The Missouri senator wants to cut off all U.S. military aid to Ukraine, but one year ago he said arming Ukraine was ‘the most important’ thing we could do.
The Missouri senator wants to cut off all U.S. military aid to Ukraine, but one year ago he said arming Ukraine was ‘the most important’ thing we could do.
O n February 24, the one-year anniversary of Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, Senator Josh Hawley (R., Mo.) appeared on Tucker Carlson Tonight to scold Republicans for voting for military aid to Ukraine.
“The truth is that Joe Biden, and, let’s face it, congressional Republicans, have spent over $100 billion and counting on the Ukraine war, and meanwhile the folks in East Palestine, Ohio, have poison in the water, poison in the air,” Hawley said. “I would just say to Republicans: You can either be the party of Ukraine and the globalists or you can be the party of East Palestine and the working people of this country.”
“It’s time to say to the Europeans: No more welfare for Europeans,” he added.
It’s not surprising to hear Hawley talk like this — pitchfork populism is basically his calling card. But when it comes to the issue of U.S. military aid to Ukraine, the Josh Hawley of February 2023 sounds much different from the Josh Hawley of February 2022.
“Russia’s brutal assault on Ukraine and invasion of its territory must be met with strong American resolve,” Hawley said in a statement released February 24, 2022. “The Biden Administration should sanction Russian energy production to a halt, and help arm the Ukrainians to defend themselves.”
Speaking to reporters in the Capitol a few days after the Russian invasion, Hawley said that “the most important thing we can do” is to “arm the resistance,” and he reiterated his call to shut down Russia’s energy sector: “Russia’s a gas station. That’s what it is. It’s not a country; it’s a gas station. We need to turn it off.” When a reporter asked Hawley if he agreed with former president Donald Trump’s comment that Putin is smart, Hawley replied: “I think Putin thinks he’s smart, but it’s gotta be our policy to make sure that this little bet he’s made — that he can just gobble up Ukraine and that’ll be easy and he’ll be able to chew it up and swallow it — we’ve got to make sure that he loses that bet. And I think the way we can do that now is we can arm the Ukrainian resistance.”
Hawley added that it was in the “strategic interests” of the United States to prevent Putin from achieving his goals in Ukraine. “I think [Putin is] a rational actor in a realist sense . . . where he has goals and he’s trying to achieve them — they’re opposed to what we should be doing. They’re opposed to our interests — our strategic interests — so we’ve got to act to thwart those goals,” he said.
A year later, Hawley is singing another tune altogether. Where once he claimed that arming Ukraine was the most important thing the United States could do to advance its strategic interests, he now says he wants to cut off U.S. military aid to Ukraine entirely.
In a recent speech at the Heritage Foundation, Hawley seemed to leave the door open to supporting some such aid if Europe increased its funding of the war so U.S. resources could be deployed to deter China. “We should cut off U.S. military aid to Ukraine until our European allies step up,” he said. But when I caught up with Hawley on Tuesday in the Capitol and asked him what specifically European allies would need to earn his support for U.S. military aid, Hawley replied: “I don’t think we should give any more funding right now. We’ve given $113 billion. All of Europe combined is $80-something [billion]. We can’t do that and, from a foreign-policy perspective, do what we need to do in East Asia — to say nothing of what we’re seeing with East Palestine. I would say right now I’m not open to any more [aid] — it needs to stop.”
Why has Hawley changed his mind? He told me that back when Russia launched its full-scale invasion, he believed the U.S. would provide “targeted, limited military aid to help [Ukrainians] defend themselves,” but he’s since come to see the U.S. as funding a “proxy war” and “nation-building.”
“We’re now literally writing checks direct to their treasury. We now have people talking about regime change in Russia. I mean, good luck with that. It’s just Afghanistan and Iraq and, frankly, Vietnam all over again. I just think it’s frankly insane,” he said.
After Russia invaded, how much U.S. military aid did Hawley expect Ukraine to need in order to defend itself? “Originally, we did something like, we did $10 or $15 billion out of the gate. That’s probably plenty,” he told me. As one of eleven senators who voted against the $40 billion Ukraine-aid package in May 2022, he criticized non-military aid in the package without saying he wanted to end all military aid to Ukraine.
But Russia has an economy nine times the size of Ukraine’s and began the war with military hardware and resources that dwarfed Ukraine’s defenses. Did Hawley really think, I asked, that $15 billion in U.S. aid would be enough to help a small country repel Putin’s army from the new territory it had seized? “That was never my objective. I didn’t set an objective because it’s not my country. It’s Ukraine’s country,” Hawley said.
When I pointed out that he said a year ago he believed it was in the United States’ “strategic interest” to keep Russia from reaching its “goals” in Ukraine, Hawley said that Putin’s goal at the time was taking “the entire country of Ukraine.”
“That turned out to be laughably wrong. That was a gross intelligence miscalculation,” Hawley said. But isn’t it more accurate, I asked, to say that the intelligence community was right that Putin wanted to take the whole country, and he simply failed to achieve that aim? “We were told that it was imminent, and he would absolutely be able to do it. As it turns out, that was totally wrong,” Hawley replied.
Wouldn’t the entire country have fallen without U.S. aid? No, Hawley said, “I think the Ukrainians are pretty, pretty tough fighters. And I think what we’ve seen is that the Russian military is significantly more degraded than we were told.”
“I thought that we were going to provide defense to help Ukrainians defend themselves; they’ll set their own aims. But suddenly it became, you know, ‘Oh, we now are basically running the show.’ This is why I say it’s an exercise in nation-building.”
Hawley also described his dovish approach to Russia as a necessary step toward taking a more hawkish stand against China. “We need to get postured correctly” by redeploying existing military assets to Asia, he told me. “With regard to Taiwan itself, we should provide them conditional aid out of the defense budget. It shouldn’t be like hundreds of billions over and above.”
There is certainly a reasonable foreign-policy debate to be had about U.S. interests in and commitments to Ukraine and Taiwan. But it’s difficult to view Hawley’s maneuverings on Ukraine solely through a foreign-policy lens. When Putin shocked the world by launching a full-scale military invasion of Ukraine rather than the “minor incursion” into the eastern part of the country that many had expected, Republican voters almost unanimously supported doing more to help the Ukrainians, according to Quinnipiac polling. One year (and $100 billion) later, polls show that GOP voters are just about evenly divided on the question, with 47 percent saying the U.S. is doing “too much” to help Ukraine and 48 percent believing it is doing “about the right amount” or “too little” — and Hawley’s populist base is firmly in the “too much” camp. Writing in the Washington Post last week, George Will accused Hawley of being “a human windsock, responsive to gusts of public opinion.” Yet few other GOP senators have followed Hawley’s lead.
“Our objective should be simple: It should be for Russia to lose and for Putin not to get stronger and not to pose a greater threat to the United States,” Senator Ted Cruz (R., Texas) told me on Tuesday. Cruz, who voted for the $40 billion package in May 2022, said the argument that we should cut off U.S. military aid to Ukraine and redirect it to defending Taiwan or pursuing domestic priorities is “badly mistaken” and that military aid to Ukraine is “enormously important to protecting our national security.” He pointed to a 45-minute Senate floor speech and to episodes of his podcast in which he’s made that argument, and added that he’s skeptical of non-military funding that could fall prey to corruption.
“We need to continue to support Ukraine but make sure it’s effective, which means beat the Russians,” said Senator Joni Ernst (R., Iowa).
“It is clear that Putin’s unwarranted aggression cannot go unchecked,” said Senator Katie Britt (R., Ala.), who attended the Munich Security Conference in February.
“Now’s not the time to lose our nerve,” said Senator Todd Young (R., Ind.).
Senator Marco Rubio (R., Fla.) told me that the effort to help Ukraine expel Putin’s army requires “constant engagement with the American people to explain to them why it’s in our national interest.”
“I think China would like nothing more than for Russia to succeed in this endeavor. It strengthens their authoritarian bloc. It undermines the West and the United States,” Rubio said. “China’s worst-case scenario is a weakened Russia that allows the U.S. and the West and the free world to focus exclusively on the threat from China.”
“But,” he added, “I think it goes back to the basic premise that if a country like Russia can invade and take a neighbor because they feel like it, you set a standard that will be repeated in other parts of the world.”
Whether Republican voters buy those arguments remains to be seen, but one year after Russia’s invasion, a strong majority of Republican senators continues to support military aid to Ukraine.