For Bonnie Kristian, a Reason contributor and fellow at Defense Priorities, a foreign policy think tank, DeSantis has “a standard Republican record.” He’s been “critical of Pentagon waste but uninterested in reducing military spending, even to balance the budget; skeptical of unchecked foreign aid; reflexively supportive of Israel; willing to subvert civil liberties in the name of fighting terror; critical of U.S. military intervention in Syria under the Obama administration but supportive of it in the Trump years; and prone to framing relations with unreformed Soviet bloc nations—Cuba, North Korea, and especially China—in absolutist, ideological terms,” Kristian wrote in The New York Times in January.
And while the Ukraine war is the most acute and pressing foreign policy issue facing the country right now, Kristian notes that DeSantis seems to be a more serious Iran hawk than Trump ever was. “He talks about [Iran] in very absolutist terms, saying that the United States and Iran have no interests in common,” she said during an appearance on Larison’s Crashing The War Party podcast last week. “It seems plausible that he would be moving back towards not just this dysfunctional, no-active-diplomacy relationship that we have with them right now, but potentially thinking about military intervention there again.”
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