How Much Do Ron DeSantis’s Foreign-Policy Comments Matter?

By Jim Geraghty

Tuesday, March 14, 2023

 

As an all-but-announced presidential candidate, Florida’s Governor Ron DeSantis invited scrutiny of his nascent foreign-policy thoughts. I largely concur with Mark Wright that DeSantis’s latest answers to Tucker Carlson’s questions are vague and muddy considering the stakes. Clearly, DeSantis wanted to sound isolationist or noninterventionist enough to peel off some support among those currently supporting Donald Trump — particularly those who watch Carlson every night. DeSantis also beat up some straw men by saying the U.S. shouldn’t deploy troops to Ukraine or pursue an explicit policy of “regime change” in Moscow. (Yes, President Biden sometimes blurts out an off-the-cuff “for God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power” regarding Putin, but U.S. policy is not officially aiming to change the regime in control of Russia.)

 

DeSantis seems most comfortable hitting what he calls the Biden administration’s “virtual blank check.” Okay, fine, let’s all agree that U.S. aid to Ukraine should not be infinite. What should that limit be? What’s the number that DeSantis or any other Republican is willing to establish as “this far, no farther”? How much in military aid, and how much in humanitarian aid?

 

And does the situation on the ground affect this final-limit number in any way? Would DeSantis be willing to send more if Ukraine is gaining ground, or is he willing to cut off aid below that threshold if additional aid appears to be merely prolonging a bloody stalemate?

 

Before DeSantis answered Carlson’s questions, he test-drove a similar approach in remarks about Russia and Ukraine in February, appearing on Fox and Friends and trying to create a Goldilocks position between the GOP’s hawkish and isolationist wings — a some-from-column-A, some-from-column-B approach that added up to a muddled hodgepodge. DeSantis began by playing to the hawks, hitting President Biden for opposing sending lethal aid to Ukraine when he was vice president, and contended that Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine because he perceived Biden as a pushover: “I don’t think any of this would have happened, but for the weakness that the president showed during his first year in office, culminating, of course, in the disastrous withdrawal in Afghanistan.” But then DeSantis pivoted to his denunciation of the administration’s “open-ended blank check.”

 

As we watch the governor attempt to finesse a thorny foreign-policy issue by way of bromides, we probably ought to remember that a presidential candidate’s foreign-policy vision and the actual policies enacted by his administration are often no more than distant cousins.

 

In 1992, Bill Clinton accused President George H. W. Bush of “coddling” China and pledged to link China’s trade status to its human-rights record — and then backed away in May 1994, declaring, “we have reached the end of the usefulness of that policy.” By 2000, Clinton signed into law “Permanent Normal Trade Status” for China and declared, “I believe the choice between economic rights and human rights, between economic security and national security, is a false one.” Somehow warm relations with Beijing weren’t “coddling” anymore.

 

In a 2000 presidential debate, George W. Bush warned, “If we’re an arrogant nation, they’ll resent us. If we’re a humble nation, but strong, they’ll welcome us. And it’s — our nation stands alone right now in the world in terms of power, and that’s why we have to be humble.” Bush’s foreign-policy legacy is rarely described as “humble.”

 

Barack Obama pledged to close the detention center at Guantanamo Bay but found enacting that change much more difficult than it looked from the campaign trail, no matter which party controlled Congress. President Trump never got around to deporting all Syrian refugees, bringing back waterboarding, or banning Muslims from entering the United States.

 

And Joe Biden spent much of his first year in office talking about how much he wanted a “stable and predictable” relationship with Russia. I suppose you could now characterize the U.S. relationship with Moscow as stably and predictably hostile.

 

Every foreign-policy challenge looks easier during a cable-news interview than it does when you’re sitting behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office, when lives are at risk. Would a President DeSantis go nose-to-nose with an aggressive Putin or whoever is running Russia in 2025? Or would he see the “borderlands” or Crimea as not worth the trouble? Would he prioritize avoiding any conflict in Eastern Europe that could turn into a “proxy war with China”? Isn’t the dispute between Taiwan and Communist China a “territorial dispute” akin to that between Russia and China?

 

Presidential candidates are usually just trying to come up with something that sounds good and “tough” during a debate or television interview. But once in office, getting that presidential daily briefing, every foreign-policy challenge suddenly looks a lot more complicated. What DeSantis says now may not tell us all that much of what he would do as president.