The Swipes at Ron DeSantis’s Foreign-Policy Chops Are Unconvincing

Barton Swaim is among my favorite Wall Street Journal columnists — it’s a deep bench over there. But I admit to being underwhelmed by “DeSantis Isn’t at Home Abroad,” his column from earlier this week.

I don’t quibble with Swaim’s observations that the Florida governor is more at home on domestic issues, and that his foreign-policy viewpoints have been formed through that prism. For example, DeSantis’s central concerns are about terrorists’ crossing our southern border, and the specter of adding slews of Palestinian refugees to the already unmanageable hordes of unvetted aliens President Biden has gone out of his way to admit into our country. Yet DeSantis is right about these matters. And it cannot be wrong in an election campaign to highlight significant matters that are of great concern to voters. It is simply a fact that Americans care more about American homeland security than about war in Ukraine and the Middle East, important as those matters are.

About the Author

Andrew C. McCarthy

Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at National Review Institute, an NR contributing editor, and author of Ball of Collusion: The Plot to Rig an Election and Destroy a Presidency.

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Barton Swaim is among my favorite Wall Street Journal columnists — it’s a deep bench over there. But I admit to being underwhelmed by “DeSantis Isn’t at Home Abroad,” his column from earlier this week.

I don’t quibble with Swaim’s observations that the Florida governor is more at home on domestic issues, and that his foreign-policy viewpoints have been formed through that prism. For example, DeSantis’s central concerns are about terrorists’ crossing our southern border, and the specter of adding slews of Palestinian refugees to the already unmanageable hordes of unvetted aliens President Biden has gone out of his way to admit into our country. Yet DeSantis is right about these matters. And it cannot be wrong in an election campaign to highlight significant matters that are of great concern to voters. It is simply a fact that Americans care more about American homeland security than about war in Ukraine and the Middle East, important as those matters are.

About the Author

Andrew C. McCarthy

Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at National Review Institute, an NR contributing editor, and author of Ball of Collusion: The Plot to Rig an Election and Destroy a Presidency.