Page Text: Bradley Devlin
Just three days after the last debate almost came to blows in a heated standoff between Josh Mandel and Mike Gibbons, the Republican candidates for senate in Ohio once again took to the debate stage. Some of the candidates desperately tried to get in the good graces of Republican voters by not only proclaiming what they’d supposedly done for President Donald Trump—who has yet to give his sought-after endorsement—but what they’d be willing to do for Ukraine. Except for J.D. Vance, the answers from all of the candidates regarding Ukraine should be all but disqualifying.
Mandel, who delivers every line as if he’s reading from a cringeworthy Boomer Facebook post, asserted that conservatives and Republicans who do not think Ukraine is of America’s vital national interest are “out of touch.”
“We should care about what’s happening there because Vladimir Putin is a thug. He is an authoritarianism,” Mandel claimed before correcting himself. “He is a leader in authoritarianism.” Aside from sending defense systems, such as Avengers and Patriots, to Ukraine, Mandel said the Biden administration “completely screwed up the deal with Poland and the MiGs.”
The deal Mandel is referencing was a jet exchange program in which the U.S. would provide Poland with F-16s if Poland gave some of its MiG-29s to Ukraine, which likely would have required equipment overhauls for Ukrainian pilots to fly them in the first place. But the Russian Ministry of Defense has previously stated that countries who provide Ukrainians with jets and access to airfields would be considered an overt intervention in the war in Ukraine. Such a move likely leads to war with Russia.
As a follow up, one of the debate moderators asked Mandel if he would support a no-fly zone. Mandel said he would “if the Europeans can create a no-fly zone,” but added “I do not think we should be putting American boys and girls in the air because if that happens they need to be prepared to have air fights with Russian MiGs.”
The question of what to do about Ukraine was then posed to Gibbons, who monotony replied, “I think we need to arm them [the Ukrainians] to the teeth.” With regards to a no-fly zone, Gibbons said, “If the Europeans do it, but it can’t be American pilots.”
But, as Mandel admitted, a no-fly zone would surely lead to fire fights with Russian jets or anti-air weapons. Would the European countries imposing this no-fly zone be NATO members that would surely invoke Article 5 when one of their pilots gets blown out of the sky? If not, then what European country outside of NATO has the military capabilities to even attempt to impose a no-fly zone? Moldova? Sweden? The Austrians, Swiss, or the Serbs? These nations don’t have the capabilities, much less the desire, to inject themselves into the current conflict by declaring a no-fly zone over Ukraine. Ultimately, a no-fly zone declared and enforced by the Europeans (read other NATO members) rather than the U.S. leads to the same result: America at war with Russia.
Jane Timken delivered her statement even more robotically than Gibbons and said that “we should not have American pilots flying in Ukraine,” but didn’t specify whether or not she’d support the newfangled idea of a European no-fly zone. “What we should be doing is providing the MiGs from Poland that Volodymyr Zelensky has requested.”
“That is peace through strength,” Timken, with all the passion of a glitchy mother automaton, claimed. Over the course of the debate Timken tossed out her prepared invocation of President Ronald Reagan’s foreign policy catchphrase so many times I lost count.
Matt Dolan, an Ohio state senator and part-owner of the baseball team formerly known as the Cleveland Indians, said that he’s not for a no-fly zone for the time being. “But as a U.S. senator you engage with your generals, you engage with intelligence to find out if it would actually work,” Dolan said a day after the 19th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
Of course, when have the generals and intelligence ever been wrong?
When the moderator asked Vance what to do about Ukraine, Vance replied, “first of all, we should absolutely not support a no-fly zone.”
“It sounds nice, like we asked the Russians not to fly planes over Ukraine,” Vance went on to say. “What it means in practice is American Marine Corps pilots, Air Force pilots, Navy pilots getting in dogfights with Russian jets.”
Vance then took aim at Putin and the Republican establishment:
It’s tragic. It’s terrible. What Vladimir Putin did was wrong in invading a sovereign country on his border, but we have our own problems in the United States to focus on. I’m very distressed, frankly, that for four years congressional Republicans refused to give Donald Trump $4 billion for a border wall. $4 billion for a border wall when fentanyl was pouring into our country, killing our citizens by the tens of thousands. In one week they gave Joe Biden $14 billion for Ukrainian aid. What I would do in this moment is condition further Ukrainian aid on support for our border and support for our problems. People always say we can walk and chew gum at the same time. Let’s actually do it.
After nearly every candidate at one point or another tried to attack Vance for his previous comments about what happens to Ukraine, the moderator saw it fit to ask Vance about his comments yet again. “You have said, and I’m quoting here ‘I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another,’ but isn’t it the job of the United States senator to care about our allies and our foreign policy?”
It’s worth noting that while the U.S. has been friendly with the Ukrainian government, especially since 2014, that the U.S. does not have any commitment to defend Ukraine’s territorial integrity in treaty form.
“To be clear,” Vance replied, “I said I don’t care about it relative to other interests that are in our vital National security interests—our southern border crisis, our inflation crisis—these are much bigger problems for the leaders of this country.”
Vance added:
We have to be statesmen about this. What is happening is of course a tragedy, but how does it affect the vital national interests of this country. All of these guys have said in some variety that we should be doing something. Well does that something mean getting ourselves involved in a war in Ukraine? Because this nonstop escalation will eventually lead there if we’re not smart about it.
Of course, Ohio Republicans should not be Ukraine one-issue voters when it comes time to go to the ballot box on May 3. But what Republican candidates say about Ukraine in Ohio’s senate race, or any other Republican primary this year, is a good barometer for how firmly they grasp what being “America First” actually means. Responses like those given by Mandel, Gibbons, and Timken Monday not only betray a candidate’s failure to understand the nature of the conflict in Ukraine, but what’s truly afflicting America’s middle and working class—our porous southern border, skyrocketing energy and food prices, failing public schools, an economy dominated by left-wing multinationals, and the collapse of the family.
Four of the five candidates on the debate stage in Cleveland on Monday are willing to pull out all the stops for Ukraine, but only one seems focused on delivering for Americans.
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