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 eventโ€™s invitation deemed โ€œWashingtonโ€™s decades-long, failed, bipartisan foreign policy consensus.โ€ย 

The self-described emergency conference, โ€œUp 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 wouldnโ€™t score the decisive endorsement of former President Donald Trump until a couple of weeks later, Vance embraced recognizably โ€œAmerica Firstโ€ talking points in his allotted time.

โ€œAt the end of the day, our foreign policy needs to be a little more sophisticated than โ€˜the guy in Russia is goodโ€™โ€”sorry, โ€˜the guy in Russia is bad and the guy in Ukraine is good,โ€™โ€ Vance told the gathering of roughly 100 attendees. โ€œThat may very well be true, but it doesnโ€™t lead to any foreign policy conclusions for the American people.โ€ย 

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 heโ€™s not the only candidate running a non-interventionist playbook this midterm cycle. Amid one of the 21st centuryโ€™s greatest geopolitical crisesโ€”the war in Ukraineโ€”several 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.

โ€œTheyโ€™re 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 yearโ€™s midterm cycle. โ€œWeโ€™re making policy, theyโ€™re trying to get electedโ€”thatโ€™s 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 debatedโ€”even among politicians of the same partyโ€”but most Republican and Democratic lawmakers alike broadly agree that the outcome of ongoing war in Eastern Europe will have far-reaching consequences for Americaโ€™s role in the world. And according to a recent Ipsos poll, most Americans agree, with four in five adults saying that the war โ€œposes 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 Rightโ€™s 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 โ€œrealism.โ€ In theory, the realist school of thought rejects the moral binary of โ€œgood guysโ€ and โ€œbad guysโ€ in geopolitics, arguing instead that nations are guided by rational self-interest. In practice, itโ€™s lent itself to soft defenses of autocratic leadership in the name of prioritizing American economic and national security interests.

Blake Masters, Republican candidate for Arizonaโ€™s Senate seat, is among the doctrineโ€™s 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. โ€œPutin 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. โ€œAnd there is no reason to provoke them over NATO expansion and Bush-era regime change mania.โ€ย 

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.

โ€œI think thereโ€™s 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 โ€œwrongโ€ to call Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky a โ€œthug,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. โ€œA month ago, a lot of people asked me: โ€˜Why is Ukraine important?โ€™โ€ GOP Rep. Mike McCaul, the ranking Republican on the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, told The Dispatch at this yearโ€™s annual House GOP issues retreat in late March, roughly one month after Russia invaded Ukraine. โ€œSo I had to make the case, [itโ€™s] important because, you know, freedom and democracyโ€”I would hope thatโ€™d be enough.โ€

McCaul said he also talked to his colleagues about the considerations behind President Joe Bidenโ€™s decision to lift sanctions on the Nord Stream II pipeline in Russia and the Ukraine conflictโ€™s 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 โ€œSquadโ€โ€”Democratic Reps. Cori Bush, Rashida Tlaib, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, and Ilhan Omarโ€”in 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.โ€™s โ€œunequivocal supportโ€ for the alliance and underscoring its commitment to โ€œshared democratic values.โ€ย 

During his keynote address at last monthโ€™s โ€œUp 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. โ€œI believe that NATO is obsolete, NATO became obsolete whenโ€”when the Soviet empire fell,โ€ Massie told the crowd. โ€œIf I could, we would dissolve it tomorrowโ€”at 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. Heโ€™s running in Washingtonโ€™s 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 districtโ€™s 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 โ€œwould tend to agreeโ€ with Massieโ€™s antipathy toward NATO, and has also suggested that the U.S. is partially to blame for prolonging the war. โ€œThe only thing thatโ€™s keeping Zelensky and this fighting goingโ€”all the killing of the Ukrainians going on right nowโ€”I mean, thatโ€™s a lot of that is the fact that thereโ€™s Western aid being given to the Ukrainians,โ€ said Kent, whose wife was killed by a suicide bomber in Syria in 2019.

Itโ€™s the kind of rhetoric thatโ€™s 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. โ€œThe 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. โ€œThat would be payback for the 2016 election.โ€

Carlson has also made a conscious effort to draw attention to Vance, Masters, and Kentโ€”all of whom appeared on his show since announcing their candidacies, hoping to make a big splash with voters. โ€œThe Republican Party is getting better, much better,โ€ Carlson said on air in July. โ€œWe know that because of two new Republican Senate candidates,โ€ he said of Vance and Masters.

Days after Vance said he didnโ€™t โ€œreally care what happens to Ukraine one way or anotherโ€ on February 19, he released a statement saying โ€œRussiaโ€™s assault on Ukraine is unquestionably a tragedy.โ€ But that walk-back didnโ€™t 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: โ€œI donโ€™t care enough about whatโ€™s going on over there that Iโ€™m going to step in it, get a bunch of our citizens killed and pour more and more money into the war sinkhole while weโ€™ve got our own problems here at home.โ€ Vance has repeatedly criticized the โ€œfinancial incentivesโ€ for U.S. commitments abroad, going so far as to blame the war in Ukraine on โ€œidiotic energy policy and the defense contractors.โ€

Despite his foreign policy pronouncements, Vanceโ€™s 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 Russiaโ€™s 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 Vanceโ€™s Senate bid via the Super PAC โ€œProtect Ohio Values.โ€ (Vance also previously worked for Thielโ€™s Mithril Capital Management.)

Thiel has also thrown his financial weightโ€”at least $10 million in fundingโ€”behind 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 โ€œsham, created by military defense contractors so they could get rich.โ€ Following Russiaโ€™s initial assault on Ukraine, Masters blamed the mounting crisis on โ€œdecades of smug and derangedโ€ American foreign policy.ย ย 

Republican Sen. Josh Hawley, a beneficiary of Thielโ€™s 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 

โ€œI think that we need a foreign policy thatโ€™s geared around protecting Americaโ€™s national interests in a realist-based way,โ€ Hawley said in a brief interview in the U.S. Capitol. โ€œRussia is an acute threat. Thereโ€™s no doubt about that. But what Iโ€™m opposed to is American troops fighting in Russia and fighting in the Ukraine, because we canโ€™t 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.

Vanceโ€™s GOP primary win on Tuesday signifies that thereโ€™s some appetite for a limited approach to the Ukraine conflict among Republican voters, at least in Ohio. But whether Vanceโ€”or the other non-interventionists running in the midtermsโ€”can attract enough voters to get to Congress wonโ€™t be answered untilย November.

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