The biggest critics of President Donald Trump’s efforts to achieve peace between Ukraine and Russia have been “wrong” on foreign policy for decades, according to Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-MO).

During an interview on “Fox News Sunday,” Schmitt delivered a retort after being pressed to respond to critiques from his colleagues across the aisle following Trump’s meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska last week.

Sen. @Eric_Schmitt: The people who are most critical of @POTUS‘ pursuit of peace “have been wrong, for the last 30 years, about every single foreign policy issue under the sun.” pic.twitter.com/JMkr8ljDEy

— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) August 17, 2025

“The people who are most critical have been wrong for the last 30 years about every single foreign policy issue under the sun,” Schmitt told anchor Shannon Bream.

As an example, Schmitt took aim at Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser under former President Joe Biden who had also been interviewed on the program on Sunday.

“I mean, you just had Jake Sullivan on,” Schmitt said. “Jake Sullivan just presided over, in the last four years, the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, the invasion of Ukraine by Russia that he’s now critical about President Trump.”

Sullivan also bragged in October 2023 about the Middle East region being “quieter” than it had been in two decades — just days before Hamas launched a deadly attack on Israel.

“So, these Wilsonian adventurers who think America can be everywhere all at once all the time have been wrong about everything,” Schmitt said.

Democrats have argued that Trump is being played by Putin, but Schmitt rejected the idea that a peace agreement is not attainable just because the Alaska meeting did not immediately end the conflict.

“I look at this from a realistic point of view,” he said. “The diplomacy that President Trump is engaging in, which has been very successful since he took office, is about engaging people that, you know, maybe aren’t your best friends in the world, but you’re trying to get to a peace deal. That’s exactly what this was.”

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and European leaders are expected to huddle with Trump at the White House on Monday. Another meeting with Putin could follow.

“It’s going to take time,” Schmitt said. “So, that meeting led to the next meeting, which is going to happen on Monday, which will likely lead to the next meeting. That’s how that typically works. I think for some people so used to the 24-hour news cycle, maybe that isn’t fast enough, but that’s how the real-world works.”

Schmitt contended Trump is trying to be a uniter, unlike Biden.

“We just didn’t see that the last four years. Joe Biden was out to lunch and his only plan was to send $200 billion of American taxpayer funds over there without a plan,” he said. “And so President Trump, I think, is seeking peace. He’s bringing the parties together. And that’s what diplomacy is all about. That should always be our first option, and that’s where we’re at right now.”

The following excerpt is taken from “The Man Who Invented Conservatism: The Unlikely Life of Frank S. Meyer,” by Daniel J. Flynn, (Encounter Books, August 19, 2025)

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“For the first time in the past few months I find myself viscerally as well as intellectually deeply concerned about the immediate future of the country,” Frank Meyer wrote in March 1968 to co-founder of National Review Willi Schlamm in Europe. “Between Vietnam, this summer’s projected insurrectionary riots, and the real threat to twenty years of economic stability that the monetary situation poses, almost anything could happen.”

Everything did.

Lyndon Johnson soon announced his decision to neither seek nor accept the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination. Days later, a career criminal on the run after escaping prison murdered Martin Luther King Jr. The tragedy, and the initial elusiveness of the murderer, fueled riots that killed dozens in Chicago, Washington, D.C., Baltimore, and points beyond. Uprisings that spring plagued campuses. Columbia, where student activists occupied university buildings and held administrators hostage, served as the focal point. In June, Sirhan Sirhan, a Palestinian immigrant incensed over U.S. aid to Israel, murdered Robert Kennedy. All the while the Vietnam War reached peak violence; more than three hundred American men died in combat each week.

The chaos jarred Meyer. Even prior to Kennedy’s murder, the National Review columnist had described the times as the most fateful for Americans since Fort Sumter. The upheaval, he reasoned, emanated not from deprivation but abundance. This did not lead to a more contented society. Riots, campus takeovers, civil disobedience, crime, and other actions often vaguely or specifically linked to political demands counterintuitively followed. The more authorities rewarded disobedience, disorder, and disregard for law, the more disobedience, disorder, and disregard for law proliferated. The damage from nihilism and a West alienated from itself, he concluded, bore this bitter fruit of attempted civilizational suicide.

His articles adopted an ominous tone. More shocking to readers, his order-liberty emphasis flipped. He still articulated libertarian positions in opposing the draft and in shunning calls for gun control in the wake of the assassinations (“An unarmed citizenry is potentially the victim, first of anarchy, then of tyranny and totalitarianism”). The holstered firearm spotted under his jacket at a Philadelphia Society meeting in Chicago, where American Communists knew him best, indicated he practiced what he preached. The times dictated a condemnation of freedom’s unsavory cousin chaos. In March, Richard Nixon identified order as the priority. Meyer followed that summer by telling readers that “order is the first condition of civilizational existence, the only foundation of freedom and well-being for anyone and everyone.”

Credit: Encounter Books

His son John’s attendance at Columbia amid the takeover and riots laying waste to his hometown of Newark the previous summer personalized the events. So did his own history. He had once stood on the other side of the barricades. If he regarded many antiwar protestors as effectively aiding the Vietcong, then he surely recalled his own role in the 1930s peace movement that had softened Great Britain, the United States, and other countries. Meyer the Communist had shouted down speakers, disrupted meetings, and scoffed at campus authorities the way Mark Rudd now did. He saw others reliving his life and wanted to stop them from inflicting the damage that he had once caused.

“The issue facing the United States this summer is the survival of a free society,” he told readers. “No society can exist in a state of endemic disorder. Specifically, a representative republic cannot function if its magistrates and its representative assemblies are subject to blackmail by mob violence.” From Death Valley Days came a sheriff to make things right.

Meyer saw in Ronald Reagan the figure to lead Americans out of the smoke, grime, and darkness of 1968 to a place more resemblant of America. Some regarded this as a pipe dream; others as unwise.

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HUGH KENNER wrote William F. Buckley, Jr., a private letter critical of his “Ronald Reagan: A Relaxing View,” an unusually long cover article. Kenner explained of his letter to Guy Davenport, “It is to their honor that they want it revised for print. Imagine, per contra, The Nation running a pro-Reagan piece.” Not everyone welcomed Buckley’s tolerance. And, because

of that, Kenner’s view of the magazine changed. “Communication from WFB just re[a]d from Switzerland says that my Nervous View of Ronald Reagan has been held over till April (!) at Frank Meyer’s (!!) intervention, in the interests of fairness, Frank having held that Reagan (!!!) should be given a chance to reply,” Kenner wrote Davenport. “If Reagan does not, the accompanying rebuttal will be by Frank (!!!!).”

Behind the scenes, a January editorial meeting resulted in the board’s endorsement of Meyer’s personally rebutting the anti-Reagan piece. In February, Bill Rusher supplied the Master — the sobriquet he had long ago given to Meyer — with a dossier. Jeffrey Hart later received the task of writing the Meyer-engineered counterpoint to an article preoccupied with Reagan’s treatment of the universities. This substitution, given that it negated one English professor’s charge of anti-intellectualism with another’s rebuttal, struck as a master stroke to anyone paying attention but too cute by half to anyone really paying attention.

When “A Nervous View of Ronald Reagan” ran in May as an “Open Question,” Kenner, though a major asset as a literary critic, appeared outside of his element. Unlike Davenport, who had threatened to resign in 1965 after being assigned to cover a Philadelphia Society meeting, Kenner did subscribe to the general tenets that animated National Review. Nevertheless, the University of California–Santa Barbara professor came off as a parochial cosmopolitan in portraying California’s governor as a philistine for supporting the firing of the university system’s president, Clark Kerr, and for his periodic clashes with academia, which to many conservatives increasingly resembled a left-wing training ground. The philistinism, to them, occurred among the people perverting intellectual pursuits toward the service of narrow, ideological ends.

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Hart, on leave from both Dartmouth and National Review to write speeches for Reagan, authored the “Open Question” that appeared immediately after Kenner’s. He juxtaposed Reagan’s widely shared critique of the campuses with Kenner’s use of “zamindary,” a ten-cent word even by National Review standards. He wondered why Kenner must psychoanalyze his subjects as though the mind holds the answer for all questions. For Kenner this undoubtedly avouched philistinism’s further inroads on the intellectual right; for many readers, it likely contrasted California’s man of the people with yet another of its professors above all in an ivory tower. The byline did not fully obscure who lurked behind every word. As a bewildered Davenport had explained to Kenner, “Frank thinks that Reagan ought to be president of the USA.”

Kenner lost sleep. He went from gaining respect for the magazine to losing it. Buckley, though playing a passive role, allowed this to happen. He acted as godfather to Kenner’s daughter, paid for another daughter’s freshman year at college, and served as best man at the widowed Kenner’s second wedding. The active involvement of his other friend of more than a decade, the editor of his book reviews, sharpened the sting. So did yet another colleague’s mockery of him in print as an egghead. “I can sympathize with you,” Davenport wrote, “knowing how I would feel to be hee-hawed at by a cold bastard like Hart who can scarcely hide the fact that he has been called in to wipe a well-aimed egg off a politician, and to denounce the opposition with cultivated yelps and whimpers.” Meyer lost his section’s most accomplished literary critic.

He pleaded with Davenport to beg his friend back. The last issue in May listed Kenner as an associate. Any trace of him had disappeared from the masthead by June.

Meyer succeeded in shielding his favored candidate but at terrible cost. The tear revealed the frayed fabric holding together the two elements — the cynosure for conservatives and a citadel for refined literary appraisal — that made National Review great. Meyer could play conservative pope. He could serve as keeper of culture. Could he play both? The question did not always yield an answer in the affirmative.

◆ ◆ ◆

THE SAME WEEK that National Review offset Kenner’s criticism with Hart’s rebuttal, The New Republic published Meyer’s “Why I Am for Reagan,” one in a series from supporters of the various presidential contenders. The magazine commissioned Meyer to write the piece for obvious reasons. His campaign for Reagan began the moment the campaign for Goldwater ended.

In December 1964, Meyer spotlighted Reagan as the Republican future. The veteran actor had delivered a compelling infomercial for Goldwater that aired a week before the election. He did not merely replace Goldwater’s scowl with a smile. He eviscerated Great Society liberalism with humor, anecdotes, and folksy logic. Reagan connected. One could almost see the studio audience, and Frank Meyer listening in his living room, wondering, “Why can’t I vote for this man?” People who knew him as a star nevertheless experienced a revelation that night that they had watched, well, a star.

Reagan parlayed that speech into a run for governor in the state that suddenly boasted the most people. He vanquished Nixon’s vanquisher. Weeks before Reagan assumed office, Meyer touted him as the next president. As with Goldwater, the enthusiasm masked a Johnny Bravo quality. Ronald Reagan nevertheless fit the suit better.

Reagan met the requirements of “a candidate who can stir conservative enthusiasm and behind whom a campaign for delegates to the Republican National Convention of 1968 can be launched,” “Principles and Heresies” maintained in 1966. “By the principled positions he has taken, and by his proven ability as a campaigner, demonstrated both in 1964 and this year in California, Ronald Reagan, should he prove the governor he promises to be, qualifies for this role.”

Rusher shared Meyer’s enthusiasms. Buckley touted Reagan, too. Again, James Burnham opposed.

“I insist that Reagan is a serious candidate,” Meyer responded to Burnham’s insistence to the contrary. “Furthermore, if it were journalistically advisable to support a single candidate, it would unquestionably be our duty to make Reagan our choice with Nixon as our second choice.”

* * *

This excerpt from “The Man Who Invented Conservatism,” by Daniel J. Flynn is published by permission of Encounter Books.

Daniel J. Flynn is a senior editor of The American Spectator and a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution. He has authored seven books, including “Blue Collar Intellectuals: When the Enlightened and the Everyman Elevated America;” “A Conservative History of the American Left;” and “Cult City: Jim Jones, Harvey Milk, and 10 Days That Shook San Francisco.”

The views expressed in this excerpt are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.