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DeFlorida Blueprint: DeSantis finds his foreign policy as he inches toward 2024 run​

by W. James Antle III, Politics Editor |
May 12, 2023 07:00 AM


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DeFlorida Blueprint is a five-part series examining the legislative and policy record of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. As the Florida legislature wraps up its 2023 session, DeSantis is widely expected to declare he is running for the Republican presidential nomination, putting him on a collision course with former President Donald Trump.
The previous installments of this series examined his record on education, healthcare, economic policy, and environmental issues. This part will look at his record on foreign policy.


If Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) runs for president, there will be one major area where his record at the statehouse in Tallahassee will provide limited insight into what he would do in the White House: foreign policy.
Florida governors do have to deal disproportionately with issues involving nearby countries in the hemisphere, especially Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua. But criticism of those three regimes in a post-Cold War era doesn’t necessarily require a comprehensive grand strategy. Nor does DeSantis’s vow to be “the most pro-Israel governor” in the country.
DEFLORIDA BLUEPRINT: HOW DESANTIS HAS PURSUED A TEDDY ROOSEVELT CONSERVATIONIST IMAGE

DeSantis is also emerging as a leader of the Republican Party at a time when its foreign policy views are in flux, with libertarian and populist wings of the GOP challenging the consensus on international issues that existed until former President Donald Trump won the nomination and the White House in 2016.
Earlier this year, DeSantis sought to burnish his international bona fides with travel to Japan, South Korea, and Israel. Governors do often engage in trade missions abroad to drum up business for their states.
“Foreign policy and defense often trip governors up,” a Republican strategist, who requested anonymity to speak candidly, told the Washington Examiner. “DeSantis will be no different.”
The first time DeSantis received major pushback from fellow Republicans as he flirted with a presidential campaign was when he answered questions about his view of the war in Ukraine. Both his characterization of the Russian invasion as a “territorial dispute” less vital to American national security interests than China or border security and the venue for his comments — the television show hosted by Tucker Carlson, then still with Fox News, who is the most prominent conservative critic of United States involvement in the war effort — were seen as a major statement of his foreign policy views.

Not all of it was positive. The Wall Street Journal editorial board decried DeSantis’s Ukraine comments as a “puzzling surrender to the Trumpian temptation of American retreat.”
“Mr. DeSantis has sounded more hawkish notes on Russia in the past, and the press will play those up as contradictions,” the editorial continued. “This could become less a policy issue than a matter of character. What does Ron DeSantis believe, anyway?”
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) initially compared DeSantis to Neville Chamberlain. Former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley, a declared candidate for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, said DeSantis was just copying Trump and invoked a longtime conservative movement slogan, taken from a 1964 Phyllis Schlafly book boosting Barry Goldwater, that “Republicans deserve a choice, not an echo.” She told Carlson, “America is far better off with a Ukrainian victory than a Russian victory, including avoiding a wider war."
Trump agreed with Haley, at least about the echo. “It is a flip-flop,” he told reporters during an Iowa campaign swing. “He was totally different. Whatever I want, he wants.”

DeSantis subsequently clarified that he wanted Ukraine to prevail and that Russian President Vladimir Putin was, in his view, guilty of war crimes, a characterization Trump just this week resisted as diplomatically counterproductive. But his allies say detractors are oversimplifying his views on foreign policy for political purposes.
They maintain that DeSantis’s foreign policy views were honed during his time in the military, during which he fought in Iraq. The now-44-year-old has a voting record on these issues from his time in Congress, which included a six-year stint on the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
There are examples of both hawkish and restraint-oriented tendencies from DeSantis’s time in the House. A fierce critic of China, Cuba, and Venezuela, he opposed former President Barack Obama’s proposed 2013 military intervention in Syria and the idea of training and supplying Syrian rebels on the grounds because “mujahideen fighters in Syria are not moderates nor are they pro-American.”
But DeSantis also voted for a resolution pressing Obama to “provide Ukraine with lethal defensive weapon systems to enhance the ability of the people of Ukraine to defend their sovereign territory from the unprovoked and continuing aggression of the Russian Federation," a stance seen by critics as at variance with his Tucker Carlson Tonight comments. Like most Republicans, he opposed Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran, from which Trump removed the U.S.
“I constantly hear people say Americans are war-weary, and I disagree with that. I think Americans are willing to do what it takes to defend our people and our nation,” DeSantis said in the House during a debate on fighting the Islamic State in 2014. “They are weary of missions launched without a coherent strategy and are sick of seeing engagements that produce inconclusive results rather than clear-cut victory.”
The tensions were apparent in 2017 comments about the war in Afghanistan, as he questioned whether things were much better than when the Taliban was overthrown. “Is Afghanistan on the brink of becoming a terrorist’s dream again? Are we making the same mistakes over and over again? Should we just be done with this entire Godforsaken place?” he asked. “Or should we be concerned that ISIS now has a dangerous affiliate, ISIS-K, in Afghanistan, that aspires to reach out and strike the U.S. homeland? How do we get this right? Or can we?”
In a rare bit of agreement between the last two commanders in chief, Trump and President Joe Biden both concluded the answer to the last question was no. But the chaos that followed Biden’s 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan was widely denounced by Republican hawks — and Trump.
DeSantis has been described as a “Jacksonian” who wants a strong military used sparingly and unsentimental. In his recent book The Courage To Be Free, he rejected the “messianic impulse” he said animated the foreign policy of former President George W. Bush.
“Bush sketched out a view for American foreign policy that constituted Wilsonianism on steroids,” DeSantis wrote. He took a swing at Bush’s second inaugural address, which attempted to cast the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as a global fight for freedom and the transformation of the Middle East. “I remember being stunned,” DeSantis wrote. “Does the survival of American liberty depend on whether liberty succeeds in Djibouti?”
These are more eloquent versions of the arguments Trump made in rejecting Bush’s foreign policy, including calling the Iraq war a mistake on the debate stage in military-heavy South Carolina shortly before winning the primary and ending Bush’s brother’s campaign.
But Bush could also be a cautionary tale for governors running for president trying to map out a foreign policy. During his 2000 campaign, Bush talked about a “humble foreign policy” and the need to have an “exit strategy” before entering a military conflict. At the time, Bush was navigating a GOP split on foreign policy and trying to stop conservative votes from being siphoned off by anti-interventionist Reform Party nominee Pat Buchanan. After 9/11, however, Bush delivered a much different foreign policy.
Trump has tried to cast DeSantis as a Trojan horse who apes populist and “America First” positions on the campaign trail but who, once elected, will revert to Bush Republicanism. Foreign policy is a big part of that critique, although DeSantis’s positions are further from Bush’s than those of Haley or former Vice President Mike Pence, who both served under Trump.
DeSantis’s position on border security is clearer from his time as governor. He bused migrants to the wealthy liberal enclave of Martha’s Vineyard in protest of Biden’s border policies and was heartily condemned by the White House for using them as “political pawns.”
“We’ve had periods where we had high immigration levels that we have had success. We’ve also had periods where we have great success with immigration levels being very low, such as … [in] the decades after World War II,” DeSantis told the National Conservatism Conference in Miami, a populist Right gathering that first gained influence under Trump. “So the issue is, how does immigration serve the people of the United States and the national interest? We’re not globalists who believe that foreigners have a right to come into our country whenever they want to.”
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
If DeSantis enters the race for the GOP nomination in the coming weeks, as is widely expected, his team of foreign policy advisers will begin to take shape, giving more clues to how he would engage with the world.
For now, DeSantis is focused on exporting his Florida values to other states.
 
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