Amid surging conservative skepticism, Cotton shows hawks how to talk about defending American strength abroad.
Amid surging conservative skepticism, Cotton shows hawks how to talk about defending American strength abroad.
S peaking at the National Review Institute’s foreign-policy forum last week, Senator Tom Cotton said that he believes Ukraine’s central war aim — forcing Russian invaders from Ukrainian territory — is “very reasonable,” and that the U.S. should back it “to the hilt.”
“I think one of the failures to deter this invasion in 2021, early 2022 is a lesson that President Biden should have taken from Ronald Reagan’s foreign policy, is that standing with our friends, helping them defend themselves, being clear and competent in the use of American power in all of its many tools and instruments does not lead to war. It leads to success,” Cotton said, citing President Reagan’s decisions to invade Grenada and arm Afghan rebels in their fight against the Soviet Union.
Cotton’s invocation of Reagan came in a question-and-answer session that followed his prepared speech, which was sharply critical of the “grand and abstract doctrines” and distorted interpretations of American political history advanced by self-described proponents of realism and restraint.
During the Q&A session, Cotton elaborated on the deficiencies of that sort of thinking, panning what he sees as “a false choice that Barack Obama specialized in,” and that the current administration, staffed by Obama-era officials, continues to present: “It’s either some kind of humiliating concessions, or it’s outright war.”
Notably, that all-or-nothing framing is also used by some libertarian and right-leaning policy types who advocate what they call foreign-policy restraint, and who have lately had significant success in stirring conservative skepticism of policies meant to provide substantial material support for Ukraine’s war effort. Among other things, they charge that those who support Ukraine, however well-intentioned, are unnecessarily prolonging an already-brutal conflict and increasing the risk of another world war or a nuclear conflict.
The night after Cotton’s NRI speech, 57 House Republicans voted against a $40 billion dollar package of aid to Ukraine, with some of them arguing that such a large sum shouldn’t go to a foreign country amid domestic problems such as the border crisis, inflation, and the baby-formula shortage. Then, this past Monday, eleven GOP senators voted against moving the bill forward in a procedural vote, while Cotton voted yes.
Cotton believes that most Americans are with him, based on his interactions with voters across Arkansas and polling data. Opposition to Russian aggression is something that is very deeply ingrained in the American psyche, he argued at the NRI event.
“When you see this kind of war of aggression waged by a brutal dictator, in which women and children are being slaughtered, the American people, and especially conservatives, feel very strongly,” Cotton said. “That’s borne out, not just in anecdotal public-opinion baths across the state of Arkansas, [but] in my colleagues’ states as well, or in public-opinion polling as well: that Vladimir Putin and Russia are as popular as syphilis these days.”
The reason for that is rather straightforward, according to Cotton, who said that most people intuitively understand that allowing dictators to reshape political borders whenever they like is dangerous. In this view, strong American support for Ukraine is a matter of Jacksonian prudence rather than Wilsonian idealism.
In the current political environment, gauzy talk about principles and international norms is a sure way for conservative hawks to cede the field to those who peddle Obama-era talking points about simple, all-or-nothing choices. Cotton understands this as well as anyone, and by making the case for a muscular American foreign policy in hard-nosed, realist terms, he is offering like-minded colleagues in Congress and elsewhere an invaluable playbook.