Republicans today are the least reliable partners in our democracy after five years of putting their principles in a blind trust managed by Donald J. Trump.
Trump spent four years in the White House alienating Western European democracies. First, he reneged on a deal Barack Obama had reached with Iran to stop their development of nuclear weapons in return for easing sanctions. Trump also withdrew from the Paris Agreement to limit climate change and, after meeting Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2018 in Helsinki, Finland, Trump said he trusted Putin more than US intelligence agencies who accused Russia of meddling with the 2016 election.
Trump was also on the same page with Putin on the future of NATO. “Trump told his top national security officials that he did not see the point of the military alliance, which he presented as a drain on the United States,” the New York Times reported in 2019. Trump’s former national security adviser John R. Bolton confirmed that report in his 2020 memoir that described Trump as repeatedly saying he wanted to quit the alliance. At one point he said, “I don’t give a s—- about NATO.” Bolton said he had to convince Trump not to quit NATO in the middle of a 2018 summit.
Trump in 2019 also placed a hold on aid to Ukraine to pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to do him “a favor” by launching an investigation of Joe Biden. That July 25, 2019, phone call led to Trump’s first impeachment; the hold on aid to Ukraine was finally lifted in mid-September, only after intense pressure from members of Congress on both sides of the aisle.
Biden spent much of his first year in office mending relations with NATO and the European Union. Meanwhile, Putin started moving mechanized units of the Russian army to the Ukraine border in March 2021, and the Russian military presence continued to increase through 2021 and into 2022. All the while, Russian diplomats assured Western nations Russia had no intentions to attack Ukraine.
Putin kept denying plans to attack Ukraine until two breakaway regions in eastern Ukraine declared their independence and the Russian army moved across the border to “keep the peace.” Naturally, Trump lauded his mentor as “very savvy” for making a “genius” move into the breakaway states. “Putin declares it as independent. Oh, that’s wonderful,” Trump said Feb. 22, referring to the Russian troops as “the strongest peace force I’ve ever seen.”
Many Republicans, following Trump’s lead, reflexively undermined Biden’s support for Ukraine through early March, when 31 Senate Republicans voted against a $1.5 trillion spending bill that included $13.6 billion in humanitarian and military assistance to Ukraine.
But as public support for Ukraine grew, with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky’s emotional plea for more weapons and a no-fly zone over Ukraine, in a virtual address to Congress March 16, Republican senators saw a chance to play war hawks against Biden, who had agreed with other NATO leaders that enforcing a no-fly zone, or allowing Russian-made MiG fighters to be transferred to Ukraine from Poland, would amount to a declaration of war on Russia that could start World War III.
After Zelensky’s speech, Biden announced the Pentagon was sending nearly $1 billion in military equipment to Ukraine, including 800 Stinger antiaircraft systems, 100 drones, 25,000 helmets and more than 20 million rounds of small-arms ammunition and grenade launcher and mortar rounds to help Ukraine’s defenders keep up the fight. But that gave Republicans an opening to demand more aid than Biden could allow without escalating the war.
“President Biden needs to make a decision TODAY: either give Ukraine access to the planes and antiaircraft defense systems it needs to defend itself, or enforce a no-fly zone to close Ukrainian skies to Russian attacks,” Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), who voted against Ukraine aid, said in a statement. “If President Biden does not do this NOW, President Biden will show himself to be absolutely heartless and ignorant of the deaths of innocent Ukrainian children and families.”
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), who voted against the Ukraine aid, said Biden needs to “step up” and send MiG jet fighters and other weapons to Ukraine, accusing the administration of “dragging its feet.”
Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) also voted against the spending bill. He said he “strongly” supports providing aid to Ukrainians, but he “ultimately could not support the rest of this bloated spending bill,” apparently because it funded Democratic priorities.
In all, 25 Republican senators voted against the aid for Ukraine, then called for Biden to do more for Ukraine.
Former Republican political strategist Rick Wilson sounded the alarm about how that’s going to play out in the midterm election campaign. He wrote in the Washington Post March 18 that it will get ugly:
“[The GOP] wants to play the most beloved game in the GOP playbook: that the Democrats are weak on defense. In my decades as a GOP ad maker and strategist, I made some pretty notorious ads about it. And I can tell you they work.
“Democrats too often miss the optics and politics of foreign policy, hoping good choices will outweigh the dark, emotional games Republicans like to play when it comes to national security. Republicans specialize at turning Democratic successes overseas into disasters. It’s a slow-burn strategy designed to trigger an outrage culture that doesn’t stop at the water’s edge. GOP leaders don’t care about reality; their audience doesn’t care about the truth, and their political media apparatus always stays on message.
“Donald Trump bungled the 2020 negotiations ending the war in Afghanistan, freeing the Taliban at scale and setting a date certain for US withdrawal. When Biden stuck with that commitment to exit, Republicans leveraged the inevitable chaos in Kabul into a cataclysmic political fable; if only the weak Democrats had held on for another year, victory was ensured.
“Similarly, the terrorist attack on the Benghazi facilities in 2012 was another faux scandal-in-a-box because it gave Republicans — me included — a populist tale to be weaponized, embedded in the right’s mythos and deployed repeatedly. I distinctly recall being in a focus group that year and watching the pollster tease from participants how Benghazi could be used to offset the 2011 killing of Osama bin Laden under Barack Obama and transformed into a political millstone for Hillary Clinton.”
Then there is the pro-Putin wing of the party exemplified by Madison Cawthorn (R-N.C.) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.). “Many Republican base voters are dictator-curious and believe Russian President Vladimir Putin is the savior of White, straight, law-and-order Christianity; the virus of Trumpian hyper-nationalism, with its constant call to reject alliances, diplomacy, smart power and multilateral action, has deeply infected the GOP,” Wilson wrote.
From Harry Truman to George H.W. Bush, there was a bipartisan American resolve to contain Russian aggression, and politics stopped at the water’s edge. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the increasingly fascist lean of the Grand Oligarch Party, that bipartisan unity has largely collapsed. Putin is testing the Western alliance of democracies. Too many Republicans like his style. — JMC
From The Progressive Populist, April 15, 2022
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