DeSantis Isn’t at Home Abroad
The governor is strong on domestic policy, but is he up to the challenge of a suddenly menacing world?
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Barton Swaim
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Oct. 22, 2023 4:10 pm ET
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Republican presidential candidate and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis participates in a campaign event at Anderson University in Anderson, S.C., Oct. 19. PHOTO: ERIK S LESSER/SHUTTERSTOCK
Murrells Inlet, S.C.
Richard Nixon was famously bored by domestic policy. “I’ve always thought the country could run itself domestically without a president,” he once told an interviewer. “All you need is a competent cabinet to run the country at home. You need a president for foreign policy.” Ron DeSantis might say the opposite. Ask him any question on domestic policy and he can offer a seminar. Foreign policy clearly bores him.
His book, “The Courage to Be Free,” treats the major issues of his years as Florida’s governor—crime, education, corporate activism, public health—with technical mastery and rhetorical sophistication. His few remarks on foreign affairs suggest a need for intellectual cloture. He calls George W. Bush’s foreign policy “Wilsonianism on steroids.” When Mr. Bush said in his Second Inaugural that “the survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands,” Mr. DeSantis, then 27, reports asking himself: “Does the survival of American liberty depend on whether liberty succeeds in Djibouti?”
As a presidential candidate, he has talked more about what the U.S. shouldn’t be doing than what it should. Hamas’s invasion of Israel made that approach impracticable. Nikki Haley, who has emerged as Mr. DeSantis’s chief rival for the coveted position of Donald Trump’s leading challenger, likely benefits most from the sudden salience of foreign policy. She was United Nations ambassador for two years, and unlike most U.N. ambassadors performed memorably.
On a swing last week through South Carolina—which holds its primary on Feb. 24—Mr. DeSantis began every talk by discussing Israel, although he mostly confined himself to points of domestic significance: the media’s perfidy in falsely characterizing an explosion in a Gaza hospital as an Israeli attack, the threat of terrorists’ crossing the U.S. southern border, the unwisdom of “importing” Gaza refugees.
Mr. DeSantis believes the greatest threat to U.S. national security is China. On Thursday at Anderson University, he acknowledged that the war in Israel could inflame the Middle East, and that the “conflict in Europe”—he prefers not to say “Ukraine”—could expand westward. But “we have one true global threat to this country, and that is the Chinese Communist Party.” Yet even his discussion of the Chinese threat had mainly to do with homeland policies: barring the Chinese government from purchasing U.S. land, “disentangling” the American and Chinese economies.
Mr. DeSantis is a gifted rhetorician. There are few domestic-policy questions on which he isn’t prepared to give a coherent multipart answer. Only on foreign policy does he rely on ham-fisted conventional-wisdom talking points.
At a Thursday town hall in Rock Hill, a questioner asked why the governor had said in March that aiding Ukraine in its war with Russia was strategically unimportant. Mr. DeSantis interrupted with a correction: What he said was that it was of “secondary or tertiary” importance. (The questioner had it right. In a response to a candidate survey from Tucker Carlson, Mr. DeSantis wrote that “while the U.S. has many vital national interests . . . becoming further entangled in a territorial dispute between Ukraine and Russia is not one of them.”)
Mr. DeSantis then told the questioner that President Biden has given Ukraine a “blank check”—the most shopworn metaphor in this debate—and that “a lot of Republican senators don’t articulate, you know, how do you have an endgame in a conflict?” He went on: “Because what they’re doing is not gonna get where their rhetoric is. . . . Look, some of our Republican senators, they want to bomb everywhere. That’s their view.”
Later that night, in an onstage interview at a gathering of Republican women in Rock Hill, Mr. DeSantis was asked about aid to Israel. “We support their right to defend themselves,” he said. “But it’s their war, it’s not our war.” Part of what he meant was that the U.S. shouldn’t constrain Israel’s response. He’s right about that. But had he forgotten that Hamas murdered Americans on Oct. 7, and that some of the hostages now held by Hamas are Americans?
As for the war in Ukraine, Mr. DeSantis recited the usual objection: “They haven’t put a clear objective to it. It’s kind of a stalemate.” That’s true as far as it goes, but the result of that haphazard policy is that the Russian military is grinding itself to dust in Ukraine.
To be fair, avoiding substantive discussions of foreign policy may be the smarter political play. The GOP is badly divided on the Ukraine question; most voters don’t hold strong, consistent views on foreign policy; and campaign positions are often overtaken by events, both before and after the election.
On Friday morning, some 300 people crammed into a small VFW in Murrells Inlet, south of Myrtle Beach. Some were turned away, as per fire-marshal regulations. Mr. DeSantis was running more than an hour late, so I had time to canvas listeners on why they’d come. About half said they supported Mr. Trump, chiefly because prosecutors had targeted him so relentlessly that to vote against him didn’t feel right. “He’s been needled over and over,” one woman said. “It’s wrong, and I just think I can’t let them do that.” Her presence at a DeSantis event, though, suggested her mind wasn’t made up.
Mr. DeSantis spoke for nearly an hour and took questions for another 30 minutes. Ukraine didn’t come up. Nobody asked what he’d do if China invaded Taiwan on his watch. They asked about woke companies, rogue school boards, DEI and prosecutors backed by George Soros. Mr. DeSantis, standing on a dais in his usual blue suit, tieless white shirt and black cowboy boots, kept the room rapt.
On the way out, the woman who’d spoken of prosecutors needling Donald Trump grabbed my elbow. “I’ve changed my vote,” she said. “That was incredible.” Another person said the same, in almost the same words.
Mr. DeSantis’s impatience with foreign policy may alienate some donor-class friends. I find it frustrating. But I wouldn’t discount his ability to talk uncommitted voters into joining his side. You need a president for foreign policy, as Nixon said, but Ron DeSantis’s message—that he’s done it in Florida and he can do it in Washington—may hold more appeal than simple poll questions can foretell.
