It’s unclear if public engagement on a significant foreign policy issue is possible. Ukraine: The D.C. battle that wasn't

At last, Washington has found a fight it does not want to have.

When the Russian parliament authorized the deployment of military forces in Ukraine, sending black-clad gunmen into the former Soviet Republic, it might have been expected to touch off yet another battle between the White House and congressional Republicans.


Instead, there has been a conspicuous absence of saber-rattling on both sides — an acknowledgment, perhaps, of the complexity of the situation in Eastern Europe, as well as the public’s overwhelming distaste for foreign entanglements. For Democrats and Republicans who spent much of the last century competing to be Moscow’s most credible antagonist, and much of the past decade fighting over which party killed terrorists more ruthlessly, there was no rush to the battle domestic stations over the weekend.

( Also on POLITICO: Why Russia no longer fears the West)

The slight substantive gap between the parties was on vivid display as Secretary of State John Kerry and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, a leading GOP foreign policy spokesman, toured the Sunday shows. Both men floated a similar range of options for responding to Russian aggression, including economic retaliation, aiding the provisional government in Ukraine and potentially freezing Russia out of the G-8.

There’s some jockeying for partisan advantage: Republicans, including Rubio, have argued that President Barack Obama emboldened Russian leader Vladimir Putin with a kid-gloves foreign policy. Big-name Democrats, including 2016 favorite Hillary Clinton, have so far deferred to the current administration in outlining a response policy; Democrats see no value in getting ahead of the White House on a complicated set of decisions in a still-unfolding crisis.

Illinois Rep. Adam Kinzinger, a Republican military veteran elected in the 2010 conservative wave election, said he did not expect Ukraine to become a flashpoint for conflict between the White House and the Hill.

( PHOTOS: Ukraine turmoil)

“You’re going to find a House that’s very cooperative with the administration on this,” Kinzinger said on ABC’s “This Week.”

Former NATO Supreme Allied Commander Wesley Clark said he expected Obama to have the political maneuvering room he needs to answer Russia’s actions, which Clark called “a spear aimed at the heart of NATO.”

“What [Obama] needs is the support of Congress when he goes through the decision-making process and comes out with the right answers,” Clark said in an interview. “It’s not clear you need the public engaged at this point, and it’s not clear it would be helpful.”

It’s also unclear whether public engagement on a significant foreign policy issue is even possible at this moment in American politics. The backdrop for Obama’s Ukraine response — and the congressional reaction on both sides of the aisle — is a historic level of public disengagement from conflicts overseas.

( Also on POLITICO: Obama’s options on Russia)

Several times during Obama’s presidency, events abroad have prompted Americans to consider whether their country should play the role of international policeman. In each case so far — in Libya and Syria, and in the ongoing war in Afghanistan — the public has answered in the negative.

A Pew survey published in December even found that for the first time, a majority of Americans say that the United States should “mind its own business internationally and let other countries get along the best they can on their own.” Fifty-two percent of respondents agreed with that proposition, while only 38 percent disagreed.

“This is the most lopsided balance in favor of the U.S. ‘minding its own business’ in the nearly 50-year history of the measure,” Pew reported.

That attitude has characterized voters’ views of individual conflicts: Last September, at the height of global alarm about the Syrian regime’s use of chemical weapons against civilians, a Reuters/Ipsos poll showed 65 percent of Americans said the Syrian conflict was “none of our business.” In the spring 2011 Libya intervention, early public support gave way quickly to solid disapproval: by November 2011, a CBS News poll showed Americans believed, 49 percent to 37 percent, that the U.S. should never have gotten involved in North Africa.

As long as the public seems to equate foreign crisis-management with the use of military force, the president and other government leaders may have a bit more leeway to communicate “the fact that the United States can’t change everything in the world,” one Democratic foreign policy strategist said.

The strategist added: “That’s an incredibly difficult thing for an American president to say: ‘I can’t go make everything better.’”

So as much as ambitious presidential candidates in both parties, and Obama’s most enthusiastic antagonists in the GOP, may seek to look tough in response to Putin’s aggression, it’s unclear exactly how much toughness Americans want to see from their leaders in reaction to a military incursion thousands of miles away that does not involve U.S. service personnel.

No prominent voice in either party has suggested putting American soldiers into eastern Ukraine. Both the White House and some of its critics said Sunday that military force was not in the cards.

“If you’re asking whether the U.S. should be taking military strikes against Russian troops in Ukraine or in Crimea, I would argue to you that I don’t think anyone is advocating for that,” Rubio said Sunday on “Meet the Press.”

Even Arizona Sen. John McCain, a famously hawkish legislator who staked his 2008 presidential campaign on support for the war in Iraq, said in a Daily Beast interview this weekend that a U.S. military response in Ukraine is not an option.

Instead, McCain has called for the administration to target Russian officials individually with financial sanctions and revive missile defense plans previously scrapped by the Obama administration.

While many legislators have not yet spelled out their policy preferences for the Ukraine response, American Enterprise Institute scholar Danielle Pletka said she expects Republicans to end up close to where Arizona Sen. John McCain has staked out his position.

“Most of the party will gather behind McCain, or McCain-lite,” Pletka predicted. “McCain is advocating serious and practical non-military steps.”

To the extent that there has been a partisan debate about the tumult in Ukraine, it has been a backward-looking one: between Republicans who feel Obama emboldened Putin with a wavering foreign policy, and Democrats who view Ukraine as a case in point for the limitations of American military force as a policymaking tool.

On Twitter and other social media sites over the weekend, Republicans gleefully circulated Obama 2012 campaign materials mocking Mitt Romney for calling Russia this country’s “No. 1 geopolitical foe.”

Former Romney foreign policy adviser Alex Wong said the 2012 GOP nominee had been vindicated on some level by events in Ukraine, and called the crisis in Eastern Europe an opportunity for Republicans to show that they have a relevant, alternative set of foreign policy values.

“I think recent events have made clear that Gov. Romney had a very clear view of Vladimir Putin, his autocratic behavior and his strategic ambitions, and President Obama simply didn’t,” he said.

At the same time, Wong cautioned: “First and foremost, this is a national security issue, a diplomatic issue. I think what you see in Washington, for members of Congress, is that they’re treating it as such.”