What’s at Stake in 2024

Since 2016, the Democrats have become, to revisit a phrase from the Iraq War decade, America’s war party. Few anticipated this. Barack Obama’s retort to Mitt Romney’s anti-Russian hawkishness in the 2012 debate (“the 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back”) reinforced the longstanding view that Democrats were oriented more towards peace-making than the GOP. No one realized it then, but Obama’s words marked an end of an era that had begun with Eugene McCarthy and George McGovern. 

Four years later, Donald Trump depicted the Iraq war as a big fat mistake and went on to win the South Carolina primary against rivals who refused to acknowledge the disaster. Eight years after that, Democrats have gone giddy over endorsements for Kamala Harris from former congresswoman Liz Cheney and her father Dick. The latter was the leading force in the Bush administration behind the Iraq war and a principal orchestrator of the lies to justify it. He has never expressed regret over his actions and the horrific carnage that resulted. Bill Kristol, who has evolved from conservative journalism’s most important Iraq war promoter to Never Trumper and Kamala backer, paved the way. Open letters endorsing Kamala from aging GOP foreign policy hawks have become a critical tool for the campaign to validate her foreign policy seriousness.

It is not clear whether former members of the second Bush administration will secure roles under a President Harris. But they have reason to hope. Despite the obvious differences in background, W. and Kamala have much in common. Both are good looking and exceptionally photogenic. Neither developed the slightest reputation for political wisdom or gravitas. For alumni of Bush’s war disasters seeking a new political vessel, Kamala fits the bill more readily than Obama, who was ideologically opposed, or Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, with their decades of Washington experience and their own well-developed policy networks. And, obviously, more readily than Donald Trump. 

As the Kristol circle and the Cheneys have moved to Harris, Donald Trump has tried to remake the GOP into the less warlike of the two parties. It is a work in progress; there are many prominent GOP hawks who hope to thwart him. But if you look at the Trump campaign now, its most visible and active surrogates are vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance, from the beginning the Senate’s most prominent Ukraine war skeptic, and Tulsi Gabbard, the former Democratic congresswoman whose hair began to turn prematurely gray during her first tour as a combat medic in Iraq. Add to them Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whose trenchant analysis of the Ukraine war and NATO expansion may have been the position that made him most unacceptable to the Democratic establishment. In September, Kennedy penned an op-ed with Donald Trump Jr. calling for negotiations with Russia. They noted the announcement of pending changes in Russia’s nuclear doctrine, which had previously stressed that weapons could only be used if the sovereignty of the Russian state was threatened. Kennedy may be the only prominent American political figure who actually reflects and talks about the Cuban missile crisis of 1962; his father and uncle, of course, played a critical role in walking the world back from Armageddon. 

Tulsi and RFK Jr. for Kristol and the Cheneys is a trade most Trump supporters would embrace. The Democratic establishment seems to welcome it, too, though one would think there would be misgivings among Democratic voters beyond the Jill Stein set. 

The political turnabout is not merely about a few dozen personalities shifting sides, and not merely about foreign policy. It is still not well understood. The red–blue electoral map of Obama–Romney 2012 is very much like today’s, which may lead one to conclude that the cultural battles and coalitions of that year continue in much the same way, intensified by social media. To some extent they do—Obama’s semi-privately expressed derision for those “clinging to their guns and religion” is probably shared by most leading Democrats today. 

But the split has evolved and deepened since 2012. If a Democrat had blamed an election loss on Russian collusion in 2012, rather than 2016, the progressive world would have been more or less baffled. Now such charges are a predictable part of the Democrat rhetorical arsenal. 

The Bush-Cheney administration followed up decisions by President Bill Clinton to push NATO eastward and in 2008 teed up Ukraine for future membership. There were warnings from inside the establishment, most notably from William Burns, then ambassador to Russia and currently CIA director, that extending NATO to Ukraine would be perceived by Russia as an existential threat, not merely by Putin and his circle but by everyone with any connection to the Russian security establishment. Obama’s joke about Romney’s Russia policy might have signaled that a progressive American administration would be prudent regarding Russia. However, with Hillary Clinton as secretary of state, several neoconservatives including Victoria Nuland were given important roles guiding his administration’s Russia policy. During Obama’s second term, Putin was transformed in the Beltway mind from a geopolitical rival with a large nuclear arsenal to a visceral cultural enemy. 

In a perceptive essay published in early 2022, on the eve of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Richard Hanania suggested that the turning point occurred when Russia became openly culturally conservative at home, at the same time the United States was experiencing the early tremors of its woke revolution. In 2013, Russia passed legislation outlawing LGBTQ “propaganda” directed at minors, shortly after it handed down serious jail sentences to members of Pussy Riot, the over-the-top feminist performance art collective, for sacrilegious acts at the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow. The events transformed Russia’s image among progressive elites. Russia turned from a recondite subject for foreign policy types to a symbolic participant in the West’s internal cultural battles, though, as Hanania noted, its urban gay bar scene very much resembled that of the rest of Europe. Putin’s Russia became not only a threat to Ukraine or the Baltic states but to all progressive values in the West. 

The transformation of Russia from rival to culture war foe was the leading edge in a sea change of how Democrats view foreign policy. The foreign affairs analyst Christopher Mott has coined the phrase “the woke imperium” to describe a new confluence of social justice ideology and neoconservative foreign policy. For Mott, social justice rhetoric thus far has served mostly to manufacture consent for what the foreign policy establishment would do anyway, though its universalist and culture-transforming rhetoric would justify almost unlimited United States interventions around the globe. “The Fight for Ukraine is also a fight for LGBTQ Rights,” proclaimed Vanity Fair in 2022, an early example. In Foreign Affairs, still the most establishment of American journals, a trio of authors this summer criticized progressives who were resistant to U.S. military spending and intervention. “Today’s progressives need to get comfortable with American power,” they intoned, outlining how progressive values required the United States to increase its military spending. 

The issues animating the woke imperium have been gestating for years. The blogger Steve Sailer began using the phrase “invade the world, invite the world” during the Bush presidency to describe the mindset of an administration relatively indifferent to policing its own borders but avid to play a military role in other people’s societies. The growing salience of immigration as a progressive issue illustrates the degree to which Europe’s political fault lines match our own. 

Large majorities of Europe’s voters want limited or zero immigration, while Europe’s ruling parties resort to increasingly baroque political and parliamentary maneuvers to keep anti-immigration parties out of power. Until now, an informal alliance of establishment parties, supranational EU institutions, and social justice NGOs have collaborated to keep the migrants coming, almost at will. But votes for national populist parties keep rising, and a decisive reckoning between the two sides seems inevitable. Foreign policy, including the war in Ukraine, has remained a secondary issue for Europeans, but in almost every country those who prefer negotiations with Russia rather than a Ukraine “victory” and NATO expansion support a populist left-wing or right-wing anti-mass-immigration party. 

If Russia is the woke imperium’s Great Satan, the Little Satan is Hungary, led by the repeatedly elected conservative, Viktor Orban. A tiny country, it is derided by both progressive and neoconservative American journalists to a seemingly obsessive degree. Hungary is both the first European country to actually close its borders to migrants claiming asylum and the NATO member most openly skeptical about pursuing proxy war with Russia to the point of victory. Other U.S. allies are genuinely undemocratic and often repressive, whether the issue is allowing gay bars or elections or press freedom, but Beltway progressives and neoconservatives who never question American ties to Morocco or Pakistan or Saudi Arabia become rabid on the subject of Orban. 

As in the United States, the political battles over immigration and foreign policy have caused major European figures to retreat from their presumed commitments to centuries-old core Western liberties. After anti-immigration riots in England and Ireland the past two summers, set off by reports of migrant crime, there was at least a temporary wave to suppress and prosecute “hate speech.” In the United States, no less a liberal establishment figure than Hillary Clinton has openly called for the prosecution of those who spread what she called “misinformation,” which seemed to be nothing more than political speech she doesn’t like. 

In the United States, the immigration debate has naturally fused into the general cultural battles over wokeness. If you want to abolish or radically defund the police, of course you want to abolish ICE and other agencies entrusted to enforce U.S. immigration law. Kamala Harris sought to do that as a U.S. senator, sponsoring a bill to transfer ICE enforcement funds to “refugee resettlement” NGOs. She has openly called for the end of deportations, which of course is the only meaningful sanction available to border enforcement agencies. The mainstream press, deeply supportive of Harris, has more or less refused to report on these past positions, and it is possible her September visit to the border will allow her to present herself as in line with what voters want. 

America’s election is now being contested in seven battleground states. It is roughly tied according to the polls at this writing, though it is possible that Harris or Trump will open up a meaningful lead in the final weeks. The vast preponderance of American election coverage focuses on issues ancillary to those central ones discussed here. Abortion, regrettably for pro-lifers, may be a settled issue for the current generation of voters. The Biden Harris team has not done terribly with the post-Covid economy, and assuming it continues to bring inflation under control, it is not obvious that Trump would do better.

Much of the November outcome will depend on undecided or marginal voter assessment of personality and character: Trump is an extraordinary if aging figure who has risen to the top of three or four different professions. He is also an egotistical man who comes across as an obnoxious loudmouth to many. Some who might support his positions are simply tired of him. Kamala seems clearly to be hiding something with her reluctance to speak to the media or off the cuff. With media assistance she has sought to keep her previous record of woke positions (particularly on immigration) from voters, but it is not clear how much she is also hiding a general lack of knowledge and competence in addressing a wide range of public policy issues. It is a problem she has been unable to solve with repetitive incantations of “I grew up a middle class kid” and other such phrases. 

But the polls now taken most regularly on voter issue concerns—on abortion, whom do you trust more on the economy, on “protecting democracy”—don’t get at the more decisive policy differences between the candidates, particularly on foreign policy where presidents have more autonomy to make historic decisions. 

The last time foreign affairs played heavily in American elections was the 1980s. Ronald Reagan’s famous bear ad in 1984 helped solidify the notion that Democrats might be too naïve or soft to deal effectively with Moscow. So far as I know, no one has tried to estimate whether Harris loses more “peace” voters to Trump than she gains with Cheney voters. The well-known election analyst Mark Halperin has suggested that the forever wars may be a kind of sleeper issue favoring Trump, though he stressed that this was more an intuition than an observation based on data.

In a political demography sense, it is certain that non-college-educated whites, whose shift towards a Trumpian GOP has been pronounced since the Bush years, have paid a steeper price for the forever wars than any other group in terms of broken families and shattered lives. Military recruitment, unsurprisingly, is down, and one doubts that calls to fight for the values of the woke imperium will revive it. But at this moment, when the United States active duty military involvement in the Mideast is more or less veiled and there is heavy technological and training coordination with Ukraine but no U.S. casualties, it is not a foreign policy election. As Walter Kirn and Matt Taibbi point out, taking note of the press’s non-coverage of the menacing changes in Russia’s nuclear doctrine, the pro-Kamala press aims to keep it that way. 

It is nonetheless an election with enormous foreign policy consequences. It is not very clear what a Kamala foreign policy would look like. Her rhetoric on Ukraine is indistinguishable from people in the Kristol-Cheney orbit. Would she empower them? Or would she veer nearer to her present national security advisor Philip Gordon, who reputedly has more moderate views and was a player in the Obama effort to reach a nuclear deal and détente with Iran? Does she agree with Joseph Biden’s very Silent Generation prudence, still evident despite the president’s belligerent Ukraine rhetoric, about the dangers of risking an open conflict with Russia over territories inhabited by Russian-speaking people on Russia’s border? Or does she believe, as she has said, not only that Putin is a Hitler-type tyrant bent on marching his troops into Poland and beyond but also that he is “bluffing” in his warnings to the West about the dangers of escalating the war, as much as the Beltway establishment now professes? Has she ever thought about such questions? 

What is clearer is that Harris as a politician has drawn much inspiration from wokeness, which can be distilled into the notion that the European world and its progeny are more guilty and disreputable than any other civilization and must, uniquely among civilizations, be held accountable for its crimes. She has praised wokeness explicitly, without defining it; she has endorsed reparations; she has argued explicitly that the United States should not have the right to deport people who cross its borders illegally. This is part of the mentality of the contemporary left. What is new is that these views are now entirely consistent with a militarized and interventionist foreign policy. Russia, no longer a revolutionary power, has become a symbol in our own cultural battles, so anti-Russian sentiment is a key component in America’s own cultural civil war. 

The same political fault lines run through every European state as well, even if the question of whether one wants mass Third World immigration is not logically connected to Ukraine’s NATO aspirations. A Harris victory would be a huge tonic for those parties in Europe who favor progressivism in all its forms and are anti-Russian hawks—and a damaging setback for those who think, on all of these issues, that Hungary might have a point.

It would be premature to declare that a Trump victory would signal a triumph for realism and restraint in American foreign policy. The obvious complicating factor is the Middle East, and Israel under Netanyahu’s leadership is clearly risking wider war, most probably in hope of bringing America into its battles. Trump undoubtedly believes in a version of America First, but he is also, by temperament and life experience, genuinely sympathetic to Israel. It would be naïve to think those sensibilities could not come into conflict.

On Ukraine, where the risks of wider war, including even nuclear war, are considerable and immediate, a Trump victory would have more obvious consequences. His second term would serve almost immediately as precursor to a peace settlement, where a free and independent Ukraine would be shorn of its NATO base aspirations, and much of its Russian identifying territories would remain in Russian hands. There would be peace and rebuilding. Russia’s newly created alliances of necessity with China and Iran would lose their reason for existence. 

Trump has taken an enormous political risk to stake out that ground, initially unpopular, as was his Iraq view in his own party. His position is moral and strategically sound. A Trump victory would also be a tonic for all the forces in Europe, stretching ideologically from Giorgia Meloni to Sahra Wagenknecht, who believe that mass Third World immigration is a recipe not only for increased crime but for endless cultural conflict, leading eventually to the fracture and possible erasure of the never unified but always recognizable cultural entity that was the cradle of modern science and democracy. In this he stands with the vast majority of Europe’s citizens, if not most of the powers that govern the continent today.

For Americans, the election result is likely to be less decisive, whoever wins.