In a recent interview with Piers Morgan, Florida governor Ron DeSantis went to work cleaning up the wholly unsatisfactory statement he provided Fox News Channel’s Tucker Carlson regarding Russia’s war in Ukraine. As Dan McLaughlin noted, DeSantis’s acknowledged that calling Russia’s expansionist war “a territorial dispute” was clumsy, though he insists his remarks were “mischaracterized.”
The victimization narrative notwithstanding, DeSantis’s new remarks — which are, in some important ways, incompatible with the comments he provided Carlson — will probably smooth the many GOP feathers his earlier comments ruffled. But in trying to synthesize the demands of nationalism with the GOP’s conventional affinities toward extroversion abroad, he has still demonstrated that these two worldviews are incompatible.
“What I’m referring to is where the fighting is going on now, which is that eastern border region Donbas, and then Crimea, and you have a situation where Russia has had that,” DeSantis said. “I don’t think legitimately, but they had. There’s a lot of ethnic Russians there.”
The governor further explained that, while the existence of “ethnic Russians” around Russia’s periphery doesn’t give Moscow “a right” to invade its neighbors, that contributed to a situation “where the fighting is going on now, which is that eastern border region Donbas, and then Crimea, and you have a situation where Russia has had that.”
Huh?
The reason why there is “fighting going on” in Donbas, Crimea, and well beyond since 2014 isn’t because native Russian-speaking Slavs populate those portions of Ukraine. It’s because Moscow invaded and illegally annexed those territories.
The existence of ethnic Russians in the nations Moscow regards as its “near abroad” — the former Soviet space and some portions of the Warsaw Pact — serves as Moscow’s pretextual justification for its expansionist ambitions. The existence of an ethnic diaspora beyond the borders of revisionist powers has justified irridentist ambitions since the dawn of nationalism. It’s not a legitimate rationale for wars of aggression, and DeSantis says he doesn’t regard Putin’s war as just. So why bring it up?
Moreover, DeSantis observes, Moscow’s battlefield setbacks demonstrate that “Russia is not showing the ability to take over Ukraine, to topple the government or certainly to threaten NATO.” That’s why it’s unwise to “escalate more involvement,” meaning “I would not want to see American troops involved there.”
Well, okay. That’s not an option on the table because no serious American policymaker has advocated such a course. Indeed, forward positioning NATO troops and providing material support for Ukraine’s effort to keep Russian forces far away from NATO’s borders advances that objective. Gone are his expressions of distaste for providing Ukraine with specific offensive capabilities such as fixed-wing aircraft and long-range ordnance. So, what exactly is DeSantis’s objection to America’s present posture?
The Taiwanese are of full or partial Han descent. Would DeSantis lend credence to Beijing’s narratives about uniting (the ruling caste of) the Chinese people? Of course not. In fact, he insists that checking Chinese aggression with a deterrent posture in the Indo-Pacific is “a critical interest” and crucial for “our key allies like Japan and South Korea.” But the same rationale applies to Europe, where the U.S. has mutual defense pacts with nations like Poland, Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia, all of whom have plenty of “ethnic Russians” within their borders — a condition Moscow is keen to bring up, and which justifies in the Kremlin’s view efforts to destabilize those nations.
It’s nice to see DeSantis mopping up the mess he made in the comments he provided to Carlson, but the cleanup operation only demonstrates why those ill-considered comments were a blunder in the first place.