Governor Ron DeSantis clarified his position on U.S. involvement in the Russia-Ukraine war in a Monday statement provided to Fox News’ Tucker Carlson, arguing that there are no vital American interests at stake in the conflict and suggesting that the U.S. should focus its resources on pressing domestic issues such as border security and the opioid crisis.
“While the U.S. has many vital national interests — securing our borders, addressing the crisis of readiness with our military, achieving energy security and independence, and checking the economic, cultural and military power of the Chinese Communist Party — becoming further entangled in a territorial dispute between Ukraine and Russia is not one of them,” DeSantis said, breaking from many of his fellow GOP 2024 contenders and tacking closer to his chief rival for the nomination, former president Donald Trump.
Carlson sent a questionnaire on the Ukraine issue to all expected Republican presidential candidates and received responses from DeSantis, Trump, former vice president Pence, South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem, and others.
Last month, DeSantis made the case that escalating the conflict in Ukraine would not be in America’s best interest, particularly if doing so led to a proxy war with China. The governor reiterated Monday that President Biden has failed to share a strategy with the public regarding Ukraine, refusing to outline goals in his State of the Union speech.
“The Biden administration’s virtual ‘blank-check’ funding of this conflict for ‘as long as it takes,’ without any defined objectives or accountability, distracts from our country’s most pressing challenges,” DeSantis said.
As of November, America’s rate of spending in Ukraine was running at just under $7 billion a month, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
“Our citizens are also entitled to know how the billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars are being utilized in Ukraine,” DeSantis said.
The potential 2024 frontrunner noted the growing danger of nuclear war as the conflict persists and argued that providing certain weapons to Ukraine would make the stakes of the conflict appear existential to Russian president Vladimir Putin.
“F-16s and long-range missiles should therefore be off the table,” he added. “These moves would risk explicitly drawing the United States into the conflict and drawing us closer to a hot war between the world’s two largest nuclear powers. That risk is unacceptable.”
America’s investment in military equipment and artillery for the embattled country has been significant. In December, Biden prepared to ship out the Patriot missile-defense system to Ukraine to aid in its war effort against Russia. In January, Biden authorized the shipment of 31 Abrams M1 tanks to Ukraine, after initially suggesting that providing tanks would recklessly escalate the conflict.
Of the 2024 contenders, Pence and Haley, have been the most strident in expressing support for Ukraine.
“Never forget, the light does shine in the darkness and the darkness cannot overcome it,” Pence said during a speech at the University of Texas marking the anniversary of the invasion.
“We will not forget your struggle for freedom and I believe the American people will stand with you until the light dawns on a victory for freedom in Ukraine and in Europe and for all the world,” Pence added. “So help us God.”
Trump, meanwhile, has repeatedly insisted that Putin would have never invaded if he were still president and argued that he would be able to strike a deal between the two nations if he were to take office. Trump has also emphasized that the U.S. is getting ripped off by Europe in terms of share of aid to Ukraine. During his first term, Trump lamented America’s financial exploitation by other western nations for NATO defense and other international partnerships.
“Start by telling Europe that they must pay at least equal to what the U.S. is paying to help Ukraine,” Trump said in a statement provided to Carlson. “They must also pay us, retroactively, the difference. At a staggering 125 Billion Dollars, we are paying 4 to 5 times more, and this fight is far more important for Europe than it is for the U.S.”
Trump rejected regime change in Russia as a solution to the situation but gave a limited explanation: “No. We should support regime change in the United States, that’s far more important. The Biden administration are the ones who got us into this mess.”
DeSantis took aim at the foreign-policy establishment in his statement, accusing unspecified actors of pushing toward regime change in Russia as the ultimate goal of U.S. involvement in the conflict.
“A policy of ‘regime change’ in Russia (no doubt popular among the D.C. foreign policy interventionists) would greatly increase the stakes of the conflict, making the use of nuclear weapons more likely,” DeSantis said. “Such a policy would neither stop the death and destruction of the war, nor produce a pro-American, Madisonian constitutionalist in the Kremlin. History indicates that Putin’s successor, in this hypothetical, would likely be even more ruthless. The costs to achieve such a dubious outcome could become astronomical.”
While the border crisis rages on, causing unprecedented drug deaths and burdening the country’s resources, America cannot dedicate itself to the war in Ukraine, DeSantis suggested.
“We cannot prioritize intervention in an escalating foreign war over the defense of our own homeland, especially as tens of thousands of Americans are dying every year from narcotics smuggled across our open border and our weapons arsenals critical for our own security are rapidly being depleted,” he said.