Ron DeSantis’ slightly artful dodge on Ukraine
The Florida governor did not have the best start to his presidential campaign. But he did give one appropriate answer.
By Daniel Drezner, Professor of International Politics at The Fletcher School
Ron DeSantis announced that he was running for president on Tuesday. At least, I assume he did, since the Twitter Spaces venue he used for the announcement worked about as well as one would expect from a company that fired 90 percent of its engineers over the past year.
The Twitter fuck-up made it very easy for the mainstream media to double down on the flailing DeSantis campaign narrative. Even when the technical problems subsided, DeSantis seemed to focus like a laser beam on Extremely Online issues that are unlikely to engage the GOP base all that much.
Needless to say, this has annoyed Republicans casting about for an alternative to Donald Trump. See, for example Politico’s Rich Lowry’s latest column:
If DeSantis has slid markedly in the national polls and had some genuine embarrassments in recent months — a botched Ukraine statement, the Disney fight dragging on — the overwhelming negativity toward him in the press says more about the media than it does about him. Its herd mentality means that once a narrative has set in, everyone tends to double down and feed into it more. So we get the consensus that DeSantis is very bad at doing the thing — running for president — that he hasn’t formally done yet.
His strengths are being played down, when they aren’t completely ignored.
Read the rest of Lowry’s column to see the political case for DeSantis. The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World is not entirely persuaded by his argument. This is particularly true on international affairs; even Lowry acknowledged that DeSantis’ foreign policy musings to date have been underwhelming at best. A lot of what he said after the announcement fell into that same underwhelming category. For example, according to the New York Times’ political team of Jonathan Swan, Shane Goldmacher, and Maggie Haberman, DeSantis said more silly stuff about foreign policy on Fox News after his announcement:
Mr. DeSantis previewed his hard-line policies to confront the Chinese Communist Party. While Mr. Trump focused largely on the trade dimension of the relationship during his presidency, Mr. DeSantis talked more broadly about countering China’s influence, territorial expansion and military ambitions.
On Fox News, Mr. DeSantis called for a 21st-century version of the Monroe Doctrine to counter China’s influence in Latin America. The Monroe Doctrine, laid out by President James Monroe in the early 19th century, warned European countries not to colonize America’s backyard.
Mr. DeSantis also said the U.S. needed to form stronger partnerships with India, Australia and other allies to counter Chinese expansion in the Pacific. And he called for the reshoring of critical manufacturing — saying the U.S. was too closely mingled, economically, with China.
Much of that quoted section reads like the Biden administration’s approach to China on steroids. But I, for one, am super-curious to learn exactly how a President DeSantis would block Chinese economic engagement with Latin America. It is not like DeSantis has said or done anything that would indicate a willingness to engage with Latin America in ways that would woo them away from China. To the extent he mentions Latin America, he focuses on cracking down on immigration and completing the wall along the Southern border. If those are his stated policy aims, why would President Lula of Brazil or President López Obrador of Mexico give a flying fuck about U.S. preferences in the region? FFS, López Obrador is already urging Hispanics not to vote for DeSantis.
In the spirit of Lowry’s admonishment, however, I want to acknowledge one slightly more artful answer that DeSantis gave on foreign policy. The National Review’s Dan McLaughlin reported on one response to a media query about Ukraine:
He was asked if he had a bottom-line dollar limit to how much aid he would offer to Ukraine, and declined to give one, observing that he hoped that the war would be over by next January (a predictable subtext of his prior remarks on the war) but also emphasizing that there is a need to bring the war “in for a landing” that avoids a lengthy war of attrition.
Another account provided his exact quote: “I would like to see a settlement of this [war]. I do not want to see a wider war. I think it is absolutely unknowable what it will look like in January of 2025. But I would not want to see the United States with our troops get enmeshed in a war in Russia or in Ukraine.” (emphasis added)
You know what? Despite some others judging DeSantis harshly, I’d characterize that as a halfway-decent response. No one wants to see the war escalate, so DeSantis is on safe ground articulating that position. More importantly, he is right not to make any policy pronouncements right now. It is more than 18 months between now and the end of the Biden administration. That is a lifetime even in this kind of military slugfest. There is no sense in DeSantis speculating what he would do then without knowing the situation on the ground, and that is currently unknowable.
So props to DeSantis for dodging this question. This is an instance in which choosing not to answer is not just the politically savvy thing to do — it’s the strategically savvy thing to do.
(This post is republished from Drezner’s World.)