At a Washington Marriott, the nationalist wing of the Republican Party wrestles with what Putin’s war means for their movement.
As William Ruger, a Trump nominee to become ambassador to Afghanistan and the president of the American Institute for Economic Research, told me, “The neocons seem strangely buoyed by the current crisis, and love the Manichaean rhetoric coming out of the White House about this being a fight between democracy and authoritarianism. But the forces of realism and restraint are not going to back down from the fight. Unlike twenty years ago, the American public will not swallow neocon bromides.”
The participants generally described themselves as “realists” and “restrainers,” and the meeting featured what amounted to realist royalty — politicians and thinkers, ranging from GOP Sen. Rand Paul (Ky.) and Reps. Thomas Massie (Ky.), Dan Bishop (N.C.) and Matt Rosendale (Mont.) to Michael Anton, Sohrab Ahmari, Mollie Z. Hemingway, and, of course, Vance. It was organized by the American Conservative magazine and American Moment, whose self-described mission is to “identify, educate, and credential young Americans who will implement public policy that supports strong families, a sovereign nation, and prosperity for all,” and which features Vance on its board of advisers. Their explicit aim is to create a young counter-establishment to the hawkish national security network that has flourished in Washington over the past several decades, one that could funnel ideologically reliable appointees into a future Trump, DeSantis, Cruz or Hawley administration.
It was notable that at the conference, speaker after speaker targeted the GOP hawks more often than they spoke about Ukraine itself. Indeed, Kyiv itself was essentially MIA — serving more as a proxy for a dispute about America nationhood than about the country’s own fate as it’s mercilessly pummeled by Putin. The basic argument, outlined in a manifesto titled “Away From the Abyss”appearing in the new Compact magazine, is that aiding Ukraine is tantamount to hurting Ukraine. In resisting deescalation, the U.S. and its allies, so the thinking goes, run the risk of encouraging hapless Ukrainians to battle to the last man, all in the hopes of pursuing a Western-led regime change policy toward Moscow that might well trigger a global cataclysm.
Russ Vought, the president of the Center for Renewing America and the director of the Office of Management and Budget under Trump, for example, complained about the “bombardment of the neocon moment that we are in.” For Vought, Ukraine seemed to be a sideshow. The real question, he said, is, “Why haven’t we brought our troops home from Europe? These are the questions that leaders should be considering.” In 2019, Trump, he claimed, was concerned about how Ukraine would dispose of American military aid and sensibly ordered a temporary suspension. But an “essentially imperialist” network of foreign policy elites that is oriented towards conformity “freaked out” and it “led to stark consequences for the president” — a polite term for impeachment. In the future, Vought said, “it will take a president that has the confidence to reject the experts and expose them.”
Then there was Joe Kent. Kent is a 41-year-old former Green Beret running for Congress against Washington Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler — one of 10 House Republicans to vote to impeach Trump in 2021 over the Jan. 6 insurrection. By contrast, Kent, who has received Trump’s endorsement and received financial support from Peter Thiel and Stephen Wynn, spoke at the “Justice for J6” rally in September in Washington, where he declared, “It’s banana republic stuff when political prisoners are arrested and denied due process.” He says that he is running against “the establishment” and frequently appears on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show and Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast. Addressing the conference via video, Kent explained, “Our political establishment is dead set on driving us into a catastrophic conflict with Russia.” More lethal aid to Kyiv and cyberattacks on Russia are a path to war. “We must be pragmatic,” he said. His pragmatism appears to consist of granting Putin what he covets: “Putin has laid out what he wants in Ukraine — a decent starting point,” and his demands for control over Donetsk and Luhansk are “very reasonable.” Like Vought, he singled out the neocons for blame. “The neocons on the right,” he stated, are “power drunk, bloodthirsty and cannot be trusted. Biden is sleepwalking to war.”
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/04/02/trump-conservatives-emergency-meeting-gop-russia-00022419
