After more than 18 months of war, a plurality of Republicans say the U.S. should do more to support Ukraine. But despite the view shared by 40 percent of Republicans, according to a recent CNN-SRSS poll, the Republican presidential candidates remain as splintered as ever.
While a summer of campaigning through Iowa, New Hampshire, and Ukraine itself initially revealed the GOP's splintered views on U.S. aid to Ukraine, the Republican presidential debate in August further revealed the candidates' diverging views.
Opting to talk of COVID-19, abortion, and Hunter Biden, the eight candidates who qualified for the debate didn't speak of Ukraine until the halfway point, when Fox News hosts Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum provoked the topic. The debate stage was ripe grounds for Republicans to oppose further U.S. support.
Entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis seized the debate stage as an opportunity to express their 'America First' opposition to further aid, drawing stark dissent to the supportive views of fellow candidates; former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, former New Jersey Governor, Chris Christie, and former Vice President, Mike Pence. However, it was the Jesuit-educated Ohio businessman, Ramaswamy, who garnered some of the debate's fiercest attention. With a grin ear to ear and his lonely hand adamantly raised in the air to the question "Is there anyone on stage who would not support the increase of more funding to Ukraine?" Ramaswamy made it known he was the candidate beholding the most passionate opposition to Ukrainian aid (and support of former President Donald J. Trump.)
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"At the Republican debate in August, [Ramaswamy] accused Republicans who support military aid of prioritizing Ukraine's border security over the United States' border security, and disparaged Pence's and Chris Christie's visits to Ukraine as making a 'pilgrimage to Kyiv, to their pope, Zelensky,'" wrote The New York Times' Maggie Astor.
Taking the attention he amassed on the debate stage and running with it to further campaigning in Iowa, Ramaswamy was quickly met with Republican pushback to his hardline against aid to Ukraine.
While U.S. aid to Ukraine was continuously raised through the 'America First' lens at the GOP's first presidential debate, the threat Russia's invasion poses to democracy was merely brushed upon.
So, why do most Republican candidates adamantly oppose further Ukrainian aid when a significant portion of their base supports it? Donald Trump.
As for that "elephant not in the room," Donald J. Trump, who Ramaswamy made sure to praise during the August debate, the entire war would've been prevented had he been in office during February 2022 when Russia invaded Ukraine due to his willingness to surrender Ukrainian land to Russia. In his counterprogramming session with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson the same night of the debate, Trump spoke of Russia's war in Ukraine not as a conflict provoked by Russia that is stripping Ukrainians of fundamental rights and freedoms but rather as a mass casualty event that wouldn't be happening under his watch.
Russia's invasion of Ukraine and subsequent conflict is a "horrible war that we're very involved in," according to Trump, who opted to speak about the suicide of the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein and water pressure during his nearly hour-long session on the platform X, formerly known as Twitter.
Speaking over the waving finger of Ramaswamy, DeSantis, lacking assertion, said the U.S. should decrease aid to Ukraine because Europe needs to "carry their weight." However, Haley was sure to remind the 12.8 million viewers that some European countries have given more aid to Ukraine than the U.S. in percentage of their defense budget.
Currently using Soviet-era planes for their war defense, Ukraine has long asked for 20mm cannon-strapped F-16 fighter jets from Western countries, which has been approved by the U.S. and fulfilled by Norway, Denmark, and the Netherlands. While the Pentagon did recently announce the U.S. will train Ukrainian pilots on F-16s in October, no American F-16s have been committed to Ukraine, so it seems in terms of Ukraine's biggest wish of late, Europe is carrying its weight.
In the latter half of the debate, Ukraine was more topical, however, two opposing groups were formed, the American-first majority who said the U.S. should focus on the Southern U.S. border before worrying about Ukraine's, and the minority who believes the U.S. can address immigration while also protecting Ukrainian democracy. The latter, who think the two topics aren't mutually exclusive, included Haley, Christie, and Pence.
In viewing Ramaswamy's argument as a "giveaway" to Russian President Vladimir Putin, Pence, who's also recently visited Ukraine, displayed confidence in America's capacity to handle both aid to Ukraine and the Southern U.S. border. Although he is still actively sewing together his role in the sovereignty dilemma of the 2020 presidential election to garner the most polling support today, Pence stood in Ukraine's capital, Kyiv in June and committed "everything in our power" to "restore the sovereignty" of Ukraine.
Elevating the severity of the U.S. border argument, in opposition DeSantis displayed arguably his most audible point in assuring a DeSantis Administration would have U.S. troops at the Southern U.S. border, not in Ukraine, because as he sees it, the current administration is not handling both, therefore, he will pick one over the other.
Convoluting the opponent's argument was their continual assertion that the cordial relationship between Russia and China is an immense threat to the US. Considering this to be the "single greatest threat we face," Ramaswamy was met with opposition from Haley, the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, who said Ramaswamy wants to "hand Ukraine to Russia, he wants to let China eat Taiwan."
"A win for Russia is a win for China," Haley, who was also the only candidate to acknowledge the then-recent supposed (now confirmed) death of Yevgeny Prigozhin, the Russian mercenary leader who led a march on Putin's Moscow in June, said.
While U.S. aid to Ukraine was continuously raised through the 'America First' lens at the GOP's first presidential debate, the threat Russia's invasion poses to democracy was merely brushed upon. This represented a broader held belief, that Americans are more concerned with "protecting a rules-based international order than defending democracy," according to polling early in the war by the Brookings Institute.
With $113 billion in aid to Ukraine approved by the U.S. to date under the current democratic Biden Administration, the GOP's August squabble could've only further decreased the popularity of a Republican White House in 2025 for Ukrainians. In a debate that concluded with a much less clear "winner" than usual, the greatest loser might just have been Ukraine itself, whose U.S. backing is vividly not guaranteed with Trump's GOP.
