What’s happened to cause Sen. Josh Hawley’s U-turn on Ukraine?
What’s happened with our Missouri Senator Josh Hawley and Ukraine? A year ago, he was saying “the most important thing we can do” was to arm the Ukrainians resisting Russian attacks. Today, he’s saying this: “The truth is that Joe Biden, and, let’s face it, congressional Republicans, have spent over $100 billion and counting on the Ukraine war, and meanwhile the folks in East Palestine, Ohio, have poison in the water, poison in the air… I would just say to Republicans: You can either be the party of Ukraine and the globalists or you can be the party of East Palestine and the working people of this country.”
It’s easy to do what George F. Will and others are doing by attacking Josh Hawley for being a “human windsock,” in other words, being blown by the wind of public opinion. It’s harder to take the time to listen to what he’s actually saying and why he’s changed. John McCormack of National Review has done that, and also interviewed other hard-right conservatives such as Senator Ted Cruz who haven’t made the same switch.
Here’s a link to John McCormack’s National Review article: https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/03/josh-hawleys-u-turn-on-military-aid-to-ukraine/
And here’s George F. Will’s criticism of Hawley: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/02/22/ukraine-war-isolationists-hawley-republicans/
I’m frankly not sure what to make of Hawley’s position.
I think a very good case can be made that this is Europe’s problem and the Europeans, not the Americans, need to be primarily responsible for fixing it. To be fair, the European funding for the Ukrainians has significantly increased, and the main effect so far of Vladimir Putin’s attack has been to galvanize Europeans against Russia, not only for the short term, but putting enough fear of Russia into countries like Sweden and Finland to push them into NATO.
A very good case can also be made that if Putin isn’t stopped now, it won’t be long before we’re forced to defend an actual NATO member against Russian aggression — and then we won’t have a choice anymore. An even better case can be made that what President Putin thought would be a “cakewalk,” taking Ukraine in a matter of days or weeks, needed to be prevented to give a strong warning to President Xi of China not to try the same in Taiwan.
That last point — deterring China from military aggression against Taiwan and other American allies in Asia — is perhaps the best argument for continued American involvement in Ukraine, even according to Hawley’s own views of America’s role in the world. Hawley believes, and he may well be correct, that the rising power of China should be the primary concern of the United States in world affairs. Hawley has a point that Russia is no longer functioning as a peer-level competitor to the United States and is primarily important in the world because Russia is, as Hawley puts it, a “gas station.” Hawley believes the way to handle Russia is to cut off its revenues from oil and natural gas, which since the end of the Cold War, have largely come from pipelines to Europe. The problem is that restricting Russian sales to customers in Europe has led to Russia selling to countries that couldn’t care less about Russia’s human rights record or its wartime atrocities in Ukraine, and hasn’t had the desired effect of reducing Russia’s revenues, but rather making Russia more dependent upon China. How will pushing Russia into a closer embrace of China help stop Russian aggression or deter China from its expansionist goals?
It needs to be noted that this isn’t the first time Hawley has changed his position on important matters. As some have noted, when he was first elected to become Missouri’s attorney general, Hawley said he wasn’t going to use his state position as a steppingstone to higher office.
As with most things, there are two sides to that story.
To be fair to the other side of that debate, it isn’t as if Hawley just randomly decided to run for the Senate. A group of people representing a broad spectrum of the seriously fractured Missouri Republican Party at that time said Hawley was the right man at the right time to unify the party and take back a senate seat that then-Senator Claire McCaskill had managed to keep despite Missouri becoming a deeper and deeper shade of “Republican Red.”
A number of those people, led by John Danforth, now regret backing Senator Josh Hawley. They may be right; they may be wrong. But a number of Republicans had previously tried and failed to defeat McCaskill, and Hawley was viewed at the time as a uniquely talented man who could do what others had failed to do.
Regardless of whether we agree or disagree with Hawley, his brand of “pitchfork populism” is quite popular among Missouri Republicans. Hawley talks the way he does because he has — or at least thinks he has — widespread support for his views among conservative Republicans in rural Missouri.
As people who live and work at and near U.S. Army Fort Leonard Wood, Hawley is listening to us on military matters. If we like what he’s saying, we need to tell him so. If we don’t, then we need to tell him that as well.
Unlike many in Washington who know little about what rural Americans think, and care less, Hawley is listening. What George Will calls being a “human windsock” can just as easily be called “listening and responding to constituents.”
Military families and veterans telling Hawley what they think about military matters will carry actual weight, particularly with an election coming up next year for his seat.
