A loud GOP minority pledges to make trouble on Ukraine military aid
Acongressional delegation of five Republicans and two Democrats met with representatives of Ukraine’s parliament this month in Poland, where the Ukrainians thanked the delegation for US aid and asked for F-16 fighter jets to help in the war against Russia. Three members of the delegation described the meeting as cordial and informative.
“I just got back from meeting with the Ukrainian Parliament in Poland, where they demanded F-35s and thought it was an obligation for every American to pay $10 a month to fund their war,” first-term conservative Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, R-fla., wrote in a heated email to this reporter three days later. Ukrainians are not asking for the more advanced and expensive F-35s, but regardless, Luna said the US’ role in the conflict could “potentially start WWIII.”
Ukraine ranked low on her constituents’ concerns, she added, vowing to brief her colleagues about the encounter.
Luna is among the boisterous proponents in Congress of former President Donald Trump’s “America first” world view that regards financial commitments overseas with extreme scepticism. Like Trump, they maintain that every dollar spent on Ukraine — and there has been $113 billion for the war so far — is a dubious investment of taxpayer money that could have been better used on domestic priorities, like fighting the spread of fentanyl. Senior Republicans who support the war and maintain the hawkish traditions of the establishment GOP fear the movement will gain momentum as the conflict grinds on and Trump’s candidacy consumes the 2024 spotlight.
For the moment, America’s commitment to Ukraine seems resilient. President Joe Biden announced an additional $1.2 billion in military aid last week. Ukraine funding has gone unmentioned in the $4.5 trillion in spending cuts House Republicans are demanding in exchange for raising the debt ceiling. A House resolution introduced in February by Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-fla., aimed at halting further aid to Ukraine attracted only Luna and nine other signatories among the chamber’s 222 Republicans.
An amendment by Sen. Josh Hawley, R-MO., to establish a special inspector general to oversee Ukraine-related expenditures drew 26 supporters among 49 Republican senators. And one week before Luna met with the Ukrainians, Speaker Kevin Mccarthy, who previously
Ukraine funding has gone unmentioned in the $4.5 trillion in spending cuts House Republicans are demanding in exchange for raising the debt ceiling
declared that Ukraine would not receive a “blank check” from the United States, emphatically told a Russian reporter that “we will continue to support” Ukraine in the war effort.
But there is evidence to suggest that the anti-ukraine flank of the Republican Party is playing not to the fringe but to the heart of the party’s base. A survey last month of registered voters by Kristen Soltis Anderson’s Echelon Insights found that 52 per cent of Republicans and Republicanleaning independents do not think US interests are at stake in Ukraine. Similarly, a survey in March conducted by Axios/ipsos found that 57 per cent of Republicans opposed providing weapons and financial support to Ukraine.
“It’s insane that so few Republican members are willing to say what I’m willing to say,” Sen. J.D. Vance, R-ohio and a vocal opponent of aid to Ukraine, said in a recent interview. “Clearly, something is broken down about the democratic opinion-making process.”
He added, “I’d love to hear Mccarthy be more sceptical of aiding Ukraine, because I think that’s where most of his voters are.”
Vance said his opposition to aiding Ukraine came from enlisting at 18 as a Marine in the Iraq War. “I feel this deep sense of shame and regret for having gotten caught up in all of the social pressure to support the war and to think that it would have led to a good outcome,” he said.
When Trump denounced the war as a presidential candidate in 2015, Vance recalled that “I wanted to stand up and cry, because I was so happy that somebody finally said it.”
Gaetz, whose conservative district includes an Air Force base and a naval air station, said the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had devastated his community. “I saw the impact up close,” he said, “and I came to the view that this just isn’t worth it.”
Gaetz said that his party’s dominant foreign policy ideology for the past three decades, neoconservatism, “has done our country harm.”
Hawley echoed Gaetz and said that the legacy of neoconservatism, an interventionist foreign policy, continued to pervade Republicans’ policymaking approach. “My party took a serious wrong turn in the 1990s,” Hawley said. “And in D.C., you still see strong remnants of that thinking when it comes to Ukraine. But that’s not where the voters are.”
But some well-known Democratic anti-war voices reject the parallel between attacking Afghanistan and Iraq and lending military assistance to Ukraine. Among them is Rep. Barbara Lee, D-calif., whom Gaetz now describes as a “folk hero” for casting the lone vote against authorising President George W. Bush to use military force after the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Lee, who received death threats after that vote, said that in Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, “we see a dictatorship attacking a democracy. And we need to be on the side of democracy. Whenever you see innocent people being killed by a war criminal, you want to do what you can to support them.”
Lee declined to ascribe a motive for the dovishness in the GOP, but other Democrats did not.
“If you look at where the political energy is within the Republican Party right now, I’d say it’s with what I call the Tucker Carlson/viktor Orban/donald Trump wing of the party,” said Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-MD. and a member of the Foreign Relations Committee, referring to the bombastic former Fox News host and the autocratic prime minister of Hungary. “And among that group, there are some very influential voices, starting with Trump, who believe that the idea of ‘America first’ translates into America retreating from the rest of the world.”