By Noah Rothman
Monday,
February 12, 2024
‘It is
a plot against the President Trump, plain and simple,” Senator J.
D. Vance pointedly determined on Monday. You might wonder which “plot”
he was referring to. At this point, there are so many furtive cabals allegedly
working behind the scenes to thwart the populist agenda that it’s getting hard
to keep track of them all. According to Vance, the latest assault on Trump’s
prerogatives has taken the form of legislation designed to aid our partners
abroad in their fights against America’s enemies, and the authors of the former
president’s forthcoming torment are his fellow Republicans.
Over
the weekend, a bipartisan group of 67 senators took a step toward approving a
$95 billion bill designed to refill America’s depleted ordnance stocks while
providing support for our front-line partners in Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan.
Calling it a foreign-aid package is a misnomer. The lion’s share of the funds
it would unlock would never leave the United States.
Of
the $61 billion earmarked for supporting Ukraine, nearly $20 billion is devoted
to replenishing Defense Department inventory. Another $13.8 billion allows
Ukraine to purchase the U.S.-made ordnance it needs to fire out of U.S.-made
platforms, while $14.8 billion funds support operations such as training
Ukrainian fighters. Almost $3 billion is dedicated to deterring Chinese
aggression against Taiwan, but nearly $2 billion of that would only replace
munitions already transferred to Taipei. $14 billion is allocated to funding
Israel’s defensive needs, much of which will fund the U.S.-based manufacture of
anti-missile interceptors.
That
would seem straightforward, but Vance sees it as a cleverly laid trap designed
to compel a future president Trump to implement policies he doesn’t like.
“Though few have noticed, buried in the bill’s text is a kill switch for the
next Trump presidency,” Vance writes in the American Conservative. “The legislation
explicitly requires funding for Ukraine well into the next presidential term.”
Even
though Speaker Mike Johnson ran for his current role while insisting that the
U.S. “can’t allow Vladimir Putin to prevail in Ukraine,” Vance interprets the
bill as an effort to jam the House GOP and spark an internal conflict over
Johnson’s speakership. “This is how you save Joe Biden’s presidency,” Vance
writes. “By taking the chaos of Joe Biden’s tenure and making it about
Republican chaos being even worse.”
To
summarize the plot, it involves a Democrat-led chamber passing legislation
supporting a generally popular cause that a plurality of Republican
voters dislikes. That legislation will then sow chaos in the otherwise placid and preternaturally competent House GOP,
culminating in Joe Biden’s reelection. And if it doesn’t, it will serve as a
pretext to impeach Donald Trump for failing to execute the law — a theory of
impeachment Vance deems “novel” while ignoring its apparent appeal to Republicans who see impeachment as a remedy to
Biden’s refusal to enforce the law. Quite the intrigue.
The crux
of Vance’s claim rests on a mechanism in the bill that ensures the
availability of the funds Congress appropriates through the fall of 2025. This
fairly standard provision is unlikely to be necessary — those funds will almost
certainly be under contract well before that date. After all, if Vance believes
the funding horizon for Ukraine is too long and hamstrings future presidents,
that was not a reservation he expressed in his support of a House-backed bill
providing for Israel’s defense through September 2025. We’re fast running out
of good-faith explanations for Vance’s latest claim.
Indeed,
the senator’s enthusiastic effort to read malignancy into the attempt to take
the issue of Ukraine off the agenda for the remainder of the calendar
year could be construed as misplaced zeal if it didn’t
contrast with Vance’s inability to see malice on the part of the country whose
aggression made this initiative necessary.
The
Ohio senator spent a good portion of a weekend he will never get back making
excuses for the delusions under which Russian president Vladimir Putin
operates, all while casting his domestic opponents as a threat to liberty
akin to Putin’s regime.
“Most
of the historical criticisms of the Tucker-Putin interview are as dumb as they
are meaningless,” Vance wrote of former Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s sojourn
to the Kremlin. He zeroed in on Putin’s deeply unnerving claim that Poland conspired
with and, ultimately, instigated Hitler to the point that Berlin had no choice
but to invade in 1939. The point of Putin’s revisionist history was to
rehabilitate the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, which culminated in Stalin’s
participation in the partition of Poland and the massacres the Soviet and Nazi
invasions precipitated. “Every nation tells stories about itself and its
enemies that are at least partly rooted in bogus claims,” Vance
wrote.
What
a chilling summary dismissal of Putin’s effort to whitewash the prelude to the
Holocaust in Poland. “The point is that if you want to understand world affairs
and make smart decisions, you have to understand how people see themselves,”
Vance wrote in his own defense. That high-minded apologia was preceded by
flippant performance art in which Vance joked that America’s self-appointed
“disinformation” police and the Biden administration have engaged in repressive
tactics at least reminiscent of Putin’s. His point wasn’t entirely clear. If
there was one, it was to downplay the threat to American national security
represented by an expansionist autocrat prosecuting the largest conventional
war of conquest in Europe since 1945.
Vance
has a habit of accusing those who support Ukraine’s defense against Moscow’s
objective of forcefully yoking the Ukrainian people to the culturally
totalitarian and politically authoritarian Russian state of being “obsessed”
with the embattled European nation. But that is self-serving projection.
Moscow’s
revisionist history isn’t an unremarkable exercise in nationalist mythmaking;
it’s just downstream from Holocaust denial. American Democrats aren’t just as bad as
Putin’s regime — not until they start murdering
journalists and political
dissidents at home and abroad, and sponsoring crimes against humanity. Donald Trump isn’t being put into any sort of
trap unless you regard Congress’s lawmaking prerogatives as somehow
illegitimate when they happen to conflict with his own.
Does
Vance believe otherwise? Who knows. But he certainly thinks you might be
convinced to.
No comments:
Post a Comment