As Jacob Heilbrunn explains at Politico, isolationist Republicans held an “Up From Chaos” conference at the Marriott Marquis hotel in downtown Washington on Thursday to discuss on an “emergency” basis the conflict in Ukraine.
The young men, almost all of them soberly dressed in dark suits, and women, almost uniformly wearing dresses, listened attentively as one speaker after another warned about the perils of intervention for their very own lives. A return to the thinking that led to Iraq and Afghanistan could result in nothing less than World War III over Ukraine, they were warned.
Obviously, Vladimir Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine and blast its cities into oblivion has created a new political cost to being pro-Russia, anti-NATO, and anti-interventionist in general. But the organizers of the conference are playing for more than a solid defense in the current news cycle.
The participants generally described themselves as “realists” and “restrainers,” and the meeting featured what amounted to realist royalty — politicians and thinkers, ranging from GOP Sen. Rand Paul (Ky.) and Reps. Thomas Massie (Ky.), Dan Bishop (N.C.) and Matt Rosendale (Mont.) to Michael Anton, Sohrab Ahmari, Mollie Z. Hemingway, and, of course, [J.D.] Vance. It was organized by the American Conservative magazine and American Moment, whose self-described mission is to “identify, educate, and credential young Americans who will implement public policy that supports strong families, a sovereign nation, and prosperity for all,” and which features Vance on its board of advisers. Their explicit aim is to create a young counter-establishment to the hawkish national security network that has flourished in Washington over the past several decades, one that could funnel ideologically reliable appointees into a future Trump, DeSantis, Cruz or Hawley administration.
Pitting themselves as the ideological opposites of the Neo-Conservatives who brought us the Iraq War and interminable occupation of Afghanistan, these folks might find an attentive audience on the left. But since they’re to the right or far-right on nearly every social issue, for most progressives, they’ll never be more than situational allies on specific votes, largely confined to foreign policy or military spending issues.
The truth is, these folks are espousing views that are so tightly aligned with the Kremlin that it’s hard to not to suspect them of being funded by Russian intelligence.
Russ Vought, the president of the Center for Renewing America and the director of the Office of Management and Budget under Trump, for example, complained about the “bombardment of the neocon moment that we are in.” For Vought, Ukraine seemed to be a sideshow. The real question, he said, is, “Why haven’t we brought our troops home from Europe? These are the questions that leaders should be considering.”
Putin has worked diligently for decades to create divisions in the Western alliance and to weaken NATO and the European Union. At his peak, he watched America elect Donald Trump and the United Kingdom opt for a BREXIT from the E.U., while simultaneously seeing governments from Budapest to Rome become rife with Russia sympathizers.
He appears to have badly overstepped with his decision to invade Ukraine, however, and it has immediately unraveled all his progress. The West has not been this united since the early 1990’s, and there’s no longer any debate about the importance of NATO. Still, this unity is tenuous, and Putin can make a pretty strong comeback if the Republicans, led by the Rand Paul/Josh Hawley wing of isolationists, win the midterm elections as widely expected.
The truth is that there are more options than being a Putin fan-boy on the one hand, and a violence-addicted Neo-Conservative on the other. You can be in favor of a strong, united and pro-democracy West without wanting to invade random countries in the Middle East or spend decades occupying Central Asian outposts. Even at the lowest level of ideological commitment, you can simply be opposed to violations of the international order where one country invades another and reduces its infrastructure to rubble based on the most transparent (de-nazification) lies.
In other words, simply positioning yourself as the enemy of Neo-conservatism doesn’t make you right, nor does finding some limited common ground with the war hawks make you wrong.
The surest sign that you’re wrong right now is if you sound like an organ of the Kremlin’s propaganda machine, and that’s precisely how the folks at the Up From Chaos conference sound to me. It’s hard to say how witting they are about this, but they’re giving aid and comfort to Putin, and they’re most likely going to have a lot more power in Congress and in the Republican Party after the November elections.
It’s a big concern.
