The Last Redoubt

By Nick Catoggio

Tuesday, February 20, 2024

 

The surprising thing about the Senate’s new military aid package for Ukraine isn’t that it looks dead on arrival in the House.

 

The surprising thing is that it might not be.

 

Normally, a bill that passes the upper chamber with 70 votes, including 20+ from the minority party, would warrant consideration in the lower chamber and almost certainly sail through. All the more so in this case given the urgency with which Ukrainian troops need to be resupplied in order to fend off Russia’s creeping advance.

 

Instead, House Speaker Mike Johnson greeted the passage of the Senate package earlier this month by declaring that he won’t take it up, because the legislation lacks immigration provisions—an outcome that his own party orchestrated, by the way, because it thought it might gain an electoral advantage by doing so.

 

The insta-collapse of the bill in the House feels shocking, yet not shocking. Donald Trump’s GOP is dominated by populists; populists have turned against supplying Ukraine with additional aid for various complicated reasons; and so House Republicans, who have the most to fear from motivated populists in primaries, oppose further aid. That’s democracy for you. As the saying goes: The people have spoken, the bastards.

 

But that’s not what’s happening here. Despite populist antipathy to another aid package, there are assuredly enough Republican votes in the House for the Senate bill to pass comfortably with Democratic help.

 

According to Democratic Rep. Jason Crow, in fact, senior House Republican leaders told Volodymyr Zelensky himself that the aid will be approved if they can figure out a way to force a vote on it that doesn’t involve Johnson. The speaker won’t call a vote himself for fear that the populists in his conference will punish him by ousting him if he does, but there’s no question that a sizable bipartisan majority would vote yes if given the chance.

 

Which is strange under the circumstances, no?

 

The story of the past month in American politics has been about Trump completing his yearslong acquisition of the GOP. Winning big in the early presidential primaries and knocking out Ron DeSantis seemed to erode whatever resistance to his agenda was left among the pre-Trump Republican establishment. When Mitch McConnell suddenly advised his colleagues in the Senate to vote no on the immigration compromise he had appointed James Lankford to negotiate, it felt like a formal surrender by the old guard to populism. The war for the soul of the party was over at last; Trump had won a total victory.

 

Except that he hadn’t, it turns out. If he had, there wouldn’t still be large minorities of the House and Senate Republican conferences willing to defy him and his base by maintaining a Reaganesque hostility toward Russia instead of adopting a Trumpish spirit of accommodation.

 

Foreign policy is the last redoubt of traditional conservatism within this wretched party. Why?

 

***

 

Just because Trump’s victory on foreign policy hasn’t been total doesn’t mean it hasn’t been substantial and convincing.

 

For instance, Lindsey Graham, one of the staunchest Republican hawks in Congress, contrived a reason to oppose the new Ukraine aid package that just so happened to echo Trump’s own rationale. Fellow uber-hawk Marco Rubio, who once warned against trusting Trump with nuclear weapons, voted no as well before pathetically shrugging off what the former president said about inviting Vladimir Putin to attack Europe if NATO countries don’t spend more on defense.

 

More Senate Republicans opposed additional aid to Ukraine this time than supported it. That’s Trump’s influence at work. His “America First” influence is clear among the grassroots as well: A Pew poll conducted in December found 48 percent of Republicans think the U.S. has done too much for the Ukrainians compared with 33 percent who think it’s done the right amount or too little. Shortly after the war began in March 2022, those numbers were 9 percent and 72 percent, respectively.

 

Yet, despite it all, the new aid package passed the Senate easily with Republican help and would pass the House easily as well. I think there are moral reasons for that and reasons that we might broadly call “political.”

 

The political reasons start with this: American voters typically don’t care much about foreign policy.

 

They do when the country is thrust into a foreign crisis, of course, as happened after 9/11. But when American troops aren’t in harm’s way, it’s anyone’s guess how closely the average voter follows international conflicts. The players in any such conflict are often unfamiliar and their motives potentially confusing, and U.S. interests in the outcome can be maddeningly abstract. In “normal” times, most voters don’t let foreign policy decide how they vote.

 

This is one of those times. However much the average American might care about the result in Ukraine, he or she almost certainly cares more about inflation and the border crisis. And, as one might expect from a party that’s shifted toward tribalist nationalism, Republican voters during the Trump era have become more apt to search for enemies domestically than abroad. It’s no coincidence that, apart from occasional grumbling about China, GOP leaders in Congress reliably focus their political energy on waging culture war more so than the real thing.

 

Donald Trump’s own positions are instructive here. He was unequivocal about wanting to see the Senate’s immigration compromise defeated, but on the subject of Ukraine, the most he’ll say is that any further aid should be offered as a loan, not as a grant. Perhaps he fears being blamed for Ukraine’s eventual subjugation if the GOP ended up cutting off Ukrainian forces, or perhaps this is a case of him feeling unsure about Russia’s prospects for victory and not wanting to side too closely with a prospective loser.

 

Either way, he’s more ambivalent about the war than he is about domestic issues—and so are his fans. Despite a plurality of Republicans believing in December that the U.S. had done too much for Ukraine, when Pew asked last month whether the war between Russia and Ukraine is an important national interest, 69 percent of Republicans said “yes.” When asked whether it was important to them personally, 56 percent agreed. In both cases, the numbers weren’t wildly different for Democrats.

 

All of this ends up being good news for Republican hawks in Congress. Because foreign policy is complicated and of low political salience, it’s unlikely that the voters of their districts will feel strongly enough about them voting the “wrong” way on Ukraine to punish them in a primary. It’s the high-salience issues like immigration where heresy is apt to be punishable by political death. They can get away with defying Trump on one but not the other.

 

The other political reason for the sustained pro-Ukraine resistance within the GOP is that, for traditional conservatives, standing up for Europe against Russian expansionism is the bedrock upon which their worldview is fixed. Their enormous pride in Ronald Reagan’s great accomplishment, victory in the Cold War, means they won’t lightly relinquish hawkishness toward Russia even under pressure from Trumpist isolationists.

 

That reality has made for a fascinating age gap in Congress, one noticed by the members themselves:

Feast your eyes on this table, which lists how Senate Republicans voted on the recent Ukraine aid package in order of their seniority in the chamber. Reagan’s heirs in the old guard were nearly entirely in favor, and Trump’s heirs in the new guard were nearly entirely opposed. Even certain players in modern populist media who cut their teeth politically working in Reagan’s administration have found themselves reverting to form lately on the issue of Ukraine:

Asking a Reaganite to hand victory on a silver platter to Russia in a major war is simply asking too much. It would mean the end of the world as they’ve known it their whole lives—the end of the Pax Americana that’s kept order globally since 1945 and the end of everything they thought they knew about the land of the free as an indispensable check on Russian malevolence.

 

Most traditional conservatives will make any concession on domestic affairs that populists demand, up to and including condoning a coup attempt to keep Trump in power. But letting the Kremlin rampage across Eastern Europe? Too much. Too much.

 

For now, at least.

 

***

 

On the latest episode of The Dispatch Podcast, Jonah said he would take opponents of Ukraine aid more seriously if their arguments didn’t so often resort to bad faith. Like, oh, for instance:

There is no draft. If there were a draft, Tucker Carlson’s daughters wouldn’t be eligible. And no one is calling for American boots on the ground, including Ben Shapiro. A compelling case for neutrality should be built on sturdier stuff than this in a war where the balance of moral equities weighs so heavily in one side’s favor, and where a united Western front against Russia has kept American troops off the battlefield in Europe for 75 years.

 

Carlson is an extreme example of a Ukraine dove acting in bad faith—not many have openly admitted to wanting Russia to win, as he did in 2019, after all—but there are less extreme ones with more power than him. Another recent example:

If Vance wants a settlement, it’s not clear why he’d want to weaken rather than strengthen Ukraine’s negotiating power by starving them of further weapons. The less able Ukrainian troops are to resist Russia’s advance, the less reason Putin has to stop short of full conquest. It’s also unclear why Vance would decline the opportunity to be briefed by the president of Ukraine himself on the state of battle, as a better-informed senator is usually a more effective senator. Unless, of course, he feared that what he heard from Zelensky might complicate his position.

 

He’s acting in bad faith and his pro-Ukraine Republican colleagues in the Senate surely know it and resent it, likely hardening their position. That’s the moral component to which I referred earlier that’s driving them to resist pressure from the base to cut off further military aid. The dispute over Ukraine isn’t just an argument over war, it’s a moral argument between the GOP’s classical liberals and its post-liberals.

 

A proxy war, even.

 

For figures like Vance and Carlson, antipathy to aiding Ukraine goes hand in hand with advancing a broader illiberal agenda. It’s certainly not true that every critic of continuing to arm the Ukrainians is a proto-fascist, but it does seem to be true that every proto-fascist is a critic of continuing to arm the Ukrainians. Their ideological project is obvious: The weaker the Western liberal order becomes on the battlefield, the more attractive Putin’s Christian authoritarian model might seem by comparison. If you’re a fan of that model and keen to open Americans’ minds to it, seeing Zelensky, Biden, and NATO defeated is of utmost importance.

 

It’s not a coincidence that the Senate’s foremost critic of Ukraine aid said this not long before he was elected in 2022:

 

“I tend to think that we should seize the institutions of the left,” [J.D. Vance] said. “And turn them against the left. We need like a de-Baathification program, a de-woke-ification program.”

 

“I think Trump is going to run again in 2024,” he said. “I think that what Trump should do, if I was giving him one piece of advice: Fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.”

 

“And when the courts stop you,” he went on, “stand before the country, and say—” he quoted Andrew Jackson, giving a challenge to the entire constitutional order—“the chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.”

 

…

 

“We are in a late republican period,” Vance said later, evoking the common New Right view of America as Rome awaiting its Caesar. “If we’re going to push back against it, we’re going to have to get pretty wild, and pretty far out there, and go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with.”

 

That’s cartoon villainy. Not as cartoonish as Vladimir Putin’s version, naturally, but pro-Ukraine Republicans might reasonably calculate that defeating authoritarian Russian villainy abroad will make the homegrown version that much less palatable to American voters as an electoral proposition.

 

Bear in mind too that those Republicans have put up with a lot of petty villainy from the leader of their own party with respect to Russia in the past eight years. Trump critics can quote chapter and verse on that—the Helsinki fiasco, the apologetics for Putin’s bloodlust, the half-joke about hacking Hillary Clinton’s emails—but there are always obnoxious new episodes to catalog. When he finally piped up about Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s recent demise on Monday, for example, Trump not only declined to mention Putin, he adopted the vague Kremlin talking point that the dissident had suffered a “sudden death.”

 

Old-guard Republicans have watched the party of Reagan become the party of a man who not only spins for Russia, who not only admires Russian ruthlessness openly, but who, to an unnerving degree, seems to treat moral questions in all facets of life as transactional matters. They’ve learned to swallow their disgust at him in the name of keeping their jobs, but is it so hard to believe that they might occasionally choke on their own bile when he or one of his unsavory acolytes seems a little too obsequious toward Putin?

 

The war in Ukraine is a moral travesty of unusual enormity. It’s a war of conquest, transparently; the man responsible for it is a glorified mafia boss turned nationalist lunatic high on his own supply of mystical propaganda; his army targets noncombatants deliberately and indiscriminately; and the gratuitous atrocities they perpetrate on their victims seem almost lab-designed to inflict maximum emotional cruelty.

 

Imagine being an old-guard Republican, watching all of that play out, while at the same time, your populist GOP colleagues in the Senate gradually drift toward the pro-Russian position. You might snap. That could be as innocuous as sending an angry tweet at a media figure who can make your life in politics uncomfortable, as Thom Tillis did—or it could be something as significant as defying Trump’s base by voting for a new Ukraine aid package even if it makes Putinist simps unhappy.

 

That’s what happened in the Senate, I think, and what’ll happen in the House among old-guard Republicans if they can figure out a way to get the Senate bill on the floor. Traditional conservatives have an almost infinite capacity to digest post-liberal populist sleaze in the name of holding the GOP coalition together and, more importantly, keeping their jobs. Almost.

 

But not quite. In foreign-policy matters of life and death like Ukraine, conscience still has a chance to win out over Trump’s political influence.

 

Enjoy it while it lasts. As the old guard ages out of Congress and is replaced by more J. D. Vances and Matt Gaetzes who owe their political success to Trump’s favor, the faction of Republicans willing to preserve the Pax Americana will dwindle, flicker, and ultimately blink out. At least until some new foreign crisis revives hawkishness on the American right.