The two-term Florida governor distinguished “strong defense” from “military adventurism,” and unpacked key policies from his own gubernatorial tenure.
Owen Tilman
Editor-in-Chief, The Buckley Beacon
Last week, Republican Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (YC ‘01) delivered the keynote address at the Buckley Institute’s fifteenth annual conference. In his speech, DeSantis reflected on his gubernatorial record, and emphasized the need for bold, results-oriented conservative leadership.
DeSantis was first elected governor in 2019, after which his tenure in Florida became a national model for conservative domestic policy, including on education reform, crime, and controversial cultural issues. Recently, this domestic unity on the American right has been challenged by growing fissures, particularly on issues of foreign policy. Among conservatives under 50, polling indicates that they are split halfway on Israel’s yearslong military offensive in Gaza and its corresponding U.S. support.
In light of the sharpening divides, DeSantis, who is a longtime supporter of the state of Israel, emphasizes the need for a balanced approach to American global leadership.
“Buckley was a proponent of a strong defense, but he was a critic of military adventurism,” DeSantis told The Buckley Beacon. “He was critical of the Iraq nation-building enterprise. And I think as conservatives, human nature is what it is, peace through strength is the appropriate approach to the world.”
As a candidate in the 2024 Republican presidential primary, DeSantis sat between the “hawkish” foreign policy of former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley and the anti-interventionism of biotech entrepreneur and now-Ohio gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy. A veteran of the Iraq War, DeSantis cautioned against mistaking strong national defense for “social engineering” in other nations.
“We should not be overextending, we should not be engaging in adventurism. We should certainly not be engaging in social engineering abroad,” DeSantis added.
While critical of past foreign policy endeavors like Iraq, DeSantis has been broadly supportive of more recent American interventions, including President Donald Trump’s June strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities.
“I think a good example of that is President Trump’s bombing of Iranian nuclear facilities,” DeSantis said. “That was the right decision to make. I think it benefited America’s national security. I think it sent a broader message to people around the world that the president’s willing to take action.”
Just a week prior to DeSantis’ keynote, the Buckley Institute hosted British neoconservative author Douglas Murray—who, in an interview with The Beacon, distinguished “endless” from “judicious” American involvement in foreign conflicts. Murray also criticized so-called Chomskyism, or a tendency to assume U.S. involvement lies at the root of all foreign conflicts.
DeSantis issued a similar criticism of this tendency, while acknowledging legitimate mishaps in past American foreign policy.
“I just think it’s factually inaccurate. I think we’ve made mistakes in foreign policy,” DeSantis said. “Remember when Obama and Hillary did this Libya escapade. It was a total failure. … And so there are times when U.S. foreign policy is not clearheaded and has produced poor results, but to say that overall the world is a worse place because of the United States, that’s obviously not true.”
In his interview with The Beacon, DeSantis also discussed his gubernatorial record, which has featured large inflows of migration from other states. In 2022, Florida was America’s fastest growing state in population, with the state gaining $196 million in adjusted gross income in the past decade.
DeSantis, who has been governor for six of those ten years, attributes the interstate migration to policies in other states and their cities.
“The reality is, we’ve had a lot of migration. There’s positives from that, but then there’s also challenges from that. And I think that certainly in Florida, you’ve got a lot of people that have pride that Florida’s led on all these issues, but at the same time, they look at [Zohran] Mamdani and they’re like, ‘The guys got to get their act together. We can’t just have every city failing, and then the default is to move to Florida when things don’t work out,’” DeSantis said.
On November 4, self-described democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani resoundingly defeated former New York governor Andrew Cuomo in the general election for New York City mayor. Mamdani’s winning platform touts raising taxes on the city’s top earners, which if implemented could combine the city’s state and local taxes to the highest in the country—a policy experts link to the mass migration out of states like New York and California.
“I know the fallout will be if he follows through with his ideology and his instincts, the results will be disastrous for public safety, terrible for business and economy,” DeSantis said of Mamdani’s platform. “Obviously, he’s going to botch the budget if he’s going to try to take over grocery stores.”
DeSantis’ tenure as governor has made national headlines through controversial reforms to Florida’s system of public education. These include implementing universal school choice, and restricting classroom instruction on issues of sexual orientation or gender identity, as well as “critical race theory.”
Since the Covid-19 pandemic, Florida’s scorecard on educational outcomes remains scattered, with the National Assessment of Education Progress’ (NAEP) 2024 report indicating a statewide drop in elementary math and reading proficiency after the pandemic. In 2025, Florida was also in the bottom four states in SAT scores, part of a continued decline that started prior to DeSantis’ first term.
DeSantis, like Florida Commissioner of Education Manny Diaz, contests the 2024 NAEP results, maintaining that policies like school choice still set Florida apart from education in other states.
“Part of it on the NAEP results is that they are not factoring in universal school choice,” DeSantis told The Beacon. “So, the subsets that they’re using are not representative samples of where they are, but even with that, without having our school scholarship kids appropriately accounted for, which are going to perform a little bit better, we were still top 10 [in] fourth grade reading, and fourth grade math.”
Under DeSantis, Florida has also substantially increased the number of charter schools, enrolling more than 405,000 students in 2024.
“You really have to factor in all those things. Interesting stat are charter school populations, 400,000. That’s more than the entire K-12 population of probably half the states in the country. If that population was its own state, it would be in the top five in student achievement. And these are disproportionately low-income kids,” DeSantis said.
DeSantis is ineligible to run for reelection in 2026, although he could run for a nonconsecutive term in the future.