The argument DeSantis is making is that Biden helped provoke Russia’s invasion by his weakness.
The rise of Donald Trump created an entire cottage industry of pundits, especially former Republicans, whose entire oeuvre, audience, and business model are built around denouncing Trump and wielding him as a cudgel against the Republican Party. People reinvented their entire identities around being anti-Trump. While every ideological niche holds its own risks of being blinded by partisanship or ideology or captured by one’s audience or sources, it is especially tenuous to have your entire career wrapped up in the long-term political viability of one 76-year-old man as your foil. Among other things, this creates a desperate need to simultaneously prop up Trump while claiming that anyone who defeats Trump must be exactly the same as Trump, only more so.
Understanding this dynamic explains a lot about the line that Tim Miller and Amanda Carpenter of the Bulwark have taken on Ron DeSantis and Ukraine following the Florida governor’s comments Monday on Fox & Friends. Miller says that DeSantis “blames US for Russian invasion of Ukraine – Attacks US president while in war zone – Signals we should dial back support for Ukraine – minimizes RUS threat – Anti Afghanistan withdrawal – Bellicose talk about China.” (Miller pretends that this is a “first look at DeSantis foreign policy” as if there is not a record of past statements and votes). Carpenter echoed this, claiming that “DeSantis says that Biden is to blame for Russian aggression.” She expands on this in a column claiming that DeSantis “blame[d] Biden for Russia’s aggression against Ukraine.”
Others echoed versions of this theme that DeSantis is somehow part of a “blame America” caucus. Jennifer Rubin claimed that “DeSantis pandered to pro-Russian apologists.” Jonathan Chait, in a column entitled “Ron DeSantis Goes Full Trump on Ukraine,” wrote that DeSantis “blamed the invasion not on Vladimir Putin but on Joe Biden.” Steve Benen asserted that DeSantis “suggested his own country deserves part of the blame for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.”
Here’s what is really going on. Vladimir Putin’s own propaganda line is that Ukraine, NATO, the EU, and/or the U.S. are to blame for his aggression by being too provocative. His stated grievances include various steps taken over the past decade to oust a pro-Russian regime in Ukraine, resist Russia’s invasion of Crimea, and try to knit Ukraine closer to the West and arm its military in order to defend its survival as a sovereign state. There are, in fact, voices on the American right (many of them of the Trumpier variety) who echo versions of this argument.
Here’s the problem for Miller, Carpenter, and the rest: This is the opposite of the argument DeSantis is making, which is that Biden helped provoke the invasion by weakness: by his retreat from Afghanistan, by inadequate armament of Ukraine, especially during the Obama years, and by Biden’s “minor incursion” statement implying that the U.S. would do nothing if Putin invaded (which was followed by a dramatic escalation by Putin). This is a traditionally and conventionally hawkish critique of the American president for failing to deter a bad actor who would understand only strength and resolve. In the aftermath of the invasion, majorities of Americans concluded that it would not have happened if Donald Trump was still president.
As Aaron Blake of the Washington Post notes, DeSantis’s taking this line is consistent with his own record in Congress:
At a 2014 hearing, DeSantis warned that Putin’s justification — that Crimea was largely composed of ethnic Russians — could be extended to other nations and even some NATO members such as Latvia and Estonia. He pressed an Obama State Department official to confirm that the United States would defend those countries from a Russian incursion . . . under Article 5 of the NATO charter. In a 2015 interview on Fox Business Network, DeSantis criticized Obama for not giving Ukraine both defensive and offensive weapons, saying, “If you had a Reagan-esque policy of strength, I think you would see people like Putin not want to mess with us.”
At a 2017 hearing on Russia, DeSantis criticized the lack of action after Putin went into both Crimea and Georgia, saying, “Russia expanded its influence over the eight years of the Obama administration in malevolent ways.” Crimea remained a focal point in 2018, when DeSantis told Fox News’s Sean Hannity, “They did nothing when Russia invaded Crimea, made incursions into Ukraine, went into Syria.” (DeSantis also used the interview to praise Trump’s choice of uber-hawk John Bolton as national security adviser.)
That same year . . . DeSantis expanded on his view of the costs of inaction in the face of Putin’s aggression. DeSantis said Putin “wants to reconstitute the Russian Empire,” and, “I think that he’s been a threat for a long time.” DeSantis even gently chided then-President Trump for speaking positively about having a relationship with Putin: “You’re better off dealing with Putin by being strong. . . . When Putin sees he can gain an inch, he’s apt to take a mile. And basically, if America’s not going to give him any pushback, I think he’s going to continue to try to expand Russian influence.”
Four days after the war started in February, 2022, DeSantis called Putin an “authoritarian gas-station attendant” and suggested that the U.S. and Europe should wean themselves off of Russian energy exports in the hopes that this would cause Russian oligarchs to overthrow Putin. His remarks then were consistent with his stance today:
And I can tell you this, the media spent four years saying that Trump was some type of agent of Russia and yes, when I was in Congress, when Obama was president Obama refused to send weapons to Ukraine. When Trump was President, we sent weapons to Ukraine. He didn’t like that very much. When Obama was president took Crimea when Trump was president. They didn’t take anything. And now Biden’s president, and they’re rolling into Ukraine.
And so I think if you look at what happened in Afghanistan, you lose 13 servicemembers, you have all these, all this equipment left behind, you leave other Americans behind, it was a total catastrophe, but it displayed the lack of leadership that Joe Biden is bringing to the table. And so as important as it was that what was happening with the Taliban there, what I told people at the time is, the most significant consequence of Biden’s failure in Afghanistan is not even likely going to be in Afghanistan. There’ll be some bad things for sure. But Russia was watching that, China was watching that, Iran was watching that, that whetted the appetite of these of these dictators. And so you see what Putin is doing? You’re gonna see China continuing to act belligerent, I think you’re gonna see the Iranians as well. So the weakness has really bred a lot of the disorder that you’re seeing right now.
Now, I will say, it’s hard to know what’s true with media reports, because quite frankly, a lot of them are false. And so it’s I don’t want to get ahead, but I do you see people in Ukraine fighting back. And if you look at Putin, going in there, kind of half hearted, you know, there was really a lack of overwhelming force, a lack of . . . daring that has given the Ukrainians the oxygen to fight back. Now, the whole world is kind of coming down. Even the Chinese said, they don’t consider themselves allies of Russia, that they have strategic interests in common, but they distancing themselves from what was going on. And so I was heartened to see them having some moxie to fight back. And let me tell you if you go into another country with an armed population, that is hell bent on resisting you. I mean, it’s going to be death by 1000 cuts for the Russian army.
It’s clear that the people that they sent in there . . . were not ready for primetime may have not had these types of military operations in a long time. In Russia, I don’t think that they felt that they were going to get any resistance whatsoever. And so you’ve seen how this works when I served in Iraq, you know, when you have people that are fighting in the streets like that, very different. So I think the Ukrainians have done a good job so far standing up to this and the question is is, how much does he want to throw his country down the toilet, because it’s not going to get any better? And I think he’s backed himself into a real corner here with his miscalculations, but those miscalculations were very much borne of his estimation of Biden’s weakness. So, having the America and having the weakness that we’ve seen, it does have serious, serious consequences.
But the Bulwark and its readership are deeply invested in the narrative that Republicans are Putin sympathizers who parrot Kremlin propaganda, and that DeSantis represents a continuation of this. In order to squeeze the square peg of DeSantis’s remarks on Russia and Ukraine over the past year into the round hole of “Republicans side with Putin,” it is therefore necessary for Carpenter and Miller to reframe DeSantis’s comments as “blame America” in order to keep up the pretense that he’s making the exact opposite argument from the one he has laid out. I never thought I would live to see the day that a publication edited by Bill Kristol would feign horror at a hawkish argument for deterring tyrants.
Carpenter’s column has to be read to be believed. The juxtaposition of the first two sentences is a master class in un-self-awareness: “Gross things can happen when you convince yourself that, no matter what, you must position yourself in complete opposition to your political opponents. Just look at what Ron DeSantis is doing.” She claims that “in a quainter era, domestic political disputes would stop at the water’s edge,” which is a thing that has never been true for more than a few months at a time at any period in American history. This is like Miller making up the idea that one is not supposed to criticize the president while he is abroad — the actual norm, albeit one much breached, is that you shouldn’t criticize the president or the country’s foreign policy while you are abroad. Presidents don’t get to shut down all debate by leaving the country. Carpenter goes on to claim that “what DeSantis either does not know, or will not say, is that even third-rate military powers are dangerous when they are led by authoritarians” — exactly the thing DeSantis has said before of Putin.
Carpenter and Benen both suggest that DeSantis is ignorant of how much of Russia’s current military weakness is the result of western aid to Ukraine, but then, DeSantis didn’t deny that Russian aggression was a problem or say that he was against all aid to Ukraine — quite the contrary. He just raised the issue of how far it will continue to go, and observed — correctly — that Putin no longer has the military capacity to threaten other neighbors.
The whole effort to paint DeSantis as a Putin apologist or an isolationist is the rankest nonsense. Nick Catoggio (f/k/a Allahpundit) at the Dispatch is cynical as to DeSantis’s motives and commitment to the Ukrainian cause, but he pours cold water on Chait in particular:
We know what “full Trump” sounds like on Ukraine. It involves praising Russia’s debacle as “genius” and “savvy,” touting your “very good relationship” with Vladimir Putin, and calling for limiting weapons shipments to Ukraine in order to force a Ukrainian capitulation, i.e. “peace.” That wasn’t DeSantis in the Fox interview. He began by faulting the Obama/Biden administration for not sending enough weapons to Ukraine in 2014 and ended by calling the war a catastrophe for Russia in so many words, one which he believes most Russians secretly oppose. He didn’t call for cutting off Ukraine, and he didn’t admire Putin’s war of conquest as a demonstration of “strength.” By the standards of modern right-wing populism, that practically qualifies as hawkish.
Daniel Drezner, who is likewise acridly critical of DeSantis, nonetheless notes:
DeSantis has a kernel of a good point in calling on the Biden administration to “identify what is the strategic objective that they’re trying to achieve.” Polling shows that most Americans agree that it is worth stopping Russia from absorbing Ukraine. The problem is that this leads to a policy outcome that is a grinding battle exacting an appalling loss of life. The Biden White House needs to lay out a path for what achievable victory looks like in Ukraine.
Now, does this mean that DeSantis is beyond criticism? Of course not. He absolutely is doing some political pandering here to the people who don’t want any aid to Ukraine, and while it is reasonable to note the problems with a bottomless American financial commitment to bankrolling the war, there is certainly a risk that things will end badly if we pull the plug on the Ukrainians (just as they ended badly in Afghanistan when we finally cut and ran). This from Chait, however, is straight out of the worst rhetorical excesses of pro–Iraq War Bush Republicans:
The most important audience for DeSantis’s remarks is not in the Republican primary, but in Moscow. Vladimir Putin has built his strategy on the assumption that he can keep throwing conscripts into the trenches of eastern Ukraine longer than the United States is willing to keep sending money and arms to Kyiv. Putin’s main hope has rested on Donald Trump returning to office in 2025. Now he has a second option should Trump falter in the primary. The odds that Putin will end the war just got longer.
Are we really arguing now that any discussion of any limits to American aid to Ukraine makes you objectively pro-Putin? I mean, if that is the standard for foreign wars, even ones in which the U.S. is not a direct combatant, I have 40 years of grudges to settle with Democrats, and would like to know this for future reference. It is, in reality, objectively dangerous for the Biden administration to act as if debate is off the table. In a democratic society, voters tend to weary of long commitments — our history is replete with examples of this, from Reconstruction to Afghanistan. I support Biden’s current policies on Ukraine regardless of what he did to help get us into this mess, but it would be insane to just ignore the fact that the policy is almost certain to grow progressively less popular the longer the war drags on. Biden will need to keep making the case. If he doesn’t, don’t blame Ron DeSantis for noticing.