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Dispatch wrote: The Coming GOP Civil War Over Ukraine Funding
How the midterms will shape U.S. support for the war.
Nick Catoggio
Spoiler:How succinctly can you summarize the Republican identity crisis in the age of Trump?
I can do it in two tweets. One, since deleted:
Two, answering the outcry that ensued:
Tweet one sounds like it was written by Такер Карлсон, although I don’t know that even Tucker would stoop to describing the provinces claimed by Russia in its preposterous Anschluss as “Ukrainian-occupied.”
Tweet two sounds like it was written by Lindsey Graham.
Pity poor CPAC, forced to square that circle when pandering. Traditional Republican hawks believe in power projection, fear and loathe Russia after decades of Cold War conditioning, and sympathize with moral arguments for foreign intervention. Modern Republican doves believe America is chronically overextended abroad, view Russia as a distraction from the rising threat from China, and regard intervention as at least as likely to produce immoral outcomes as to prevent them.
Beneath those differences lies a philosophical rift. At the risk of oversimplifying, right-wing hawks tend to be classical liberals, willing and often overeager to make the world safe for democracy. Right-wing doves tend to be populist and post-liberal. It’s not just skepticism about America’s ability to project power effectively that makes them suspicious of foreign adventures. It’s the fact that, when we do project power, unfailingly we do so at the expense of illiberal regimes like Vladimir Putin’s.
Post-liberal Republicans don’t view illiberal regimes as something to be reflexively opposed and contained. In some respects, they’re to be emulated. Why fight Putin, a self-styled warrior against Western decadence, instead of learning from him?
The differences between the two Republican camps on Ukraine have been papered over so far by Democrats’ total control of government. So long as there are 10 traditional GOP hawks in the Senate to help Chuck Schumer beat a filibuster, and there are, U.S. aid to Kyiv will continue to flow. But that will change if Republicans take back one or both houses of Congress this fall, as is likely. And depending on how big Kevin McCarthy’s majority is, it could change drastically.
Would U.S. support for Ukrainian self-defense continue with Republicans in charge?
The two camps are about to fight their own war to answer that question.
Most Americans still support the war after seven months of conflict. After years of intense partisan polarization, we’ve all become inured to polling in which one side lands 80/20 on an issue while the other lands 20/80. Ukraine is different. In late August, Reuters found majorities in both parties believe the U.S. should continue to back the Ukrainians until all Russian forces withdraw from Ukrainian territory. More recently, Gallup reported that 66 percent of Americans support Ukraine in its effort to reclaim lost territory even at the price of a prolonged war.
But the hairline cracks in partisan opinion are starting to widen. In the Reuters poll, 66 percent of Democrats said they’re with Ukraine until it achieves its goals versus 51 percent of Republicans who said so. Gallup’s survey found Republican opinion particularly close-run: Just 50 percent of GOPers would tolerate a prolonged war in order to see Ukraine recover territory versus 46 percent who want to see the conflict end quickly and are willing to have Ukraine cede territory to Russia toward that end. Across 13 different demographic groups, Republicans were the only one in which more than 40 percent answered that way.
Gallup also asked Americans whether they think the U.S. has given too much aid to Ukraine, not enough, or the right amount. “Too much” was the least popular position at just 24 percent of all respondents. A plurality of 38 percent said we haven’t given enough aid, and 36 percent thought we’ve given the right amount. Among Republicans, the trends reversed. A plurality of 43 percent said we’ve given too much aid versus 30 percent who said we haven’t given enough and 26 percent who felt we’d given the right amount.
The hawkish optimist’s take on those numbers is that, even within the GOP, a majority still resists the “too much” position. The pessimist’s take is that Republicans once again far outpace every other demographic group in their skepticism about helping the Ukrainians. After the GOP’s 43 percent, the next largest cohort to say that the U.S. has given too much aid to Kyiv stood at just 31 percent.
The distinct sense one gets from the polling is that Republicans are shifting from solid support for Ukraine’s war effort to tepid support, and will in short order shift to tepid opposition and then solid opposition.
What you think is primarily driving that shift depends on how cynical you are about the modern Republican Party.
The innocuous explanation is that the more fiscally conservative of our two factions is reverting to form. America has, to be sure, spent an exorbitant amount on Ukraine by the standards of foreign aid. The $12 billion appropriated in the government-funding bill that passed last Friday brings the total given to the Ukrainians this year to some $67 billion, “the highest amount of military aid the United States has committed to any country in a single year in nearly half a century, since the Vietnam War.” It approaches 10 percent of the Pentagon’s annual budget. And we’re shelling it out amid rising anxiety about a new global recession that’ll shrink federal tax revenue and soaring interest rates that will make America’s debt that much more expensive and unsustainable.
It’s a lot of money, especially under the circumstances.
On the other hand, when the history of this era is written, I wonder if aid to Ukraine won’t be seen as one of the most freakishly cost-effective military expenditures in the history of the United States. We spent $2 trillion on a war in Afghanistan that began and ended with the Taliban in charge. We’re in the hole for $400 billion and counting on the F-35 fighter jet. If I told you a year ago that for $100 billion or so we could decimate Putin’s military, cause Russia to lose its status as a great power, and do so without losing a single American life, would you have taken that deal? If we could swing the same deal with Taiwan and get the same outcome with respect to China, wouldn’t we?
As liberals will happily remind you, Republicans traditionally haven’t been sticklers about fiscal responsibility when it comes to defense spending. I don’t think sticker shock is the core reason GOP voters are leery of more Ukraine aid.
A more plausible reason is that “America First” Republicanism has scrambled both parties’ respective tolerances for indefinite foreign adventures. It’s the left, not the right, that spearheaded humanitarian intervention in Libya and (almost) Syria under Obama. It’s the right, not the left, that sought engagement with Putin’s Russia and questioned the utility of NATO under Trump. As the Ukraine war drags on, right-wingers may increasingly perceive it as a Democratic-led do-gooder initiative that lasts forever, goes nowhere, and ends up costing a boatload of cash we don’t have. The fact that Trump disclaimed Bush’s legacy so eagerly in 2016 also unmoored Republican voters from feeling obliged to defend interventionism as a matter of consistency or strength. “We are ending the era of endless wars,” Trump told West Point grads in 2020. That mindset makes it easy for some right-wing populists to view Ukraine as a “Democratic war” despite the fact that polls show bipartisan support.
The parties’ instinct to polarize around issues may force them further apart once Republicans take power in Congress, like magnets repelling each other at the poles. In the first flush of outrage over Russia’s invasion, with the GOP all but powerless to block outlays of military aid, that instinct was blunted. But once McCarthy or McConnell has veto power over legislation, it will reemerge with various “America First” fig leaves offered to explain Republicans’ sudden reluctance to fund the Ukrainians. “We can’t continue to send all of our assets to Ukraine,” said GOP Rep. Roger Williams recently, as an example. “A lot of what we’ve sent to Ukraine should be down at the border.” I don’t know what he thinks the Border Patrol would do with HIMAR systems, say, but his excuse is more palatable than the truth—namely, that House Republicans will be expected to obstruct Ukraine funding simply to demonstrate that divided government means no more blank checks for Joe Biden. Giving the White House everything it wants for Ukraine would be letting Democrats “win,” and insofar as the new Republican majority has any mandate from the base, it’s to make sure that Democratic “winning” ends. Whatever that means for the Ukrainians.
The two impulses described above, obstructionism and isolationism, converge in the party’s nationalist wing. And unfortunately for McConnell and especially McCarthy, that wing punches above its weight in its influence over grassroots Republicans. Democratic Rep. Ruben Gallego recently told Politico, “I’ve talked to a couple of [Republican] members that have voted for pro-Ukraine legislation in the past. They have town halls now where they come and get yelled at using Tucker Carlson talking points. And of course at some point they’re going to have to deal with primaries.” Populist media stars have been making unhappy noises about Ukraine aid for months while the molten MAGA core in the House has already taken to voting against legislation about it. Eventually this will catch up to what Tim Miller of The Bulwark calls the House Republican “fear caucus,” the members who don’t share populists’ sympathies for authoritarian regimes but who do fear the electoral repercussions of voting against Vladimir Putin if it means voting with Joe Biden.
Very soon the Russia apologists on the right will begin arguing that, inasmuch as appeasing Putin is the only way we all get out of this alive, any Republican who votes for Ukraine aid is voting for nuclear war. Do we think an invertebrate like Kevin McCarthy is prepared to stare down the Tucker Carlsons and cast that vote anyway? Bear in mind that unless Republicans win a surprisingly large majority in November, the only way McCarthy will be able to pass future Ukraine funding bills is with the help of House Democrats. If plowing billions into Ukraine to defeat Russian authoritarianism weren’t bad enough, in other words, he’ll have no choice but to partner with the dreaded libs to do it.
All of this augurs badly for future Ukraine aid and would seem to portend a populist rout in the coming Republican civil war over the issue.
