It didn’t escape the notice of conservatives that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell was sporting the colors of his favorite team on the evening of the State of the Union address. Like millions of the virtue signalers on Facebook who replaced the Black Lives Matter or Covid vaccination logos on their profile pictures, McConnell’s blue and yellow tie was a visual manifestation of his belief that support for Ukraine is the “the most important thing going on in the world.”
As President Joe Biden’s astonishing success in getting the Senate Republicans to rubber-stamp his decision to spend more than $100 billion on aid to Ukraine last year demonstrated, the Beltway GOP establishment is just as invested in the war in Ukraine as the Democrats.
Some of it is the product of the vestigial remnants of Reaganite policy toward the Soviet Union, which rightly believed that a willingness to engage and defeat Moscow wherever it sought to expand its reach was necessary. Yet despite the fact that Vladimir Putin dreams of reassembling Stalin’s empire, his Russia doesn’t pose the same threat to the West that the Soviet Union did.
That has been demonstrated by Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. It’s been, to put it mildly, a fiasco that exposed systemic incompetence. Outside the possibility of Biden blundering into a nuclear Third World War scenario, the Russians no longer present a potent threat to an expanding NATO.
Yet Republicans, such as Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., are still sounding the same sort of critique
