Sometimes the news cycle juxtaposes events in ways that simply cannot be ignored. So it is with Tuesday’s incident over the Black Sea, which came hard on the heels of the disclosure of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ Ukraine Doctrine.
Reaction on either side of the political spectrum to the latter — ranging from Ron DeSantis, just another Putin stooge to Ron DeSantis, political hack — look, generously, misguided in light of Tuesday’s events.
Granted, DeSantis’ take on the United States’ involvement in Russia’s deadly, unprovoked mischief in Ukraine, is a dance on a slender rail. Its attempt to strike a balance between support for Kyiv and putting U.S. personnel in a hot war certainly is too nuanced for today’s all-in hot-take tastes.
While you can read the complete text of DeSantis’ thoughts, provided by request to Fox News nighttime host Tucker Carlson, the essence boils down to this:
America’s vital interests — “securing our borders, addressing the crisis of readiness within our military, achieving energy security and independence, and checking the economic, cultural, and military power of the Chinese Communist Party” — deserve the nation’s fullest attention. A “territorial dispute” between historic antagonists backed in Washington with blank checks and absent time tables, “defined objectives or accountability” necessarily “distracts from our country’s most pressing challenges.”
Americans had similar thoughts about being drawn into European messiness in 1916 and again in 1940. Ultimately, the U.S. did what it had to do; now, as freedom’s foremost watchdog on Planet Earth, the eyes of the globe are on the American people and those who would lead us. Monday, the DeSantis who would be president looked to some important voices as an unserious applicant.
Then came Tuesday, when a pair of Russian military jets harassed, damaged, and ultimately forced down an unarmed U.S. drone performing surveillance over international waters over the Black Sea. And we were drawn back to DeSantis’ hesitation about moves that “would risk explicitly drawing the United States into conflict and drawing us closer to a hot war between the world’s two largest nuclear powers.”
Maybe the Russian pilots were turned loose to further embarrass the current White House occupant, whose direction of policy in and around Ukraine has been hesitant, feckless, and vague. It wouldn’t be the first time Putin mocked U.S. indecision.
Nonetheless, we are reminded of Fred Thompson’s Admiral Josh Painter when a returning warplane crashes into the deck of the USS Enterprise amid rising tensions over the possibility that a Soviet nuclear sub captain had gone rogue:
“This business will get out of control. It’ll get out of control and we’ll be lucky to live through it.”
Admiral Painter’s wisdom notwithstanding, some of DeSantis’ thoughts on the matter give us pause. No “long-range missiles”? What precisely does that mean? American-supplied missiles that can strike Moscow from Kharkiv? Yes, that might be a bad idea. As we’ve lately seen, Russia doesn’t need a threat to be legitimate to flex its paranoia. But no to missiles that could target Russian troops massing just across the border? Hmmm.
Peace should be the objective, “without question”? That could be interpreted to as a rhetorical blank check, a hopelessly weak starting position for any negotiations.
Ideally, Vladimir Putin and his thugocracy would be taught a lesson that liberty-loving nations will neither sit idle while Moscow attempts to reassemble the Soviet empire (sorry about that, Georgia), nor will the resolution of Russian aggression be merely the restoration of borders as they were before the tanks rolled. Ideally — that word again — Putin would put Russian territory at risk every time he ventured across internationally observed cartographer’s lines.
But this isn’t 1919, and nobody wants World War III breaking out over whether Belgorod and Shakhty remain part of the Russian Federation, or join free Ukraine, as payment for Putin’s cold-blooded adventurism.
So, yeah, Ron DeSantis, probable presidential candidate in the near future, will have some elaborating and explaining to do not long after he announces. But the fresh evidence of Russian — which is to say Putin — prickliness deserves notice, which DeSantis’ Ukraine Doctrine provides.
