Isolationist stance by GOP is a disgrace

When historians look back on the early days of 2024, they probably won’t recall what, precisely, an elderly Democratic president couldn’t quite remember about the names or countries of other world leaders. They will note what 26 Senate Republicans chose to forget about world leadership.

I’m referring to Tuesday’s Senate vote on a $95 billion supplemental foreign-aid package, including $60 billion in desperately needed military assistance for Ukraine, along with $14 billion for Israel and $10 billion for civilians in conflict zones, including the Gaza Strip. The bill must still pass the House, where it faces the opposition of Speaker Mike Johnson and can only hope to survive via parliamentary maneuvering and the votes of Democrats plus some remaining Republican security hawks.

On paper, the 70-29 vote looks like a bipartisan embrace of embattled democratic allies. But it marks the moment when Republicans reverted to the isolationism of the original America First Committee of pre-World War II infamy. A majority of the GOP Senate conference, including onetime Ukraine hawks such as Lindsey Graham and Tom Cotton, voted against the aid — mostly, they said, because it wasn’t paired with border-security measures.

That’s the same bill they previously voted against — a bill patiently negotiated over months by one of the most conservative Republicans in the Senate, Oklahoma’s James Lankford. The cynicism would be breathtaking if it weren’t so predictable coming from the Trumpified right.

Let’s walk through some additional points of dissent among Republicans who opposed the bill.

From Arkansas’ Cotton, there’s the argument support for Israel’s efforts to defeat Hamas is incompatible with any civilian assistance for residents of Gaza.

From Ohio’s J.D. Vance: “The supplemental represents an attempt by the foreign policy blob/deep state to stop President Trump from pursuing his desired policy.”

What a mix of cruelty, defeatism, conspiracy-mongering and political servility. As for Vance, at least his position has the virtue of clarity: This is about sucking up to Donald Trump and his followers and abetting the Republican front-runner’s declared policy of encouraging Putin to invade underspending NATO members.

What all this makes for is a deeply unserious Republican Party at a deadly serious global moment. It’s commendable that 22 Republicans still chose to vote for the bill. But many of those who did — Mitch McConnell and Mitt Romney among them — are nearing the end of their careers. Today’s GOP isolationists now have more in common with George McGovern’s “Come home, America” slogan than with anything Ronald Reagan or Dwight Eisenhower stood for.

In January 1945, Arthur H. Vandenberg, R-Mich., gave a landmark Senate speech now remembered as the moment when his party finally began to put its reflexive isolationism behind it. “We still propose to help create the postwar world on a basis which shall stop aggressors for keeps and, so far as humanly possible, substitute justice for force among freemen,” he said. “We propose to do it primarily for our own sake.”

For our own sake. The point of helping Ukraine defend itself against its despotic foe — like the point of defending Israel, or Taiwan, or NATO members rich or poor — isn’t altruism.

For the GOP to now lose that understanding is as much a disgrace to it as it is, potentially, a disaster for us all.