Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) clinched a victory on Wednesday when the Senate — including 48 of the chamber’s 50 Republicans — voted overwhelmingly to admit Finland and Sweden to NATO.
The resolution, which cleared the chamber in a bipartisan 95-1 vote, was a top priority for the Republican leader, who wanted to send a signal about the direction of a GOP that had drifted toward isolationism under former President Trump.
Trump throughout his presidency was a critic of NATO. It was a part of the “America First” agenda that reverberated with parts of the GOP base after the Iraq and Afghanistan wars but also divided Republican officeholders.
McConnell visited war-torn Ukraine with a congressional delegation in May and made stops in Finland and Sweden during that trip. During the debate over bringing those countries into NATO, he argued that doing so made the U.S. stronger, not weaker.
The GOP leader definitely won the battle, even if he lost Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), the only member of either party in the Senate to vote “no.”
Most strikingly, Sens. Mike Lee (R-Utah) and Rand Paul (R-Ky.) both shifted in their votes. The two were the only senators to vote against resolutions in 2017 and 2019 adding Montenegro and North Macedonia, respectively, to NATO.
On Finland and Sweden, the two libertarian-leaning lawmakers took a different stance: Lee voted for the resolution, and Paul voted present.
“There’s a real and dangerous world out there, and it’s very easy to talk about U.S. isolationism or U.S. restraint or U.S. disengagement from the world, and then it’s quite another matter voting in favor of that. And I think that’s, you know, what we saw with Sen. Paul and Sen. Lee not voting against Sweden and Finland...