As you might have noticed, there is real diversity of opinion about the topic du jour here at National Review, the Ukrainian War. That is because we thrive internally on debate about the great matters of the day, especially when it comes to questions with no easy answers. (If there’s a “Russia instantly loses without mass slaughter or geopolitical destabilization” Easy Button that solves the Russo–Ukrainian War out there, then it’s fair to say everyone at NR would have pushed it in February of 2022; perhaps it lies stashed away on a shelf in Bill Kristol’s basement office.) I fall in mostly on the side of Charles C. W. Cooke on this matter substantively, and furthermore share his disdain for hecklers who would presume to act as our assignment editors.
Instead I would like to make a comment about the nature of politics, and the well-calibrated cynicism of the specific angle of attack made by a certain kind of Former Conservative-in-Exile who once wielded great influence in Republican circles. First of all, I did not find DeSantis’s statement to be particularly offensive. Did it lack the moral clarity I would prefer? Certainly. The use of “territorial dispute” to describe Russia’s invasion of Ukraine (the initial goal of which was to absorb the country wholesale if possible) is the sort of studied, bloodlessly “neutral” language choice that suggests a degree of audience pandering. But unless you want to elevate in-the-weeds policy disputes about which weapons systems to send to Ukraine into elemental moral choices between Good and Evil in United States politics, then the criticism of DeSantis cannot properly be that he wrote out a careful, line-straddling response to the question.
Which brings me to my real point: Another way to describe all of this would be with that simple word, “politics.” Presidential politics in the Age of Trump, in particular. Because I have a brain and enjoy using it on occasion, I can clearly see that this “position statement” on Ukraine has been lawyered within an inch of its life to signal to voters that DeSantis, while not a Rand Paul–like isolationist, is also not a kept pet of the neoconservative Republican old guard (who, as Charlie delicately pointed out in his earlier piece, don’t exactly have the finest track record on these matters). DeSantis is wooing Trump or Trumpy voters, not voters like me. (Voters like me want to see someone conservative and effective win the nomination, so that we win the presidency and get to do enjoyably conservative things. We can already agree about DeSantis, regardless of whether he is our first choice or not.) I suppose some expect me to find the compromises politicians make in positioning themselves in presidential politics — the way they trim and tack in the political winds without letting their masts snap or sails shear away — to be something to condemn. Oh the hypocrisy, the cynicism, the moral rot of it all!
Nah. And you will never stampede or shame me into thinking otherwise. I don’t consider electoral politics to be beneath me, because people who do generally tend not to win elections. (I am interested in winning elections.) Furthermore, Ron DeSantis has nothing really to defend; his campaign wrote a statement I pretty much agree with, and unless you really doubt that China is a greater long-term threat to the United States than Russia, then the argument has devolved into an exercise in semantic quibbling and the divining of “true meanings.”
So I find it insulting that we are being asked to pretend that this is the latest in a series of “disqualifying” acts committed by Ron DeSantis when it is no such thing, and when the requests are always coming from those acting in transparent bad faith or with ulterior motives. Ulterior is perhaps a loaded word, but these people do not seem to be particularly concerned with the health of the Republican Party — an establishment I have a hearty amount of contempt for myself, mind you — or conservatism writ large (at least any kind of conservatism that doesn’t place them centrally). They do seem to be pretty interested in telling me that every single candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024, including the undeclared ones, has been pre-disqualified, and that my failure to acknowledge this is evidence of my insufficient intellectual integrity. It is evidence of something, certainly. But I would not presume to know what, as, unlike David Frum, I am not a mind reader.