Donald Trump claims he could finish the war in Ukraine in one day and avert World War III, whereas Ron DeSantis prefers a culture war to save a foreign democracy.
The ex-president and Florida governor’s increasing shadow campaign for the GOP candidature in 2024 is likely to compound grassroots conservatives’ already rising disdain for becoming Ukraine’s arsenal of democracy.
This should worry Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s government, which has shamelessly thanked Americans for their multibillion-dollar generosity while warning that he will continue to seek for more.
A contentious Republican primary based on the isolationist sentiments of the party’s “Make America Great Again” wing might produce a nominee, and maybe the 47th president, who will abandon Joe Biden’s guarantee that Americans will stand with Ukraine “for as long as it takes.”
A year after Russia’s horrific and unjustified invasion, there are already early signs of waning popular support for Biden’s repeated funding and arms packages for Ukraine. In addition, Trump ally House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has warned against a “blank check” for Ukraine. The reaction of the ex-appointees president’s in the GOP-controlled House to Biden’s daring secret visit to Kyiv last month suggests that the Republican nominee for 2024 will almost certainly cater to a base that believes the US should spend its money securing its own borders rather than Ukraine’s, and that Biden cares more about foreigners than Americans.
New polling sheds light on the GOP’s stance on Ukraine. According to an AP-NORC study done in late January, support for the US delivering weapons to the country has declined compared to the spring, and that decline has been worse among Republicans – down to 39% from 53% in May 2022.
Trump has no ill will towards Zelensky, despite what he falsely portrayed as their “wonderful” 2019 phone discussion, in which the then-president attempted to coerce his counterpart into initiating an investigation into Biden using US military aid. Trump was impeached for the first time as a result of the incident. More recently, in a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Saturday, Trump appeared eager to reignite his genuflecting connection with Russian President Vladimir Putin, whom many in the world now consider a war criminal. Yet the necessity to defend a democracy under attack is a foreign idea to Trump, even at home.
“Before I ever take the Oval Office, I will have resolved the horrible war between Russia and Ukraine.” I will resolve the issue. And I will solve it quickly, in no more than a day,” Trump promised. “I know precisely what to say to each of them,” he continued, before implying a possible strategy of siding with the aggressor in the fight by reminding his audience that “I got along quite well with Putin.”
DeSantis, whose foreign policy views are mostly unknown, has not been as forthright as Trump about what he would do in Ukraine. After all, he isn’t even a declared contender yet, despite new indications that he is. But, in a recent Fox News interview, he appeared to try to catch up with Trump, warning that the Biden administration had “no clear, strategic objective identified” in Ukraine and that it was not in the US’s interests to get involved in a proxy war with China there, after the White House warned Beijing that it could start sending arms to Russia.
This is a shift from his posture as a lawmaker in 2014 and 2015, when he firmly backed arming Ukraine to confront Russia, according to AWN’s KFile.
, pt., pt., pt., pt. The Russian president looks to be preparing for an endless war in Ukraine, where he has been entrenched since 2014 following the unlawful invasion of Crimea. Any signals that a potential Republican president might let Kyiv go would feed into his apparent assumption that the West will inevitably tyre and divide. After all, Germany only agreed to send Leopard tanks to Ukraine after Biden agreed to also send more sophisticated US M1 Abrams tanks to the conflict.
Even if Kiev wins the conflict or reaches a currently unlikely peace deal with Moscow, its future could rely on being a de facto NATO protectorate armed with Western weapons and even security guarantees from major US or European powers that, based on current rhetoric, some future Republican presidents may be loath to honour.
On Ukraine, not every Republican agrees with Trump or DeSantis. Many major House committee chairmen, for example, support current or expanded aid and military hardware for Ukraine, as well as its request for F-16 fighter jets, which Biden has declined to provide. Some possible Republican primary candidates have also expressed support for the US endeavour. Former US ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley, who launched her candidature last month and portrays herself as a would-be scourge of strongmen like Putin and China’s Xi Jinping, tweeted last year: “This isn’t just a fight for Ukraine, this is a war for freedom.”
But, presidential primaries have a propensity of defining a party’s policies at the extremes – and with Trump and DeSantis considered as the current favourites, their opponents may face increased pressure to fall in line in order to secure their own electoral viability.
Ukraine’s major attention is on the war, with new evidence that its desperate struggle in Bakhmut may be crumbling.
Nevertheless, the likelihood of altering political realities in the United States as a new White House campaign begins implies that Zelensky’s need for more weaponry and ammunition to evict Putin’s men from Ukraine will become much more pressing.
In Ukraine, Trump sees an opportunity to go after DeSantis.
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“I am the only candidate who can make this guarantee, I can simply prevent World War III,” Trump stated in a speech laced with lies. “By the way, if something doesn’t happen soon, we’re going to have World War III.”
In some ways, the former president is repeating his 2016 strategy of warning about America’s vulnerability to foreign wars. He’s attempting to create fatigue over the United States’ arms-length participation in Ukraine, as he did throughout the extended conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq.
And, while Biden was in Europe last month, he made another typical criticism of presidents who are fixated on foreign policy by turning up in East Palestine, Ohio, at the site of a chemical spill caused by a freight train crash.
“I sincerely hope that when your representatives and all of the politicians arrive, including Biden, that he has some money left over from touring Ukraine,” Trump added.
According to AWN’s Kristen Holmes, the former president sees an opportunity to hit DeSantis over his proposals as a congressional candidate in 2012 to privatise some social benefits, implying that he is not sufficiently aligned with the GOP base in opposing financial and military help to Ukraine.
“We will never return to a party that wants to give unlimited money to fight overseas endless wars while demanding we eliminate veteran and retirement benefits at home,” Trump stated during his CPAC speech.
