Trumpists struggle to define their position on war in Ukraine

Trumpists are now trying to figure out a way to defend their thinly veiled support for Putin and new authoritarianism in Europe by invoking the language of pacifism and "traditional conservative non-interventionism" which contrasts itself with neo-cons, whom they claim have reasserted influence in a GOP now supporting Ukraine. They recently held an "emergency meeting" to discuss this new challenge to their influence, as most Republicans in office have unambgiuously condemned Putin and voted for sanctions and assistance to Ukraine. Politico published this informative article on the "emergency" meeting and the issues it raises for the future of the GOP. (Note that their case for "peace" has nothing to do with the well-being of Ukrainians, or an attempt to imagine a diplomatic solution to the prospect of a long-term war of attrition. As the author states of those who spoke at the meeting: “Kyiv itself was essentially MIA — serving more as a proxy for a dispute about America nationhood than about the country’s own fate as it’s mercilessly pummeled by Putin.”) 

Politico writes in an article published April 2, 2022: 

J.D. Vance was on the warpath. “Using American power to do the dirty work of Europe is a pretty bad idea,” he told a crowd on Thursday, warning against the U.S. getting more involved in Ukraine. “We don’t have that many non-insane people in Washington. I need you to be some of them.” Vance wasn’t speaking at a campaign stop in Ohio, where he is running for the U.S. Senate, but at the Marriott Marquis hotel in downtown Washington. The audience consisted of over one hundred mostly younger conservatives, and he was sounding the alarm about not just foreign intervention, but about other conservatives — the worrisome resurgence of the Republican establishment. The event was the “Up From Chaos” conference, a self-described “emergency” meeting organized by the Trumpian wing of the GOP to grapple with the political fallout from Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. The young men, almost all of them soberly dressed in dark suits, and women, almost uniformly wearing dresses, listened attentively as one speaker after another warned about the perils of intervention for their very own lives. 

A return to the thinking that led to Iraq and Afghanistan could result in nothing less than World War III over Ukraine, they were warned. And so, as Putin’s deadly and unprovoked assault drags on, the GOP is also going to war — against itself. As so often, the battle revolves around the America First doctrine first espoused by former President Donald Trump in April 2016, during the Republican primaries, at Washington’s Mayflower Hotel, where he promised that he would perform a U-turn in American foreign policy by shunning military intervention abroad. That promise never quite bore out. It was the Democratic President Joe Biden, not Trump, who ended up pulling American troops from Afghanistan. 

Throughout his erratic and volatile presidency, Trump never really gained control of his own national security advisers, hawkish thinkers such as H.R. McMaster and John Bolton who managed, from the perspective of Trump loyalists, to subvert his nationalist foreign policy. 

But Trump did manage to shift conservative thinking about Putin himself, a powerful adversary of the U.S. who wields power with an autocratic strength that Trump and his followers openly admire. Even the invasion of Ukraine has not prompted Trump to alter his fundamentally adoring view of the Russian leader. The most that Trump would concede is that he was “surprised” Putin had invaded. Then Trump reverted to type, trying once more to game the Ukraine crisis (as he did in 2019 during a phone conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy that led to his first impeachment) for his own personal benefit by imploring Putin, during an interview this week on Real America’s Voice network, to release information about Hunter Biden’s nefarious activities. 

Though Trump’s view of Putin may be little changed, the Russian invasion has broken open the uneasy marriage between the followers of Trump, who abhor foreign entanglements, and the hawks of the Republican Party, who have rarely seen a war they didn’t want to enter. After the debacle in Iraq, the neoconservatives who champion a crusading foreign policy based on democracy promotion and regime change came into bad odor. But almost overnight, the hawks are mounting a comeback as a new foreign policy consensus forms in Washington around bolstering the alliance with NATO and standing up to Russian aggression. “The neocons haven’t been able to put points on the board for years,” says Melinda Haring, deputy director of the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center. “With Ukraine, they’re back.” 

Maybe so, but nothing provided a better window into the ideological ferment of the GOP — and the staying power of the Trump wing of the party — than the daylong conference at the Marriott Hotel. Throughout, it became clear that the war on Ukraine is not prompting the Trump-aligned right to back down. Quite the contrary. As William Ruger, a Trump nominee to become ambassador to Afghanistan and the president of the American Institute for Economic Research, told me, “The neocons seem strangely buoyed by the current crisis, and love the Manichaean rhetoric coming out of the White House about this being a fight between democracy and authoritarianism. But the forces of realism and restraint are not going to back down from the fight. 

Unlike twenty years ago, the American public will not swallow neocon bromides.” The participants generally described themselves as “realists” and “restrainers,” and the meeting featured what amounted to realist royalty — politicians and thinkers, ranging from GOP Sen. Rand Paul (Ky.) and Reps. Thomas Massie (Ky.), Dan Bishop (N.C.) and Matt Rosendale (Mont.) to Michael Anton, Sohrab Ahmari, Mollie Z. Hemingway, and, of course, Vance. It was organized by the American Conservative magazine and American Moment, whose self-described mission is to “identify, educate, and credential young Americans who will implement public policy that supports strong families, a sovereign nation, and prosperity for all,” and which features Vance on its board of advisers. 

Their explicit aim is to create a young counter-establishment to the hawkish national security network that has flourished in Washington over the past several decades, one that could funnel ideologically reliable appointees into a future Trump, DeSantis, Cruz or Hawley administration. It was notable that at the conference, speaker after speaker targeted the GOP hawks more often than they spoke about Ukraine itself. Indeed, Kyiv itself was essentially MIA — serving more as a proxy for a dispute about America nationhood than about the country’s own fate as it’s mercilessly pummeled by Putin. The basic argument, outlined in a manifesto titled “Away From the Abyss” appearing in the new Compact magazine, is that aiding Ukraine is tantamount to hurting Ukraine. In resisting de-escalation, the U.S. and its allies, so the thinking goes, run the risk of encouraging hapless Ukrainians to battle to the last man, all in the hopes of pursuing a Western-led regime change policy toward Moscow that might well trigger a global cataclysm..... 

Several of the panelists either avoided talking about Putin or largely elided the brutality of his attempted subjugation of an entire people. But more than a few appear to harbor a conciliatory view of Putin’s prowess that was first enunciated by Patrick J. Buchanan eight years ago in a column in the American Conservative. Buchanan asked, “Is Vladimir Putin a paleoconservative?  In the culture war for mankind’s future, is he one of us?” The question was pretty much rhetorical. Buchanan’s argument was that America, not Russia, was the bad guy in the world. According to Buchanan, “President Reagan once called the old Soviet Empire ‘the focus of evil in the modern world.’ President Putin is implying that Barack Obama’s America may deserve the title in the 21st century. Nor is he without an argument when we reflect on America’s embrace of abortion on demand, homosexual marriage, pornography, promiscuity, and the whole panoply of Hollywood values.” 

At the conference, I asked Scott McConnell, a lapsed neocon who co-founded the American Conservative with Buchanan and Taki Theodoracopulos in 2002 to protest the Bush administration’s march to war in Iraq, why a host of conservatives shifted from the Reagan-era stance of supporting freedom abroad to backing Putin and other far-right populists like Hungary’s Viktor Orbán. He explained, “Putin and Orbán are not communists. They are classic authoritarian autocrats. There is far more freedom in Hungary than there was thirty or fifty years ago.” It’s a point of view that is unlikely to disappear any time soon on the “America First” right — and that helps guarantee that the Marriott conference was but a fresh skirmish in a longer battle inside the GOP itself. 

Note: This is edited for DP. The full article (a long read) can be found here.