Ukraine Negotiations Highlight GOP Pivot Away From Bush Era Foreign Policy

“Reagan would be rolling in his tomb,” Rep. Don Bacon told RealClearPolitics of the plan before turning his ire toward the vice president, now the standard-bearer of America First realpolitik. The Nebraska Republican found it “bothersome” for JD Vance to ask “‘why would Republicans care about Ukraine?’”

“Well, we care about national security,” Bacon said, answering his own question. “We learned in the 1930s that isolationism does not work.”

Bacon has emerged as one of the more vocal pro-Ukrainian lawmakers. A retired Air Force general, he even considered resigning early from the House in protest, a move that would eat further into Speaker Mike Johnson’s slim majority. He does not plan to seek reelection in 2026 and, in the meantime, has sharpened his words for the Trump administration, accusing them of “sounding like Neville Chamberlain in 1938” and of “checkers playing” when geopolitical chess is required. He says that Vance has “a weak argument” on the Ukraine question and complains that the NATO skeptics in the administration “act like they know more than Eisenhower.”

Those words are as sharp as they are rare these days. Republicans are not in the habit of crossing Trump or Vance, his apprentice and presumed successor. A Vance spokesman declined to comment when asked about the Bacon criticism.

The vice president did react generally, however, to dissent in the ranks, accusing “the beltway GOP” of elevating Ukrainian issues over more domestic ones like crime and affordable housing. “The political class is really angry that the Trump administration may finally bring a four-year conflict in Eastern Europe to a close,” Vance wrote in a social media post Tuesday.

“Putin has spent the entire year trying to play President Trump for a fool. If Administration officials are more concerned with appeasing Putin than securing real peace, then the President ought to find new advisors,” Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell said in the statement on Friday.

“Rewarding Russian butchery would be disastrous to America’s interests,” the former Senate majority leader added.

The old hawks are fighting a losing battle in many ways, their arguments amounting to little more than rearguard action. President Trump ran on a promise to wrap up the war in Ukraine, and all of his lieutenants, from Vance to Secretary of State Marco Rubio and White House special envoy Steve Witkoff, are united in their mission.

“As a senator from America, I believe our core national interests involve protecting the homeland and our hemisphere while focusing, in a much more meaningful way, on China,” said Missouri Sen. Eric Schmitt. A new kind of Republican, Schmitt has stepped into the role that Vance and Rubio recently occupied in the Senate before decamping to the administration. Their elevation after the last presidential election, Schmitt told RCP, is further evidence that “the realist perspective is the ascending foreign policy view of the Republican Party. It is where the real people are at.”

The old dogmas that defined the Cold War are no longer applicable, Schmitt argues. The enemies and the world they inhabit are different. What is needed now, and what the U.S. delegation is focused on, he says, “are the realities on the ground.” The Missouri Republican said that while Ukraine had fought “valiantly,” that fledgling democracy remains “outmanned” by Russia. Hence, the need for compromise, peace, and an end to “the meatgrinder” of a war that has claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands.

“The American people have grown tired of forever wars, blank checks, and this Wilsonian adventurism that believes America can be everywhere, all at once, all the time,” Schmitt said. “The 21st Century will be defined by who wins this great power competition – the United States of America or communist China.”

The White House grew weary of the land war in Europe long ago, with frustration alternating between Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Russian leader Vladimir Putin. The talk from Schmitt about defending the homeland and the Western Hemisphere reflects the new, closer-to-home priorities of this administration. Nevertheless, there is a feeling that perhaps the weekend talks in Geneva could finally bear fruit and bring the conflict to a close.

The proposed plan requires, among other things, that Ukraine cap the size of its military at 600,000 troops and agree never to join NATO. It requires Russia, in turn, to agree not to invade neighboring nations in exchange for reintegration into the world economy. Critics contend that the details, which are not final, lean heavily in Russia’s favor.

Zelensky has agreed to the framework, though he qualified that “much work” remains ahead. He offered to fly to Mar-a-Lago to meet with Trump over the Thanksgiving holiday. Previously, the administration threatened to cut off aid if Ukraine did not agree to come to the table.

“The nature of any kind of compromise is that not everyone will get what they want,” Schmitt said. “But the goal here is to end the war and bring about peace.” Critics will have their say, but from the beginning of the Biden administration until now, he argued, “the only thing that they’re espousing is that somehow this war needs to go on in perpetuity.”

“When you’re dealing with these issues of war and peace, you have to be honest about where you’re at,” the senator said of the situation on the ground, “and I think right now is the optimal time for the parties to come to an agreement and end this war.”

Bacon took a more dour perspective. He has been on the phone with foreign ambassadors since details of the plan dropped. His early assessment: “Our allies are wondering, can they count on America? And right now, their confidence is shaken.”

Turning his attention back to the vice president, Bacon said, “For someone like Vance, if he thinks he is going to be a serious candidate in 2028, and he’s really saying, ‘Why would Republicans care about Ukraine, well a lot of Reagan Republicans won’t vote for that kind of guy.”

“It means Republicans will be a losing party for a while, until we regain some kind of new identity,” he concluded. “But there’s people like me, and we’re not going to go away.”