“What absolutely infuriates me is that you have policymakers from both parties enabling this and normalizing this type of behavior. It is absolutely inappropriate to enable a foreign leader, in the middle of a hotly contested election, to come the United States and effectively campaign against one of the major party candidates,” Dan Caldwell, public policy advisor at Defense Priorities, told The Federalist in an interview.
“I don’t blame Zelensky for trying to manipulate our politics. I don’t think it’s right, I don’t think that the United States should be continuing to almost unconditionally support Zelensky, but at the same time, the United States is the biggest single funder of the war in Ukraine, and so I don’t blame him for trying to achieve a political outcome that in his mind will benefit his country.”
The cognitive dissonance among Republicans, with some skeptical of Ukraine funding and others fully embracing the foreign war, is a window into a bygone era, where some Republicans are trapped in a Cold War mindset, Caldwell explained.
“It’s representative of the larger divide within the conservative movement on foreign policy. There are still far too many Republicans who think it is 1983 and think that Russia is still the Soviet Union, and that therefore anybody who is fighting Russia is somebody that we need to effectively support unconditionally,” he said. “Their brains are stuck in an era that has long passed us by, and I think that is driving a lot of the behavior you are seeing from some Republicans who still want to hold up Zelensky as the savior of Western democracy.”
“This is a guy who’s become more authoritarian, he’s effectively ruling through martial law, he’s outlawed political parties, shut down certain media outlets,” Caldwell added. “They’re engaging in mass conscription, literally grabbing young men off the streets and sending them to the front to fight. Just like any society that is in war for [an] extended period of time, Ukraine is becoming more illiberal.”
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