William Kristol took to Twitter earlier this week and had this to say: “I assume @WSJopinion and @NRO will not only come out strongly against DeSantis on Ukraine, but also discuss whether being on the wrong side of the defining foreign policy issue of our time isn’t disqualifying for the presidency. Or are they merely the tail to Tucker’s dog?”

Now, Mr. Kristol, once among the most highly respected conservative figures in America, has not been terribly relevant for some time, which likely explains this unfortunate and unhelpful lapse into hyperbolic social-media drivel. Mr. Kristol is also a deeply intelligent, historically astute, and committed conservative, which makes the hyperbole all the more regrettable.

Clearly, there is room for maneuver on the question of support for Ukraine, and not all of it on the Republican side equates neatly to parroting Tucker Carlson, any more than it necessarily evokes a sinking back to the old anti-war “give peace a chance” sophistry. But once you tamp down the superfluous rhetorical flourish, Kristol’s criticism of DeSantis’ stated position is not entirely off-base.

DeSantis, responding to Carlson’s request for a statement on Ukraine from likely GOP presidential candidates, released a statement that painted him pretty firmly in a neo-isolationist corner. He led off saying, “while the U.S. has many vital national interests… becoming further entangled in a territorial dispute between Ukraine and Russia is not one of them.” He went on to say, “without question, peace should be the objective,” without bothering to establish any parameters as to what would constitute an acceptable “peace”. An enslaved Ukraine? Millions in mass graves? The Russian army encamped on Poland’s southern border? “Peace,” history grimly instructs us, can come in many forms, not all of them pleasant.

His call to take delivery of major weapons systems, like F-16s and long-range missiles, off the table was surely not intended to be, but could certainly be construed as, advocating for a continuation of President Joe Biden’s largely anemic and disjointed response to the Kremlin’s aggression: Sure, we are never going to give them F-35’s, but F-16’s? Not providing the hardware necessary to win is simply a formula for prolonging the conflict.

To be sure, not everything DeSantis said was entirely without merit. He quite correctly pointed out, for instance, that Biden’s ongoing policy of curtailing domestic fossil fuel production (notwithstanding his surprising, but welcome, approval of the Willow oil project in Alaska) is empowering Russia’s own energy-driven economy and war machine.

He also raises a concern that focusing on Russia and eastern Europe threatens to distract from the larger and more ominous national security threat posed by Communist China. He is right to raise the concern. Back during the Cold War, U.S. defense policy was guided by a “two-and-a-half wars” concept – the policy of maintaining a military that could handle two major wars (say, one against Russia in Europe and one against China in the Pacific) as well as a little brushfire elsewhere, a counter-insurgency in Central America or Africa. Those days are long gone, the result of years of aimlessness and misdirection that has left the United States with a defense and foreign policy so impoverished as to lead us to wonder if we can win just one conflict. But the solution, especially for a Republican presidential contender, is not to ignore the bear to your left because you are worried about the tiger to your right, but to propose policies to correct the imbalance.

The most regrettable note of DeSantis’ statement was his lamentable mischaracterization of the Russian invasion as a mere “territorial dispute.” First, it is inaccurate, no less so than writing off China’s designs on Taiwan as a “territorial dispute”. Secondly, it dismisses America’s legitimate security interests – the more immediate ones being Russian encroachment into Europe, access to the Mediterranean and fissuring of the NATO alliance. The longer term interest is in preventing bigger problems down the road; if Russia prevails in Ukraine, the next major European crisis orchestrated by Moscow will be far greater, more existential, and leave no question as to the need of direct American involvement. If we think Russia is too much of a distraction from other interests now, what will we do then? It’s the “broken windows” principle of urban crime control – if you let little things go, they grow into bigger problems – applied at the international level. We just have to look at crime in major cities – like Denver – to see the effects of abandoning that principle. One can extrapolate from there.

It’s an election year, and election years tend to prompt these kinds of poll-influenced responses to serious issues. But it ought not be too much to ask that those seeking the position of commander-in-chief would crystallize a foreign policy based on something more rigorous than answers blowin’ in the wind.

Kelly Sloan is a political and public affairs consultant and a recovering journalist based in Denver.