Isolationists in the GOP Forget the Lessons of the Past

In today's Republican Party, the only true party "values", if one will, are aiding and abetting Donald Trump and giving performances aimed to please the ugliest, most extreme and most ignorance embracing elements of the Republican Party base.  The welfare of the majority of Americans simply does not matter.  Likewise, America's leadership role in the world and investing in the defense of allies out of long term self-interest, not handouts, no longer matters to the vast majority of congressional Republicans.  Republicans claim to want border security yet killed a bill that would have given them almost everything the claim to have wanted for many years.   Then in the next hypocrisy filled breath, they whine that they do not want to fund aid to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan until there is border security, something they themselves blocked at Trump's bidding.  In all of this, these cowardly individuals are forgetting the disastrous consequences that similar isolationist policies brought in the lead up to WWI and especially WWII when America's failure to engage and to stand up to autocrats encouraged regimes that ultimately brought ruin to large parts of the world and to millions of deaths that might have been avoided.  A column in the New York Times looks at GOP hypocrisy and the party's refusal to learn from the mistakes of the past.  Here are highlights:

When historians look back on the early days of 2024, they probably won’t recall what, precisely, an elderly Democratic president couldn’t quite remember about the names or countries of other world leaders. They will note what 26 Senate Republicans chose to forget about world leadership.

I’m referring to Tuesday morning’s Senate vote on a $95 billion supplemental foreign-aid package, including $60 billion in desperately needed military assistance for Ukraine, along with $14 billion for Israel and $10 billion for civilians in conflict zones, including Gaza. The bill must still pass the House, where it faces the opposition of Speaker Mike Johnson and can only hope to survive via parliamentary maneuvering and the votes of Democrats plus some remaining Republican security hawks.

On paper, the 70-to-29 vote looks like a bipartisan embrace of embattled democratic allies. But it marks the moment when Republicans reverted to the isolationism of the original America First Committee of pre-World War II infamy. A majority of the G.O.P. Senate conference, including onetime Ukraine hawks like Lindsey Graham and Tom Cotton, voted against the aid, mostly, they said, because it wasn’t paired with border-security measures.

That’s the same bill they voted against last week — a bill patiently negotiated over months by one of the most conservative Republicans in the Senate, Oklahoma’s James Lankford. The cynicism would be breathtaking if it weren’t so predictable coming from the Trumpified right.

From Arkansas’s Cotton, there’s the argument that support for Israel’s efforts to defeat Hamas is incompatible with any civilian assistance for Gazans. From Wisconsin’s Ron Johnson, we have the claim that although Vladimir Putin is “an evil war criminal,” Russia is certain to win the war, so funding Kyiv prolongs Ukrainian suffering and, by implication, wastes American money. From Ohio’s J.D. Vance, this: “The supplemental represents an attempt by the foreign policy blob/deep state to stop President Trump from pursuing his desired policy.”

What a mix of cruelty, defeatism, conspiracy-mongering and political servility.

Johnson’s argument that Ukraine can’t win is belied by the fact that until it started running out of artillery shells, it was more than holding its own against Russia. It also echoes the prewar defeatism of figures like Robert Taft and Joseph Kennedy, who argued against helping Britain during the Blitz because Hitler was destined to win.

As for Vance, at least his position has the virtue of clarity: This is about sucking up to Donald Trump and his followers and abetting the Republican front-runner’s declared policy of encouraging Putin to invade underspending NATO members.

What all this makes for is a deeply unserious Republican Party at a deadly serious global moment.

There is abundant room to criticize the Biden administration’s foreign policy record, from the shambolic withdrawal from Afghanistan to the reluctance to arm Ukraine with the weapons it needed when it needed them (and not after the Russian Army consolidated its front lines) to, yes, its disastrous performance at the southern border, which has been both a policy and a political fiasco.

There is no conceivable reason the fate of Ukraine, a vital U.S. interest, should hinge on our border policy, however broken, any more than a patient should put off getting a skin cancer removed until he loses 50 pounds. It is an idiotic linkage guaranteed to do harm.

In January 1945, Arthur H. Vandenberg, a Michigan Republican, gave a landmark Senate speech now remembered as the moment when his party finally began to put its reflexive isolationism behind it. “We still propose to help create the postwar world on a basis which shall stop aggressors for keeps and, so far as humanly possible, substitute justice for force among freemen,” he said. “We propose to do it primarily for our own sake.”

For our own sake. The point of helping Ukraine defend itself against its despotic foe — like the point of defending Israel, or Taiwan, or NATO members rich or poor — isn’t altruism. It’s self-interest rightly understood, the kind of understanding that prewar isolationists like Vandenberg gained only from the ashes and agony of a world war. For the G.O.P. to now lose that understanding is as much a disgrace to it as it is, potentially, a disaster for us all.