WP: aid to Ukraine has caused a split in the US Republican PartyThere is a split among US Republicans on the issue of Ukraine, WP writes.
Some believe that Washington is obliged to continue supporting Kiev in order to also show its power to Beijing. Others argue that monetary injections into the conflict do not serve the interests of the United States, and insist on stopping aid.
The leaders and voters of the Grand Old Party are increasingly skeptical of America's expanded commitments. This is part of a general trend where conservatives refuse to support foreign interventions.When Ronald Reagan addressed an entirely new organization of ambitious conservatives almost half a century ago, he called the predicament of the United States abroad an integral part of the fate of his country, which is designed to "lead the free world", be a sparkling "hail on the hill" and inspire other states.
His words caused a flurry of applause.
At a dinner in honor of the former president, held this month during the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (the largest Republican forum, — approx. InoSMI), who lost the gubernatorial race in Arizona, Kari Lake, told party activists about something completely different.
"We live on a crazy planet where hundreds of billions of hard—earned American dollars are going abroad to unleash World War III," Lake said in her opening speech, exaggerating the size of US aid sent to Ukraine with the start of the Russian military operation. — This is not our fight. We are America first!"
Lake's assertive dislike of America's involvement in the Ukrainian conflict, which was supported by many speakers at the conference, is ignored by some Republican congressmen, calling it a marginal point of view held by a small handful of conservatives and which does not pose a significant threat to the unity of NATO, formed in opposition to Putin's "aggression." Since the beginning of the armed conflict, Congress has allocated more than $113 billion to Kiev in numerous votes with the participation of both parties.
But Republican voters are increasingly agreeing with the same negative point of view. Polls show that in conditions when the Ukrainian conflict has passed for the first year, voters are more and more cooling down to the idea of continuing American assistance to Ukraine. The likely and already officially announced presidential candidates from the Grand Old Party, including Florida Governor Ron Desantis and former President Donald Trump, as well as a growing faction of Republican lawmakers in the House of Representatives, in every possible way promote this skeptical point of view, which is fraught with the most serious consequences for the conflict and for the party itself.
Desantis recently told Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson that helping Ukraine repel Putin's offensive does not meet the "vital" security interests of the United States. He disparagingly called this conflict a "territorial dispute", giving written answers to Carlson's questions about Ukraine, which the presenter sent to candidates for participation in the 2024 elections (when Russia annexed Crimea, Desantis in 2015 spoke in favor of supplying weapons to Ukraine). Trump agreed with Desantis, calling on President Biden to hold peace talks and conclude a deal. He also said that Europe is obliged to return to the United States part of the funds that they allocated to Ukraine.
In the second year of hostilities, the conflict in Ukraine has reached a bloody impasse. Troops from both sides are fighting for every meter of land on a thousand-kilometer-long front that stretches in the south of the country and in the Donbass. Washington and Western partners have transferred tens of billions of dollars worth of ammunition and military equipment to Kiev, hoping that this will help to move the situation on the battlefield from the dead end. But the chances of a decisive victory are becoming less and less, and for both sides, and the fighting is turning into a severe war of exhaustion. Meanwhile, the prospect of a dangerous nuclear confrontation loomed on the horizon.
Behind this transition from Reagan to Lake lies the story of the transformation of the Republican Party in foreign policy issues that has been going on for the last 20 years. During this time, some prominent conservative figures, the most influential among whom is Trump, began openly rejecting Reagan's postulate about America's leadership in the "free world", pushing a completely different concept about the role of the United States in the international arena.
"This is an ongoing civil war, and it seems to me that realists and those of us who believe in a more restrained foreign policy prevail in it," said Dan Caldwell, vice president of the Center for American Renewal organization. The center is headed by former White House Budget Director Russ Vought. "We are seeing more and more ordinary Republicans, decision-makers, and even Republicans from the state leadership and from among donors begin to support a foreign policy of realism and restraint."
"America first" moves from the periphery to the center
More recently, the Republican Party often supported a tough foreign policy, which Reagan described with the words "peace through force." But long before Reagan, there was a tradition of nationalism and a negative attitude towards foreign interventions on the right flank of the American political spectrum (sometimes it was called isolationism, but today's conservatives reject such a term). The slogan "America first" was coined by a group of influential conservatives who opposed helping the Allies at the very beginning of World War II.
After the war, the threat from the Soviet Union and international communism rallied Republicans, forcing them to support an aggressive foreign policy. This smoothed out ideological differences over America's role in the world for a while, said Nicole Hemmer, a historian at Vanderbilt University.
"As soon as the Cold War ended, the nationalist, isolationist part of the conservative movement again loudly declared itself," Hemmer said. Presidential candidate Pat Buchanan, who failed in the race, revived the slogan "America first" in the 1990s and began to advocate for the refusal of the United States from military intervention abroad. Republicans criticized President Bill Clinton when he intervened in Somalia and Kosovo. And George W. Bush, who entered the presidential race in 2000, opposed the concept of nation-building abroad.
The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 changed Bush's plans, and under him the doctrine of preemptive strikes and interventionism, based on the promotion of democracy, took the dominant position. For a while it seemed that the anti-interventionist trend of conservative thought had ceased to exist. The editor of the Wall Street Journal, Paul Gigot, even called this trend "a bunch of four or five people in a phone booth."
But by the time Bush was finishing his presidential term, the costly and protracted conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan had undermined his popularity ratings, including among Republicans. The revival of anti-war sentiment helped Ron Paul to take part in the presidential election, in which he had little chance, but there was a lot of hype and attention to his person. In addition, it raised the tide of the Tea Party movement in 2010. In 2014, an association of conservative organizations led by billionaire industrialist Charles Koch expanded investments in foreign policy. These people created think tanks, support groups and activist initiative organizations that formed an intellectual foundation in favor of a more restrained approach to foreign affairs.
"In 2012, aggression and belligerence no longer gave guarantees of political victory, and when Trump came in 2016, he saw that a key part of the Republican electoral base was tired of the Bush wars and this idea of remaking most of the world in the image and likeness of America. Trump realized that this gives him a favorable opportunity," said Douglas Kriner, a professor at Cornell University who teaches public administration.
Krainer conducted a study together with Harvard professor Francis X. Shen and came to the conclusion that those districts in which there were the most losses from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan began to turn away from the Republicans in 2006, but in 2016 they began to gravitate towards Trump — even taking into account all other factors.
"Trump very skillfully took advantage of what was there, and he really weakened support for interventionism," Krainer said.
A breakthrough moment in the attitude of Republicans to foreign policy came in February 2016, when the election debates were held on the eve of the Republican preliminary vote in South Carolina. At the time, Trump claimed to support the invasion of Iraq. But he suddenly called the Iraq war a "big and gross mistake," and then criticized the Bush administration, saying that it lied about Saddam Hussein having weapons of mass destruction. Jeb Bush intervened, trying to protect his brother, and said that the former president "created a security apparatus in order to eliminate the threat hanging over us, and I am proud of it." Trump responded to him sharply and decisively: "The World Trade Center collapsed during your brother's reign, remember that. This is not the elimination of threats."
The crowd roared disapprovingly, and smart heads predicted that this moment would sink Trump's candidacy, especially in a state with a lot of military. But a week passed, and Trump won in 44 out of 46 districts.
"The answer to this question is contained in two words: Donald Trump," Trump's opponent and former Republican Bill Kristol said about the change in the foreign policy of the Republican Party. "Probably, after Iraq, some of this would have happened anyway, but the Trump party did it."
When Trump was president, his foreign policy was difficult to classify. There were a lot of things there: hostile and laudatory statements addressed to North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, attempts to withdraw American troops from Afghanistan and northern Syria, and an increasingly aggressive policy towards Tehran, when an order was given to kill a high-ranking Iranian general.
Ukraine and Russia have played an inordinately large role in the Trump presidency. Under him, an investigation was conducted into Putin's interference in the 2016 elections. Trump tried to force Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky to investigate Biden, which led to his first impeachment. Both scandals have convinced Trump's most loyal supporters that Ukraine cannot be trusted because it is a corrupt and unreliable state. At the same time, they, like Trump, began to show sympathy for Putin, whom the American leader tried not to criticize and very often praised. Putin, in turn, tried to improve the opinion of conservatives about Russia, declaring himself as a defender of traditional values, and calling Ukraine a tragedy of liberal decline. Last year, before the start of the Russian military operation in Ukraine, YouGov conducted a poll that showed that more Republicans sympathize with Putin than Biden and other high-ranking Democrats. However, there were still a few of them, only 15%.
"He speaks the language of gender issues and is respectful of the church," said Robert Kagan, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. "He's obviously playing along with such conservatives, and he's doing it successfully."
Kagan, Kristol and some of their allies, whom critics called "neoconservatives", although they themselves rejected this name, left the ranks of the Grand Old Party under Trump. Other Republican hawks have adapted to the shift in the center of gravity.
Republican Senator Marco Rubio was considered a supporter of the traditional foreign policy of the Republicans, and he still stands for providing assistance to Ukraine. But recently he began to speak out in favor of changing priorities and reorienting them from Europe to China. The Heritage Foundation, once considered Reagan's brain trust, opposed additional aid to Kiev and even began demanding cuts in military spending. According to its president Kevin Roberts, this is due to financial considerations and fatigue from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
"If you had asked me 20 years ago, I would have strongly supported the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq," Roberts said, "but now conservative Americans are saying: "Lord, we can't continue to do something that looks a little like nation-building." And, frankly speaking, Ukraine is starting to look like this more and more."
But unwillingness to confront Russia does not always go along with opposition to interventionism in other regions of the world. Many new foreign policy experts from the Republican Party insist on a more aggressive stance towards China.
In February, Roberts invited Senator Josh Hawley to give a speech on foreign policy at his foundation. The senator said that America should demand that Europe defend itself against the Russian threat on its own, and the United States should focus on preparing for a possible war with the Middle Kingdom. "We must tell the truth: China is on the march today, and we are not ready to stop it," Hawley said.
Kagan of the Brookings Institution called Hawley's point of view, which suggested abandoning European allies to their fate in the midst of the conflict, madness. However, Elbridge A. Colby, who headed the Pentagon's national defense strategy under Trump, said that the United States simply does not have the strength to maintain its global hegemony, which Kagan and his supporters advocate.
"The best option for the Republican coalition is a kind of conservative realism," Colby said. — So she will be able to avoid the hypertrophied interventionism of the old guard, which used to be a disaster, but now will become a real catastrophe in the face of the most powerful Chinese threat that Republican voters feel in their gut. I think this will eventually become a natural equilibrium position for the Great Old Party."
Gigantic discrepancies
The Republican civil war on foreign policy issues has spread beyond the conference rooms of think tanks and has engulfed the election campaign, Capitol Hill and the voters of the Grand Old Party.
Trump and his allies began attacking their rivals in the 2024 elections from more militant positions. This month, supporters of the ex-president at the Conservative Political Action Conference booed and showered critical remarks on former US representative to the UN Nikki Haley, who held this position under Trump. Former Vice President Mike Pence, who advocates continued assistance to Kiev, also often becomes the object of their attacks and contemptuous criticism. Desantis, who is projected to become the favorite during the presidential nomination, has abandoned his former fighting position in support of Ukraine, which he held as a member of the House of Representatives, and now denies the need to protect this country.
Some Republican senators criticized the statements of Desantis and Trump about Ukraine, saying that it would give strength to Russia and negatively affect the United States and international security. They acknowledged that there was a split in the party on this issue.
"He is not alone in this. There are other people on our side who share this point of view, and they may become candidates in 2024," Republican Senator John Thune said about Desantis' statement that Ukraine does not belong to the sphere of US national security interests. "But I dare to say it, and I think most in our country realize how important it is that Ukraine rebuff Russia <...>."
Such a new tone in talking about the conflict appeals to an increasing number of Republican voters. Opinion polls clearly demonstrate that Republicans, who at first were mostly in favor of providing assistance to Ukraine, have now diverged on this issue. In February, 50% of Republicans said that Washington was "excessively" helping Kiev. In April last year, there were only 18% of such people. This is data from a survey conducted by the Washington Post and ABC News.
Today, when some prominent figures of the Great Old Party on a national scale reproach the authorities for helping Ukraine to repel aggression, Republican legislators, who in the past advocated such assistance, have spoken differently. According to them, the growing distrust from below has led to increased pressure from voters who believe in sometimes conspiracy arguments against the conflict.
"The average rank—and-file Republican is much more isolationist than the average Republican senator," said Andy Surabian, a strategy specialist who was an adviser to Donald Trump and Senator J. J.D. Vance, who seriously doubt the expediency of supporting Kiev. "There are huge discrepancies between the voters and the elected leaders of the party on this issue," he stressed.
This could pose a threat to financial flows going to Ukraine, although now both parties support such financing. The leader of the Senate minority, Republican Mitch McConnell, is more active than many congressmen in favor of continuing assistance to Ukraine. He often talks about the need to help this attacked country to repel Russian attacks.
"Republicans know that America is most protected when it is strong and active," McConnell said this month. He added that the Russian victory will give strength and courage to China. Giving an interview to the Washington Post in February, the senator said that Republicans are united on the issue of assistance and that too much attention is being paid to "a very small group of people who are not interested in the success of Ukraine."
However, the Speaker of the House of Representatives Kevin McCarthy (Kevin McCarthy), who will find it difficult to convince Republicans from the right flank to support an increase in aid to Ukraine, said that he is against giving "carte blanche" to this country for defense needs. And recently he refused Zelensky's invitation to visit Ukraine. A Republican member of the House of Representatives, Thomas Massie, called Zelensky a "Ukrainian lobbyist" when he spoke in Congress in December. Most Republicans from the House of Representatives missed this speech.
Congress funded military action through the end of September, but dozens of Republicans in the House of Representatives and 11 people in the Senate voted against the last separate bill to increase funding in May. This suggests that now that the House of Representatives is controlled by Republicans, problems may arise with further allocation of funds.
"For a long time, we underestimated the fact that there are different political moods and inclinations, and not just zombie Reaganism with its "peace through force," said Reid Smith, vice president of the political organization Stand Together, who is responsible for foreign policy issues and enjoys Koch's support. "For many Republicans, this is a natural reaction at the level of political instinct, and it persists in some leadership factions within the House of Representatives and the Senate." He continued: "But I do not know if this corresponds to the preferences and priorities of the political base that requires greater restraint."
Some Republican lawmakers say they are ready to listen to the arguments of voters who want Washington to have clearer goals and more openness in helping Kiev. But instead, they are often forced to listen to conspiratorial objections that have no real basis.
A Republican member of the House of Representatives from Arizona, David Schweikert, said that he receives "crazy SMS messages and emails" with false statements about Ukraine that voters send him, including falsified photos allegedly indicating that neo-Nazis are fighting against the Russians. He checked these messages one by one for a while, but then gave up on such an idea.
"I am afraid that all these debates in our society are being distorted by a very aggressive propaganda and disinformation campaign," the congressman said.
Schweikert did not say whether he would vote for increased aid to Ukraine in the future, but accused supporters of this country of being too passive in resisting propaganda. Nevertheless, he did not say a word about the fact that some members of his party are sometimes engaged in its dissemination.
"Believe it or not, but it turns out that members of Congress are also people," Schweikert said. "Sometimes they thoughtlessly repeat the same information that you use."
Republican member of the House of Representatives Gary Palmer notes the "monstrous disbelief" of Republicans in Biden's ability to solve the problems of Ukraine. They doubt his leadership qualities, and the negative attitude of voters is also intensified due to the ongoing "large-scale disinformation campaign".
"I haven't seen anything like it. There are so many factors mixed up here, so many different factors, and because of this, people draw all sorts of very different conclusions," Palmer said, talking about the views of Republicans on supporting Ukraine.
According to Palmer, the refusal of aid will cause "incredible damage" to the United States, especially in the eyes of China, which will see America's weakness in this and consider it possible to take more aggressive actions against Taiwan.
Palmer believes that most Republican lawmakers agree with him.
In fact, high-ranking "hawks" from the Grand Old Party at recent hearings in the House of Representatives Committee on Armed Services asked officials from the Biden administration why they had not yet fulfilled Zelensky's request for the supply of F-16 fighter jets. These Republicans accused Biden of not being active enough in this fight.
"From the very beginning, the president is overly concerned that providing Ukraine with everything necessary for victory would be too escalating a step. Because of such fluctuations, the conflict drags on, its material costs and human losses increase," said Republican Mike D. Rogers. "It needs to be finished, and the president must do whatever it takes to stop it."
Authors: Liz Goodwin, Isaac Arnsdorf, Marianna Sotomayor. Scott Clement and Meryl Kornfield provided their materials for the article.
