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While Russia’s reinvasion of Ukraine this week stress-tests the Biden administration, it’s also forcing Republicans to confront their own divisions.
The GOP is all over the map politically, as Russian President Vladimir Putin tries to redraw his own boundaries. Former President Donald Trump privately has signaled a split with more isolationist voices from the MAGA wing of the party who have excused Russia’s aggression, who themselves are at odds with more establishment Republicans over how to confront Russian aggression, if at all.
To an extent, these camps reflect a new evolution of long-standing GOP foreign policy factionalism. But as Putin moves troops into Ukraine, Republicans’ divergent approaches to the crisis are complicating their pushback on President Joe Biden’s response to the crisis.
Trump told an adviser recently that he doesn’t think Putin should be able to take Ukraine — even just from a real estate standpoint — and that he sees the Russian leader’s current actions as an attempt to steamroll Biden, according to a person familiar with the conversation.
Trump said Putin has sized up Biden and decided that he isn’t strong enough to stop Russia from rolling into Kyiv, this person recalled, adding that the former president has also blamed Biden for poking the bear by tying his legacy too closely to expanding NATO and to Russia’s Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline. Publicly and privately, he has described the current standoff as a problem for which he is the lone solution.
“This never would have happened with us had I been in office — not even thinkable,” Trump said in a Tuesday radio interview, describing Putin’s recognition of Ukrainian separatist regions as “savvy.”
Putin “sees this opportunity. I knew that he always wanted Ukraine. I used to talk to him about it. I said, ‘You can’t do it, you’re not going to do it,’” Trump added. “But I could see that he wanted it. … They say, ‘Oh, Trump was nice to Russia.’ I wasn’t nice to Russia.”
Even as Trump portrays himself as better-equipped to counter Putin, the majority of congressional Republicans are backing Biden’s vow to impose crushing sanctions on Russia after its troops entered eastern Ukraine on Tuesday. Some have even praised Biden’s moves, like the deployment of additional U.S. troops to Eastern Europe to boost NATO’s defenses.
But a vocal GOP minority on and off Capitol Hill — represented by Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), Fox News host Tucker Carlson and Ohio Senate candidate J.D. Vance, among others — has taken a third path, actively arguing against any U.S. involvement in the region while still dinging Biden. They argue that expanding the U.S. commitment to NATO is a mistake, and that the president should instead focus on countering China and securing America’s southern border.
That discordant chorus is making it harder for Republicans to craft a unified message on Russia the way it did during last year’s chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan or during Putin’s invasion of Crimea when Barack Obama was president in 2014.
Conservatives in the third, self-described “America First” camp contend that the GOP base is on their side, even as congressional Republicans are for the most part in line behind Ukraine and NATO.
“There’s a difference between what politicians think and where voters are,” said Hawley, who’s broken with his fellow GOP senators when it comes to supporting Ukraine. “It won’t be [a friction point] with voters, because they’ve made up their mind. But it will be among elected officials for a while.”
“Sending new troops, expanding the security commitment, and expanding NATO — I just think that’s a strategic mistake. It’s a matter of strategic priorities,” Hawley added, describing China as his No. 1 target.
Hawley was among the dozen or so Senate Republicans who did not sign onto legislation released last week that outlines the GOP position on what should happen when Putin invades Ukraine. That bill proposed a harsh slate of sanctions including some that go further than what European allies are comfortable with.
“I think a vast majority of our conference is in the ‘don’t let Putin get away with it’ camp,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said, describing Hawley as an outlier. “To allow Putin to get away with the destruction of Ukraine and to think it won’t affect China is naive.”
Those conservatives reluctant to sign onto the GOP sanctions plan say that their position doesn’t amount to isolationism. Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon said the MAGA movement is instead focused on protecting the nation’s southern border and countering Beijing.
“It’s not a split on the right. It shows you the new right, or the new Republican Party, versus the neocons that are still there,” said Bannon. “We don’t have any interest — no one in the Trump movement has any interest at all in the Russian-speaking provinces of eastern Ukraine. Zero.”
But inside the White House, there is a belief that the GOP’s fissures on Ukraine — and Trump’s own history with respect to Russia — have left the president with more political wiggle room to operate. White House spokesperson Andrew Bates parried Trump’s jab at Biden with a succinct reminder of the former commander in chief’s peripatetic treatment of Putin.
“It’s hard to imagine someone having less credibility on Russia or Ukraine than the previous President,” Bates said by email. “Donald Trump undermined NATO, excused Russia’s seizing of Ukrainian territory, feuded endlessly with our allies, publicly sided with Vladimir Putin against American law enforcement, compromised classified intelligence by providing it to Russian officials, canceled sanctions over Russia’s complicity in using chemical weapons against civilians, and even withheld military [aid] to Ukraine in an unprecedented political blackmail attempt.”
On Tuesday, Biden announced new sanctions that target Russian oligarchs, banks and sovereign debt while declaring that would only be the beginning of the punishments if Putin continues to encroach into Ukrainian territory. The Senate had failed over the past month to develop its own bipartisan deterrent sanctions plan.
Several establishment Republicans involved in those talks lauded the Biden administration for its sanctions rollout while calling for more. But, in a further sign of internal GOP divisions, other conservatives hit the president on Tuesday for not going far enough to slap back at Putin before an invasion began. Those Republicans are quicker to criticize Biden’s earlier reluctance to impose sanctions as punishment for Russia’s military buildup on the Ukrainian border, as well as other destabilizing actions like cyberattacks.
They’ve also pushed Biden to cripple the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which the German government said it would suspend on Tuesday after Putin recognized two breakaway regions of eastern Ukraine as independent.
“Sadly, President Biden consistently chose appeasement and his tough talk on Russia was never followed by strong action,” House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and other GOP national security leaders in the chamber said in a Tuesday joint statement.
The Nord Stream 2 decision has dogged Biden for almost his entire presidency. Last year, he decided to waive sanctions on the Russia-to-Germany pipeline, as part of a bid to repair U.S.-Germany relations that eroded under Trump.
Notably, the pipeline served to unify Republicans when Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) forced a vote on sanctioning it last month. That effort failed to clear the 60-vote threshold required in the upper chamber, but a majority of senators — all Republicans except one, and a handful of Democrats — supported it. And some in the GOP see that foreign affairs unity as well within reach again.
“I’m not worried about the Republican conference,” said Graham. “We’re going to be very aggressive.”
Source: Politico
