Ron DeSantis isn’t even a declared presidential candidate yet, but his skeptical stand over the war in Ukraine means the Republican campaign is already revolving around him.
The Florida’s governor’s warning this week that the war is a mere “territorial” dispute that is not a core US national interest forced his potential 2024 Republican rivals to respond – and earned condemnation from some concerned and puzzled GOP lawmakers. It also focused attention on President Joe Biden’s multi-billion dollar lifeline of missiles, tanks and ammunition to Kyiv, raising the possibility that the war could become a major fault-line in the Republican primary race and next year’s general election.
And in a striking scene Wednesday that reflected a suddenly enlivened debate over US policy, the nation’s top military officer and the secretary of defense spelled out in robust language why Americans should care about Russian President Vladimir Putin’s onslaught.
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley and Secretary Lloyd Austin might have delivered their full-throated defense of Biden’s strategy even had DeSantis not spiced up the political debate over Ukraine. But their specific spelling out of the rationale for US support for President Volodymyr Zelensky’s government – which took place the day after a Russian jet downed a US drone over the Black Sea – took on extra significance in light of DeSantis’ comments. And it came across as an implicit rebuke of a governor who lacks foreign policy experience and who hasn’t laid out a specific worldview he might advance in higher office.
Milley argued that the conflict in Ukraine could hardly be more important to the interests of the United States and free people across the world.
“This is and remains a Russian frontal assault on the rules-based international order that has been in place…
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