Daniel DePetris and Erik French perpetuate part of an old myth:

Historically, a crisis of international proportions would band Republican and Democratic lawmakers together [bold mine-DL]. Yet in an age of rapid partisanship on seemingly every major policy issue, that tradition has been relegated to the sidelines.

There have been times when a major event or crisis has at least temporarily caused Americans to set aside partisan disagreements, but this is comparatively rare and usually quite brief. Even the extraordinary degree of post-9/11 unity came to an end within two or three years, and by 2006 partisan divisions specifically over foreign policy issues were fairly wide and bitter. “Banding together” across party lines in response to foreign crises is not completely imaginary, but it isn’t really much of a tradition, either. The party out of power always has strong political incentives to attack the current administration and to use international events as a club with which to beat the sitting president, and it becomes even more tempting to do that when the president is in his second term and suffering from poor approval ratings. Indeed, if the party out of power weren’t doing some of this, it would be failing in its basic responsibility to hold the party currently in power accountable.

This isn’t something that has started very recently. Republican politicians and pundits have been railing against almost every Obama foreign policy decision from the start. That is fairly normal, and if done intelligently it could even be valuable. Unfortunately, most of them have also been more than happy to use any number of unfounded and false claims in that effort, so there is really nothing new in the latest wave of ridiculous accusations and complaints. The problem, then, is not that partisans are taking advantage of foreign events to criticize and attack administration actions (or lack thereof). After all, we should expect the opposition party to challenge how a president conducts foreign policy, and we shouldn’t want opposition politicians to avoid making legitimate criticisms for the sake of bipartisanship or out of a misguided belief that Americans should defer to the executive in the name of national unity. We have seen how brief moments of national unity and excessive deference to the president can land the U.S. in a great deal of trouble, and we should not want to encourage those habits no matter which party happens to be in power.

The problem at present is that the partisan critics are just recycling the same bogus charges that they have tried to sell to the public for the last five years to no avail, and because of that it is much easier for the administration to dismiss partisan its critics when they make such poor arguments and have so little credibility on these issues. What we need is an opposition party that makes smarter, better-informed arguments that do something other than repeat cliches and carp about “weakness,” and that could in turn lead to better policy decisions now or in the future, but that isn’t what we have.

DePetris and French go on to argue that there needs to be unity across party lines in order to do certain things in response to the crisis in Ukraine:

Instead, Republicans and Democrats alike need to work together in a rare act of bipartisanship to implement a unified policy that is helpful to Ukraine’s future, punishes Russia for its clear violation of the United Nations Charter and highlights U.S. resolve during a time of international crisis.

This takes for granted that there is broad bipartisan agreement on what ought to be done, but all of that is contested. No doubt there are many hawks that think it would be “helpful to Ukraine’s future” to agitate for another round of NATO expansion, for example, but this seems neither helpful nor desirable for the U.S. There is also bound to be significant disagreement over how and to what extent Russia should be “punished” for its recent illegal actions. While the authors recognize the need to balance “between deterring further Russian aggression and reassuring Putin that the US, EU, and NATO do not plan on threatening Russia’s interests if it behaves like a responsible power,” many of the partisan critics they mention see no need to strike this balance. In that sense, the domestic political quarrels over Ukraine and Russia aren’t entirely pointless. They are quite useful in showing that the opposition party is proposing mostly bad or unworkable ideas that are undesirable on the merits.