Josh Hawley Defends Flip-Flop on Ukraine, Says It’s ‘Laughably Wrong’ That Putin Wanted to Take ‘Entire Country’
Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) defended his flip-flop on U.S. support for Ukraine on Tuesday, calling it the consequence of a “gross intelligence miscalculation.”
In an interview with National Review‘s John McCormack, Hawley was asked how he went from declaring that “Russia’s brutal assault on Ukraine and invasion of its territory must be met with strong American resolve” to telling other members of his party that “You can either be the party of Ukraine and the globalists or you can be the party of East Palestine and the working people of this country.”
Last year, in the immediate aftermath of Russia’s invasion of its neighbor, Hawley asserted that it was in the U.S.’s “strategic interests” to arm Ukraine, going so far as to argue that “It’s gotta be our policy to make sure that this little bet he’s made — that he can just gobble up Ukraine and that’ll be easy and he’ll be able to chew it up and swallow it — we’ve got to make sure that he loses that bet.”
“I think the way we can do that now is we can arm the Ukrainian resistance,” he continued. But Hawley told McCormack that his past position was predicated on the idea that Putin wanted to take “the entire country of Ukraine.”
“That turned out to be laughably wrong. That was a gross intelligence miscalculation,” said Hawley. When McCormack challenged him by positing that taking all of Ukraine had been Putin’s objective and he had been thwarted in no small part by the efforts of the U.S., as Hawley had once hoped, the senator rejected the theory.
“We were told that it was imminent, and he would absolutely be able to do it. As it turns out, that was totally wrong,” he said.
Hawley also deemed the initial U.S. aid package of around $15 billion “plenty.” Pressed by McCormack on whether that would have been enough to repel the invading Russian force, Hawley replied “That was never my objective. I didn’t set an objective because it’s not my country. It’s Ukraine’s country.”
