The mission of Issues in Perspective is to provide thoughtful, historical and biblically-centered perspectives on current ethical and cultural issues.

As I am writing this piece, continued American aid for Ukraine is in grave doubt. Tucker Carlson recently conducted a friendly interview with Vladimir Putin (see below).  There are reports from the front lines that Russia is advancing, in part because of Ukrainian ammunition shortages. In short, the war is reaching a critical stage, and Ukraine may lose because, among other factors, there is increasing evidence that many Republicans are simply turning against Ukraine. In fact, in some GOP circles, there is now outright contempt for the Ukrainian cause. As David French observes, “Ronald Reagan isn’t just rolling over in his grave, he may also lurch from it in a fit of incredulous rage. This is a remarkable and potentially catastrophic reversal by a political party that is in a state of near total, frequently random ideological transformation.”

Who opposes further aid to Ukraine?

• There are several old-school “paleoconservatives” who object on classic isolationist grounds: It’s not our fight, our support is costly, we might find ourselves inadvertently embroiled in war, etc.
• But the (historically new) Republican movement against Ukraine is rooted far less in policy than in a perverted reality that “Ukraine is a pernicious villain, Putin is a flawed hero and Russia should have crushed Ukraine long ago. MAGA Republicans’ hatred and contempt for Volodymyr Zelensky and the Ukrainian cause is shockingly vehement. Candace Owens says she wants to ‘punch’ Zelensky. Donald Trump Jr. calls him an ‘international welfare queen.’ [Tucker] Carlson says he dresses ‘like the manager of a strip club.’ It’s all bizarre and unreasonable.”

To many of these Republicans, “Putin isn’t just innocent, he’s admirable. Heroic, even, in some ways. Putin isn’t defined as an authoritarian dictator at the helm of one of America’s chief geopolitical rivals. No, he’s defined as an anti-woke leader who defends Christian civilization by taking on the decadent West.”  French reports that,

• “In a 2017 speech at Hillsdale College, the Claremont Institute’s Christopher Caldwell declared that if ‘we were to use traditional measures for understanding leaders, which involve the defense of borders and national flourishing, Putin would count as the pre-eminent statesman of our time.’ In Caldwell’s words, Putin ‘is not the president of a feminist NGO. He is not a transgender-rights activist. He is not an ombudsman appointed by the United Nations to make and deliver slide shows about green energy.’
• “In 2021, The American Conservative’s Rod Dreher praised a Putin speech condemning the West and said that Putin and Hungary’s Viktor Orban were ‘completely clear and completely correct on the society-destroying nature of wokeness and postliberal leftism.’ (It should be noted that Dreher has nonetheless unequivocally condemned Putin’s invasion [of Ukraine].)”
• “Jordan Peterson, meanwhile, went so far as to imply that Russia’s aggressive attack may have been merely self-defense against the threat of Western cultural decadence. The culture war, he mused, may be ‘serious enough to increase the probability that Russia, say, will be motivated to invade and potentially incapacitate Ukraine merely to keep the pathological West out of that country, which is a key part of the historically Russian sphere of influence.’”

There is an old saying: The enemy of my enemy is my friend. Ideally, the phrase means that Americans set aside their domestic differences to address foreign threats to the nation. But in this hyper-polarized era, the far right gets this equation precisely backward. They are aiding Vladimir Putin because they see him, too, as opposed to their domestic enemies.

So, what about Tucker Carlson’s peculiar and bizarre interview with Vladimir Putin?  “What you are about to see seemed to us sincere,” Carlson told his internet viewers before the interview was broadcast: “A sincere expression of what he thinks.” As Matthew Luxmoore of the Wall Street Journal argued, “Carlson largely gave the Russian leader free rein to expound on ideas that have animated his continuing war in Ukraine and that challenge Russia poses to the Western-led world order . . . [Carlson did not] challenge Putin about Russian atrocities in Ukraine or his crackdown on dissent at home.”

The danger is  that some conservative American voters “might fall for Putin’s litany of lies, half-truths and distortions, including a claim that he wants to negotiate with Washington to end the war, which would mean forcing Ukraine to surrender its territory.” Reporters for the Washington Post offered several summary observations:

• “Putin seemed eager to convince them that Ukraine rightly belongs to Russia, and that President Biden and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky are the ones prolonging the war. Whether he succeeded remains to be seen. But what is already clear is that Putin dominated the interview from start to finish.”
• “Putin used each question to hammer home his main arguments: that Russia was the aggrieved party, a victim of repeated false promises by the West. Despite this, Putin insisted, Moscow was ready to negotiate and to end the war—but with the United States, underscoring his insistence that the Ukrainian government is an illegitimate puppet of the West.”  “We are ready for this dialogue,” Putin told Carlson.  The supposed willingness to negotiate, however, contrasts sharply with Russia’s long insistence that only Ukraine’s total capitulation, including a broad surrender of occupied territory, will end the war.
• Putin offered “many misrepresentations during the interview. He . . . suggested, for example, that Russia troops pulled back from trying to conquer Kyiv as part of a peace deal, which was later violated by Ukraine. In fact, Russia’s forces were defeated and retreated after suffering heavy losses.  Putin also told Carlson that a main reason for the invasion, and one of Moscow’s continuing chief goals, is the ‘denazification’ of Ukraine—part of Putin’s continuing false allegation that Kyiv is controlled by Nazis. Ukraine is a democracy, and Zelensky, who was overwhelmingly elected president in 2019, is of Jewish descent, as are other top officials. Putin’s real goal, many analysts say, is to oust Zelensky in favor of a Russian puppet regime.”
• The rest of the interview contained an array of Kremlin falsehoods or half-truths including Putin’s insistence that “NATO and U.S. military bases started to appear on the territory, Ukraine, creating threats to us.” In fact, NATO before the invasion had rebuffed Ukraine’s efforts to join the alliance largely out of concern about antagonizing Russia.
• “The heart of the interview was Putin’s lengthy lecture covering more than 1,000 years of history, from the creation of Kyivan Rus—a state that provided the foundation for modern Ukraine, Russia and Belarus—to the present.  Although initially promising to speak just 30 seconds on the subject, the answer lasted nearly a half-hour—all to make Putin’s case that Ukrainians are actually Russians living “on the edge” of the Russian empire.  However, Putin’s version of the history of Ukraine—as well as that of Russia, Belarus, Lithuania, Poland and Hungary—was riddled with inaccuracies, experts said. This included his false assertion that Poland ‘pushed’ Nazi Germany to attack it and start World War II.”
• As Luxmoore reports, after the interview, Dmitry Medvedev, Russia’s former president and deputy chair of Putin’s Security Council, declared that “Russia’s president explained thoroughly and in detail to the Western world why Ukraine has never, does not and will never exist.”

In conclusion, tragically, many GOP leaders are not offering significant geopolitical arguments for their opposition to aiding Ukraine. David French presents a summary of the simple facts which many GOP leaders seemingly ignore or reject:

• “Ukraine is no threat to Russia. It has no capacity to threaten Russian sovereignty. Its only sin was resisting Russian domination, and when Russia could no longer dominate the nation through its chosen puppets, it chose to do so directly, through a brutal attack that recalled the worst wars of the European past.  But the moral clarity goes even deeper than the bare fact of who attacked whom. The fight between Russia and Ukraine isn’t just a fight between nations, but rather a fight between political systems and philosophies. Ever since the advent of liberal democracies, autocrats have believed them to be weak, too soft to prevail in a world that is so often red in tooth and claw . . . To the authoritarian, the dynamics of the Russia-Ukraine fight were clear. On the one side was a strong leader of a mighty Christian nation, commanding legions of hardened soldiers in a holy war against a soft and godless foe. On the other side was the woke, weak West—wealthy and decadent, individualist to the point of self-absorption. How could it find the resolve to battle and die when the real fighting began?”
• “An autocrat decided to test the West, and he has paid the price in blood and treasure. Estimates of Russian losses are staggering. Roughly 315,000 troops have been killed or injured. To put that number in perspective, the entire prewar army consisted of only 360,000 men and women. It has lost 2,200 of its prewar stock of 3,500 tanks. A declassified American intelligence assessment claims that ‘the war in Ukraine has sharply set back 15 years of Russian effort to modernize its ground force.’”
• “Under the cold calculus of war, aid to Ukraine is one of the most cost-effective military initiatives in modern American history. At a cost equal to a small fraction of the American defense budget—in 2022, the U.S. spent $812 billion on national defense; since the war began, we have given $75 billion in aid to Ukraine—the Ukrainian military has set back Russian offensive capabilities for years or more. And this has been accomplished without the loss of life of a single member of the American military.”

French concludes with this astute proposition:  “We’re doing something worse than choosing to lose a war. We’re choosing to let another nation lose a war, a nation that is pouring out its blood to live free. Our heads and our hearts should both tell us this is wrong.

• Our head tells us that we are helping break the military power of one of our two most powerful geopolitical rivals at a cost our nation can easily afford.
• Our heart tells us that we are a nation of free people that stands with another nation of free people. Doing so is part of America’s DNA.
• Our head tells us that our nation’s enemies, countries such as China, Iran and North Korea, are watching us closely and measuring our resolve.
• Our heart remembers the line of ambulances in Kyiv and says that such courage cannot be in vain.
• Our head looks at a challenging battlefield and tries to discern a path to victory.
• Our heart cries out, can’t we at least ensure that Ukraine survives, independent and free?

It is not often when we face a war in which the moral and strategic stakes are so clear.   So it is with Ukraine, and this is the choice we face:  We cannot fund Ukraine without Republican votes. “And if those G.O.P. lawmakers fail, our nation fails. History will record that we chose to abandon a country that is standing against a great evil. It does not even ask us to stand with it on the field of battle. It merely asks that we place a sword in its hand.  America has made profound and catastrophic foreign policy mistakes in the past. But never in my lifetime have we been on the verge of a mistake so profound and catastrophic that was the direct result of theories and ideas that were so shallow, stupid and frankly bizarre.”

There are still millions of Republicans who want to support Ukraine. But if the last eight years have taught us anything, it’s that in any clash between traditional Republicans and MAGA, traditional Republicans typically surrender. MAGA is once again dragging the GOP into its perverted reality, and the consequences will be catastrophic for Ukraine, Europe and the future of American security.

See David French In New York Times (14 December 2023 and 8 February 2024); Matthew Luxmoore in the Wall Street Journal (10-11 February 2024); David L. Stern, Francesca Ebel, Mary Ilyushina and Serhiy Morgunov in the Washington Post (11 February 2024).