Too many conservatives oppose support for Ukraine. What’s their alternative?

The conference’s opening video set the day’s context. “Russia has invaded Ukraine, the world in chaos, and Washington’s decades-long, failed bipartisan foreign policy is to blame,” it proclaimed. Virtually every speaker echoed this “blame America” attitude, attacking the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and interventions in Syria and Libya as misguided failures. They rightfully contend that these acts squandered American power, damaged American prestige and emboldened America’s adversaries. But they wrongly use those errors as justification to ignore the perilous situation before us.

Speakers took pains to blame Vladimir Putin for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but they also criticized NATO’s expansion eastward and the foreign policy elite’s support for Ukraine’s membership in the European Union as unnecessarily provocative. Massie was the most explicit in ascribing blame to NATO, arguing that the alliance should have been dissolved after the Cold War, that it shouldn’t have expanded into former Soviet and Warsaw Pact nations, and that he would vote to have the United States leave NATO if he could. The fact that NATO in 1997 effectively forswore permanently stationing troops in any of those newly admitted countries was never mentioned.

This worldview overlooks both the sentiments of those former captive nations themselves and the actions Russia likely would have taken without E.U. and NATO expansion. All of these nations rushed to join Western economic, political and security institutions when they became free. Poland, for example, had been invaded three times by Russia between 1920 and 1944; it did not want to experience a fourth incursion. Had the West denied Poland’s pleas, it almost certainly would have been at the mercy of a rejuvenated Russia once it had recovered from the post-Soviet economic and political collapse. Former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev made this clear in a recent statement in which he called the Soviet Union’s conquest of Poland after World War II a “liberation” and disingenuously claimed that “there are no anti-Polish sentiments in Russia and never have been.”

The speakers’ naivete extended to their views on how to end the Russo-Ukrainian conflict. Joe Kent, the Donald Trump-endorsed congressional candidate who is running against Republican Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler for Washington state’s 3rd District, said it would be “reasonable” to reward Putin’s aggression by recognizing the independence of the breakaway Ukrainian regions of Donetsk and Luhansk. Kent said such a concession would be acceptable because residents of those regions are Russian speakers, but the same principle would give Russia a right to intervene in Estonia and Latvia, two NATO members that also contain large Russian-speaking populations. This is no imaginary possibility: Russia has scared Sweden, which is not part of NATO, in recent years with a military buildup in its Baltic Sea enclave of Kaliningrad, which has no strategic purpose other than threaten Poland and the Baltic NATO members. It speaks volumes that Kent does not recognize his principle for peace could lead to conflict between Russia and NATO or the alliance’s dissolution.

Nearly every conference speaker, including those on its final forward-looking panel, failed to provide a clear alternative to the foreign policy approach they decried. Former New York Post editor Sohrab Ahmari argued that more conservatives that share the speakers’ perspectives needed to move into government roles, but he never clarified what those people would do. Conservative speechwriter Michael Anton said these views would eventually prevail within the GOP because younger Republicans backed them and would eventually outvote the older, Cold War-era members of the party. But he did not explain exactly what these voters were for other than rejection of Bush-Obama era interventionism.

Only William Ruger, Trump’s nominee to be ambassador to Afghanistan (though he was never confirmed), accepted the challenge to lay out an alternative foreign policy. He argued for limited U.S. involvement abroad, with military power only used to protect the United States’ few vital interests. But even Ruger did not clearly delineate what those interests are and which current entanglements should be discarded.

American conservatism has long had a libertarian and paleoconservative minority that eschewed active and consistent global engagement. That faction’s hero, Ohio Sen. Robert A. Taft, even opposed NATO’s creation in 1949 because he viewed it as unnecessarily provocative to the Soviet Union. Most conservatives, however, rejected these views long ago. They will continue to reject them so long as modern adherents fail to provide an alternative vision to make America more secure.