Vance versus McConnell defines GOP Ukraine fight

First-term Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) and Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) are the faces of the debate over Ukraine that has split the GOP for months and raises the question of who is in charge of the Republican Party.

McConnell has told colleagues he will spend possibly his final two years in Congress attempting to revive the party of Eisenhower and Reagan, and his allies say he is on the cusp of winning this round of the battle with Vance.

But many see in Vance, a leading candidate to be former President Trump’s running mate, the vanguard of a future Republican Party with “America First” advocates in control.

It’s a revolution in some ways for the Republican Party, and one that is not over yet.

“I’ve been in the Senate just long enough to see our conference from one where as Republicans, we were all about defense, we were all about national security, we were all about standing with our allies — deterrence is our best approach,” said Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), who voted to pass the Senate’s defense supplemental spending bill in mid-February. That legislation included support for Ukraine.

“It’s changed. There are more Democrats, it seems, that are now taking up that mantle of national security through alliances with other countries,” she added. “I do know in my conversations that I’ve had with Sen. McConnell since he decided he is not going to run for majority leader. He says, ‘I’m actually relishing the opportunity to spend more time on national security issues.’”

The Senate will vote Tuesday to advance a $95 billion foreign aid package that includes $61 billion for Ukraine, which the House passed over the weekend.

Vance thinks he’s winning the broader argument within the party, which means this could be the last major Ukraine aid package Congress passes.

“Europe needs to step up and the United States needs to focus on Asia. Notwithstanding some lingering cold warriors, we’re winning the debate because reality is on our side,” Vance told The Hill in a statement.

Republicans aligned with Vance say the party isn’t going back to the Teddy Roosevelt and George W. Bush vision of projecting American power around the world.

“It’s nice to have some allies, it’s nice to have Sen. Vance and others,” said Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), a leading Senate proponent of Trump’s America First philosophy.

“Certainly our voters — we’re just not neoconservatives anymore. For a long time, we were really the party of empire-building. Let’s just be honest, that’s what it is. And I don’t think that’s where our voters are,” he said.  

The Senate is widely expected to approve the foreign aid package this week. The bigger question hovering over the power struggle between McConnell and Vance is whether it will get a majority of Senate Republicans.

Twenty-two of 49 Senate Republicans voted for it when it passed the Senate in February, which McConnell at the time hailed as a major victory because Trump was calling GOP senators and urging them to vote against it.

Getting a majority of GOP senators to vote for it Tuesday, now that Trump has softened his opposition to Ukraine funding and Iran attacked Israel with a barrage of drones and missiles, would be a major victory for McConnell.

It would dispel criticisms from fellow Republican senators that he’s out of step with his own party.

One Republican senator, who requested anonymity to talk about the infighting among GOP colleagues over Ukraine, said it was a major problem that a majority of Republican senators didn’t support McConnell’s position in February.

“There is not a majority of the Republican conference in the Senate that wants to vote for stand-alone funding for Ukraine, and I think it’s a problem when the leadership votes with the other party, not with the majority of its own party. To me that isn’t really leadership,” the senator said.

“The notion that you elect a leader and that person has free rein to do whatever they want, those days are over,” the lawmaker added.

Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.) and other McConnell allies, however, say that what’s at stake for the country is what’s most important.

McConnell argues that there has always been a strain of isolationism in the Republican Party and notes that his party tends to mold itself to complement the views of its most prominent leader, who today he acknowledges is Trump.

“We’ve had different periods with different views, and I think they largely reflect whoever the views are of the most prominent Republican,” McConnell told The Hill earlier this year.

McConnell views the war in Ukraine as critical to American national security and warns that letting Russia roll through Ukraine will pose a serious threat to European allies and U.S. economic interests on the continent. And he says it would give a green light for Iranian aggression in the Middle East and Chinese aggression in the Indo-Pacific.

He won a victory with the House passage of the foreign aid package, and perhaps a convert in Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), who moved it through the House despite threats to his job from conservative opponents.

McConnell says Russian President Vladimir Putin will never agree to a negotiated peace settlement if he thinks that the United States will walk away from the war.

“United States leadership remains the essential force behind the peace and prosperity enjoyed by generations of Americans. And this tremendous asset requires our attention and investment,” McConnell said after the House voted Saturday to send the foreign aid package, including Ukraine funding, back to the Senate.

“The task before us is urgent. It is once again the Senate’s turn to make history,” he said.

Tuesday’s vote to advance the package in the Senate puts McConnell on a collision course with Vance, who argued in a New York Times op-ed that “the math on Ukraine doesn’t add up.”

Vance doubled down with a memo circulated to colleagues last week arguing the war is consuming “far more matériel than the United States can produce under any plausible scenario over the coming years” and “kills far more men than Ukraine can mobilize and train over coming years.”

McConnell’s allies say Vance has become the most effective spokesperson for Republicans on Capitol Hill who oppose funding the war in Ukraine because he’s able to make nuanced intellectual arguments and has a level of credibility with the national media that many MAGA conservatives simply lack.

But they say he’s getting his facts wrong about how many PAC-3 interceptors Ukraine needs for its Patriot missile systems and how many 155 mm artillery it needs in its arsenal to hold off Russia. 

Vance argues the $60 billion for Ukraine the Senate will vote on this week is a “fraction” of what it needs to turn the tide of the war.

“Fundamentally, we lack the capacity to manufacture the amount of weapons Ukraine needs us to supply to win the war,” he wrote in the Times.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), a leading Senate defense hawk, chided his freshman colleague Sunday for getting in over his head by making sweeping claims about Ukraine’s needs and the capability of the U.S. industrial base to meet them.

“I challenge JD Vance to go to Ukraine and get a briefing from the Ukrainian military and talk to the Ukrainian people, then tell me what you think,” Graham said on “Fox News Sunday.”

“Quit talking about things you don’t know anything about until you go,” he fumed.

One congressional aide said “there’s a huge difference between the information available to senators who sit on Armed Services, Intelligence, Foreign Relations and to some degree Appropriations and the rest of the conference,” referring to the committees with jurisdiction over national security and foreign policy.

The aide said the biggest flaw with Vance’s memo is that it vastly overstates how many PAC-3 interceptors and artillery shells Ukraine needs to defeat Russian forces on the battlefield, calling it “orders of magnitude off.”

The aide said while Vance says Ukraine is using 160 interceptors a month and needs more than 7 million 155 mm artillery shells per year, classified Pentagon numbers, which are available to senators, reveal that Ukrainian troops are consuming far less material.

“The real number is classified, and it is much smaller,” the source said of the number of artillery shells needed. “So the whole basis of the [Vance] analysis is fundamentally flawed. That makes everything that comes after it sort of pointless.”

The source also said Vance’s assertion that the United States doesn’t have the capacity to supply Ukraine failed to adequately account for weapons being supplied from NATO allies.

But even Vance’s critics acknowledge he’s made a strong argument in highlighting Ukraine’s manpower shortage.

“Ukraine needs more soldiers than it can field, even with draconian conscription policies,” Vance wrote in the Times.

He explained that he’s not calling for capitulation but instead urging President Biden to “broker” a peace deal since his administration has “no viable plan for the Ukrainians to win this war.”

A second congressional aide responded to the criticism of Vance’s memo by noting that all senators have access to classified information and can assess for themselves how many missiles and artillery shells Ukrainian forces need to match Russia.

The aide argued that if proponents of Ukraine funding have a “sliver bullet” to knock down the arguments in the memo, they should unveil it.

Vance’s allies don’t like McConnell’s characterization that they are isolationists in the mold of Sen. Robert Taft (R-Ohio), Washington’s most prominent Republican in the 1940s, who opposed the 1941 Lend-Lease Act, which was critical to Britain’s war effort against the Nazis, and also opposed the formation of NATO.

“Sometimes I read, ‘Oh, the Republicans are becoming isolationist.’ That’s not the case. Our voters are really worried about China, they’re really worried about the border, obviously. You can’t be an isolationist in today’s world,” Hawley said.