Mark Twain’s famous quip of history seldom repeating but at least rhyming comes to the fore once again. The isolationism of William Jennings Bryan (failed 3-time Democratic presidential candidate), Eugene Debs (socialist), Charles Lindbergh (1940-1, America First Committee), and the 1960’s anti-war left has found a home in some of the boisterous ranks of the GOP. Now, must we add Ron DeSantis to the list of people dipping their toe in the tepid water of today’s isolationism, a form of reflexive non-interventionism?
Recently, Gov. Ron DeSantis declared on Tucker Carlson that Ukraine is not a “vital” interest of the US when he said, “While the U.S. has many vital national interests . . . becoming further entangled in a territorial dispute between Ukraine and Russia is not one of them” (see below). He had the nerve to incoherently call it a “territorial dispute”. Putin’s stumbling blitzkrieg in February and March of 2022 had more than the Donbas in his sights. It was an attempted seizure of the whole country. Mere territorial dispute?
First, Trump senses the popularity of the new isolationism too and seeks to exploit it by using the banal canard of domestic problems leaving little room for a superpower foreign policy: “The Democrats are sending another $40 billion to Ukraine, yet America’s parents are struggling to even feed their children” (see below). If the presence of starving children in America is an argument against our involvement in the world, Spain would still control much of the Caribbean and the Philippines; the Panama Canal would have remained the unfinished and overgrown mess that Ferdinand de Lesseps left it; the Kaiser would be free to redraw the map of Europe; Hitler might have turned London into another one of his vacation retreats; and a free-ranging USSR would still have a hammerlock on Eastern Europe with an array of Third World proxy satraps menacing our borders and access to rare earths.
Republican Senator Josh Hawley is more forthright in his isolationism when he said in a February speech before the Heritage Foundation, “We should cut off U.S. military aid to Ukraine until our European allies step up.” Again, “I don’t think we should give any more funding right now” (See below). He talks as if stopping naked aggression on the continent of Europe is not in our interests all by itself, as if 104,812 US deaths and 552,117 total casualties in 1940’s Europe were wasted.
Is DeSantis beginning his transition into Charles Lindbergh, to join the other trans-Lindberghs in the House GOP’s neo-Squad (move over AOC for Gaetz and company) and their supporting cast of huckster pundits. Lindbergh was noted for his advocacy of neutrality from the start of the war in 1939 until Japanese naval aircraft turned Pearl Harbor into a burning hulk. Isolationism works until it doesn’t.
That Metternich of the right, Matt Gaetz, in a display of thundering obtuseness in 2021, proclaimed to Gen. Mark Milley, “We are an Atlantic power. . . .” Right there, Gaetz made us a regional power, and as one, incoherently, we ought not support Ukraine. His latest concoction is the “Ukraine Fatigue Resolution” which demands a halt to further military and financial aid to Ukraine (see below).
It joins the ranks of other stoppages to US intervention such as the Democrats’ abandonment of South Vietnam. They got us in – JFK, LBJ – and now enthralled by the 60’s neo-Marxist New Left, they were determined to desert the South Vietnamese. After the signing of the Paris Peace Accords in January 1973, a Democrat-led Congress approved an end to funding slated for August of that year. As things in the South heated up in 1975 under a full-scale North Vietnamese invasion, they rejected any more assistance to our beleaguered ally. The communist North Vietnamese flag flew atop the presidential palace in Saigon.
And let us not forget Biden’s August 2021 bugout from Afghanistan. A new flag flies over Kabul. It was an expression of the same phenomena: get out, stop supporting, end the intervention, cease the “forever wars”. They always, though, seem to end in the same manner: quarter million boat people, reeducation camps, genocidal atrocities, calamities in adjacent countries, and years of subsequent US feebleness and fickleness.
The Florida tin-hat Metternich is not even playing checkers as Putin, Xi, and the mullahs play chess. A key to playing chess is understanding the linkages of moves. Such as, a bugout of Afghanistan led to Putin’s 2022 imitation of the North Vietnamese brazen assault on the South back in 1975, and a Ukraine bugout would be a green flag for Xi to cross the Taiwan Strait. I’m not sure if the GOP’s neo-Squad in Congress can even conceive of the connection between a surrender in Ukraine and Xi’s plans for Taiwan. They sure as heck make hay of the consequences of Biden’s bugout of Afghanistan. Bugouts are bugouts regardless of whether they are under the donkey or elephant banner.
With his finger up in the proverbial popular winds, DeSantis joins Trump and the GOP’s neo-Squad in falling under the spell of a new Vietnam Syndrome. Remember it? It referred to a period of pathological fear of US intervention after the fall of Saigon. What did that give us? The world became a meaner place with a massive Soviet military buildup and rabid Soviet adventurism all around us. Then the over year-long humiliation of the US by the Iranian mullahs after taking American embassy personnel hostage in 1979-80. We wrung our hands, proved flagrant incompetence in a failed rescue mission, and had to wait till Reagan was sworn into office in January 1981.
They all talk of peace. Matt Gaetz does. In his surrender resolution, he blusters, “. . . the United States . . . urges all combatants to reach a peace agreement.” Of course, the simultaneous cutoff of assistance to Ukraine will guarantee a peace agreement . . . under Putin’s terms. That’s not peace; it sets the stage for the conquest of the Baltic republics and Taiwan. It’s Munich 1938 and Czechoslovakia 1939 all over again. That’s right, Gaetz, prove that you have a spine by showing that you don’t have one.
A new Vietnam syndrome – the “forever war” syndrome – has gripped the dim bulbs in the GOP, my party. It is disheartening to witness the normally level-headed, like DiSantis, become so infatuated with willful historical blindness.
RogerG
Read more here:
* “DeSantis saying Ukraine support is not ‘vital’ national interest sparks backlash in GOP”, Jack Forest, CNN, 3/15/2023, at https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/14/politics/desantis-republicans-ukraine-aid/index.html
* For Matt Gaetz’s Ukraine fatigue Resolution go to his website: “Matt Gaetz Leads 11 Lawmakers in Introduction of ‘Ukraine Fatigue’ Resolution to Halt U.S. Aid to Ukraine” at https://gaetz.house.gov/media/press-releases/matt-gaetz-leads-11-lawmakers-introduction-ukraine-fatigue-resolution-halt-us
* Charles Lindbergh’s speeches against US intervention in Europe can be found here: “Two Historic Speeches: October 13, 1939 & August 4, 1940” at http://charleslindbergh.com/americanfirst/speech3.asp
* “Josh Hawley’s U-Turn on Military Aid to Ukraine”, John McCormack, National Review Online, 3/1/2023, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/03/josh-hawleys-u-turn-on-military-aid-to-ukraine/
* “The two biggest 2024 Republican names would mean bad news for Ukraine”, Stephen Collinson, CNN, 3/15/2023, at https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/15/politics/2024-republicans-trump-desantis-ukraine/index.html