Ron DeSantis’ first foray into world affairs as a potential presidential candidate hasn’t gone well. DeSantis’ dismissive description of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as “a territorial dispute” that doesn’t merit U.S. attention spawned a gale of fervent pushback from top Senate Republicans and others in the party.
It has highlighted what one politician described as a “civil war” within the GOP over Ukraine and American foreign policy generally. If so, it’s a conflict that the believers in traditional Republican dedication to protecting democracy abroad must win — and that the modern-day isolationists of the party’s populist-MAGA wing (Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley prominent among them) must lose.
The rift began when Fox News host Tucker Carlson released responses to a written survey of potential 2024 president candidates. DeSantis, the Florida governor widely viewed as a likely contender with MAGA voters who are ready to move on from former President Donald Trump, answered regarding Ukraine in pretty much the way Trump himself did.
“While the U.S. has many vital national interests — securing our borders, addressing the crisis of readiness with 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,” DeSantis wrote.
Territorial dispute? Russia launched an unprovoked attack on a neighboring democracy and U.S. ally in a blatant land grab, has targeted civilians, committed war crimes and hinted at using nuclear weapons. This is a “territorial dispute” only in the Hitler-era Germany sense.
That fact wasn’t lost on Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., who noted that the “Neville Chamberlain approach to aggression never ends well,” referring to the British prime minister condemned in history for his appeasement of Hitler.
Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, worried that the remark “raises questions” about DeSantis’ understanding of the conflict — a devastating assessment of a potential presidential candidate by a party elder. DeSantis’ fellow Floridian, Sen. Marco Rubio, lamented that “I don’t know what he’s trying to do or what the goal is.”
Given that the comment represents an about-face for DeSantis’ support for Ukraine of just a few years ago, it’s clear that his goal here was to pander to the MAGA wing of the party. That wing shares Trump’s continuing, disturbing deference to Russian leader Vladimir Putin and Trump’s isolationist instincts, shortsightedly and inaccurately presented as “America first.”
Graham described the Russian invasion as “an attempt by Putin to rewrite the map of Europe by force of arms” — just as Hitler attempted. The World War II generation (and, indeed, the “party of Reagan” that today’s Republicans still fancy themselves to be) understood that confronting such tyranny ultimately isn’t a gesture of altruism but of self-preservation. Hopefully, that awkward first lesson of DeSantis’ expected presidential campaign will take hold.
