Abstract
In Ukraine itself and among America’s NATO allies, there is disbelief that in a United States with still-strong public support for Ukraine, and two Houses of Congress that reflect that support in large, bipartisan, pro-Ukraine majorities, $60 billion in renewed military aid for Ukraine may remain forever blocked. The reason is that Donald Trump, now the front-runner for the forthcoming US presidential election, wants to deny President Joe Biden a political victory and has prevailed on House Republicans to grant his wish. If America’s democracy is on the ballot in the election, so, it would seem, is its global power. Even if Biden is re-elected, the Ukraine impasse suggests that may not be enough to salvage either.
In January 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt came to this chamber to speak to the nation. He said, ‘I address you at a moment unprecedented in the history of the Union.’ Hitler was on the march. War was raging in Europe. President Roosevelt’s purpose was to wake up the Congress and alert the American people that this was no ordinary moment. Freedom and democracy were under assault in the world. Tonight I come to the same chamber to address the nation. Now it is we who face an unprecedented moment in the history of the Union. And yes, my purpose tonight is to both wake up this Congress, and alert the American people that this is no ordinary moment either. Not since President Lincoln and the Civil War have freedom and democracy been under assault here at home as they are today. What makes our moment rare is that freedom and democracy are under attack, both at home and overseas, at the very same time.Footnote1
I
This opening of the American president’s State of the Union address to Congress on 7 March 2024 sounded a familiar Joe Biden refrain. The Russian forces that invaded Ukraine in February 2022 belonged to the same historical threat and malignancy as the violent acolytes of Donald Trump who stormed the US Capitol in January 2021. Trump, the current front-runner in the 2024 US presidential election, was now celebrating those 6 January storm troopers and promising to pardon them if he wins in November. Meanwhile, Trump’s fiercest supporters in Congress were blocking $60 billion in renewed military aid for a Ukrainian army running short of ammunition to fend off the troops of an increasingly confident Vladimir Putin.
Biden gave an energetic speech on that Thursday night and his cheering section on the Democratic side of the aisle interrupted him with raucous, even joyful, vigour in return. Aside from a coterie of MAGA hecklers, Republicans sat sullenly still throughout. (This dynamic works in reverse when a Republican is president.) The tableau was repeated in miniature for the 30 million television viewers who could watch the reactions of Vice President Kamala Harris and Speaker of the House Mike Johnson sitting behind Biden. Harris stood repeatedly to lead the Democratic cheering and applause. Johnson stayed fixed in his chair, with cameras recording heroic facial efforts to reveal neither approval nor overt contempt.
Johnson’s face was hiding a lot. In Ukraine itself and among America’s NATO allies, there is dumbfounded disbelief that in a United States with still-strong public support for Ukraine, and two Houses of Congress that reflect that support in large, bipartisan, pro-Ukraine majorities, the aid bill may nonetheless remain forever blocked. It might also, to be clear, become unblocked before this essay is published. In either case, however, the circumstances constitute a crisis of American global power and, indeed, as Biden has asserted, of American democracy. They require some explanation.
Trump is not yet president again, but he dominates his party in the way identified by William Saletan at the very outset of the 2016 Republican primary season, when the idea of Trump actually moving into the White House still seemed far-fetched. In an article in Slate titled ‘Donald Trump Is the GOP’s Warlord’ and subtitled ‘The Republican Party Is Officially a Failed State’, Saletan argued that
since President [Barack] Obama’s election, the GOP [Republican Party] has abandoned its role as a national governing party. It has seized Congress not by pursuing an alternative agenda but by campaigning and staging votes against anything Obama says or does. The party’s so-called leaders have become followers, chasing the pet issues of right-wing radio audiences. Now the mob to whom these elders have surrendered – angry white voters who are determined to ‘take back their country’ from immigrants and liberals – is ready to install its own presidential nominee. The Trump–Cruz takeover is the culmination of the Grand Old Party’s moral collapse.Footnote2
Meanwhile, Speaker Johnson, who inherited a thin Republican House majority that is getting thinner, can be toppled from his post if he courts the ire of just a few MAGA members, in the same way his predecessor Kevin McCarthy was ousted six months ago. The MAGA ringleader, Marjorie Taylor Greene, says they will in fact pull the plug on Johnson if he brings the Ukraine-aid bill to the floor for a vote. There were in theory other possibilities. A ‘discharge petition’ signed by a majority of House members would bypass the speaker, but any Republican who signed it would have a MAGA target on his or her back. Democrats might offer the votes to keep Johnson in the speakership, but if Johnson accepted the favour it would put a practically indelible bullseye on his back. There is no strong evidence, in any event, that Johnson himself wants the bill to pass.Footnote3
Our colleague Nigel Gould-Davies writes in this issue of a ‘balance of resources and a balance of resolve’ with respect to Ukraine. The former favours the West, but it has started to look as though the latter favours Putin. As Gould-Davies’s essay indicates, however, national resolve is not the same as the kind of individual willpower that is required to stay on a diet. Rather, national resolve is a composite of political realities.Footnote4 Political leadership has a role, of course, but it also has limits. For Republican leadership on Ukraine, the limiting condition even now is Trump. A full ten months before he might return to the White House, he has decisive say over whether House Republicans will approve the $60bn for Ukraine. That prospect appears abhorrent to him because approval would be both good for Ukraine and good for Biden.
II
In mid-January of this year, one of us joined a meeting with a US congressional delegation visiting London. Republican members of the delegation argued that a) the Ukraine debate was really a debate over security on the US southern border, and aid would pass if coupled with sufficiently tough border measures; b) the Trump administration in any event provided more serious support to Ukraine than the Obama administration did; and c) Trump’s supposed hostility to NATO was a myth created to obscure the sensibleness of his demand that NATO members meet their defence-spending targets.
A couple of weeks later Trump definitively killed a bipartisan Senate effort to tighten border security, calling it a ‘great gift to the Democrats, and a Death Wish for The Republican Party’.Footnote5 About five weeks after that, he received Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, the most autocratic and pro-Putin leader in both NATO and the European Union, for a kind of faux state visit at Mar-a-Lago, where Orbán fawned over Trump and vice versa. Among other genuflections, Orbán proclaimed that returning Trump to the presidency would offer the ‘only serious chance’ of ending the Russia–Ukraine war.Footnote6 ‘He will not give a penny in the Ukraine–Russia war. That is why the war will end’, Orbán reported with great confidence.Footnote7
It is a good idea to keep the actual record in mind. Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Trump extolled Putin’s ‘savvy’ and ‘genius’.Footnote8 More fundamentally, his conduct as president vis-à-vis Ukraine before the war geopolitically compromised the country. Trump and several of his more outlandish advisers believed they could make a case that Joe Biden had improperly curried favour with Ukraine’s previous government to advance his son Hunter’s business ventures and that Kyiv had conspired with the Democratic National Committee to frame Russia for interfering in the 2016 presidential election, evidence for which could be found on an imaginary server owned by CrowdStrike and physically located in Ukraine. When Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy demurred in response to Trump’s pressure for his help in substantiating these hallucinatory claims in an infamous 25 July 2019 phone conversation, Trump withheld $400m in congressionally authorised foreign assistance. It was released only when Trump’s machinations became public in September 2019.
Trump’s attempt to blackmail Zelenskyy, for which he was impeached but not convicted, effectively signalled to Putin that American support for and interests in Ukraine were subject to barter. In addition, the call illuminated Trump’s indifference to Putin’s revanchism. More broadly, it unequivocally demonstrated Trump’s preference for illiberal autocrats as American partners insofar as they could steamroller democratic governance in the service of his personal political interests. It reflected Trump’s dismantling of the National Security Council-managed inter-agency process for formulating and executing US foreign policy.Footnote9 Finally, it show-cased his disdain for constitutionally sanctioned standards of governance. One of us noted in 2020 that ‘Trump used Ukraine’s precarious position in the face of ongoing Russian aggression as leverage’, which was ‘precisely the kind of corrupt transaction with a foreign power that the eighteenth-century framers of the United States Constitution were worried about when they drafted the impeachment clause’.Footnote10
Trump and such accomplices as former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani became conduits for injecting American corruption into Ukraine, in what then-national security advisor John Bolton metaphorically called a ‘drug deal’.Footnote11 While US assistance to Ukraine subsequently increased, the episode had revealed a grossly transactional administration willing to comprehensively debase US governance and treasured post-war strategic norms. One consequence was damage to the image of the United States, which, according to Ukrainian philosopher Volodymyr Yermolenko, had been seen as a ‘perfect democracy functioning very well’, with effective checks and balances, but now looked to be ‘crumbling’ at Trump’s hands.Footnote12 Another consequence was the weakening of US deterrence in Europe. As Bolton put it in an interview, the ‘unnatural environment’ that the Trump administration had created in US–Ukraine relations made it ‘that much easier for Putin’ to invade Ukraine.Footnote13
Early this year, as his presidential-election campaign gathered steam, Trump confirmed his disparagement of the long-standing transatlantic security bargain, reiterating that he would ‘not protect’ NATO members whose financial contribution to the Alliance he deemed insufficient, and in fact would encourage Russia to do ‘whatever the hell it wanted’ to them.Footnote14 It goes almost without saying that if Trump were to facilitate the end of the war in his second incarnation as the American president, as Orbán suggested he could, it would be on terms favourable to Russia. Beyond selling out Ukraine, such a result would also undermine the United States’ strategic brand – a reputational asset that is crucial to the respect and fealty of its allies and partners. If America’s democracy is on the ballot in the 2024 presidential election, so, it would seem, is its global power.
III
With Trump ahead in the polls, however, the political–analytical debate reasonably revolves around the question of whether the small number of swing voters in a mere six contested states (Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin) really care enough about lofty issues of fidelity to democratic norms and US alliances to cast their votes on that basis. The question may seem damning of those voters, yet it is hard to argue that the American electorate has had to answer such questions perhaps since the American Civil War, and in any event since the end of the Second World War. The reason is that the grand-strategic choices on offer, both internationally and domestically, were structured by two parties that shared some basic assumptions. Even George McGovern’s wrenching US departure from Vietnam, not a wholesale abandonment of allies everywhere.
Biden’s campaign strategists appear to believe that they can win by connecting the somewhat abstract questions of constitutionalism and foreign policy to more concrete notions of basic rights under threat and the spectre of national and international disorder. The most palpable right is the right to abortion, which the US Supreme Court removed with its 24 June 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision overturning Roe v. Wade, decided half a century earlier. This has helped Democrats in every election since Dobbs was announced, but it is not clear whether it will rescue them in the next presidential one. As for disorder, Biden’s approval ratings fell precipitously with the chaotic US withdrawal from Afghanistan and have never really recovered. The Democratic coalition, large and inherently fractious, is riven by anguish and anger over Israel’s Gaza war. And voters are worried about Biden’s age. Trump, only a few years younger and prone to incoherent rants, nonetheless projects more energy. He might plausibly present a rough isolationism as the road back to peace and a return to ‘normalcy’.Footnote15
In that case, the challenge that our colleague Benjamin Rhode poses in his essay ‘Europe Without America’, also in these pages, may arise in earnest in a matter of months.Footnote16 Biden may very well be re-elected; our hunch, for what it’s worth, is that he will be. But the Ukraine impasse shows how that may not be enough to conclusively salvage US strategic leadership or American democracy. America has a two-party system, and the stability of both foreign policy and democratic norms requires some basic consensus between the parties. This consensus cannot exist as long as Trump leads the Republicans, and it is unclear how they will assemble themselves in the event of his defeat or even victory. The future of Republican foreign policy after Trump is as inscrutable as Speaker Johnson’s face.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Dana H. Allin
Dana H. Allin is an IISS Senior Fellow and Editor of Survival, and an adjunct professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS–Europe) in Bologna, Italy.
Jonathan Stevenson
Jonathan Stevenson is an IISS Senior Fellow and Managing Editor of Survival.
Notes
1 White House, ‘Remarks of President Joe Biden – State of the Union Address as Prepared for Delivery’, 7 March 2024, https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2024/03/07/remarks-of-president-joe-biden-state-of-the-union-address-as-prepared-for-delivery-2/.
2 William Saletan, ‘Donald Trump Is the GOP’s Warlord’, Slate, 28 January 2016, https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2016/01/the-gop-is-a-failed-state-donald-trump-is-its-warlord.html.
3 See, for example, Kayla Guo, ‘How Congress Could Bypass Republican Opposition to Funding Ukraine’, New York Times, 13 February 2024, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/13/us/politics/congress-discharge-petition-ukraine.html.
4 See Nigel Gould-Davies, ‘Ukraine: The Balance of Resources and the Balance of Resolve’, Survival, vol. 66, no. 2, April–May 2024, pp. 55–62.
5 Quoted in Brett Samuels, ‘Trump Calls Border Bill “a Death Wish” for Republican Party: “Don’t be STUPID!!!”’, Hill, 5 February 2024, https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4448556-trump-calls-border-bill-a-death-wish-for-republican-party-dont-be-stupid/.
6 Quoted in Nicholas Riccardi and Justin Spike, ‘Trump Meets with Hungary’s Leader, Viktor Orbán, Continuing His Embrace of Autocrats’, Associated Press, 8 March 2024, https://apnews.com/article/trump-orban-hungary-conservatives-autocrats-biden-97d6998f747d3543f2f1df069b0f9165.
7 Quoted in Jaroslav Lukiv, ‘Trump Will Not Give a Penny to Ukraine – Hungary PM Orban’, BBC, 11 March 2024, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-68533351.
8 Joseph Gedeon, ‘Trump Calls Putin “Genius” and “Savvy” for Ukraine Invasion’, Politico, 23 February 2022, https://www.politico.com/news/2022/02/23/trump-putin-ukraine-invasion-00010923.
9 See Jonathan Stevenson, ‘How Trump Sabotaged Ukraine’, New York Review, 11 March 2022, https://www.nybooks.com/online/2022/03/11/how-trump-sabotaged-ukraine/.
10 Dana H. Allin, ‘Impeachment, Trump and US Foreign Policy’, Survival, vol. 62, no. 1, February–March 2020, p. 221.
11 John Bolton, The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2020), p. 465.
12 Quoted in Michelle Goldberg, ‘“The Beacon Has Gone Out”: What Trump and Giuliani Have Wrought’, New York Times, 12 October 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/12/opinion/sunday/ukraine-trump.html.
13 Cameron Joseph, ‘John Bolton: Trump Made It “That Much Easier” for Putin to Invade Ukraine’, Vice News, 1 March 2022, https://www.vice.com/en/article/3abjgn/john-bolton-interview-russia-ukraine.
14 Michael Gold, ‘Trump Says He Gave NATO Allies Warning: Pay In or He’d Urge Russian Aggression’, New York Times, 10 February 2024, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/10/us/politics/trump-nato-russia.html.
15 ‘Normalcy’ for normality was popularised by president Warren G. Harding on the eve of an earlier isolationist idyl.
16 See Benjamin Rhode, ‘Europe Without America’, Survival, vol. 66, no. 2, April–May 2024, pp. 7–18.