US voters offered false dichotomy between domestic chaos and WWIII

(Originally published Nov. 4 in “What in the World“) Ukraine’s air defenses managed to knock down 66 of the 96 drones Russia launched against it Sunday.

But officials in Washington fear Russia has managed to break the stalemate and resume gaining territory in the eastern Donbas region. Ukraine’s bigger problem now, they say, isn’t a shortage of Western weapons—it’s a shortage of Ukrainian troops. And Russia now has the benefit of at least 8,000 North Korean troops helping it eject a Ukrainian incursion into its own Kursk province.

With U.S. presidential elections just a day away, this puts the West in a dangerous predicament. Depending on the outcome, it could:

a) try to push Kyiv into a deal with Russia that gives Moscow a land bridge to the Crimea, locking in its territorial gains in the Russian-speaking East, together with a promise not to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization;

b) give Kyiv the kind of long-range weaponry that would allow it to alter the balance of power in the war, as The Guardian advocates, but risk provoking a nuclear response from Moscow against Ukraine, the West, or both; or

c) provide Ukraine with reinforcements of the one weapon it hasn’t been supplying: troops, at the cost of Western lives and the risk that it provokes a nuclear response from Moscow against Ukraine, the West, or both.

This was always the risk in U.S. President Joe Biden’s incrementalist strategy of escalation by stealth. Biden failed to provide Ukraine with the material it needed to achieve total victory and instead gave it only enough to hold Russia at bay, betting he could exhaust Moscow’s ability to fight. Russian President Vladimir Putin, conversely, bet that he could not only last, but out-wait the West’s willingness to keep supporting Ukraine. He came very nearly close to losing that bet as Russia’s own weapons stocks and troop levels ebbed. But Putin got crucial help from both Iran and North Korea. And Biden managed to fight until almost the last Ukrainian.

In the latest example, Ukrainian Volodymyr Zelensky has pleaded for Washington to let him use long-range missiles to start killing those North Korean troops before they arrive and start killing Ukrainian troops.

Now, the U.S. public is on the verge of possibly re-electing a deeply unreliable populist who, among a range of other devastating decisions, would most likely choose option a) above. It’s no wonder that U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin chose this week, above all others, to pen an appeal to the public that casts the war in classic, Cold War, black-and-white, freedom-versus-tyranny terms.

It was casting the world in terms of this false dichotomy—a contest of the U.S. vs. global evil—that paradoxically rendered Donald Trump the unlikely candidate for qualities that are really a Democratic domain: diplomacy, détente, and peace. And it’s unfortunate that voters who recognize the very realistic, contemporary danger Trump poses to democracy in American are being asked to swallow an unrealistic, unsustainable and outdated view of America’s place in the rest of the world as one of the many very good reasons to vote against him.

Fortunately, a vote for Kamala Harris isn’t a certain vote for World War III, even if she has said she would maintain Biden’s foreign policy. But a vote for Trump is almost definitely a vote for policy chaos in the U.S. and abroad.