Ron DeSantis, potential Republican standard-bearer, sounds out of his depth
WASHINGTON » Apparently no one told Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis that if you’re going to wade into the deep waters of foreign policy, you should at least know how to dog paddle.
It turns out that the man many Republicans hope can run for president in 2024 as “Donald Trump without the baggage” is like a deer in headlights when asked, very politely, about the war in Ukraine. It’s not just that he’s unready for prime time. He can’t even handle “Fox & Friends.”
Appearing this week on that GOP-friendly morning show, DeSantis tried to take a Trumpist “America First” position about the war — questioning the level of U.S. military and economic aid President Biden and Congress have given to Ukraine while there are problems that need to be addressed here at home. He ended up sounding weak, ill-informed and incoherent.
I’m old enough to remember when it would have been out of bounds to criticize a U.S. president when he was on foreign soil — and unthinkable when the commander in chief was in a war zone. As DeSantis spoke, Biden was meeting in Kyiv with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, having endured a 10hour train ride from the Polish border under threat of potential attack by Russian missiles.
But that was then, this is now. While what is left of the Republican establishment praised Biden’s bold gesture, the ascendant faux-populist wing of the party complained about Biden supposedly — all together, now — caring more about Ukraine’s borders than he cares about our own. This is worse than an apples-to-oranges comparison; more like apples-to-orangutans. But that’s where DeSantis went, claiming that “while he’s over there,” Biden has “not done anything to secure our own border here at home.”
For the record, it is not necessary to believe Biden’s handling of the U.S.-Mexico border crisis has been optimal, or even adequate, to support a policy of helping Ukraine defend itself against Russian President Vladimir Putin’s brutal and unprovoked war of conquest. DeSantis must know this. I doubt his professors at Yale University and Harvard Law School let him get away with such sloppy thinking.
But imagine, for a moment, how his words must have brightened Putin’s day. His dream would be for Trump, who treated Putin the way a fanboy stans his idol, to return to the White House in January 2025. But to hear Trump’s principal (but still unannounced) opponent for the GOP nomination taking the isolationist line? That can give Putin only more reason to stay the course — keep bombing Ukrainian hospitals, playgrounds and power stations; keep murdering children and grandmothers — for two more years.
DeSantis was announcing his weakness, not just to Putin but also to China’s Xi Jinping, North Korea’s Kim Jong Un and the mullahs in Iran. And in the same interview, DeSantis also showed that he either has not been paying attention to what is happening in Ukraine or does not understand what he has been seeing.
He said of the Biden administration: “They have effectively a blank-check policy with no clear, strategic objective identified. And these things can escalate, and I don’t think it’s in our interests to be getting into a proxy war with China, getting involved over things like the borderlands or over Crimea.”
Where to start? Far from writing a blank check, Biden has meted out money and materiel far too slowly for the liking of Zelensky — and Biden’s more hawkish critics. The clearly stated strategic objective is to prevent Putin from wiping independent Ukraine from the map. There are scenarios under which I suppose this could become a proxy war with China, but it isn’t now, since Xi has so far declined to give Putin weapons. And when DeSantis talks about “the borderlands” I guess he means the eastern Donbas region, which Putin has “annexed” but which lies within Ukraine’s internationally recognized borders. Those lands and Crimea could someday be topics of negotiation, but meanwhile Putin is trying to grab the whole country.
Perhaps the dumbest thing DeSantis said, though, was to imply that the war was basically no big deal. “The fear of Russia going into NATO countries and all that and steamrolling, you know, that has not even come close to happening,” he said. Now, why might that be? Maybe because the United States and NATO showed strength in coming to Ukraine’s aid. Maybe Russia now looks like what DeSantis called a “third-rate military power” because Western arms and intelligence helped Ukrainian forces decimate the Russian military, destroying perhaps half of its tanks.
DeSantis’s performance was bad on every level. Still, I can’t wait to hear what he has to say when someone informs him, psst, that Russia has a whole bunch of nuclear weapons.