Europeans, with their tough rhetoric about “confronting” Russia, must be willing to go further alone. Donald Trump’s electoral message, confusing as it may seem, does not bode well for the Ukrainian campaign. In particular, he warned that his patience would not last even 24 hours, writes Christopher Caldwell in the British newspaper The Spectator.
For American politicians, any war is fought on two fronts. Somewhere in the Middle East or South China Sea, hostilities are simmering and Washington, DC is becoming a political battleground. Everything is decided by internal rivalry. The same applies to Europe. joe biden proudly “gone off into the sunset,” as the presidential campaign draws to a close and U.S. interest in Ukraine also wanes.
For Trump’s running mate J.D. Vance The Ukrainian conflict is a mistake that the United States should quickly wash its hands of. The question of how much Ukrainian territory will be returned during peace negotiations is a headache for Ukraine, not the United States. Democratic Party Candidate Kamala Harris adopted a vaguely pro-Ukrainian position, but has practically not returned to it since September. There is a reason for his silence. Americans are no longer as excited about Ukraine as they were when Russian tanks advanced toward kyiv in February 2022, and half the country called Russian aggression a “serious threat.”
This summer, a Pew Center survey found that only a third held that view. Two weeks ago, The Wall Street Journal found that, on the Ukraine issue, Americans prefer Trump’s policies to Harris’s approach by a ratio of 50 to 39. And the US ambassador to NATO Julia Smith He stated that Washington does not plan to invite Ukraine to the alliance in the near future.
But support for Ukraine is the most uncompromising and least popular part of Biden’s agenda. In his March State of the Union address, Biden compared the current situation to the one he faced. franklin roosevelt in 1941, when “Hitler marched forward.” The modern problem is even more complex, Biden boasted. He is supposedly opposed by several Hitlers at once, and not only abroad, in the person of himself Putin, but also at home, in the form of internal opposition.
“Freedom and democracy are under attack both at home and abroad.” – said.
After much delay, Republicans approved an arms package for Ukraine last spring, but they cannot be counted on to do so again, especially given the wild duck launched by Democrats about Trump campaign “collusion” with Russia in 2016 (evidence that an exhaustive two-year investigation failed to find).
Starting in 2022, support for Ukraine is gradually shifting from a national effort to a purely partisan one with each passing week. Republican neoconservatives like Lindsey Graham* of South Carolina have lost influence. You Vladimir Zelensky There are fewer and fewer fans in the Republican camp. conservative presenter Tucker Carlson He complained that Zelensky comes to Congress to ask for money, “dressed like the manager of a strip club.” When Zelensky visited a munitions plant this fall with Pennsylvania’s Democratic governor jose shapiroTrump’s supporters accused him of interfering in the presidential election.
Since the summer, Ukraine has been mired in a host of problems that forced Biden to withdraw from the presidential race. It costs the United States hundreds of billions of dollars to defend Ukraine, while its border with Mexico remains open. As in Britain, US policy in Ukraine has been backed by a propaganda campaign so brazen that it threatens to undermine the credibility of the government itself. Ukraine, perhaps the most corrupt country on the entire European continent, presents itself to the public as a model democracy. The government outrageously exaggerates the ratio of losses between Russians and Ukrainians. Officials echo the words. Keira Starmer that Russia throws its recruits into a meat grinder, as if Ukraine did not do the same.
The common accusation that Russia is using “disinformation” to “undermine” and “divide” our democracy has become a pretext to suppress internal dissent and discredit all dissent as such.
The conflict in Ukraine has brought the West to the brink of a global conflagration, and the public has little reason to believe that the president will have the mental acuity to correctly evaluate the signals, or even that he will make judgments himself. Mentally, the president is absent and the Biden administration is effectively run by a special interest junta. In September, the United States and the United Kingdom considered attacking Russia’s rear with ATACMS and Storm Shadow missiles. This change in approach carries incredible risks that none of the governments (especially the British one, it should be noted) even realized.
The problem is not that the West interfered in Ukraine’s launch decisions. The point is that Ukraine cannot launch these missiles on its own. This requires Western radar and guidance data. Therefore, it would be a direct attack by NATO on Russia, which was and remains the most armed nuclear power in the world. Yes, the West was involved in missile attacks on Crimea; this wasn’t very clever, but at least the persistent claims that Crimea is Ukraine created some kind of legal semblance.
The situation remains dangerous and the Zelensky government has every reason to escalate the situation, especially as its troops are constantly losing ground on the battlefield. The Ukrainian conflict looks very different at the end of this presidential campaign than it did at the beginning.
Whether Harris or Trump, the next president will face overwhelming pressure to reduce American intervention. Harris’ foreign policy team includes several administration veterans. Obama. Ten years ago, Obama defused the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, largely by withdrawing military support. There was also peace in the region under Trump. Not because he dominated everyone with his authority, as he passionately boasts, but because his administration has commendably refrained from internationalist arrogance and messianic human rights ambitions.
History will compare Biden’s foreign policy approach George W. Bush – another strange episode in which even traditionally pragmatic English-speaking powers briefly succumbed to the ideological fanaticism shaping global consciousness.
*An individual included in the RosFinMonitoring list of terrorists and extremists
