Conventional wisdom holds that voters disregard foreign-policy issues, but 2024 has not been a conventional year on the world stage.
Conventional wisdom holds that voters tend to forget about foreign-policy issues once they enter the ballot box, but 2024 has not been a conventional year on the world stage: With the war in Ukraine about to enter a third spring fighting season, long-simmering GOP divisions over America’s role in the conflict have moved firmly into the spotlight.
When Representative Brian Fitzpatrick (R., Pa.), a centrist, talks to his constituents about supporting Ukraine amid Russia’s unprovoked invasion, he characterizes his position as a moral imperative.
“We understand the consequences of Ukraine falling to Russia. That’s not an option,” he told National Review in the Speaker’s lobby of the U.S. Capitol Tuesday afternoon. “We have to support them.”
But for isolationist-leaning representatives like Lauren Boebert (R., Colo.), conversations with constituents look wildly different. “Not another dollar to Ukraine. We have an invasion at our southern border and I don’t give a rip about sending more money to Ukraine right now,” the congresswoman told NR on the steps of the U.S. Capitol Tuesday afternoon.
Intra-party divisions about the direction of Republican foreign policy have hit another breaking point this week as House Speaker Mike Johnson struggles to push billions in foreign aid through the lower chamber in the face of sharp opposition from within his ranks, raising questions about the trajectory of Republican foreign policy on the hill and the campaign trail as both wings of the GOP continue to dig in their heels.
After huddling with an ideologically diverse group of House Republicans on the hill Tuesday evening, Johnson announced Wednesday that he will push ahead with a high-wire act on foreign aid: scheduling votes on three separate bills on Israel, Ukraine, and Taiwan. Biden released a statement a short time later endorsing Johnson’s aid package, likely only further imperiling the speaker’s political capital among his right flank.
Most rank-and-file House Republicans are aligned with Johnson’s mainstream, Reaganite Republican view that sending additional aid to Ukraine is the only morally defensible position for the GOP, even as many self-described defense hawks continue to voice frustrations over President Joe Biden’s refusal to clearly articulate what success in the conflict should look like.
But this year’s slim and fractious House GOP majority has given outsize leverage to anti-interventionist Republicans on Capitol Hill who are skeptical of U.S. engagement overseas. For months, this small but vocal crowd of hardline House Republican detractors has expressed vehement opposition to the Senate-passed $95 billion foreign-aid supplemental, with two Republican members even threatening to oust Johnson from the speakership if he continues to push Ukraine aid through the House, no matter his means.
Staunch right-wing opposition to supporting Ukraine means Johnson may have to lean on House Democrats to push additional aid through the lower chamber, likely further imperiling his own political future as his most vulnerable members gear up for another competitive election cycle that could flip control of the House to Democrats.
Looming over all of these conversations, of course, is former president Donald Trump, the GOP’s presumptive 2024 nominee, who has sent mixed signals on his view of the war in Ukraine as he battles multiple criminal indictments and transitions to general-election mode.
On the campaign trail, Trump has insisted that Russia never would have invaded Ukraine had he been in office, and that he could end the war in 24 hours. He also sparked backlash when he said he would not protect NATO countries from hypothetical Russian attacks if they fail to spend enough on defense under the pact. More recently, Trump has floated the idea of sending additional aid to Ukraine in the form of a loan — throwing a bone to the hawkish wing of the party that is eager to push additional aid to Kyiv through Congress quickly.
“No doubt his viewpoint drives the viewpoint of those Republican primary voters, largely,” Matt Mowers, former senior White House adviser to Trump, said in a recent interview with NR. But Trump’s foreign policy as president was “much, much more muscular than he sometimes gets credit for,” he added, pointing to Trump’s having ordered strikes in Syria against targets associated with chemical-weapons capabilities and having designated the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist organization.
Trump also ordered the assassination of Qasem Soleimani, the commander of Iran’s proxy forces, and “oversaw the rollback of ISIS throughout the Middle East,” Mowers said.
Mowers says voters are looking for strong conservative national-security leaders. “Candidates that come around to that not only will be coming around to a policy position that ensures America does lead, but also will be politically rewarded for that position as well.”
New polling from the American Action Network supports his theory: 60 percent of conservative respondents in battleground congressional districts said they favor funding Ukraine, while just 34 percent said they oppose additional aid. Though it’s worth noting that those who are skeptical of Ukraine suggest the polling may have had a different outcome if respondents were presented with specific spending figures.
Mark Green, president of the Wilson Center and former USAID administrator, believes foreign affairs will indeed be more important to voters this cycle than in years past.
“People like me perennially argue that foreign-policy issues will impact voter choices. We’re usually wrong, but I believe this time might be different. I think voters will look favorably upon candidates who offer a clear, concise vision for a more peaceful, more prosperous future,” he said.
Yet many House Republicans are taking cues from the grassroots wing of the GOP that views the interventionist approach to overseas conflicts as a fool’s errand, or simply not in the strategic interest of the United States.
“Why are we spending hundreds of billions of dollars to protect the sovereignty of other countries when we don’t even protect ours? Especially when Ukraine’s such a known corrupt country?” first-term representative Eli Crane (Ariz.) told NR in a brief interview Tuesday afternoon, describing his own conversations with constituents. “Why isn’t anybody talking about peace talks? Why isn’t that the focal point here? What’s the danger of escalating this war with a country that has more nuclear weapons than anybody on planet Earth?”
Mike Garcia, a centrist Republican from California, describes his own approach to the conflict as falling somewhere in between what he calls Biden’s “whatever-it-takes, blank-check mentality” and isolationist-leaning representative Marjorie Taylor Greene’s (R., Ga.) “never a dollar more” approach.
“They’re not asking for blankets. They’re not asking for cans of beans. They’re asking for bullets. They’re asking for ATACMS,” he said in an interview. “But it requires them to commit to the strategy as well. That’s what the executive branch should be having conversations about.”
Johnson is not blind to the political realities of his Ukraine aid predicament. As NR reported earlier this week, some House Republican defense hawks told the speaker privately last week that if he’s ousted by the House GOP’s rightmost flank for championing Ukraine aid, he’d be going down for the right reasons, and history books will remember him favorably.
Around NR
• Kari Lake is the worst of the contemporary GOP, writes Rich Lowry:
In 2022, it was all-in on MAGA bombast, no matter the electoral consequences; now, in 2024, it’s fold on an issue of profound moral import at the first sign of trouble.
• Abigail Anthony reports on the Biden campaign’s new “Out for Biden-Harris” initiative that aims to mobilize “LGBTQ+” voters:
A video announcing the new initiative shows footage of Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, and Assistant Secretary for Health Rachel (previously “Richard”) Levine as Kamala Harris states that President Biden “elevated LGBTQI+ leaders to every level of our administration.”
• Florida governor Ron DeSantis projected cautious optimism to donors at an investor retreat last weekend that pro-choice advocates’ effort to enshrine abortion rights into his state’s constitution this fall will not succeed. He warned, however, that defeating the abortion-rights ballot initiative will still be a tough fight for Republicans both politically and financially, Audrey Fahlberg reports:
The former 2024 presidential candidate told donors and close allies gathered at the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino in Hollywood, Fla., that he thinks his state’s 60 percent majority threshold for passing constitutional amendments is too steep an electoral hill for pro-choice advocates to climb, tracking with public remarks he made last week in which he maintained the proposed 2024 ballot initiative is too “radical” to pass.
• The justifications for Biden not to debate Trump are starting to pile up, says Jim Geraghty. The Atlantic’s David Frum argued that Biden should decline to debate Trump because a president does not participate in forums with a person under criminal indictment for his attempt to overthrow the Constitution:
Biden is free to make any decision he likes, but those who oppose Trump shouldn’t fool themselves about the way many voters will interpret a decision like that. If the 81-year-old Biden refuses to participate in debates later this year, many Americans will conclude that it’s because he’s too old and that either he or his staff fears what Biden would say, or how he would appear, over the course of three 90-minute presidential debates.
• Trump’s criminal trial will matter, Noah Rothman predicts.
For the most part, the polls have been consistent. Voters across the political spectrum believe that, regardless of their view on the legitimacy of the charges against Trump, it’s a bridge too far to pull the lever for a convicted felon. At least, that’s what they’re willing to tell pollsters.
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