While much of American politics in the 21st century has been dominated by foreign policy, the past two and a half years have not. The hysterical government response to Covid-19 forced Americans to shift their focus back home and grapple with basic questions of liberty in the face of an increasingly totalitarian state.
Former President Trump has a checkered record at best on Covid. While he maintains to this day locking down American “saved millions of lives,” he did ultimately leave that decision to the states, administratively, if not financially.
Unfortunately, while Republican governors were generally less severe in imposing lockdown policies and tended to begin easing them more quickly than Democratic governors, very few took a principled stand. Exceptions that rule were Governors Kristi Noem of South Dakota and Ron DeSantis of Florida.
Noem deserves top honors on principle for never locking down her state a single day. She also took the most libertarian approach to Covid vaccines, neither mandating them nor prohibiting businesses or other private organizations from mandating them on their own property.
DeSantis was the first governor to drop all statewide Covid restrictions and was more willing to use government power against the private sector in both prohibiting vaccine mandates and in combatting “woke” cultural issues according to the preferences of his supporters.
Both Noem and DeSantis were rewarded with landslides in 2022 after having won much narrower victories in 2018. Both correctly cited their stands for individual liberty during the pandemic as political risks that paid off in their acceptance speeches.
While Noem’s policies were much purer on these grounds, DeSantis is the governor of a much more populous and politically important state. Unsurprisingly, he has emerged as a credible challenger to Donald Trump for the 2024 Republican nomination for president.
Having listened to DeSantis’ stirring victory speech on November 9, I couldn’t help wondering what a DeSantis presidency might look like. While DeSantis is certainly a more polished politician and more disciplined person than Trump, and while I would have rather lived in Florida in January 2021 than California, I couldn’t help being concerned about DeSantis’ foreign policy instincts.
Like Governor Noem, DeSantis has had few opportunities to opine on foreign policy. Also, like Noem, DeSantis has on those occasions spouted generic, establishment rhetoric about the threat China represents.
More telling is DeSantis’ record in Congress, to which he was elected as a veteran and supporter of the Iraq War. DeSantis opposed Obama’s war ambitions in Syria, as did a lot of Republicans just because it was Obama. Otherwise, he sounded much more like a neocon.
He supported President Trump’s decision not to withdraw from Afghanistan in 2017 making all the arguments one might expect from any establishment Republican. DeSantis certainly isn’t Liz Cheney or Adam Kinzinger, but he’s no Rand Paul, either.
Neither is Donald Trump, one would correctly argue, but here is the rub. Trump seems to have a genuine aversion to war that not only exceeds that of most of the politicians in his party, but even that of most of his supporters.
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Tom Mullen is the author of It’s the Fed, Stupid and Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From? And What Ever Happened to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness?
