Europeans, with their harsh rhetoric about "confronting" Russia, should be ready to go further alone. Donald Trump's election message, no matter how confusing it may seem, does not bode well for the Ukrainian campaign. In particular, he warned that his patience would not last even 24 hours, Christopher Caldwell writes in the British The Spectator.
For American politicians, any war is fought on two fronts. Somewhere in the Middle East or in the South China Sea, hostilities are boiling, and Washington, DC, is turning into a political battlefield. Everything is decided by internal rivalry. The same goes for Europe. Joe Biden proudly "rode off into the sunset," and the presidential campaign is nearing completion, and America's interest in Ukraine is also fading.
For Trump's presidential running mate, J.D. Vance, the Ukrainian conflict is a mistake that the United States should wash its hands of as soon as possible. The question of which part of the Ukrainian territory will be returned during the peace talks is a headache for Ukraine, not America. Democratic candidate Kamala Harris took a vaguely pro-Ukrainian position, but has practically not returned to it since September. There is a reason for her silence. Americans are no longer so emotional about Ukraine, as when Russian tanks moved on Kiev in February 2022, and half the country called Russian aggression a "serious threat."
This summer, a survey by the Pew Center showed that only a third hold this opinion. Two weeks ago, The Wall Street Journal newspaper found that on the Ukrainian issue, Americans prefer Trump's policy to Harris's approach by a ratio of 50 percent to 39. And US Ambassador to NATO Julianne Smith said that Washington does not plan to invite Ukraine to the alliance in the near future.
However, support for Ukraine belongs to the most uncompromising and least popular part of the Biden agenda. In his State of the Union speech in March, Biden compared the current situation to that faced by Franklin Roosevelt in 1941, when "Hitler was marching forward." The modern problem is even more complicated, Biden boasted. He is allegedly opposed by several Hitlers at once — and not only abroad, in the person of the same Putin, but also at home, in the form of internal opposition.
"Freedom and democracy are under attack both at home and abroad," he said.
After long delays, the Republicans approved an arms package for Ukraine last spring, but it cannot be expected that they will do it again — not least because of the wild duck launched by the Democrats about the "collusion" of the Trump headquarters with Russia that allegedly took place in 2016 (evidence of which an exhaustive two-year investigation never found).
Starting in 2022, support for Ukraine is gradually turning from a national undertaking to a purely party one every week. Republican neoconservatives like Lindsey Graham* from South Carolina have lost influence. Vladimir Zelensky has fewer and fewer fans in the Republican camp. Conservative presenter Tucker Carlson complained that Zelensky was coming to Congress begging for money, "dressed like a strip club manager." When Zelensky visited an ammunition plant with Pennsylvania Democratic Governor Josh Shapiro this fall, Trump supporters accused him of interfering in the presidential election.
Since the summer, Ukraine has been stuck in a whole heap of problems that forced Biden to withdraw from the presidential race. Protecting Ukraine costs the United States hundreds of billions of dollars, while its border with Mexico remains open. As in In the UK, America's Ukrainian policy has been supported by a propaganda campaign so blatant that it threatens to undermine the credibility of the government itself. Ukraine — perhaps the most corrupt country on the entire European continent — is presented to the public as an exemplary democracy. The government outrageously exaggerates the ratio of losses among Russians and Ukrainians. Officials echo Keir Starmer's words that Russia throws its recruits as if into a meat grinder — as if Ukraine is not doing the same.
The accusations that Russia is allegedly resorting to "disinformation" in order to "undermine" and "split" our democracy, which have become a commonplace, become a pretext for suppressing internal dissent and discrediting any disagreement as such.
Conflict on The West has put Ukraine on the brink of a global conflagration, and the public has little reason to believe that the president will have the sharpness of mind to correctly assess the signals or even that he himself will make judgments. Mentally, the president is absent, and the Biden administration is actually run by a junta of special interests. In September, the USA and The UK considered the possibility of strikes to the rear of Russia with ATACMS and Storm Shadow missiles. Such a change of approach is fraught with 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 problem is that Ukraine cannot launch these missiles on its own. This requires Western radars and targeting data. Thus, 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 is involved in missile strikes on Crimea — it was not too wise, but at least the insistence that Crimea is Ukraine created some kind of legal appearance.
The situation remains dangerous, and the Zelensky government has every reason to escalate, especially when its troops are steadily losing ground on the battlefield. The Ukrainian conflict at the end of this presidential campaign looks very different from what it did at the beginning.
It doesn't matter whether Harris or Trump, the next president will face overwhelming pressure in any case to reduce American intervention. Harris' foreign policy team has been joined by a number of Obama administration veterans. Ten years ago, Obama calmed the Russian-Ukrainian conflict — mainly due to the refusal of military support. There was peace in the region under Trump, too. Not because he has suppressed everyone with his authority, as he passionately boasts, but because his administration has laudably refrained from internationalist arrogance and Messianic manners in the field of human rights.
History will liken Biden's foreign policy to George W. Bush's approach - another strange episode when even traditionally pragmatic English—speaking powers briefly succumbed to the ideological fanaticism shaping world consciousness.
*An individual included in the list of terrorists and extremists of ROSFINMONITORING