The joke is on America

I was brought up on Dan Quayle jokes. You know the ones – like the gag that the then vice-president had turned up in Latin America and apologised for not speaking Latin. Thankfully vice-presidents are no longer a laughing stock. Today we have Kamala Harris.

Anyway, probably the most memorable line about Quayle was that people were surprised he was able to walk and chew gum at the same time. Yet recently such a feat has indeed come to seem extraordinary to the American right. Today’s Republicans seem to believe that America can have a foreign policy or a domestic policy, but not both.

Just consider the main talking points on the American right relating to the war in Ukraine. A few months ago the fringe yet noisome congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene condemned the American government for sending money ‘to defend Ukraine’s border, but not America’s border’. You don’t have to go to the fringes to find this argument: from conservative pundits to the new Republican Speaker of the House, it has become mainstream to pretend that if US money was not going to arm Ukrainians, then the builders would be down on the southern border constructing a wall to stop illegal migrants coming in.

The idea is a preposterous one. Donald Trump ran an entire successful presidential campaign claiming that he was going to create a border wall. He failed to do so. The notion that, were it not for Ukraine, the Biden administration could be busily building away is fantasy. But it is part of a fantasy the confused American right is stuck in.

The other conservative talking point about Ukraine is that Ukraine is uniquely corrupt and therefore undeserving of aid. This is what leads figures such as Speaker Kevin McCarthy, Representative Jim Jordan and chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee Michael McCaul to repeat that America must not send ‘blank cheques’ to Ukraine.