Source: Politics<\/p>\n
J.D. Vance was on the warpath. \u201cUsing American power to do the dirty work of Europe is a pretty bad idea,\u201d he told a crowd on Thursday, warning against the U.S. getting more involved in Ukraine. \u201cWe don\u2019t have that many non-insane people in Washington. I need you to be some of them.\u201d<\/p>\n
Vance wasn\u2019t speaking at a campaign stop in Ohio, where he is running for the U.S. Senate, but at the Marriott Marquis hotel in downtown Washington. The audience consisted of over one hundred mostly younger conservatives, and he was sounding the alarm about not just foreign intervention, but about other conservatives \u2014 the worrisome resurgence of the Republican establishment.<\/p>\n
The event was the \u201cUp From Chaos\u201d conference, a self-described \u201cemergency\u201d meeting organized by the Trumpian wing of the GOP to grapple with the political fallout from Russian President Vladimir Putin\u2019s invasion of Ukraine. The young men, almost all of them soberly dressed in dark suits, and women, almost uniformly wearing dresses, listened attentively as one speaker after another warned about the perils of intervention for their very own lives. A return to the thinking that led to Iraq and Afghanistan could result in nothing less than World War III over Ukraine, they were warned.<\/p>\n
And so, as Putin\u2019s deadly and unprovoked assault drags on, the GOP is also going to war \u2014 against itself. As so often, the battle revolves around the America First doctrine first espoused by former President Donald Trump in April 2016, during the Republican primaries, at Washington\u2019s Mayflower Hotel, where he promised that he would perform a U-turn in American foreign policy by shunning military intervention abroad.<\/p>\n
That promise never quite bore out. It was the Democratic President Joe Biden, not Trump, who ended up pulling American troops from Afghanistan. Throughout his erratic and volatile presidency, Trump never really gained control of his own national security advisers, hawkish thinkers such as H.R. McMaster and John Bolton who managed, from the perspective of Trump loyalists, to subvert his nationalist foreign policy.<\/p>\n
But Trump did manage to shift conservative thinking about Putin himself, a powerful adversary of the U.S. who wields power with an autocratic strength that Trump and his followers openly admire. Even the invasion of Ukraine has not prompted Trump to alter his fundamentally adoring view of the Russian leader. The most that Trump would concede is that he was \u201csurprised\u201d Putin had invaded. Then Trump reverted to type, trying once more to game the Ukraine crisis (as he did in 2019 during a phone conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy that led to his first impeachment) for his own personal benefit by imploring Putin, during an interview this week on Real America\u2019s Voice network, to release information about Hunter Biden\u2019s nefarious activities.<\/p>\n
Though Trump\u2019s view of Putin may be little changed, the Russian invasion has broken open the uneasy marriage between the followers of Trump, who abhor foreign entanglements, and the hawks of the Republican Party, who have rarely seen a war they didn\u2019t want to enter. After the debacle in Iraq, the neoconservatives who champion a crusading foreign policy based on democracy promotion and regime change came into bad odor. But almost overnight, the hawks are mounting a comeback as a new foreign policy consensus forms in Washington around bolstering the alliance with NATO and standing up to Russian aggression.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe neocons haven\u2019t been able to put points on the board for years,\u201d says Melinda Haring, deputy director of the Atlantic Council\u2019s Eurasia Center. \u201cWith Ukraine, they\u2019re back.\u201d<\/p>\n
Maybe so, but nothing provided a better window into the ideological ferment of the GOP \u2014 and the staying power of the Trump wing of the party \u2014 than the daylong conference at the Marriott Hotel. Throughout, it became clear that the war on Ukraine is not prompting the Trump-aligned right to back down. Quite the contrary.<\/p>\n
As William Ruger, a Trump nominee to become ambassador to Afghanistan and the president of the American Institute for Economic Research, told me, \u201cThe neocons seem strangely buoyed by the current crisis, and love the Manichaean rhetoric coming out of the White House about this being a fight between democracy and authoritarianism. But the forces of realism and restraint are not going to back down from the fight. Unlike twenty years ago, the American public will not swallow neocon bromides.\u201d<\/p>\n
The participants generally described themselves as \u201crealists\u201d and \u201crestrainers,\u201d and the meeting featured what amounted to realist royalty \u2014 politicians and thinkers, ranging from GOP Sen. Rand Paul (Ky.) and Reps. Thomas Massie (Ky.), Dan Bishop (N.C.) and Matt Rosendale (Mont.) to Michael Anton, Sohrab Ahmari, Mollie Z. Hemingway, and, of course, Vance. It was organized by the American Conservative magazine and American Moment, whose self-described mission is to \u201cidentify, educate, and credential young Americans who will implement public policy that supports strong families, a sovereign nation, and prosperity for all,\u201d and which features Vance on its board of advisers. Their explicit aim is to create a young counter-establishment to the hawkish national security network that has flourished in Washington over the past several decades, one that could funnel ideologically reliable appointees into a future Trump, DeSantis, Cruz or Hawley administration.<\/p>\n
It was notable that at the conference, speaker after speaker targeted the GOP hawks more often than they spoke about Ukraine itself. Indeed, Kyiv itself was essentially MIA \u2014 serving more as a proxy for a dispute about America nationhood than about the country\u2019s own fate as it\u2019s mercilessly pummeled by Putin. The basic argument, outlined in a manifesto titled \u201cAway From the Abyss\u201d<\/a> appearing in the new Compact\u00a0magazine, is that aiding Ukraine is tantamount to hurting Ukraine. In resisting deescalation, the U.S. and its allies, so the thinking goes, run the risk of encouraging hapless Ukrainians to battle to the last man, all in the hopes of pursuing a Western-led regime change policy toward Moscow that might well trigger a global cataclysm.<\/p>\n Russ Vought, the president of the Center for Renewing America and the director of the Office of Management and Budget under Trump, for example, complained about the \u201cbombardment of the neocon moment that we are in.\u201d For Vought, Ukraine seemed to be a sideshow. The real question, he said, is, \u201cWhy haven\u2019t we brought our troops home from Europe? These are the questions that leaders should be considering.\u201d In 2019, Trump, he claimed, was concerned about how Ukraine would dispose of American military aid and sensibly ordered a temporary suspension. But an \u201cessentially imperialist\u201d network of foreign policy elites that is oriented towards conformity \u201cfreaked out\u201d and it \u201cled to stark consequences for the president\u201d \u2014 a polite term for impeachment. In the future, Vought said, \u201cit will take a president that has the confidence to reject the experts and expose them.\u201d<\/p>\n