April 11

By Claire Hansen

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has made his views on America’s place in the Ukraine war clear.

Opposing Russian aggression in Ukraine is not in the “vital national interest” of the U.S., the Republican “it boy” said, dismissing the Russian invasion as a “territorial dispute” in a response to a questionnaire sent out to 2024 hopefuls by Fox News last month.

For anyone who has watched DeSantis rise to national prominence through his headline-grabbing, hard-line conservative state policies, his stance on the most pressing global issue of the day may not be surprising – but it is significant.

His view brings him firmly in line with roughly half of the GOP base – coincidentally, roughly the same portion of the party that thinks more favorably of Russian President Vladimir Putin than of Joe Biden.

DeSantis’ comments are also in the neighborhood of those made by former President Donald Trump, who announced his 2024 candidacy last year. Trump has a longer and more varied track record on the issue, but when responding to the same Fox News survey, the former president said opposing Russia in Ukraine was in the national interest “for Europe – but not for the United States.”

The view of the two front-runners for the 2024 GOP nomination is firmly out of line with a Republican Party that for decades fought to bolster democracy around the globe and viewed Russia as the center of an “evil empire” – more recently as an autocratic and corrupt state that, if no longer positioned to compete with America, was determined to meddle in its affairs.

The tension was on display as GOP senators reacted to DeSantis’ comments.

“American leadership matters. Poll tested answers are not leading,” Sen. John Cornyn, Texas Republican, said on Twitter in response to DeSantis’ statement.

“Protecting Ukraine is guarding our own national security,” Cornyn said in another post on Twitter.

Sen. Marco Rubio, Florida Republican and a former presidential candidate, told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt that the Ukraine conflict was not a “territorial dispute,” adding, “There is a national security interest in Ukraine. It’s not the No. 1 national security interest the United States has, but it’s an important one.”

DeSantis appeared to do some sort of damage control in response to the backlash, calling Putin a “war criminal” who “should be held accountable” in an interview with British TV personality Piers Morgan.

“I think he’s hostile to the United States, but I think the thing that we’ve seen is he doesn’t have the conventional capability to realize his ambitions,” DeSantis said of Putin, before going on to call Russia “a gas station with a bunch of nuclear weapons.”

Analysts note that the episode has thrown into stark relief a long-simmering debate within the GOP over foreign policy, which has come to a boil as Russia’s bloody invasion of Ukraine enters its second year.

“The invasion of Ukraine has dropped this new set of events into what already was a kind of tension on the right between those who see American defense of Europe as being a projection of American strength and those who see it as excessive entanglement with a culturally and economically liberal set of foreign states that they don’t necessarily wish to wish to defend,” says David Hopkins, a professor of political science at Boston College who studies party politics.

“I think that’s part of what’s playing out right now in Republican politics: What’s the sort of ideologically correct conservative view to have about the Ukraine invasion?”

A Split Party

GOP foreign policy priorities for decades have traced their origin to Ronald Reagan, and his name has been invoked in association with years of global interventions. Under Reagan, the U.S. aggressively involved itself in the fight against communism in Europe and in Central America through a muscular, interventionist approach.

Reagan, who emphasized American exceptionalism and the message that the U.S. was a “shining city on a hill,” saw involvement in foreign affairs as part of the country’s global responsibility – and in the country’s interest.

“Post-Cold War politics are still kind of playing out in a lot of ways, even though the Cold War has been over for 30 years,” Hopkins says. “The Cold War, in effect, resulted in a broad unity on the right about American engagement with the world, and that America had interests all over the world that needed to be defended, and that the Soviets – and in particular communism broadly – were a threat to American interests by definition everywhere in the world.”

While dissenting Republican voices advocating for a nationalistic approach to foreign policy emerged even after the Cold War, they remained in the minority. In the 1990s, long before Trump launched his White House bid, Pat Buchanan ran for the GOP nomination on an anti-interventionist platform, among other very conservative policy platforms. One of his foreign policy slogans read, “America First – and Second and Third.” Trump’s now-popular “America First” war cry was borrowed also from anti-interventionist groups that opposed U.S. involvement in World War II.

The foreign policy focus shifted from combating communism to terrorism and the Middle East, and the administration of President George W. Bush launched the then-popular invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq following the terror attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, with the familiar public justification of spreading democracy and opposing tyranny.

But those conflicts dragged on for decades.

“Since those invasions didn’t turn out so well, in the end, that really has sort of muddled the intellectual waters on the right in a lot of ways,” Hopkins says. “What lessons should we take from that failure? What does that mean about the limits of American power and interests? And what’s the correct policy response for the next time?”

Trump capitalized on the confusion with his “America First” mantra for foreign policy, but his approach to dealings with Russia proved problematic. First, Trump’s past dealings with Russian President Vladimir Putin were the subject of bizarre and salacious rumors that eventually became investigations. While no proof of collusion between Trump and Moscow emerged, Putin did cast his lot with Trump. And Trump’s most ardent supporters became more intent on blaming what they believed were politically motivated federal authorities.

In addition, after eight years of the Obama administration, the “enemies list” of far-right conservatives in the U.S. significantly overlapped with Putin’s most prominent American political opponents. And as Trump made a pillar of his foreign policy strategy the idea that other countries in NATO were not paying their fair share and that the price of the alliance was too high, he alienated traditional allies and in the process downplayed the threat posed by Russia while actively working to rehabilitate Putin and reintegrate Russia on the world stage.

The result was that opinions toward Russia – and particularly Putin – softened considerably on the political right to the point that more than half of Trump’s most solid supporters said in a poll not long ago that they believe the Russian autocrat is a better leader than Joe Biden.

Now the GOP faces a schism between the more traditional wing of the party – the one that saw Mitt Romney a decade ago identify Russia as the greatest threat to the U.S. during a presidential debate when he was the GOP standard-bearer – and the 30 percent of the party that Trump controls and that has exercised an outsized influence over Republican politics in recent years.

And with a presidential primary campaign underway in which candidates are vying for voters on the conservative right, DeSantis’ viewpoint takes on more significance. He positions himself among the voices emerging from the GOP who, inexplicably, question even the financial cost of the commitment after decades of U.S. rivalry with the vaunted Russian army. Now Moscow’s forces have been exposed as corrupt and ineffective, they are completely engaged in a ground war and being overmatched without the loss of a single American life. But many in the GOP would just as soon throw the Russian military a proverbial lifeline by curtailing support to Ukraine.

The conflict has carved an ever-widening divide between “America First” Republicans and GOP foreign policy hawks, between the Republican base and rank-and-file members of Congress, and between the party of Trump and the party of Reagan.

The Battle Lines

Intra-party tension over America’s role in the Russian invasion has been present since the start of the war, intensifying as the U.S. sends billions of dollars in aid and weapons to the Ukrainian front.

Trump’s position has been both evolving and, at times, contradictory.

Trump overturned a longtime Obama administration prohibition against providing Ukraine with heavy weapons, approving the sale of javelins to Ukraine early on in his presidency – although his motivation seemed to have more to do with money than security. Later, he held up hundreds of millions of dollars in assistance for domestic political – and not military or security – concerns. That move sparked the infamous phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy at the center of his first impeachment.

Trump has described the war as a “crime against humanity” but also suggested numerous times that Biden should threaten Russia with nuclear warfare in a bid to stop the war.

Recently, Trump has stated that he could end the war in “one day” through peace talks if he were president and has warned that Biden’s actions were sliding the world toward nuclear warfare. He has also focused on the contributions – or, he says, lack thereof – of European allies in the region, reviving his long standing arguments about NATO.

“Start by telling Europe that they must pay at least equal to what the U.S. is paying to help Ukraine. They must also pay us, retroactively, the difference. At a staggering 125 Billion Dollars, we are paying 4 to 5 times more, and this fight is far more important for Europe than it is for the U.S. Next, tell Ukraine that there will be little more money coming from us, UNLESS RUSSIA CONTINUES TO PROSECUTE THE WAR,” Trump said in response to the Fox News survey last month.

In contrast, former Vice President Mike Pence, who is rumored to be considering a White House bid, has been a vocal supporter of sending aid to Ukraine.

Some GOP senators have also been among the strongest supporters of American involvement in the conflict

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, Kentucky Republican, is one of the loudest backers of U.S. aid.

“If Putin were given a green light to destabilize Europe, invading and killing at will, the long-term cost to the United States in both dollars and security risks would be astronomically higher than the minuscule fraction of our GDP that we have invested in Ukraine’s defense thus far,” McConnell said in a statement in February marking one year since Russian forces invaded.

And in a speech to the Munich Security Conference, McConnell implied that voices denouncing robust U.S. intervention were getting outsized attention.

“Reports about the death of Republican support for strong American leadership in the world have been greatly exaggerated,” he said.

“Don’t look at Twitter, look at people in power,” he added.

Though anti-interventionists are a minority in the party in Congress, they are outspoken.

Sen. Josh Hawley, Arkansas Republican, has repeatedly objected to aid for Ukraine, stating that the choice is between having the money to deter China and writing “blank checks” to Ukraine.

“The truth is, we are overcommitted. Our elites are by the dream of liberal empire. Our uniparty ideology tells us we’re on the right side of history, and tough tradeoffs don’t exist,” Hawley said during a speech at the Heritage Foundation earlier this year, deriding the establishment stance on foreign policy. “That’s just not true. We do have a lot of military power on our side. But it isn’t deployed where it should be, it isn’t marshaled in the way we need it to be, and America and the world is going to face the consequences.”

“It is time to adopt a different foreign policy – a nationalist foreign policy,” he said.

Hawley’s view, shared by some both inside and outside of Congress, and particularly those among the MAGA wing of the party.

Criticism from some Republicans has also been threaded through with the implication that the government should prioritize domestic matters before foreign affairs – and that the two are diametrically opposed in a fiscal zero-sum game.

That “America First” approach was particularly obvious in the wake of a train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, that spilled a slew of hazardous materials. Republicans slammed the Biden administration for what they said was a belated and meager federal response.

Trump visited the small town in a de facto campaign stop just days after Biden made a daring, surprise visit to Kyiv, Ukraine, to mark the one-year anniversary of the war – a useful split-screen moment Republicans seized on to punctuate their stance on American policy and castigate Biden in the process.

“If you want to understand why so many Americans are frustrated right now: Biden is in Ukraine before Ohio,” Sen. Eric Schmitt, Missouri Republican, tweeted that week.

At the Conservative Political Action Conference earlier in March, Kari Lake, a MAGA Republican and staunch ally of Trump who lost her bid for Arizona governor last year, regaled the party’s activists with similar comments.

“We are living on Planet Crazy where we have hundreds of billions of dollars of our hard-earned American money being sent overseas to start World War III,” Lake said during a dinner address ironically named for President Ronald Reagan. “Where was Joe Biden when the people of Ohio were suffering? You all know where he was. He was standing in Ukraine, next to Volodymyr Zelenskyy, doing a phony, BS photo op. It was despicable, wasn’t it?”

“This is not our fight. We are America first. We are prioritizing our children, we are fixing our problems, and that’s what we are going to do,” she added, to loud applause.

GOP Voters and 2024

About half the Republican base, or 47% of Republican voters, believe that the U.S. is doing “too much” to support Ukraine, according to a poll by Gallup. In contrast, only 10% of Democrats said the same.

An ABC-Washington Post poll in February similarly found that 50% of Republicans think the country is doing “too much” – up more than 30 points from April 2022.

And an Ipsos poll found that only 52% of Republican voters said the U.S. should send weapons to Ukraine, and just 37% said the U.S. should send aid in addition to weapons. Tellingly, the same poll found that 43% of registered Republicans disagreed with the statement, “The United States must support democratic countries when they are attacked by nondemocratic countries.”

It’s unlikely that there are many Republicans who are single-issue voters on Ukraine – but opposition to intervention is part of the cultivation of a larger, nationalist message about putting Americans before those in other countries.

For DeSantis, who has skirted the issue for months and has appeared timid around matters of foreign policy, it could be a useful strategic move as he competes with Trump for the former president’s die-hard supporters. And it’s especially notable given that DeSantis supported arming Ukraine as a bid to deter Russia aggression in 2014 and 2015, while he was serving in the House of Representatives.

“DeSantis running against Trump – obviously in a primary, there’s this question of, ‘Well, can DeSantis be counted on to be the conservative leader that Trump was? To be as confrontational toward the left as we know Trump can be?’ And so if it’s important, it’s as a contributing factor in a larger set of issues, a larger process of image-building by political candidates,” Hopkins says.

Trump has recently seized on DeSantis’ comments – particularly those he made about holding Putin accountable, and calling Russia a “gas station” with nuclear weapons – in a bid to cast DeSantis as a RINO, or Republican in Name Only, aligned with the traditional, interventionist wing of the party.

“Those such as Mitt Romney and Ron DeSantis – very much alike – who insist on arrogantly treating Russia as deeply inferior to the other nations of the world, with no history or culture or pride, are not only ignorant and foolish, but their attitude makes it impossible to negotiate peace,” Trump said in a campaign video. “This kind of neo-con rhetoric, mocking Russia’s nuclear weapons, along with implying that Putin must be tried and presumably executed as a WAR CRIMINAL, only increases the chance of deadly nuclear escalation.”

“I am the only candidate who can prevent World War III,” Trump said.

As with any candidate’s policy positions in the primary, their views could shift during a general election. But with the deep fractures within the GOP on the issue, Republicans’ rightward lurch, and two parties’ widening divide, it’s in their interests to sound “like you’re not a liberal,” Hopkins says.

“Saying that American interests are at stake in Ukraine, that Ukraine should be defended using American power from the aggression of a horrible, authoritarian leader in Vladimir Putin, that a free Europe is dependent on alliance with the United States – those are things Joe Biden says, those are things Nancy Pelosi says, those are things that Democrats and liberals say,” Hopkins says. “And if you say all those things, then you sound like them.”