NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE T ucker Carlson asked several current and potential Republican presidential candidates and leading Republicans to answer six questions about U.S. involvement in the war in Ukraine. Given the prominence of Carlson’s show among Republican voters, he got responses from Donald Trump, Mike Pence, Ron DeSantis, Greg Abbott, Tim Scott, Kristi Noem, Chris Christie, and Vivek Ramaswamy. Nikki Haley, Mike Pompeo, John Bolton, Chris Sununu, and Asa Hutchinson all declined to answer Carlson directly, but Haley released her own statement.

Carlson’s questions are serious ones, albeit loaded in favor of his preferred position, which is against American aid to Ukraine. His queries drew answers of varying seriousness and responsiveness. Trump, as usual, rambled like a crazy man, with lots of exclamation points, all-caps phrases, repetition, and braggadocio. Ramaswamy’s response had some punchy lines but dragged on at Castro-esque length. Abbott, Scott, and Christie were much terser, with Abbott characteristically focusing on how the Biden administration is ignoring the border with Mexico. If anything, Abbott’s Texas-centric response underlined that he is unlikely to enter the presidential race.

There was general agreement on the easy calls, such as that the U.S. should not be pursuing regime change in Russia or engaging in direct military action of its own. Several responses criticized a “blank check” approach to aid and noted Joe Biden’s vacillations. There were also some divergences. Pence argued that Biden’s sanctions had been inadequate and that he “slow-walked aid to Ukraine,” while Noem argued that economic sanctions are counterproductive and that Biden was engaging in a hawkish fantasy of some Reaganesque rollback of Russia. Only Scott emphasized that degrading Russia’s military is an objective in itself, while DeSantis wrote that our objective should be “peace.” Only Pence and Christie argued that Putin remains a threat to continued aggression outside of Ukraine after a year of draining war. DeSantis has argued elsewhere that he thinks Putin’s military has taken too much damage to be a threat again for some time. DeSantis and Noem argued that the war is driving Russia into the arms of China, while Christie (echoed to some extent by Scott) argued that this is “a proxy war being waged by Russia’s ally China against the United States. . . . It would be naïve to call this anything but Chinese aggression.”

The most closely watched response was that of DeSantis, as befits one of the top two Republican contenders, whose profile on foreign policy is less defined than that of the former or current president. Prominent Republican hawks Marco Rubio and Lindsey Graham quickly hit DeSantis for being insufficiently supportive of Ukraine. Here at National Review, Mark Wright, Noah Rothman, and Jim Geraghty have all offered their critiques of DeSantis’s response, while Jeff Blehar has pointed out the statement’s political value, and Charlie Cooke has expressed ambivalence about its substance. Left-leaning media outlets have been uniformly hostile, as one would expect.

Having written repeatedly on DeSantis and his national-security and foreign-policy views, let me offer my own assessment, with some background.

The DeSantis Record

In the magazine last month, I took a deep dive into DeSantis’s record in the House and his public statements on foreign and national-security issues. That record shows DeSantis to be roughly in the center of the Republican Party. His background, including his Bush-era service as a Navy lawyer in Iraq and at Guantanamo Bay, inclines him to hawkishness. He has been a consistent critic of foreign tyrants of every stripe, including Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and the Iranian mullahs. As Noah notes, DeSantis during the Obama years favored arming Ukraine more than Obama and Biden did. He also argued for military aid to the Kurds against Iran and to the Saudi side of the war in Yemen. But he has also expressed skepticism of foreign interventions and regime changes, at least those he regarded as lacking a well-defined strategic objective. In recent years, he has focused increasingly on the threat of China.

When Putin invaded Ukraine in February 2022, DeSantis derided him as an “authoritarian gas-station attendant,” cheered the Ukrainian resistance, predicted “death by 1,000 cuts for the Russian army,” and suggested that stiffer sanctions on Putin could end up triggering the collapse of his regime — and that this would be a good thing. DeSantis also blamed Joe Biden’s weakness and mixed signals for encouraging Putin’s aggression, themes he has continued to press.

DeSantis reentered the Ukraine debate in late February 2023 with remarks on Fox & Friends that criticized Biden for seeking “an open-ended blank check,” and added, “I don’t think it’s in our interest to be getting into proxy war — with China getting involved — over things like the border lands, or over Crimea.” This was where he argued that the risk of Putin invading NATO nations or other Russian neighbors was less serious after a year of war degrading the Russian military. At no time has DeSantis argued that there was any justification for Russian aggression, nor has he ever argued that we should not have sent any aid to Ukraine.

At the time, given DeSantis’s record on Russia, I derided those who tried to frame him as a Putin apologist or an isolationist, but I also noted that DeSantis “absolutely is doing some political pandering here to the people who don’t want any aid to Ukraine,” and that the “blank check” rhetoric, while reasonable as a caution against “bottomless American financial commitment to bankrolling the war,” raised the “risk that things will end badly if we pull the plug on the Ukrainians.”

The DeSantis Response

Here is the statement from DeSantis, in full. I have numbered his responses, following Carlson’s questions:

1. Is opposing Russia in Ukraine a vital American national strategic interest?

While the U.S. has many vital national interests — securing our borders, addressing the crisis of readiness within 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. 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.

2. What specifically is our objective in Ukraine, and how will we know when we’ve achieved it?

Without question, peace should be the objective.

3. What is the limit of funding and materiel you would be willing to send to the government of Ukraine?

The U.S. should not provide assistance that could require the deployment of American troops or enable Ukraine to engage in offensive operations beyond its borders. F-16s and long-range missiles should therefore be off the table. 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.

4. Should the United States support regime change in Russia?

A policy of “regime change” in Russia (no doubt popular among the DC foreign policy interventionists) would greatly increase the stakes of the conflict, making the use of nuclear weapons more likely. 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.

5. Given that Russia’s economy and currency are stronger than before the war, do you believe that U.S. sanctions have been effective?

The Biden administration’s policies have driven Russia into a de facto alliance with China. Because China has not and will not abide by the embargo, Russia has increased its foreign revenues while China benefits from cheaper fuel. Coupled with his intentional depletion of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and support for the Left’s Green New Deal, Biden has further empowered Russia’s energy-dominated economy and Putin’s war machine at Americans’ expense. Our citizens are also entitled to know how the billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars are being utilized in Ukraine.

6. Do you believe the United States faces the risk of nuclear war with Russia?

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.

Grading the Answers: The Good News

There is good news and bad news in the responses from DeSantis. The good news is twofold. First, as a pure matter of electoral positioning divorced from the merits of the Ukraine war, it is savvy politics. This is good news for those of us who hope that DeSantis will defeat Donald Trump in the primary, as well as for Republican partisans who want DeSantis to unseat Joe Biden.

Americans are broadly supportive of the Ukrainian cause, and that is true as well of Republican primary voters. But broad support is not the same thing as enthusiasm for an endless and massive financial commitment. Americans are famously impatient with long wars, only so many voters have cared at all about foreign policy in most post–Cold War elections, and — with 2004 being the conspicuous exception — Americans since the fall of the Soviet empire have tended to consistently favor the more dovish candidates, especially in the crucial states of the Midwest.

In the general election 20 months from now, assuming that DeSantis makes it that far and that the Ukraine war is still commanding vast sums from the American budget, it seems highly unlikely that DeSantis would suffer a serious electoral penalty for expressing some fairly mild skepticism in 2023 about aid to Ukraine. The dream of David Frum, that this statement shows DeSantis “flaming out already,” is entirely delusional. For reasons I’ll get to in a bit, I’m more sympathetic to Noah’s view that the likelier political problems may arise as DeSantis is compelled by circumstances to clarify some of the things that he has so far left ambiguous.

In the more immediate term of the primary campaign, Republican voters hostile to aid to Ukraine are, unfortunately, likely to be much more engaged on this issue than Republican voters who support such aid — and this is doubly true of viewers of Tucker Carlson’s program. It is an unfortunate reality of elections that we have to accept a certain degree of pandering to bad ideas, whether that’s isolationism, protectionism, nativism, federal entitlements, or some other big-government nonsense. Reagan did it; so did George W. Bush. So did Abe Lincoln.

Erick Erickson makes the case that it is strategically important for DeSantis to, in effect, treat Carlson the way Nixon treated Mao:

It meaningfully helps DeSantis to have Tucker Carlson vouching for him with the base. Trump is not going to attack Carlson (yet). Carlson declaring “DeSantis is not a neocon” helps DeSantis. Notice how Carlson says “regime change in Moscow” is something Washington wants. It is a minority view there, but this makes DeSantis sound like he is not a creature of Washington — something Trump is claiming. . . . The Trump wing of the GOP won’t believe him and will probably be in open warfare with Tucker Carlson before the summer.

Of course, if you are rooting for Trump to beat DeSantis, you want to find every possible way to drive a wedge between DeSantis and the various factions whose support DeSantis needs in order to do that.

That brings us to the second bit of good news: In terms of both his long-term policy commitments and his ideological stance on foreign policy, DeSantis has left himself a lot of wiggle room. Jim notes, “As we watch the governor attempt to finesse a thorny foreign-policy issue by way of bromides, we probably ought to remember that a presidential candidate’s foreign-policy vision and the actual policies enacted by his administration are often no more than distant cousins.” That can happen even when candidates have consistent principles but apply them differently to different circumstances, as when George W. Bush opposed nation-building for its own sake but supported it in the aftermath of a war to topple a hostile regime.

Here, DeSantis has room to maneuver without renouncing anything he has said to Carlson. To pick one example, DeSantis says that we should not become “further entangled in a territorial dispute between Ukraine and Russia.” But does maintaining our current level of support mean being “further entangled”? Unlike Obama regarding Iraq or Biden regarding Afghanistan, DeSantis hasn’t handcuffed himself to a public drop-dead date for cutting off U.S. aid. His options remain open, both as a policy matter and a political matter. Surely, it would not be hard to argue that the situation calls for different approaches by January 2025, if the war is ongoing.

Noah argues that DeSantis shouldn’t follow Biden’s bad example of unilaterally declaring particular weapons to be off the table as forms of potential future aid to Ukraine, but it costs DeSantis little to rule out things we obviously aren’t going to do anyway. For that matter, it is not clear, as Noah suggests, that DeSantis needs a “conversion narrative” to reconcile his having argued in 2016 for arming Ukraine to deter a Russian attack with his arguing, after a year of massively arming Ukraine, that this should not continue forever. It is not as if DeSantis is taking the Carlson-esque line that we should never have been involved at all or adopting J. D. Vance’s open disregard for the situation of the Ukrainian people.

The line that most grates in this response is DeSantis’s argument that we do not have a vital interest in “a territorial dispute between Ukraine and Russia.” This raises the ambiguity Mark notes: “If DeSantis means that Ukraine recovering every last inch of its pre-war territory is not a vital U.S. interest, then we agree.” Preserving Ukraine’s territory is an important interest, but not a vital one in and of itself.

My own view of this war, from the outset, was that Russia’s principal objective is to eliminate Ukraine as a sovereign state. Any peace deal that secures and, ideally, bolsters Ukraine’s sovereignty and capacity for self-defense is a good one, even if that deal requires trading away some Ukrainian land. Israel’s experience is illustrative: Lasting peace with Egypt entailed trading away land that Israel had occupied during the 1967 war, and that was a price worth paying for the Israelis. But numerous other subsequent Israeli peace deals (both proposed and adopted) have also shown that trading away land, by itself, does not buy peace. Mark asks, “What, in principle, is the difference between the ‘territorial dispute’ between Russia and Ukraine and the territorial dispute between Communist China and Taiwan?” There is an answer to this, though not one that DeSantis has offered: There really is no irredentist claim by China to part of the island of Taiwan. Putin, by contrast, could conceivably accept a face-saving settlement for some part of the eastern territory of Ukraine.

Whether Putin actually would accept that, and whether such a deal could be structured in a way that reduces rather than increases the odds of a third war (his invasion of Crimea being the first), are very much open questions. Does DeSantis believe that the war has devolved solely into a fight over some of Ukraine’s territory? He hasn’t committed himself to an answer to that question any more than he has committed himself to an answer as to whether the war involved a vital U.S. interest at the outset.

Unlike Trump, DeSantis doesn’t immediately demand that Europe step up and take the place of our support for Ukraine, or that Zelensky sit down with Putin. Even as a matter of statesmanship, however, one can make the case that raising some questions about how long American aid can last might incentivize Ukraine to temper its own war aims if a potential peace deal were to come into view.

Similarly, I have some sympathy for Pence’s view that “Ukraine’s victory should be an unmistakable, undeniable defeat for Russia and its allies” such that Putin and the world are made to see that Russia’s choice of aggressive war failed, and that no peace deal can be a good one otherwise. Haley similarly frames the only possible endings as a Ukrainian victory or a Russian victory. A Russian defeat would, of course, discourage further aggression by Russia or other tyrannies. Winston Churchill argued in 1918 that a negotiated armistice with Imperial Germany would be insufficient: “Germany must be beaten; Germany must feel like she is beaten. No compromise with the main purpose, no peace till victory, no pact with unrepentant wrong.”

That is a fine position to take when pursuing total war in which the objective is to depose a hostile government and salt the earth. Our failure to treat Saddam Hussein that way in 1991 is why we ended up at war with him again a decade later.

The reality, however, is that such an aim is not feasible when fighting a much larger adversary (as Ukraine is) and when an end to the war can only come about by means of an agreement between both sides. Putin will not, and cannot, admit that he is beaten, even if his original aim of eliminating the Ukrainian state is demonstrably unsuccessful. Without a major escalation by the United States and its NATO allies, a deal acceptable to Putin is the best Ukraine can hope for. It is unrealistic to expect DeSantis or any other American leader to make a Churchillian commitment to war to the death against Russia.

Grading the Answers: The Bad News

That’s the positive case. But, as Noah and Mark detail, there is a good deal to dislike in DeSantis’s answers, even beyond the obvious fact that it is rank pandering. Much of it resides in things not said. As noted, DeSantis uses morally dehydrated language in framing the conflict and does not say any of the things he has said in the past about Russian aggression, Putin’s tyranny, or Ukrainian resistance. He opens himself to continuing inquiries about whether this is a retreat rather than just an omission of things Tucker Carlson doesn’t want to hear.

DeSantis argues that “the Biden administration’s policies have driven Russia into a de facto alliance with China.” It is visibly true that the war, and Russia’s resulting isolation, have either strengthened or at least revealed Russia’s common ground with China. But DeSantis is wrong to blame this wholly on Western sanctions. DeSantis previously argued — correctly — that the West’s real error was not ridding itself of its economic dependence on Russian energy. Even in this statement, DeSantis says (again, correctly) that “coupled with his intentional depletion of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and support for the Left’s Green New Deal, Biden has further empowered Russia’s energy-dominated economy.” But that is true only because we aren’t doing more to isolate Russia’s energy exports from the world economy.

For now, it is fine for DeSantis to suggest that there is some outer limit to what support America should provide to Ukraine, and to hope that the war will be over before he might take office. But “events, dear boy, events” — there is sure to be a fight at some point in 2023 between Biden and House Republicans over the next round of aid. At that juncture, DeSantis is likely to lose a good deal of his wiggle room. Beyond a certain point, it will not be sustainable for him to square the circle of supporting continued aid that runs in the hundreds of billions of dollars while arguing that no vital national interest is at stake, nor will it be sustainable for him to argue for ending aid to Ukraine without facing the consequences that could entail. He can have it both ways for now, but not forever.