Non-Interventionist Republicans: A Small, Vocal Minority
In late March, a small group of isolationist figures on the political right gathered in a dimly lit Marriott Marquis ballroom to brainstorm solutions to what the eventโs invitation deemed โWashingtonโs decades-long, failed, bipartisan foreign policy consensus.โย
The self-described emergency conference, โUp from Chaos,โ featured a handful of emerging nationalist voices, including Hillbilly Elegy author and, as of Tuesday night, Ohio Senate GOP primary winner J.D. Vance. Though he wouldnโt score the decisive endorsement of former President Donald Trump until a couple of weeks later, Vance embraced recognizably โAmerica Firstโ talking points in his allotted time.
โAt the end of the day, our foreign policy needs to be a little more sophisticated than โthe guy in Russia is goodโโsorry, โthe guy in Russia is bad and the guy in Ukraine is good,โโ Vance told the gathering of roughly 100 attendees. โThat may very well be true, but it doesnโt lead to any foreign policy conclusions for the American people.โย
If Vance parlays his Ohio primary win into a general election victory to replace retiring Republican Sen. Rob Portman, the U.S. Senate stands to gain a vocal advocate for reducing the U.S. footprint overseas. And heโs not the only candidate running a non-interventionist playbook this midterm cycle. Amid one of the 21st centuryโs greatest geopolitical crisesโthe war in Ukraineโseveral high profile Republican contenders for U.S. Senate and House seats are loudly staking their claim to an inward-looking foreign policy agenda.ย
But if elected, they might be hard-pressed to find many allies in Congress.
โTheyโre not in our world,โ Mike Rogers, ranking Republican on House Armed Services Committee (HASC), said in a brief interview last week when asked about isolationist-leaningย Republican House and Senate candidates inย this yearโs midterm cycle. โWeโre making policy, theyโre trying to get electedโthatโs the difference.โ
He said he has no plans to add non-interventionist voices to HASC should House Republicans retake the majority in the fall.ย
Among the pressing concerns for sitting policymakers are issues like how to provide most efficiently financial and military support to the democratic government in Ukraine; how to reduce U.S. and European energy dependence on Russian crude oil; and how to bolster the security of NATO allies on the frontlines of the conflict.
The practicalities and price tags of such policies continue to be hotly debatedโeven among politicians of the same partyโbut most Republican and Democratic lawmakers alike broadly agree that the outcome of ongoing war in Eastern Europe will have far-reaching consequences for Americaโs role in the world. And according to a recent Ipsos poll, most Americans agree, with four in five adults saying that the war โposes a great deal or a fair amount of risk to the world as a whole.โ Behind such national consensus, Congress has overwhelmingly passed a series of bills sanctioning Russia and providing billions of dollars in military and humanitarian aid to Ukraine.ย
Meanwhile, the New Rightโs push for neo-isolationist policies emphasizes the need to address what they see as bigger external threats to the U.S., primarily strategic competition with China and security failures along the U.S.-Mexico border.ย
Nationalist-leaning candidates have cast their non-interventionist arguments on Ukraine as an updated version of foreign policy โrealism.โ In theory, the realist school of thought rejects the moral binary of โgood guysโ and โbad guysโ in geopolitics, arguing instead that nations are guided by rational self-interest. In practice, itโs lent itself to soft defenses of autocratic leadership in the name of prioritizing American economic and national security interests.
Blake Masters, Republican candidate for Arizonaโs Senate seat, is among the doctrineโs recent purveyors, although he faces steep competition ahead of the GOP primary in August from Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich and former businessman Jim Lamon. โPutin is a thug, obviously, this invasion is wrong. But it is also true that Russia is a real country, it is a nuclear power with its own distinct interests,โ Masters said in a self-recorded video posted to Twitter in March. โAnd there is no reason to provoke them over NATO expansion and Bush-era regime change mania.โย
If elected in November, Vance and Masters will likely find common ground with the likes of Republican Sen. Rand Paul, a longtime critic of extensive U.S. military involvement overseas who for weeks held up a bill to revoke normal U.S. trade relations with Russia that had already passed the House of Representatives. But aside from Paul, Senate Republicans have been mostly unified in viewing Russian aggression as a direct threat to U.S. national security.
โI think thereโs room for all kinds of voices, but I wish they would understand that Ukraine is very important to our national security interests,โ GOP Sen. Joni Ernst, vice chair of the Senate Republican conference and a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said in a brief interview last week when asked about Masters and Vance.
House Republican leaders, meanwhile, have struggled to tamp down the isolationist voices in their ranks. In March, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy said freshman GOP Rep. Madison Cawthorn was โwrongโ to call Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky a โthug,โ and condemned GOP Reps. Paul Gosar and Marjorie Taylor Greene for speaking at AFPAC, a conference organized by white nationalist Nick Fuentes where attendees cheered for Putin.
Other leaders have tried to unify the House GOP conference behind closed doors. โA month ago, a lot of people asked me: โWhy is Ukraine important?โโ GOP Rep. Mike McCaul, the ranking Republican on the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, told The Dispatch at this yearโs annual House GOP issues retreat in late March, roughly one month after Russia invaded Ukraine. โSo I had to make the case, [itโs] important because, you know, freedom and democracyโI would hope thatโd be enough.โ
McCaul said he also talked to his colleagues about the considerations behind President Joe Bidenโs decision to lift sanctions on the Nord Stream II pipeline in Russia and the Ukraine conflictโs broader implications for Taiwanese sovereignty, among other factors.
Still, a small but vocal flank of isolationist House Republicans continue to buck the party line on Russia-related legislation.ย
Weeks after eight House Republicans voted in March against a bill to suspend normal trade relations with Russia and Ukraine, 10 House Republicans voted against a bill to allow the U.S. to enter more easily into lend-lease agreements with Ukraine. And just last week, four House Republicans joined four members of the โSquadโโDemocratic Reps. Cori Bush, Rashida Tlaib, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, and Ilhan Omarโin voting against a bill to seize the assets of Russian oligarchs and use that money to provide additional aid to Ukraine.ย
The House Republican conference has witnessed even more disunity on the topic of NATO, with nearly one-third of GOP representatives voting against reaffirming the U.S.โs โunequivocal supportโ for the alliance and underscoring its commitment to โshared democratic values.โย
During his keynote address at last monthโs โUp From Chaosโ event, GOP Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, a no-vote on all of the above bills and longtime NATO critic, went further than merely suggesting the U.S. should stay out of the Russia-Ukraine conflict. โI believe that NATO is obsolete, NATO became obsolete whenโwhen the Soviet empire fell,โ Massie told the crowd. โIf I could, we would dissolve it tomorrowโat least get the United States out of it.โ
House Republicans like Massie have piqued the interest of GOP congressional hopefuls like Joe Kent, a Trump-endorsed former combat veteran. Heโs running in Washingtonโs 3rd District against six-term GOP Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler, who voted to impeach former President Donald Trump in the aftermath of the January 6 Capitol attack. (Kent is the second-highest fundraiser behind Herrera-Beutler ahead of the districtโs jungle primary in August, having raised roughly $1.9 million in total as of mid-April.)
He said during an interview with The Dispatch in late March that he โwould tend to agreeโ with Massieโs antipathy toward NATO, and has also suggested that the U.S. is partially to blame for prolonging the war. โThe only thing thatโs keeping Zelensky and this fighting goingโall the killing of the Ukrainians going on right nowโI mean, thatโs a lot of that is the fact that thereโs Western aid being given to the Ukrainians,โ said Kent, whose wife was killed by a suicide bomber in Syria in 2019.
Itโs the kind of rhetoric thatโs regularly wielded by Fox News host Tucker Carlson, whose skepticism of U.S. support for Ukraine in its fight against Russia borders on pro-Putin propaganda and is frequently used by Russian state television in defense of Russian aggression. โThe war in Ukraine is designed to cause regime change in Moscow. [Democrats] want to topple the Russian government,โ he said Monday night, seeming to imply that the conflict was American-engineered in retaliation for domestic political grievances. โThat would be payback for the 2016 election.โ
Carlson has also made a conscious effort to draw attention to Vance, Masters, and Kentโall of whom appeared on his show since announcing their candidacies, hoping to make a big splash with voters. โThe Republican Party is getting better, much better,โ Carlson said on air in July. โWe know that because of two new Republican Senate candidates,โ he said of Vance and Masters.
Days after Vance said he didnโt โreally care what happens to Ukraine one way or anotherโ on February 19, he released a statement saying โRussiaโs assault on Ukraine is unquestionably a tragedy.โ But that walk-back didnโt last long.ย
In mid-March, Vance doubled down on his opposition to increased military aid to Ukraine, telling former Trump adviser Steve Bannon in an interview: โI donโt care enough about whatโs going on over there that Iโm going to step in it, get a bunch of our citizens killed and pour more and more money into the war sinkhole while weโve got our own problems here at home.โ Vance has repeatedly criticized the โfinancial incentivesโ for U.S. commitments abroad, going so far as to blame the war in Ukraine on โidiotic energy policy and the defense contractors.โ
Despite his foreign policy pronouncements, Vanceโs biggest donor throughout the Ohio primary has been tech billionaire Peter Thiel, the co-founder of a data analytics company that partners with U.S. intelligence and military agencies. The firm, Palantir Technologies, secured a deal with the U.S. Army worth an estimated $823 million in October of last year. On February 22, just two days before Russiaโs invasion of Ukraine began in earnest, Palantir received a $34 million order for the delivery of software stipulated in the contract.
In total, Thiel has reportedly poured $13.5 million into Vanceโs Senate bid via the Super PAC โProtect Ohio Values.โ (Vance also previously worked for Thielโs Mithril Capital Management.)
Thiel has also thrown his financial weightโat least $10 million in fundingโbehind Masters, a former executive of Thiel Foundation and Thiel Capital. Like Vance, Masters has pushed a distinctly isolationist foreign policy agenda. As the U.S. military withdrew from Afghanistan, Masters denounced the 20-year war as a โsham, created by military defense contractors so they could get rich.โ Following Russiaโs initial assault on Ukraine, Masters blamed the mounting crisis on โdecades of smug and derangedโ American foreign policy.ย ย
Republican Sen. Josh Hawley, a beneficiary of Thielโs monetary backing during his own campaign in 2018, has endorsed the two candidates. Asked by The Dispatch about their trend toward non-interventionism, Hawley described himself as a foreign policy nationalist.ย
โI think that we need a foreign policy thatโs geared around protecting Americaโs national interests in a realist-based way,โ Hawley said in a brief interview in the U.S. Capitol. โRussia is an acute threat. Thereโs no doubt about that. But what Iโm opposed to is American troops fighting in Russia and fighting in the Ukraine, because we canโt do that simultaneously and do what we need to do in the Indo-Pacific with China,โ he added, though most lawmakers and national security officials have stopped short of advocating for direct U.S. military involvement in the conflict.
Vanceโs GOP primary win on Tuesday signifies that thereโs some appetite for a limited approach to the Ukraine conflict among Republican voters, at least in Ohio. But whether Vanceโor the other non-interventionists running in the midtermsโcan attract enough voters to get to Congress wonโt be answered untilย November.