The GOP’s Debate on Ukraine Takes Center Stage

Former U.S. President Donald Trump chose not to attend the Republican Party’s first 2024 presidential primary debate in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. But just like when Trump first ran for president, it was the insurgent candidate among the contenders onstage Wednesday night who became a foreign-policy punching bag.

Even though Trump’s absence took center stage, with the Fox News moderators quizzing the candidates on whether they would support the former president as the GOP nominee if he were to be convicted in any of the handful of legal probes he’s facing, the tone for the evening was set by differences on foreign policy. And the fighting over U.S. support for Ukraine in its war against Russia was particularly vicious.

Entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, a political newcomer who has risen from the back of the field to a near-consistent third place in the polls, got the first major audience round of applause of the evening for saying the United States should stop aiding Ukraine.

“We are driving Russia further into China’s hands,” he said. Prior to the debate, Ramaswamy had called for the United States to allow Russia to retain control of some of the parts of Ukraine it has occupied militarily, in exchange for Moscow cutting ties with China.

With Ukraine’s counteroffensive flagging, support for Kyiv has become a major wedge issue inside the GOP. Last week, the top defense expert at the influential conservative Heritage Foundation think tank left the organization after being blindsided by an op-ed written by the organization’s president, Kevin Roberts. In the piece, Roberts blasted members of Congress for prioritizing Ukraine aid over the hurricane disaster relief (the article earned the indignation of a public fact check from X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter).

But more mainstream conservative voices believe the framing that Ramaswamy, Roberts, and others are posing is all wrong. “My opinion is you can’t treat assistance to Ukraine like it’s a gift or charity,” said Mark Montgomery, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense for Democracies. “This is about U.S. national interests. We have to meet aggressive authoritarian behavior against beleaguered democracies at the point of friction, not step back and say, ‘at the next line, we’ll do something.’”

Ramaswamy’s position also put him in hot water with the rest of the GOP field onstage Wednesday, most of whom believe that the United States is getting a good bang for its buck by giving U.S. guns to the Ukrainians and thereby degrading the Russian military.

“We will be next,” said former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who recently traveled to Kyiv to meet with Ukrainian officials. Former Vice President Mike Pence tried to channel Ronald Reagan’s “peace through strength” mantra as the attacks on Ramaswamy continued, calling out Ramaswamy for having a “pretty small view of the greatest nation on earth.”

Under fire from former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, who accused the political newcomer of trying to side with a murderer in Putin, Ramaswamy tried to tar the rest of the stage as George W. Bush-era neoconservatives beholden to the defense industry. “I wish you luck in your future career on the board of Lockheed or Raytheon,” Ramaswamy told Haley.

But Haley, who served as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations under Trump, fired back quickly. “You have no foreign-policy experience and it shows,” Haley told Ramaswamy in one of the biggest applause lines of the night.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who has tried to frame himself as a China hawk, mostly stayed silent during the back-and-forth on Ukraine, though he did say U.S. aid to Ukraine should be conditioned on European countries doing more to help. He previously called Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine a “territorial dispute.”

After Tim Scott bemoaned the deadly spread of fentanyl, DeSantis pushed to designate Mexican drug cartels as foreign terrorist organization, a label that carries the weight of U.S. sanctions, and promised to leave traffickers funneling drugs across the border “stone cold dead.” Pence pushed for the Pentagon to partner with the Mexican military to hunt cartels.

But agreement on border issues, and perhaps China, mask the major split on Ukraine. The problem, as Pence and other establishment Republicans saw it, was not that the nearly $50 billion tab for U.S. military aid to Ukraine was too much, but that it was too little.

“This makes it clear that we have to have a debate over this,” Montgomery said. “But my point is the debate should be won by those who believe in continued support to Ukraine.”