August 24/25, 2023 -
Information Clearing House
- "Responsible
Statecraft
" ---Foreign
policy issues typically don’t bring the
house down during presidential debates,
but the event Wednesday night certainly
broke with that tradition, leaving
proverbial blood on the floor amidst the
Republican primary contenders for 2024.
In this case, it was pretty much Florida
Gov. Ron DeSantis and entrepreneur Vivek
Ramaswamy who took the biggest body
blows from the traditional hawks, who,
sounding right from central casting (or
the year 2002), said Vladimir Putin is
an evil murderer, and continued aid to
Ukraine to keep fighting was the only
moral and right thing to do.
It didn’t matter that the majority of
Republican voters don’t want to send
more aid to Ukraine, or that a
compelling argument can be made —
and has — that continuing unfettered
arms supplies without a diplomatic track
for a ceasefire would mean more deaths,
more destruction, and more senseless
brutality for Ukraine. Or that the war
won’t be won by giving Ukraine more
HIMARS and tanks. These cases just
weren’t made by anyone on stage
Wednesday night.
“The American president needs to have
more clarity, they need to know the
difference between right and wrong. They
need to know the difference between good
and evil,” charged former UN Ambassador
Nikki Haley, referring to the two
skeptics, DeSantis and Ramaswamy. “This
guy (Putin) is a murderer and you are
choosing a murderer.”
After Ramaswamy chided candidates for
making the “pilgrimage” to “their Pope
Zelensky without doing the same thing
for people in Hawaii or the Southside of
Chicago,” former New Jersey Gov. Chris
Christie seized the moment. “I went to
Ukraine, because I wanted to see for
myself what Vladimir Putin’s army was
doing to the Ukrainian people,” he said.
“I want you all to look around this
arena tonight. And imagine that every
one of these seats was filled and if
every one of them was filled, there
would still be 2500 more children
outside to make over 20,000 who have
been abducted, stolen, ripped from their
mothers and fathers and brought back to
Russia to be programmed to fight their
own families,” Christie exhorted.
“(Russians) have gouged out people’s
eyes, cut off their ears and shot people
in the back of the head… then they go
into those homes and rape the daughters
and the wives who were left as widows.”
DeSantis and Ramaswamy, who have both
expressed wariness over unlimited aid
for the war (the latter said flat out he
wouldn’t support more), chose two
different approaches around this strong
emotional appeal. DeSantis said he
wanted “Europe to pull their weight,”
and that U.S. support should be
“contingent” on those partners doing do.
Ramaswamy said he wanted to redirect
resources now going to Ukraine to fight
the real threat — China.
“The real threat we face today is
Communist China and we are driving
Russia further into China’s arms,”
charged Ramaswamy. “The Russia-China
military alliance is the single greatest
threat we face.”
Furthermore, he said minutes later,
“your first obligation is to defend our
country and its people,” and by sending
billions to Ukraine to fight the
invasion across its own border, “you’re
not doing what we need to do to secure
our own border.”
But talk like this just opened up
space for Vice President Mike Pence to
jump in with his now familiar tagline:
“Well, let me be clear, anybody that
thinks that we can’t solve the problems
here in the United States, and be the
leader of the free world, that’s a
pretty small view of the greatest nation
on Earth.”
Ramaswamy probably took the brunt of
the attacks, mostly from Haley, who like
a gatling gun interrupted incessantly,
accusing him of having no foreign policy
experience and not supporting allies,
including Israel. He retorted by calling
her and other hawks “the same people who
took us into the Iraq War, the same
people who took us into the Vietnam
War,” and that he did not want “another
no-win war.”
But yet, all eight candidates on the
stage, which also included former
Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, Senator
Tim Scott, and North Dakota Gov. Doug
Burgum, seemed in agreement that a war
on Mexican cartels, on some level, was
in order (winnable or not). And, because
they believed China was behind the
110,000 U.S. drug overdoses last year
(the biggest killer being fentanyl),
that country should be a prime target
too.
For DeSantis, the war would begin “on
day one,” with U.S. special forces to
ferret out the cartels and drug labs in
Mexico. “Here’s the thing. The cartels
are killing tens of thousands of our
fellow citizens. You want to talk about
a country in decline? You have the
cartels controlling a lot of your
southern border. We have to reestablish
the rule of law and we have to defend
our people,” he said.
At times the conversation turned to
the influx of undocumented immigrants,
the need to complete President Donald
Trump’s vaunted wall, and putting more
security, including National Guard, at
the border. But it always came back to
China. “China is sending these chemicals
to these drug cartels for them to create
the fentanyl that is killing hundreds of
thousands of our citizens,” said
Christie.
“The Chinese are engaging in an act
of war against us, killing our citizens,
we better make that priority one in our
conversations with China and to try to
straighten that relationship out because
if we don’t, we’re gonna lose more and
more of our citizens.”
For all the talk
about a divided GOP on foreign policy,
it should be clear that when it comes to
China, these eight candidates are more
in agreement about where the country
should be training its firepower, than
not. Pinning them each down on what
exactly they are proposing, and how far
they will go to meet the threat, would
be an interesting next exercise, sans
the bloodletting.