DeSantis slips up on Ukraine

If Florida Governor Ron DeSantis really does want the Republican Party’s nomination for next year’s US presidential election he will need to show a better understanding of America’s role as leader of the free world than he did in talking about Ukraine to Fox News. “While the US has many vital national interests,” Mr DeSantis said, “becoming further entangled in (what is) a territorial dispute between Ukraine and Russia is not one of them.” Really? Ukraine, with almost the entire democratic world united in helping Kyiv defeat Russian President Vladimir Putin’s monstrous assault on its sovereignty as part of his grand design to recreate the Soviet empire, is just “a territorial dispute”?

If Mr DeSantis were any other Republican governor, such an incomprehensible, ill-judged assertion might not matter. But despite Donald Trump’s rancorous attempt to regain the White House, Mr DeSantis, at 44, remains the hot tip among pundits to win the Republican nomination with a strong chance of winning the election next year and becoming the next president.

Given that context, Mr DeSantis’s statement (importantly, it was written and not something he said off the cuff) that the fight for Ukraine is not a vital US national interest could not be more wrong or more damaging, not only to America and its place in the world but also to America’s allies who look to it for global leadership.

Mr DeSantis’s assertion plays into not only Mr Putin’s hands but also Chinese ruler Xi Jinping’s by raising the prospect that a future Republican administration in the White House would be unwilling to stay the distance in Ukraine and, by implication, also would be reluctant to do much about a Chinese invasion of Taiwan.

As the New York Post, which previously has been a strong supporter of Mr DeSantis’s presidential ambitions, noted on Thursday: “If Putin succeeds in Ukraine, it’ll show other regimes (China, Iran, etc) that aggression works. And Russia itself will look to move on other nations, including NATO allies America’s obliged to defend. Beating Putin, or even just crippling his war machine, is defending America.”

Whatever happened to Mr DeSantis’s reputation as a strong leader and a fearless fighter for principle who has ignored the polls and done what’s right in Florida? Mr DeSantis, even before launching his campaign, appears to have fallen at the first hurdle of what The Wall Street Journal has termed “the Trumpian temptation of American retreat”. The suggestion is that he is cynically reading the political mood in the Republican Party fuelled by Mr Trump’s similarly ill-judged isolationist ballyhoo as the former president, too, seeks the nomination. Polls show 40 per cent of Republicans believe Joe Biden’s administration is doing too much to help Ukraine. Elected Republicans in the US congress have expressed alarm about what they see as a mood that potentially could do serious harm to US interests and those of its allies in the fight for democracy. The top Republican on the US Senate’s Armed Services Committee, Roger Wicker, has warned about those who would appease Mr Putin.

In his statement to Fox News, Mr DeSantis did make one sensible point – that Mr Biden did not have “defined objectives” in Ukraine other than to provide arms, but not enough to drive Russia out of the country. That failure is obviously a recipe for extended conflict. But it does not follow that Ukraine is not of vital concern to the US and that it is a mere territorial dispute. Such assertions could hardly be further from the truth or more worrying for the free world that looks to the US for leadership. Mr DeSantis must beware the temptation to try to outdo Mr Trump’s isolationist MAGA fantasies.

Much has been expected of Mr DeSantis as the potential Republican nominee next year. He must waste no time in showing that he is better than perceptions of him, after his Ukraine faux pas, that he is just a younger version of Mr Trump. Mr DeSantis is surely better than that.