Politics
Critics of Ukraine funding are ready to open the checkbook for Netanyahu, but they say there’s no comparing the two situations.
J.D. Vance and Sen. Josh Hawley speak with reporters at a campaign rally on May 1, 2022, in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio.
Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images
In the years since Donald Trump was elected, a variety of Republican politicians, writers, and think tanks have declared that his positions constitute a new kind of conservatism. It’s often referred to as the “America First” ideology and accompanied by the claim that the GOP is, or is becoming, a party for “working people” rather than “the establishment”—and that the interests of working people don’t include intervention abroad.
A central plank of the America First platform, born out of candidate Trump’s claim that the invasion of Iraq was a mistake, is that MAGA Republicans shouldn’t support “endless war” or “forever war”—particularly the deployment of U.S. troops in the Middle East, or the provision of weapons and other aid to Ukraine. While president, Trump himself had to be talked out of withdrawing from NATO, the U.S.’s most significant commitment to common international defense; earlier this year, he claimed to object to the perpetuation of the war in Ukraine on humanitarian grounds, arguing that he would negotiate its end in short order were he to hold office again. Senators such as Missouri’s Josh Hawley and Ohio’s J.D. Vance have denounced the U.S.’s support for the besieged European nation as a waste of resources that would be better put toward security at the U.S.–Mexico border or deterring China, while Hawley has complained about the United States’ involvement in “constant intervention” around the world and its “massive, permanent presence in the Middle East.” The abortive America First Caucus in the House wrote in its would-be founding manifesto that “sending taxpayer money outside of the nation is generally an unwise undertaking and an entanglement that rarely provides any benefit to our citizens.”
More broadly, this wing of the party has been dismissive of the idea that regular Americans have an emotional interest in the protection of populations abroad. In their view, concern for the plight of Ukrainians is sometimes denounced as an affectation of “globalism”-friendly cosmopolitans who identify more with the interests of elites in other countries than with regular Joes and Janes in the heartland. As Vance famously told right-wing operative Steve Bannon during last year’s Ohio Senate primary, “I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or the other.” (He has since said the invasion of the country was a “tragedy” and that he is sympathetic to what Ukrainians are experiencing.) Trump adviser Stephen Miller, who now heads an organization called America First Legal, told Tucker Carlson with disdain that Ukraine support was the product of “a fetish in Washington for the citizens of foreign countries.”
These positions have appealed to the conspiratorial, online “alt-right,” whose members believe the Ukraine war has been orchestrated by globalists, neoconservatives, or just plain Jews in order to profit from military spending or inflict death and immiseration on “white” populations. Given the tendency of conspiracy theories to overlap, some of the individuals who hold these beliefs have coalesced behind the presidential candidacy of anti-vaccine ex-Democrat Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has said that Russia was “acting in good faith” toward Ukraine before it was provoked into war by the U.S. (He, too, has denounced the actual invasion as “brutal.”) RFK’s profile on X (formerly Twitter) says that, as president, he would “end the forever wars.”
Taken all together, there is enough anti-Ukraine feeling on the right that, in late September, the Biden administration and Democrat-controlled Senate felt obligated to agree with the Republican-controlled House on a short-term government funding compromise that didn’t include the $6 billion in additional Ukraine aid that had initially been planned.
Put simply, though, the isolationists’ response to Hamas’ attacks on Israel has not been isolationist. The Heritage Foundation, despite its America First turn under the leadership of new director Kevin Roberts, has announced that it “stands with Israel”—which, in context, as Emily Tamkin explained in Slate on Tuesday, is a phrase that implies support for current Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, which has been aggressive in its push to extend Israeli settlements into areas of the West Bank previously reserved for Palestinians. Vance said in a statement that the U.S. should “stand with our allies in Israel” as it strikes back against Hamas with “overwhelming force.” Hawley has called for shifting military funding from Ukraine to Israel because the latter faces an “existential threat,” and RFK Jr.’s statement about the matter said that the U.S. should take “unwavering, resolute, and practical action” to support “a sustained military campaign” against Hamas in Gaza.
(Not everyone is on board. Alt-right figures Mike Cernovich and Jack Posobiec have warned vaguely but darkly that factions within the United States will attempt to use the Hamas attack as a pretext for launching an attack on Iran. RFK Jr.’s statement was hammered by commenters accusing him of creating a new forever war.)
What’s the rationale for supporting Israel but not Ukraine? To be generous, one might argue that Israel is a more established U.S. ally than Ukraine, that involvement in a conflict with a global power like Russia has more potential strategic downsides than involvement in a conflict with Hamas, and that the exclusive targeting of civilians by a nonstate actor is a more blatant violation of international order than the invasion of a neighboring country over a historic territorial dispute. Said Victoria Coates, a former adviser to Trump and the Heritage Foundation’s vice president for national security and foreign policy: “One can make a moral case for supporting Israel based on shared values, a shared history of democracy, but the case is also very practical—its intelligence-sharing capabilities, its strategic position in the eastern Mediterranean projecting both east and west, its contribution to the stability of international energy markets.” (She also observes that Ukraine, unlike Israel, could be reasonably expected to draw non-U.S. support from European neighbors and allies.)
Being less charitable, though, one might suggest that support for Netanyahu’s government might be related to the increasingly rightward arc of his career. Netanyahu has formed a coalition with Israel’s most extreme religious parties, attempted to consolidate constitutional power through “reform” proposals that have triggered widespread domestic protests, and hosted visits by right-wing leaders like Vladimir Putin and Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, whose policies have been cited as a model for the American right by intellectuals like Vance and Carlson. Carlson and figures like Texas Sen. Ted Cruz have contrasted what they see as American softness and liberalism with the purportedly robust state of traditional Christianity, masculinity, and resistance to “cancel culture” in Putin’s Russia. Trump, a noted admirer of Putin’s ruthless style, helped advance Netanyahu’s belligerent domestic interests by moving the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. The relative treatment of Israel and Ukraine—Russia’s enemy—isn’t a contradiction if the actual issue at stake, rather than the protection of American resources, is the expression of solidarity with leaders who share an “America First”–like interest in ethnic purity, cultural conservatism, and the rollback of democratic institutions.
This might not be what motivates every conservative drawing a distinction between the two countries—Coates says she’d be calling for military aid for Israelis at the moment regardless of where its government stood on the left–right continuum. » …
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