There are no atheists in the foxholes and few isolationists in high office.
Faced with sobering briefings revealing that Ukraine is on the brink of collapse, President Mike Johnson made the jump from Benton, Louisiana (pop. 2,048) from congressman to caretaker of the transatlantic alliance.
“It was intelligence, it was the European generals who are in charge of the freedom of the world and of course it was also the developments, everything intensified,” Johnson told me, referring to the conversations that he had with the American top brass. to European command.
If these developments, namely Ukraine running out of weapons, finally brought home the president’s urgency, his decision to call the vote on foreign aid on Saturday brought a bracing dose of political clarity to Washington.
The Republican Party is moving away from its Reaganite past, but faced with the burden of leadership, it still has muscle memory; Donald Trump is more attached to his personal interest than to any ideological anchor and can be managed accordingly; and bipartisanship remains possible when bad actors are removed from the negotiating table.
It may seem difficult to reconcile the congressman who, just in September, opposed $300 million in aid to Ukraine with the one who put his career on the line to deliver $95 billion to that country bruised.
It’s easier to understand when you realize that Johnson grew up in the shadow of the B-52s at Barksdale Air Force Base in the 1980s. He is a Republican from the “Red Dawn” generation. It took higher-level briefings to congressional leaders for him to return to this old Cold War song.
Reminder: While Johnson dragged his feet for months on introducing the aid bill, he changed his mind almost immediately on the concept once he became speaker. Just days after his election to the post in October, Johnson told Senate Republicans he supported funding for Ukraine, provided aid to Israel received a separate vote.
I was struck by the reversal at the time and asked an astute House GOP aide how to explain it. “It’s amazing what some information can do,” the aide said.
By spring, Johnson looked more like Dick Cheney than Rand Paul.
“This is a projection of American strength,” Johnson said last week, adding that “we stand for freedom.”
Strikingly, he and other House Republican lawmakers have recently revived language from the 2000s even more distinctly.
After Saturday’s vote, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, Johnson’s Louisiana compatriot, told me that the United States was “standing up to evil actors around the world, that there is an axis of evil right now between Russia, Iran and China.
Few in the House have been more aggressive than Foreign Relations Chairman Mike McCaul of Texas in trying to rekindle those embers.
“I keep telling my colleagues: They’re all connected, man,” McCaul said. “Abandoning Ukraine will only invite more aggression from both Putin and President Xi on Taiwan. The Ayatollah has already raised his…
