Bill Kristol Has No Business Making Demands of NR

B ill Kristol has demanded that National Review — everyone at National Review, no less — publicly confirm that they agree with him wholeheartedly on the question of Ukraine:

This sort of behavior immediately gets my back up. Partly, this is because such injunctions are intolerably presumptuous: It is unclear why Bill Kristol seems to believe that he’s the editor of National Review when he’s not even the editor of the Weekly Standard. Partly, it is because Kristol’s petition willfully misunderstands the role that institutions such as National Review ought to play in arguing about questions of great import. Partly, it is because the “or you’re the tail to Tucker’s dog” construction reminds me of the “Unpatriotic Conservatives” trap into which Kristol, and this magazine, fell two decades ago. And partly, it is because Kristol’s unyielding tone is redolent of precisely the sort of shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later foreign-policy approach of which he has been guilty during previous debates.

Certainly, there are people at National Review who — of their own volition — have, or will, “come out strongly against DeSantis on Ukraine.” Noah Rothman did so yesterday. So, in a more inquisitorial form, did Mark Wright. But not everyone will, and the accusation that those who don’t are lackeys for Tucker Carlson is, frankly, insane. Some of us — Michael Brendan Dougherty, for example — read the Ukraine conflict completely differently than Kristol does. Others — myself, for example — are just not entirely sure what we think about the prospects and consequences of protracted American support for the Ukrainians. Disgracefully, Kristol can countenance no such distinctions.

Lest my admission of indecision prompt Kristol to take hastily to Twitter and begin a second round of demagoguery, let me lay out clearly what I am confident of at this point. I am confident that Ukraine is the wronged party here, and that Vladimir Putin’s Russia is the villain. I am confident that this is a war of aggression on Russia’s part, and not, as some have claimed, a “defensive” or “complicated” squabble. I am confident, too, that the United States ought to have helped Ukraine in pretty much exactly the way that it has thus far. As I have noted repeatedly on The Editors podcast (and perhaps in print, I can’t remember), Biden’s reaction to the Russian invasion is the sole thing that I think he has gotten precisely right in his presidency.

As such, I disagree with Ron DeSantis that this is a mere “territorial dispute” — as Noah notes drily, “Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine is a ‘dispute’ over territory in the same way a bank robber and depositor have a ‘dispute’ over money” — and I would quarrel with DeSantis’s claim that pushing back against Russian aggression is not a “vital national interest” for the United States. I am much less sure, however, that DeSantis is wrong in other areas. DeSantis says that the U.S. ought to avoid “becoming further entangled” in the conflict. After a certain point, that seems self-evident, does it not? DeSantis opposes “the deployment of American troops.” I do, too. DeSantis worries about a “blank check.” Is there another approach? DeSantis proposes that “F-16s and long-range missiles” are a bridge too far. I am not educated enough to evaluate whether that is the specific line that we should draw, but I know a great number of smart people who think that it is. DeSantis states that “peace should be the objective.” This is probably correct, but it could also be evil depending on in what circumstances DeSantis is imagining a settlement. DeSantis says that the American government ought to be more focused on the “economic, cultural, and military power of the Chinese Communist Party.” With that, I profoundly agree.

As it happens, I have been wrestling with these questions for quite a while. A couple of weeks ago — long before Ron DeSantis made his statement to Tucker Carlson — I had Noah on my podcast to discuss Ukraine and other foreign-policy matters, and, in the spirit of the Devil’s Advocate, asked him a series of questions whose answers were not clear to me. Noah made an excellent case for the importance and desirability of our long-term support of Ukraine, but I nevertheless left the conversation unsure as to what I thought. A few weeks before talking to Noah, I took part in a similar conversation with Elbridge Colby, whose opinions on this differ from Noah’s dramatically. Inter alia, Colby’s earnestly held view is that the United States currently faces “a very real choice between Asia and Europe,” and that our ability to contain China — which, in his statement to Tucker, DeSantis identified as posing the biggest threat to us — is being limited by our focus on the “the Ukraine war,” which “looks likely to be protracted, attritional, and therefore very expensive.” I left that conversation, too, unsure as to what I thought.

I cannot prevent Bill Kristol from behaving as he does — from Laurence Tribe to Scott Adams, Twitter makes certain people lose full control of their faculties — but I will inform him nevertheless that the approach and tone that he has taken toward those who are unsure about America’s ongoing Ukraine policy are decidedly counterproductive. I am not alone among anti-Putin Americans in remaining undecided as to what our long-term Ukraine policy ought to be, or as to the wisdom of spending hundreds of billions of dollars in perpetuity, or as to how far we should go in providing weapons, or as to the opportunity costs of focusing on Ukraine instead of focusing on China. And I am certainly not going to be pulled out of my uncertainty by Ukrainian-flag emojis, saccharine online cheerleading, accusations of servility toward figures of whom I’ve been critical, or the sort of smug, imperious, mob-friendly hectoring that led Bill Kristol and his cocksure compatriots to torch their reputations in the first place.