The fiery foreign policy disputes between Republican presidential primary candidates Nikki Haley, Vivek Ramaswamy, and Mike Pence serve to underline the importance of foreign policy debates.
The major takeaway from this first 2024 GOP debate is that it's not enough, as Pence and Haley attempted to do, to argue that Ukraine's survival matters because of democracy or U.S. moral leadership or because it serves U.S. security to deter Russian President Vladimir Putin in Ukraine. But neither is it enough to suggest, as Ramaswamy sought to do, that the Soviet Union no longer exists and thus that the insecure U.S.-Mexico border means the U.S. shouldn't care about Ukraine. Top line: It's OK to accept that foreign policy can be complicated and is necessarily nuanced. It's a topic ill-suited to sharp, sound bite-driven talking points.
UP FOR DEBATE: WHERE TRUMP, DESANTIS, AND REST OF REPUBLICAN 2024 FIELD STAND ON KEY ISSUES
We should spend more time discussing complex foreign policy issues and the trade-offs that go with certain choices. But the relatively simplistic arguments various candidates offered on Wednesday are not a good sign for the health of GOP public policy discourse. Incidentally, the same concern applies to the think tank arena, as shown by the Heritage Foundation's facile Kyiv-Maui comparison on Tuesday.
GOP primary voters should demand a greater depth of foreign policy knowledge from those who wish to serve in the nation's highest office. That said, on a lighter but still very serious note, Fox News deserves credit, and will earn history's positive judgment, for having the courage to ask a question about UFOs.