On the day Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts had the blue-and-yellow Ukrainian flag raised above the think tank’s Washington headquarters. Over the next several months, Heritage researchers and experts pumped out reports and essays backing U.S. assistance to Ukraine. “Without question, supporting Ukraine is in U.S. and European interests,” argued one paper. Another urged “an enduring and systematic approach to providing weapons, training, and medical care to Ukrainians.”
Eighteen months later, two of the experts who wrote those reports had left Heritage — and Roberts declared in a column that Americans were “fed up” with the “expensive, far-off war effort.” “It’s time to turn off the tap,” he wrote. “People are tired of Washington’s shady backroom deals cut with their money. Until Biden presents a direct and immediate path to end the conflict in Ukraine, and Congress comes up with a way to ensure that our aid is responsibly distributed, the Heritage Foundation will stand firm and demand that not another cent is spent fighting this war.”
It was a quick about-face for Heritage, and part of a larger shift that goes well beyond Ukraine. The venerable think tank — which once provided the blueprint for the “Reagan Revolution,” celebrated the passage of NAFTA, and warned against Donald Trump’s protectionist tendencies — has become skeptical of free trade, suspicious of foreign military entanglements, even open to government intervention to help American families.