Southern border vs Ukraine's borders: A dangerous leverage

Yesterday, I was incredibly proud of the community that I have built around my YouTube channel ATP Geopolitics when we ended up raising over $10,000 as a result of a live stream video fundraising appeal, money that will go toward equipping Ukrainians with drones and gauze, metal detectors and tourniquets. This has been a joint venture between an anti-Trump Reagan Republican pastor, a Christian professor of leadership, a Ukrainian YouTuber, and an atheist philosopher. A fine example of reaching across a number of aisles.

Yet $10,000 is a long way from $61 billion. A long, long way.

$61 billion is what the Biden Administration is trying to assist Ukraine with, finances that are so desperately needed now more than ever, given the stage of the war we are observing. And yet those funds are held up in an impasse in Congress as the Republicans smell leverage.

Ronald Reagan is turning in his grave, seeing the bipartisan support dwindling for Ukraine. This is a country with its destination set squarely on the ideal of democracy, moving away from a Soviet legacy of corruption, a journey manifested in its intention to accede to both the EU and NATO. Russia, on the other hand, is moving in the opposite direction, falling places on Transparency International's Corruption Index.

Thirty years ago, Republicans would have been chomping at the bit to spend less than a mere 5% of the defense budget to reduce Russia's military by 50%. But, right now, defending Ukraine has become a partisan issue. Global security, economic security, the desire to achieve epistemic security, the belief that the US should maintain itself at the apex of the global hegemony—all these things are now rejected by the Republicans in favor of domestic issues.

What is being demanded

The Republican lawmakers behind this impasse are demanding the passage of HR 2, which would entail (or not) the following (not exhaustive) list:

• Employers would be required to verify, under penalty of imprisonment, that all their workers are documented.  
• It makes it far harder for migrants to claim asylum and makes the process far more onerous for those able to stay long enough for that claim to be processed, increasing the requirements that asylum-seekers must meet to establish credible fear in their initial interview. Individuals failing to meet the higher standard would be removed through an expedited removal process to their home countries.
• HR 2 would also require a migrant to be physically present in the United States or to have arrived at a US port of entry in order to apply for asylum. Currently, US law allows any person arriving in the United States to pursue asylum regardless of manner of entry.
• It would increase the use of expedited removal, which is a process that empowers immigration officers to deport certain noncitizens quickly and efficiently without a hearing before a US immigration judge.
• HR 2 would restrict the use of "parole," an executive authority to allow non-citizens to temporarily reside and work in the United States. South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham said “If we don’t fix parole, there will be no deal.” This is the system that allowed both Afghans (through Operation Allies Welcome) and Ukrainians to come to the US.
• It would require the federal government to wall off at least 900 miles of the US’s 2000-mile border with Mexico, resuming all Trump-era plans that were interrupted by the former president’s electoral defeat in 2020.  
• HR 2 would roll back many protections for minors created under the Flores settlement, which resulted from a 1993 court case and has since guided federal immigration law, aside from a brief hiatus under Trump.
• It does not include any path for citizenship, bolstering of pathways to legal immigration or alternative means of supporting a U.S. workforce—and particularly food system—that relies on undocumented labor. In addition to not offering any expansion to the country’s sclerotic and backlogged legal immigration pathways, H.R. 2 wouldn’t provide funding to expand the capacity of official ports of entry—the only place where it would allow asylum claims to be made. GOP lawmakers including Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) have pushed to cut DHS’s funds if the Biden administration and the Senate don’t pass HR 2.  

The problems with this approach

There is an awful lot to unpick here, and this is certainly not to say that there aren't issues with the southern border or reforms that need to be made. Without wanting to get bogged down with issues directly concerning HR 2, here are 5 points of note pertaining to the leveraging attempt.

The first thing to note is that these two pieces of politics are simply not linked. They have been linked by the GOP by force, but they really have nothing to do with each other. The funding for both plans comes from different pots, and House Speaker Mike Johnson has already admitted this is not an issue of funding but of policy. But the US can walk and chew gum at the same time. Militarily assisting Ukraine is not contingent upon border reform in the US. In fact, there would be more justification (though it would still be tenuous) to link immigration reforms to ideas of education, healthcare, climate policy, and any number of other issues. But war in Ukraine?

Second, the lack of linkage can be taken further. The fact that the GOP has chosen Ukraine and not any other policy shows that this is not a natural connection but a forced one, derived from leverage, but also as a result of partisan issues over Trump, Hunter Biden, Burisma, Zelenskyy's refusal to be blackmailed over previous aid, and any other reason the GOP can dream up to choose Ukraine and not any other nation, policy area, or pressing topic to connect to the southern border.

Third, stalling or vetoing aid to Ukraine helps only one person: dictator Vladimir Putin. House Speaker Mike Johnson, a man who conveniently does not have a personal bank account (the shady scenario is questioned here), has received money for his 2018 campaign from Russians connected to Putin, by funneling the money through a US company. As Newsweek reports:

The Texas-based American Ethane company previously donated tens of thousands of dollars to the campaigns of Louisiana Republicans including Johnson, who was voted by the House to replace Rep. Kevin McCarthy as Speaker on Wednesday following three weeks of GOP chaos in the lower chamber.

While American Ethane was run in 2018 by American John Houghtaling, 88 percent of the firm was owned by three Russian nationals—Konstantin Nikolaev, Mikhail Yuriev, and Andrey Kunatbaev....

One of the men behind the company, Nikolaev, an oligarch with close ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin, was also found to have financially backed Maria Butina, a Russian citizen who lived in Washington D.C. Butina was sentenced to 18 months in prison in 2019 after admitting to acting as an unregistered foreign agent to infiltrate conservative political groups and influence foreign policy to Russia's benefit before and after the 2016 election."Mike Johnson's Campaign Contributions From Company Tied to Russia", Newsweek

The whole debacle appears to be a case of doing Trump's bidding. Mike Johnson is apparently in close contact with Trump over the leveraging:

Trump has expressed opposition to any deal between Senate negotiators and the Biden administration.

"President Trump is not wrong," Johnson told Fox News host Laura Ingraham on Wednesday night. "He and I have been talking about this pretty frequently. I talked to him the night before last about the same subject."

Johnson shortly after also appeared on CNN, where he told Kaitlan Collins that he speaks to Trump "every few days."

Trump asks Johnson to jump, it appears, and the Speaker replies, "How high?"

Fourth, one of the most galling aspects of this attempt to hold Ukraine hostage is that the Republicans routinely blame the Democrats for not getting aid to Ukraine. The bill had nothing to do with the southern border until the Republicans attached the two together, unsoundly making one contingent upon the other.

One can liken this to an analogy. Danny and Reg are neighbors. There is a fierce fire burning just beyond the fences of the two properties. Danny notices the fire encroaching on their land and suggests to Reg that they should work together to put the fire out to save their houses. Reg agrees that this would be a great idea in principle but demands $10,000 from Danny before helping out. The two people argue over how unreasonable or not that demand is and all the while the fire burns their properties to the ground.

Reg then has the audacity to blame Danny for the destruction for not paying him $10,000.

Fifth, there is an awful lot of internal Republican politics to throw into the mix. Georgian representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, as one might expect (being never far from controversy), is in the thick of it. She has repeatedly sought to remove support for Ukraine, wanting to take funding for Ukraine out of the NDAA (National Defense Authority Act), and generally spreading disinformation about the conflict. It appears that if Mike Johnson were to stoop so low as to work across the aisle to do a bipartisan deal with the Democrats over Ukraine, she would vacate the chair. That is to say, Mike Johnson's future as Speaker is defined by whether or not he agrees the funding for Ukraine.

Recently, Greene appeared on Steve Bannon's show to lay it all out:

"But the biggest red flag for me, Steve, right now that has me livid is this deal with Ukraine. This is a losing war, it is a losing issue, American people do not support it. Our border security is not a negotiating tool for the Ukraine war that the Pentagon lives and that Joe Biden loves and the Democrats love and that these RHINO neocon Republicans and Nikki Haley is frothing at the mouth over because her donors love it. No no no no no no, Mike Johnson should not be going in there with Chuck Schumer and saying "Oh yeah, yeah, we're gonna make this deal where 5000 illegal aliens (not migrants) cross the border every damn day so you can get $60 billion over to Zelenskyy—the most corrupt president of the world right now— because Ukraine is not the 51st state. Every day Mike Johnson gets closer and closer to this deal brings me closer and closer to vacate in the chair because I have absolutely had it.

“And this is really a civil war. This has been a civil war between Ukraine and Russia for years and years and years and then they turned it into a lie and made it into something big and threatening like World War I and World War II.”

She appeared on Fox News to verify the claims: "And that's why I told Speaker Johnson that if he made that deal in exchange for $60 billion for Ukraine, I would vacate the chair and I still stand by those words." You can't get any more explicit than that. For Republicans like Marjorie Taylor Greene, Ukraine appears to have become as divisive a partisan issue as abortion.

We live in strange times.

Conservatives vs liberals: Moral Foundations Theory

As much as I find the politics and theological ideals of Mike Johnson incredibly problematic, I can't help but think he is caught between a rock and a hard place. He is on a hiding to nothing here, with his head on the block either way.

I recently recorded an analysis of the differences between liberal and conservative political psychology and thought (with the caveat that there will be some generalizations as well as outliers and those between categories). Why are Republicans so interested in issues with the southern border and why are Democrats far more interested in what has taken place in Ukraine?

Some of it can be explained with reference to the work of political psychologists like Jonathan Haidt and the Moral Foundations theory. Conservatives are often seen to be more interested than liberals in the in-group, adherence to rules, ideas of purity, and tradition. What they see as illegal immigrants are people breaking the rules, members of the out-group diluting the purity of the American nation so that it becomes something new—something different and not the traditional ideal they hold in their minds.

Liberals, on the other hand, have greater emphasis in their moral-political evaluations on fairness and harm, as well as being much more open to new experiences. Imagine concentric circles starting with the individual in the middle, expanding to the family, the community, the region, the nation, and then beyond. Conservatives concern themselves far more with circles much closer to the individual, with emphasis on people who are more like them. Liberals are more likely to see everybody (or a greater diversity of people) in the in-group: one humanity. It is interesting to look at the sorts of charities conservatives favor (often ones concerning family and traditional values) compared to the sorts that liberals favor (often ones concerning refugees and fairness for the disadvantaged, as an example).

Problems with illegal immigrants are far more likely to raise the ire of conservatives, so it is no surprise that the southern border is such a problem for GOP voters. Trying to work out why Ukraine is important to liberals who aren't traditionally hawkish with regard to war is perhaps a little more tricky. Personally, I think it comes down to ideas of fairness in seeing naked aggression from an authoritarian megalomaniacal dictator unfairly invading a nation striving for democratic and relatively progressive moral ideals.

The war in Ukraine is a rare event in human history whereby moral evaluations really are that clear-cut. Without wanting to be too simplistic, the Russians simply are the bad guys. You can pick any number of metrics. The country invaded another sovereign nation and has consistently targeted and hit Ukrainian civilian centers and infrastructure, routinely destroying Ukrainian medical centers (more than 1,000 attacks as of last August). 121,000 Russian crimes of aggression and war crimes have so far been registered since the war started. The Russian Federation is moving down the Transparency International Corruption Index. I need not go on.

How Putinism is attractive to the GOP

There is something else that might be going on in the American political landscape. The authoritarian approach of Putin, utilizing the Russian Orthodox Church to place "traditional values" ("anti-woke" attacks on the marginalized and diverse) at the heart of society to stave off progressive Western degeneracy, is something that Republican voters of certain persuasions may be drawn to. This has been analyzed and reported on a number of times As Robert Reich states in "Putinism is breeding in the heart of the Republican party":

The biggest difference between the old cold war and the new one is that authoritarian neo-fascism is no longer just an external threat to America and Europe. A version of it is also growing inside western Europe and the US.

It has even taken over one of America’s major political parties.

The Trump-led Republican party does not openly support Putin, but the Republican party’s animus toward democracy is expressed in ways familiar to Putin and other autocrats.

Back in 2017, James Kirchick noted for Brookings:

I should not have been surprised. I’ve been following Russia’s cultivation of the American right for years, long before it became a popular subject, and I have been amazed at just how deep and effective the campaign to shift conservative views on Russia has been. Four years ago, I began writing a series of articles about the growing sympathy for Russia among some American conservatives. Back then, the Putin fan club was limited to seemingly fringe figures like Pat Buchanan (“Is Vladimir Putin a paleoconservative?” he asked, answering in the affirmative), a bunch of cranks organized around the Ron Paul Institute and some anti-gay marriage bitter-enders so resentful at their domestic political loss they would ally themselves with an authoritarian regime that not so long ago they would have condemned for exporting “godless communism.”

Today, these figures are no longer on the fringe of GOP politics. According to a Morning Consult-Politico poll from May, an astonishing 49 percent of Republicans consider Russia an ally. Favorable views of Putin – a career KGB officer who hates America – have nearly tripled among Republicans in the past two years, with 32 percent expressing a positive opinion.

This kind of thinking is perhaps best exemplified in the now-famous image taken from a Republican rally:

This about sums up the Republican party right now. pic.twitter.com/Kh1G3QocZD

— Noah Smith 🐇 (@Noahpinion) August 5, 2018

Tatyana Margolin writes in a The Moscow Times piece ("‘Traditional Values’ Unite Both Sides in a New Ideological Cold War"):

Rather than occupying opposing sides of a new ideological Cold War, Republicans and global authoritarians around the world — who may come from different political, cultural and social contexts — use alarmingly similar tactics. They are manipulating ‘traditional values’ narratives, which serve as a cultural cudgel to incite the population, and cause real harm, especially to women, LGBTI people, and other minorities. And the damage is not just local. Globally, authoritarians are aligning to disrupt multilateral spaces and undermine democratic values by creating shadow, parallel systems. 

The sort of culture wars legislation enacted over the last decade by Putin's regime is right in the wheelhouse of many Republican voters.

In this way, many Republicans now see Ukraine as a partisan issue because they view Ukraine as a substitute for the American political left. The Hunter Biden scandal took place in Ukraine and that has tainted how they view the country: a globalist playground for money laundering. And perhaps they see the messaging from left-leaning sources surrounding Ukraine as far too focused on the sort of cultural politics that raises their hackles.

What can we make of all of this? Simply put, the relatively small minority of predominantly House representatives are punching above their weight, and these blows are landing. They clearly find the southern border more important than global economic and military stability. This may be genuine, but it could also be cynical realpolitik. The narrative, however, is finding fertile ground in one area of the electorate, assisted by amplification of nefarious actors on social media (including Russian troll farms) as well as the usual suspects in the right-wing media ecosystem. Facts should matter, but they unfortunately play second fiddle to tales spun in the dark corridors of the Kremlin.

There are many reasons why these lawmakers will be thinking and acting in the way that they are, playing a dangerous game of political extortion. Of course, it remains to be seen, but I am fairly certain that, a hundred years from now, historians will be talking of this inflection moment in the history of the world. They will discuss the intersection of global conflicts of this febrile time, of Iran, North Korea, China, and Russia, of Israel and Palestine, of Venezuela and Guyana, of the coups sweeping across Africa, of Taiwan and Ukraine. The southern border will be nothing but a footnote if assistance to Ukraine is forthcoming.

However, if those lawmakers continue to veto Ukraine aid on account of HR 2, historians may see the southern border thrust front and center in being the biggest shot in the foot of a disUnited States that limps painfully into an isolationist and populist future, turning its back on the world to lick its wounds behind the wall.