Republican Party Presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy recently laid out a plan that he said would end the war in Ukraine while breaking up Russia’s growing alliance with China.
Newly minted presidential candidate North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum said, “Support for Ukraine is important to stop empowering countries like Russia in the first place by selling US energy to our allies.”
The GOP nomination contenders have different takes on U.S. involvement in Russia’s war in Ukraine, reflecting the growing divide among conservatives on the subject.
Ramaswamy’s is the most detailed of exit strategies. He said he believes a Nixon approach to Russia would curtail the looming threat of communist China.
“I will end the war by ceasing further U.S. support for Ukraine and negotiating a peace treaty with Russia that achieves a vital U.S. security objective: ceasing Russia’s growing military alliance with China,” the 37-year-old political outsider said. “This strategy is the mirror-image of President Nixon’s diplomatic maneuver that distanced China from Russia in 1972, except this time Putin is the new Mao.”
He added that President Joe Biden’s ongoing support for Ukraine is “pushing Russia into a closer military alliance with China which increases the risk of nuclear war.”
Biden has had plenty of bipartisan support from Congress, too, in delivering more than $100 billion in taxpayer-funded aid to war-torn Ukraine. On the military front alone, congress has approved the disbursement of $48.9 billion in military aid to Ukraine, according to defenseone.com.As of May 15, $36.4 billion of that total has been delivered, contracted, or otherwise committed, the defense and national security publication reported.
Ramaswamy’s peace deal would suspend any further U.S. military assistance to Ukraine and put a permanent moratorium on Ukraine joining NATO. The U.S. and Western NATO countries would end the Western sanctions regime against Russia, restore normal diplomatic relations with mutual security commitments, withdraw all troops from Ukraine, and close all their bases in Eastern Europe — “returning to the reality that existed before the July 2016 Warsaw Summit.”
Russia would completely exit its military alliance with China, ending the 2001 Treaty of Good-Neighborliness and Friendly Cooperation and the 2022 no-limits partnership, Ramaswamy proposes.
“Russia would permanently suspend all military-technical cooperation and joint military exercises with China. Russia would agree to re-enter the pre-2023 New Start nuclear non-proliferation treaty with the U.S. that Russia abandoned earlier this year in the context of the Ukraine War,” the presidential candidate said. “In addition, Russia would withdraw all nuclear weapons and delivery capabilities from Belarus, Kaliningrad, and all Russian-annexed regions of Ukraine, as well as all military forces from Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua – effectively eliminating Russia’s nuclear threat to the U.S. and Europe.”
A Pew Research Center poll found Americans, and especially Republicans, increasingly say the U.S. should focus on issues at home.
But a Gallup poll in March showed 62 percent of registered Republicans saw Russia’s war against Ukraine as a“critical threat” to U.S. interests.
Burgum noted the war in Ukraine during his campaign launch speech in his home state. He said Biden’s “disastrous energy policy is empowering Russia to wage war in Ukraine” and extolled the virtues of cleaner, safer, and cheaper energy at home. Of course, North Dakota has a huge stake in that discussion. It ranks No. 2 among all states in crude oil production and “possesses” the “single largest deposit of lignite [coal] in the world,” according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
Burgum said under Biden’s tenure, the American energy industry is under attack, forcing U.S. allies to buy energy from enemies like Russia. So, the governor supports supporting Ukraine.
“Joe Biden is literally empowering foreign dictatorships to trample neighboring democracies and we have the power to reverse course,” Burgum told The Star News Network last week. “Support for Ukraine is important to stop empowering countries like Russia in the first place by selling US energy to our allies.”
Mounting evidence suggests Biden has a compelling personal interest in Ukraine policy. The FBI finally released an FBI informant file accusing the president of playing a role in a $5 million bribery scheme involving Ukrainian energy company Burisma. This firm paid the president’s son Hunter a lot of money for seemingly little expertise.
The top GOP presidential candidates have signaled their opposition to U.S. involvement in the war in Ukraine.
Former President Donald Trump has said he could end the war in 24 hours, although he has not explained how. Trump, who has a significant double-digit lead over the crowded field of candidates, has criticized the expense of supporting Ukraine’s military efforts.
“We don’t have ammunition ourselves,” the former president said during a CNN town hall. “We’re giving away so much,” he added, picking up on one of his long-held complaints, that Europe and U.S. NATO allies aren’t pulling their weight in international security.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has had an evolving view on Ukraine. In March, two months before he officially entered the presidential race, DeSantis called Russia’s war in Ukraine a “territorial dispute.” After taking heat from fellow Republicans, the governor walked back his comments, telling Piers Morgan that what he was really just talking about the ongoing fighting in the eastern Donbas region, as well as Russia’s 2014 seizure of Crimea, AP reported.
“What I’m referring to is where the fighting is going on now, which is that eastern border region Donbas, and then Crimea, and you have a situation where Russia has had that. I don’t think legitimately, but they had,” DeSantis said. “There’s a lot of ethnic Russians there. So, that’s some difficult fighting, and that’s what I was referring to, and so it wasn’t that I thought Russia had a right to that, and so if I should have made that more clear, I could have done it.”
He has since said he thinks a ceasefire is “in everybody’s best interest.” Ukraine’s government is not in agreement.
“You don’t want to end up in like a [Battle of] Verdun situation, where you just have mass casualties, mass expense and end up with a stalemate,” he told the Japanese weekly Nikkei Asia.
Former Vice President Mike Pence, who entered the presidential race last week, has been a hawk on the United States’ involvement in Ukraine.
“The war in Ukraine is not a territorial dispute, it is a Russian invasion,” Pence said in March during a discussion on foreign policy in Des Moines hosted by the Bastion Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based national security think tank. “I believe the United States of America needs to continue to demand that the free world join us in giving the courageous fighters in Ukraine the resources that they need need to repel the Russian invasion.”
Pence has not backed off from that position.
Neither has former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley. The former U.N. secretary under Trump recently said, in clearing up a gaffe, that Russia under Vladimir Putin is an enemy and Putin is a thug.
“I fought them at the U.N. and I will continue to fight them,” Haley told the AP. “They want to destroy us and our allies and they are not to be trusted.”
A majority of Americans believe Russia is indeed the enemy. Pew Research Center polling last month found 64 percent of respondents saw Russia as an enemy to the United States rather than as a competitor or partner.
U.S. Senator Tim Scott (R-SC) has backed aid packages to Ukraine in Congress. The presidential candidate last month said the Biden administration has “led from behind — waiting too long to provide too little support.”
“With this defense spending bill, Congress is stepping in to send a clear message to Vladimir Putin and dictators around the world that the United States will not tolerate their bullying and aggression,” Scott said in voting to approve defense spending. “American strength at home and abroad is the only way to ensure security and freedom for our people today and generations to come.”
Former Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, and conservative radio talk show host Larry Elder all have expressed support for aid to Ukraine.
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M.D. Kittle is the National Political Editor for The Star News Network.
Photo “Vivek Ramaswamy” by Vivek Ramaswamy. Photo “Doug Burgum” by Governor Doug Burgum. Photo “Governor Ron DeSantis” by Governor Ron DeSantis. Photo “Mike Pence” by D. Myles Cullen. Photo “Tim Scott” by Tim Scott. Photo “Nikki Haley” by Nikki Haley. Background Photo “U.S. Capitol” by Sobia Akhtar.
