Republican Hawks Plan to Defend Ukraine with Insults

As we come close to the House potentially voting on another package of Ukraine aid, I see that Republican Ukraine hawks are in denial about their position. A CBS News/You Gov poll found that “61% of Republicans say the US should not send more weapons and other military assistance to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky”

This is consistent going back to the very beginning of the war, in which a majority of Americans said the U.S. shouldn’t play a large role in the war, and Republican support for Ukraine has always been softer.

Still, elected Republican would rather not grapple with this political reality. Here’s Dan Crenshaw:

Dan Crenshaw probably has in mind Marjorie Taylor Greene, who liberally salts her opposition to more aid with wild accusations. But Republicans who are genuinely worried about lack of support in their party need to explain and lead, not just insult.

Earlier this month, Mike Turner, chair of the House Intelligence Committee, turned toward the conspiratorial, telling CNN’s Jake Tapper, “We see directly coming from Russia attempts to mask communications that are anti-Ukraine and pro-Russia messages, some of which we even hear being uttered on the House floor.” He later used the word “infected.” This inspired hundreds of headlines about how a Republican was accusing others of spreading Russian propaganda and lies in the House. Read a bit deeper, and you see that what he’s referring to as Russian propaganda is the contention that the war has something to do with Ukraine’s potential NATO membership. “There are members of Congress today who still incorrectly say that this conflict between Russia and Ukraine is over NATO, which of course it is not,” he said. No, it couldn’t possibly be about security alliances, it’s about unshorn goodness and light against evil. “To the extent that this propaganda takes hold, it makes it more difficult for us to really see this as an authoritarian versus democracy battle, which is what it is,” Turner said.

Where would Republicans get the idea that the war had something to do with NATO? Maybe from all the things Putin has said, and all the reporting showing that Russian negotiators at the start of the war wanted a treaty that “would proclaim Ukraine as a permanently neutral, nonnuclear state. Ukraine would renounce any intention to join military alliances or allow foreign military bases or troops on its soil.” The sources we have for the substance of these negotiations are the Ukrainian negotiators themselves.

Republicans who want to pass this aid should try to rebut the actual arguments made against it. (See Senator J. D. Vance’s “The Math on Ukraine doesn’t add up.”) The primary one being that this aid is unlikely to make a significant difference on the ground. It is much smaller in scope than what was given ahead of the 2023 counteroffensive, and it’s being given to a depleted and demoralized Ukrainian military that is losing ground. It doesn’t promise material to Ukraine at anywhere near the rate that Ukraine uses it up. Although there are promises of replenishing America’s stockpiles of weapons, the current bill gives the president authority to give everything to Ukraine that we’re now funding that comes off the defense-industrial assembly line — thus delaying our replenishment for years.

Instead, we get a lot of this:

Except there is no left-wing body of opinion that wants to cut off aid to Ukraine. This is just asserting the opinion conditions of the 1980s as if they were relevant 40 years later. There is no significant left-wing caucus against aid to Ukraine; there is a left-wing caucus for cutting off Israel.

Republican hawks are unwilling to confront or admit the conditions in their own party and have no idea how to change them but through denial. How well do you think they are assessing the situation in Rostov-on-Don?