The Florida governor might be wise to get on the national campaign trail sooner rather than later to better hone his message.
While Noah and Michael each make some fair points about Ron DeSantis’s remarks to Piers Morgan on Ukraine, I fear that they are talking past the central argument that DeSantis is making: He is trying to define a legitimate war aim for the United States to aid Ukraine, argue that we have already effectively accomplished it, and lay the groundwork for unwinding our ongoing commitment (albeit without specifying the point at which we could stop).
When DeSantis says, “I do not think it’s going to end with Putin being victorious. I do not think the Ukrainian government is going to be toppled by him and I think that’s a good thing,” he is defining the war as a conflict over the survival of a Ukrainian system of government that is independent of Russia. Conceived in these terms, the aid sent to Ukraine thus far becomes easier to justify than the anti-interventionists would like. On the other hand, DeSantis says that “Russia is not showing the ability to take over Ukraine, to topple the government, or certainly to threaten NATO. . . . He’s [Putin’s] got grand ambitions. . . . But I think the thing that we’ve seen is he doesn’t have the conventional capability to realize his ambitions.” If you contend that Putin has failed, and that all that currently remains in the war is a fight over the Donbas and Crimea, then turning off the spigots at some point before the fighting has ended — or, at least, threatening to do so to bring the Ukrainian government to accept a peace deal that doesn’t necessarily include everything it wants — becomes easier to justify than the interventionists would like.
DeSantis is looking for an off-ramp that doesn’t require him to argue that we should never have gotten on the road in the first place. He’s trying to define the minimum conditions of a Western victory.
Noah argues that it is incoherent of DeSantis to deny the legitimacy of Moscow’s irredentist claims in one breath and cite the ethnic Russian population in Donbas (that Putin has used as a pretext to claim the territory) in the next. But it is not incoherent if the argument is that Ukraine could survive the loss of some of that territory and still claim a victory. This can’t be compared to Taiwan because Taiwan is an island: There is no possible way for an invasion of Taiwan to end with Communist China’s claiming some of the island without fatally compromising the defensibility of the rest.
Michael argues that “the policy courtiers around the executive branch will greet any territorial concession as humiliation and an undisguised and unqualified victory not just for Putin but for China.” This is a fair critique of the maximalist vision of many Democrats and of some Republican hawks, but it dodges the present question of whether this would in fact be an acceptable victory that we are right to pursue.
As Americans who have been raised after 1945, it can be hard for us to think in these terms. We tend to argue as if there is no possible middle ground between abandoning Ukraine’s sovereignty and backing Ukraine unquestioningly to an unlimited degree and toward an unlimited horizon. The “unconditional surrender” approach to war has a long history in America, dating back to Ulysses S. Grant in the Civil War, and it fits the American character. It has often been appropriate. But foreign policy is situational, and its first principle is triage.
Hostility to the very concept of an unsatisfying, negotiated peace in any conflict would have astounded earlier generations of Americans. We fought the Revolution for independence from Britain, but once that was achieved, there was still a negotiated peace in which both sides made compromises, including a division of disputed territorial claims. The War of 1812 ended in a draw, albeit one that allowed America to hold on to the West Florida territory that it had seized from the Spanish — including the city of Mobile. James K. Polk campaigned on “54-40 or Fight” in the Oregon Territory, but he settled with Britain for the 49th parallel. In the whole century of American conflicts against the British, from 1775 to the 1872 Alabama arbitration, we always ended up negotiating terms because Britain was the stronger power.
Unless the United States and NATO are willing to go to war on behalf of Ukraine, this will be Ukraine’s position relative to Russia. If Ukraine wants to accomplish its aim of ensuring its survival as an independent, sovereign state rather than a Russian puppet (or worse), it most likely will need to settle, and some loss of territory might be on the table. Of course, getting to that point won’t happen overnight. Putin still needs to accept (whether or not he admits this publicly) that Ukraine will survive, and that it will likely come out of the war with a stronger security position because of deeper economic and military ties with the West. It is a sad reality that more bloodletting will occur on both sides until Putin is willing to settle on such terms. America should support Ukraine in getting to that point, and DeSantis has yet to say where he would want us to stop. But his effort to define the necessary conditions for victory — which include the survival of an independent, self-governing Ukraine but not its retention of every inch of pre-war Ukrainian territory — is a serious one. We should address it as such.
There are two other takeaways here, both of them more political. One is that the obvious purpose of the original DeSantis response to the Tucker Carlson questionnaire was for DeSantis to avoid a two-front war: He will already be fighting Donald Trump, and he prefers to avoid opening a second front against Tucker. If his further explanation to Morgan doesn’t trigger criticism from Tucker, then the questionnaire will have served its purpose. The other lesson is that it requires a fair amount of parsing to see the consistency in all that DeSantis has said about Ukraine. He doesn’t have it down to an “elevator pitch” yet. That may suggest that he’d be wise to get on the national campaign trail sooner rather than later in order to better hone his message before the fall.