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

Both DeSantis and Nikki Haley would do a better job than either Joe Biden or Donald Trump of protecting America in a dangerous world.

B arton 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.

DeSantis, moreover, is demonstrating a willingness to take on a tough issue that the front-runner, former president Donald Trump, talked a good game about but failed to follow through on: the government’s legitimate authority to exclude from the United States aliens who are likely to be adherent to counter-constitutional ideologies and abominable biases, such as sharia-supremacism and antisemitism. De rigueur thinking holds that we must accept refugees and other aliens from anti-American cauldrons and other troubled regions — even if it is practically impossible to vet them for adherence to loathsome beliefs because the dysfunctional and anti-American regimes that govern their native lands do not cooperate with us (and lack reliable records in any event). If that’s what you get from Beltway deep-thinking on foreign relations, I’ll take DeSantis, thank you very much.

It is fair enough to observe, as Swaim does, that the increasingly dangerous global chessboard plays, at least at first blush, to the strengths of Nikki Haley, DeSantis’s main competitor to become the plausible Republican alternative to a Donald Trump nomination. (Yes, I realize that, in this context, “plausible” seems less plausible by the day.) Haley had a superb, if brief, tenure as Trump’s United Nations ambassador. Brevity is worth mentioning because it’s another point in Haley’s favor: She was one of the few high-profile Trump appointees savvy enough to get out while the getting was good — i.e., before the mercurial solipsist-in-chief inevitably turned on her over some perceived act of disloyalty.

Still, let’s remember that just before Haley’s stint at the U.N., pundits were speaking of her exactly as Swaim now speaks of DeSantis: a successful governor (of South Carolina) whose international-relations credentials were negligible, and who might prove out of her depth in a foreign-policy gig.

Needless to say, Haley did exceptionally well. DeSantis would, too, and for the same reasons: He’s smart, he’s a quick study, and he’s confident from having been an excellent executive. He’d have a sharp ear for the public interest, ask the right questions, and not be bullied by the Beltway Blob that always thinks it knows better. Haley’s skill-set played well in foreign relations once that arena became her job. I also believe the American-interest priorities of her domestic executive experience — coming from a red state with Reaganesque peace-through-strength sensibilities (to say nothing of her personal ties to the armed forces because of her husband’s exemplary service) — were preferable to the transnational progressivism predominant in the U.S. foreign-relations clerisy.

In the campaign thus far, Haley has spoken with more conviction about support for Ukraine than DeSantis, who blundered out of the starting gate by referring to Russia’s war of aggression as a “territorial dispute.”

Like it or not, Ukraine is a tough issue to navigate in seeking to be nominated by a Republican Party that has (a) a Trump-influenced faction that seems implacably hostile to Ukraine (even though Trump’s own meandering on the subject has been confusing and non-committal); (b) another faction that is Ukraine-skeptical out of very real fear that unbounded support detracts from higher priorities (to say nothing of other well-founded concerns); and (c) Ukraine supporters whose arguments, though insightful, have persuaded only half of Republicans (down from 80 percent when Russia invaded in 2022).

DeSantis has shifted to what I’d describe as a “supportive yet Ukraine-skeptical” position. He highlights the $120 billion in U.S. aid provided since Russia’s invasion, rejects Biden’s “blank check” approach, questions Europe’s commitment to the cause, and faults the lack of a “victory” concept (while downplaying the benefit to U.S. national security of the substantial destruction of Putin’s army, achieved with just 5 percent of the defense budget and no American boots on the ground).

More broadly, neither DeSantis nor Haley has explained how, with interest on the national debt now exceeding annual defense spending, we are going to achieve the necessary rapid defense build-up in an increasingly perilous world without seriously addressing spending. If we’re going to be adults about this, that can only mean addressing “entitlements” — something to which the Trump-era Republican Party is as mulishly resistant as Democrats have always been.

DeSantis has been better than Haley on the matter of excluding Palestinian refugees, contending accurately — if politically incorrectly — that Jew hatred, far from being confined to Hamas, pervades the Palestinian territories. DeSantis is wrong, however, to accuse Haley of recommending that the U.S. accept Palestinian refugees.

A review of the transcript of Haley’s interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper, from which this claim traces, indicates that DeSantis’s campaign is distorting her position. To be sure, Haley was confusing: First, she correctly acknowledged that the Palestinians can’t be vetted even by neighboring Arab-Muslim regimes that know them best; then, contradictorily, she asserted that “America’s always been sympathetic to the fact that you can separate civilians from terrorists. And that’s what we have to do.” Pace DeSantis, this was not Haley saying that the U.S. must accept Palestinian refugees (she later clarified that she believes it’s up to the Arab-Muslim regimes to do that). And it is undeniable that the U.S. government must and does attempt to distinguish terrorists from noncombatants in many contexts. In the asylum context, though, it is untenable for Haley to proclaim it a “fact” that this separation is practicable when (a) Hamas melds into the civilian population and (b) that population shares Hamas’s objectives.

Moreover, Haley seems to share Tapper’s comparatively rosy depiction of Palestinian public opinion — e.g., his insistence that 62 percent of Palestinians opposed Hamas’s breaking the ceasefire with Israel, and that 50 percent of them want Hamas to stop calling for Israel’s destruction. Tapper sourced those findings to the pro-Israel Washington Institute for Near East Policy. Even that polling, taken as a whole, paints a dimmer picture than suggested by the findings that Tapper mined. For example, the Washington Institute polling further found that Hamas is supported by 57 percent of Gazans and 52 percent of West Bank Palestinians; and that Palestinian support for Iran and for the terrorist groups Islamic Jihad and Lion’s Den is even more widespread.

Beyond that, there is more depressing polling, cited in my column last weekend, from the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (see here and here). These surveys conclude, for example, that 58 percent of Palestinians want a return to armed intifada against Israel, that Hamas would beat Fatah in an election (which is why Fatah won’t conduct one in the West Bank), and that the Palestinians’ preferred leader is Marwan Barghouti, a terrorist who would have to govern from the Israeli prison where, as a multiply convicted murderer, he is serving his five sentences of life-imprisonment.

All of this said, whether we’re talking strictly about foreign-policy credentials or the whole candidate package, I would not be worried about either Haley or DeSantis as president, especially considering the two alternatives — President Biden and former president Trump.

Biden is a longstanding member of the aforementioned U.S. foreign-policy clerisy. As is often observed, he has been wrong about every major foreign-policy issue in his long career. As vice president, he was a top proponent of Obama’s irresponsible, counter-constitutional Iran nuclear deal (whose revival he continues to push). As president, he has been the architect of the Afghanistan-withdrawal debacle, blundered into inviting a “minor incursion” by Russia into Ukraine, and throttled down sanctions on Iran, which has empowered Israel’s mortal enemies — and our own. Trump, meanwhile, won’t say what his plan is on Ukraine, won’t seriously address debt or entitlements (again, that’s the spending that now makes a vital defense build-up undoable), and saw the October 7 Hamas atrocities as an occasion for, of all things, bashing Israeli prime minister Netanyahu (over a petty perceived slight, because Trump is incapable of getting over himself). Most consequentially if you don’t want four more years of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, Trump can’t win in 2024.

I’d be happy with either DeSantis or Haley as the Trump alternative. I’m less concerned about comparing their foreign-policy chops than about settling on a Trump alternative, because we’re running out of time. If the GOP field stays as numerous and divided as it currently is, Trump will win the nomination and get drubbed in the general election, which has been the Democrats’ plan all along.

Squarely addressing Biden’s age and decline, Haley likes to say a vote for Biden is effectively a vote for Harris. Maybe so, but a vote for Trump now is a vote for Biden and Harris in November 2024, as well. I believe both Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley (or a ticket featuring both of them) would defeat Biden/Harris and form a strong Republican administration with solid, accomplished conservatives willing to serve in key posts. That’s what matters.