As Ohio Goes, So Goes the World?

Why Vladimir Putin might be paying close attention to this year’s Republican primaries

It might be interesting to know if Vladimir Putin got up at 5 a.m. on Wednesday to learn that J.D. Vance had won the Republican Senate primary in Ohio.

It would make sense for the Russian leader, whose invasion of Ukraine has not been greeted with the sunshine on his shoulders he expected, to do so. Aside from Ukraine, foreign policy hasn’t received much media or political attention as the political season has come around again (if it ever left), but the outcome of the primaries in Ohio and elsewhere could change the course of U.S. foreign policy, especially toward Russia.

If Vance’s victory is accompanied by fellow Trump camp followers, coupled with possible Republican takeovers of the House and Senate in November and the reluctance of sitting Republican members of Congress to stand up to Trump, could mean a return to an American First foreign policy that’s soft on Russia, averse to alliances, treaties and tackling global warming and big on tariffs and barriers to immigration.

A repudiation of other Trump-backed candidates, coupled with Russia’s mounting atrocities in Ukraine, could have the opposite effect, helping sustain the Biden administration’s support for Ukraine and a return to the principles that have governed most of American foreign policy since the end of World War II.

The real battle, though, isn’t between Republicans and Democrats. It’s between the waning and often cowering cadre of traditional Republicans and the nascent-for-now Trumpublicans such as Vance.

The postwar foreign policy that Trump and his allies have consigned to the ashheap of history was constructed and maintained by Republican presidents from Dwight D. Eisenhower to Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford to Ronald Reagan and both George Bushes. With some exceptions, most of it rested on a bipartisan foundation through the Democratic presidencies of John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.

“Since the end of the Second World War, Republican foreign policy was best characterized as taking a ‘realist’ approach to international affairs,” Ambassador Mitchell Reiss, who served in the National Security Council and the State Department in three GOP administrations, wrote last year for Britain’s Royal United Services Institute think tank. “This meant support for a strong military, for working closely with allies, partners and friends around the world, for free trade, and for defending human rights and promoting democracy.”

That policy produced its share of disasters, in Cuba, Vietnam and Iraq, for example, and it failed to produce a broader peace between Israel and its neighbors or resilient democracies in countries ranging from Hungary to the Philippines. However, it also deterred nuclear war, at least until now, and opened the door to relations, albeit troubled, between what are now the world’s two greatest economic powers, the U.S. and China.

That’s not to say that U.S. foreign policy doesn’t need an overall after 75 years, the rise of America’s first peer or near-peer competitor in China, the Age of Technology and myriad other factors that have replaced the bipolar Cold War world.

But then along came Donald Trump, who made hay where the Sun didn’t shine — in the large swaths of flyover America where neither political party nor corporate America nor the news media paid much attention to the human costs of, among other things, offshoring not just jobs, but entire industries, along with what we now call supply chains.

As Reiss explained it: “A Trump-oriented foreign policy sees a much darker, more zero-sum world. International cooperation is a ruse and a means for other countries to take advantage of the US’s gullibility and generosity; alliances are a cover for free-riding allies who don’t appreciate the US’s sacrifices and never pay their fair share.”

True to his word for once, Trump abandoned the Paris climate accord, the effort to negotiate an end to Iran’s nuclear weapons program and the Trans Pacific Partnership trade deal.

For reasons that are more mysterious but might be about nothing more than the natural affinity of a wannabe autocrat for the real thing, Trump warmed to Putin, even taking the Russian leader’s word about meddling in the 2016 presidential election over that of America’s and some of its European allies’ intelligence agencies.

His genuflection to Putin even survived the initial invasion of Ukraine, which Trump called “genius” and “pretty savvy”.

Only in Russia can those words be used to describe what’s happening in Ukraine now, but Vance and other Republican primary candidates who’ve kissed Trump’s ring can be grateful that foreign policy has been eclipsed by issues such as inflation, COVID and suddenly abortion rights that are much closer to home and easier to explain or exploit.

Putin, however, may be paying close attention to the Republican primaries for his own reason. Maybe he’s hoping that if he can reduce his botched invasion to a summer simmer, a Trumpublican return to power in the Senate and House of Representatives will undermine both American leadership and the pesky NATO alliance and allow him to resume his effort to oust Volodymyr Zelensky — who after all failed to help Trump win the 2020 election.