Ukrainians.
This is quite a change for a Cold War kid like me.
But the Russians seem to be stronger on social and traditional values than the Ukrainians, and seem to be behaving in a more sensible and realistic fashion.
In fairness to the Ukrainians, I’m not sure that there’s a lot of support among the people of Ukraine for the whole rainbow-flag agenda. I think that it’s being pushed by NATO and the EU, but that the Ukrainian government goes along for their own purposes.
I suspect that a large proportion of the Ukrainian people like the idea of EU membership less because it may help the Ukrainian economy, and more because it would give them a passport out of Ukraine. I haven’t looked up specific data on this.
Maybe I can find another way of getting you into the car.
From your comment about your three overseas “lines,” I infer that there used to be more. Maybe I can talk you back from your remaining three.
Israel is practically irrelevant to us. Moreover, of the three lines you mention, they are the one most capable of defending themselves. Even if Israel were conquered and destroyed, it is not in the path to anywhere else that it of importance. So why do you care so much about Israel? Do you just love the Jews more than you love any other people, for some reason? If so — that would actually be racist, wouldn’t it?
Russia’s west is not threatened. There’s a war in Ukraine because NATO kept encroaching on the Russians from the west, not because the Russians tried to push west. In any event, it’s clear now that the Russians don’t have the power to sweep through Ukraine to the next country — and even those, Poland and Romania, aren’t particularly important to us. Further, of course, the Europeans are perfectly capable of defending themselves. I think that they would do so, if we stopped letting them rely on “Uncle Sugar.”
This leaves China’s east. I take this to mean Taiwan. I don’t think that Taiwan should matter to us, either. It does not bring Chinese forces any closer to us. Taiwan produces some important computer chips, as I understand it, but the solution to that is to bring such manufacturing home, instead of spending our defense dollars to prop up a competitor.
I’m pretty much down to two lines myself, more or less the ones laid down in the Monroe Doctrine. One in the middle of the Atlantic, one in the middle of the Pacific. This is our hemisphere.
Other than that, I’d like to see us eliminate our commitments, and monitor events. We would still have the option of intervening, from afar, on one side or the other of a particular conflict, if we thought that it might spread to our hemisphere.
John Mearsheimer refers to this as “off-shore balancing.”
I don’t see what rationality/irrationality has to do with it. Putin is as rational as anyone else. You don’t have to be rational or irrational to use or not use nukes, or to invade or not invade Poland.
Putin can paint himself in his own corners without anybody else’s help.
It might not be a wise foreign policy, but it can be very rational. Wars do tend to require people to choose their sides, though, with no room in the middle. Following Vlad Vexler’s advice I am tolerant of when people in Ukraine do that. It’s understandable when missiles are getting tossed your way and your loved ones are dying. That doesn’t mean we have to be 100 percent one way or another, and I don’t think it’s at all true that we’re not allowed to have these discussions. I think you’re making that up. Either that, or spending your life in very different places from the rest of us. If American soldiers were getting killed it would be a different story. I’m very much in favor of not getting to that place.
The thing that is ironic is that huge numbers of Poles have left Poland for economic reasons, but now Ukrainians who are culturally similar have been flooding into Poland. It’s usually women with children and the elderly. Will be interesting if they ever return.
Probably a bad move for the U.S. to stake its reputation on whether it can properly arm a corrupt eastern-European country.
Also probably a bad move for the U.S. to weaken its military capabilities by giving its hard-to-replace weaponry to a corrupt eastern-European country.
Lindsey Graham?
FIFY
Weak foreign policy?
No wars. Abraham accords. Addressing trade imbalance with China. ISIS nearly eliminated. Got Rocketman to back down.
I dunno . . . the foreign policy of the Trump era seems pretty good right now.
Just because Putin and John Mearschimer say so, that doesn’t make it true. You have to ignore an awful lot of what has been said and done by people on the ground in order to entertain that notion.
That’s not clear at all. If they can hold out until western support slackens, they can drive Ukraine to the negotiating table and force it to give up some of its sovereignty, which just means their push to the west will go a little slower. Russia is very skillful at using corruption to get its tentacles around foreign governments, which is an especially powerful tool in those eastern european countries where corruption was once the only way to survive in a planned economy. It can take generations to throw off that mentality.
Just because you say they aren’t important to us, that doesn’t make them unimportant to us.
So should we encourage Poland and Estonia to get their own nukes so they can counter Putin’s attempts at intimidation?
Too Trumpy.
Poland and Estonia are members of NATO. Your question is irrelevant, IMHO.
Waging a genocidal war is definitely a way of upholding traditional social values. It’s a tradition that goes back several millenia. It’s sensible and realistic, and also evil. (I call it genocidal in part because there is a lot of genocidal rhetoric behind it among Putin’s supporters.)
Patriarch Kirill gives us that old time religion when he tells Russian soldiers that if they die in battle, their sins will all be forgiven. He didn’t specify what happens to Ukrainian soldiers who die in battle, but he is willing to suppress all protestant churches in Russia and use the Russian orthodox church as a spy agency within Ukraine. Of course, what can you expect from a religious leader who worked for the KGB in the 70s.
You might be on to something here. The Ukrainian people seem to put up with a lot from the west when it’s a choice between that or being culturally genocided by Russia. I like the way they accept help from the west without selling their souls for it. Unlike Russians who are rah-rah Putin, no matter what he does, they support Zelensky as a good war-time leader, but are reserving the right to determine whether that support will extend to everything he might do in the future, or even everything he is doing now. It’s very possible that, like Churchill, he will be given the boot after the war is over, this time because he isn’t doing enough to eliminate corruption. It’s a much healthier attitude than the cult of personality that Putin has allowed to develop.
I’m sure that’s true of some of them. A lot of them aren’t crazy about everything EU, but are grateful for EU support for them now. That’s true about other countries, too, such as Poland. They have to take their friends where they can find them.
There are those who would like us to abandon the NATO alliance. Not that the formal terms of the alliance require us to be helping Ukraine, of course.
I don’t see anyone here calling withdrawing from NATO. I do hear folks here saying the Europeans should meet their commitments and spend at least 2% of annual GDP on defense.
You are correct about the terms of the alliance not requiring us to assist UKR. In fact, apart from the Budapest Memo (which is not a treaty), whose terms we have fulfilled, I don’t think we have any commitments to UKR. And the Budapest Memo doesn’t require us to provide any military aid to UKR.
ETA: And since Poland and Estonia are NATO members, they don’t need to acquire their own nukes. They are under the U.S> nuclear umbrella. Pretty sure both states are also signatories to the Non-Proliferation Treaty as well.
One question that needs to be answered is whether NATO has drifted from its original purpose to the point where it no longer functions properly and perhaps a new organization should take its place. Depending on what that organization is supposed to accomplish.
Maybe in 2023 it’s outlived its usefulness. Because if it’s just going to be a tool by which the US is forced to commit itself to wars that have nothing to do with us, then no . . . no I’m not interested.
The past 20 years have convinced me that after the Soviet Union/Warsaw Pact collapsed, NATO should have been rolled up and some sort of new collective security pact taken its place.
And if it had been done without us, I have to believe that Europe would be in a better position to deal with this themselves.
If the US doesn’t help in repelling the threat from Russia, which they feel very strongly, they may start relying less on NATO and more on an Eastern European alliance that some see in the making (along with the UK). I forget what acronyms are used for it. Nobody is talking nukes at this point, but they see what happened when Ukraine gave up its nukes. I don’t think they will be withdrawing from NATO in my lifetime, but they may be hedging their bets. Right now they are entering into a huge industrial investment and agreement with Korea to make tanks, which is not an investment in NATO weapons. They have been somewhat frustrated by all the restrictions within NATO that keep them from sending as much as they would like to Ukraine. You can search for “Poland militarization” to see what bloggers are saying about of it, some of whom actually study the issue in depth before reporting on it. Poland’s military budget for this year is about 4% of GDP.
Some folks read Lord of the Rings and root for the orcs.
Biden implemented Trump’s “deal” with the Taliban.
All the Eastern European countries begged to enter NATO. Why? Because they feared Russia and Russia’s actions both in Ukraine over the last ten years and in Georgia and a few other places justified that fear. They were right to fear Russia. Putin proved it.
No, because it would mean that someone else (i.e., the U.S.) would spend the blood and treasure on their defense and they could concentrate on things like climate change.
Say what you will about Saruman, but he made the trees burn on time.
There’s too many to answer individually. I’ll just blurt out a general response, but I have no interest in engaging in a back and forth.
I did not use “isolationist” as a pejorative. Sometimes isolations are right, sometimes they are not. If you’re impulse is to not get involved in international affairs, then claim it proudly. I personally believe it is better to try to shape the world to our interest and our morality than to be at the whims of other countries shaping the world.
Russia not a threat because it has worked so hard to get to roughly a stalemate? You forget all the military aid the western countries have provided to Ukraine, the training of Ukrainian soldiers, the logistics support, the humanitarian aid, the intelligence, and the tactical doctrines, all to Ukraine. Russia is still the second most powerful military in the world, and it has taken just about every man in Ukraine with all the support the west has given them to reach this stalemate. Here are comparisons.
How could Vietnam, a third world country, reach a stalemate and then a victory over the US, the strongest military in the world at the height of its Cold War military strength? Support from the Soviets in the same way I listed above that we are giving to the Ukrainians. How could a below third world Afghanistan reach a stalemate and then victory over Cold War military strength Soviet Union? Support from the US in much the same way we are doing in Ukraine. How could a ragged group of minutemen farmers defeat the British Empire at the height of its power? Military support from France. A large powerful military can be defeated when it is fighting on foreign turf by a supported, much weaker country. But the weaker country needs support and will to fight. And this has not proven that Russia was a weak military power all along. Not by a long shot. That’s why they’ve stuck this out.
You want national interests, I’ll give you national interests, but this will prove how it’s a waste of my time to provide them. Not one single isolationist is going to change his mind. In no particular order.
1. Russian conquest of Ukraine will destabilize Europe and other parts of the world. If other countries see weakness from the west, they will join up with Russia and the China/Iran triad.
2. Instead of having a larger economic free market, you will have shrunk the free market countries and enlarged the dictatorial/semi communist countries.
3. Russian victory will show China that victory can be attained instead of the message it cannot.
4. European countries will have to arm with nuclear arms to counter the Russian threat. There will be more nuclear weapons around, not less.
5. An immoral act will have been rewarded, and that will lead to more across the world, not less, resulting in destabilizing the world and economies.
6. Russia will have a prime strategic position in central Europe and the Black Sea to carry out its historical impulses of conquest, per Imperial Russia and Soviet Union.
7. Russia will be rewarded with Ukraine’s natural resources of farming and minerals, thereby strengthening its ability to execute its interests across the world.
8. Russian victory will result in more money going into NATO, not less.
Finally it’s a question of risk decision making. If the isolationists are correct and easy Russian victory doesn’t lead to all the negatives, what have we lost? Right now it’s estimated we’ve spent $76 Billion to Ukraine. Let’s say it winds up more than double at $200B. In a $7 trillion dollar annual budget, it amounts to pennies on the dollar, and the $200B is across more than one fiscal year. And mind you, military ordinance has an expiration date, and what we’ve given them will ultimately be scraped anyway. So if Russian victory doesn’t lead to negative worldwide impacts we’ve lost pennies on the dollar and ordinance that will be replaced anyway.
If the isolationists are wrong and an emboldened Russian and China and Iran and whoever else wants to join a rising powerhouse leads to a destabilized world, then what we’ve spent in Ukraine is peanuts to the future cost.
The second statement belies the first.