Nine days ago, the idea that an obscure 2020 election denier from Shreveport, Louisiana, with less than five thousand dollars in his household’s bank accounts, a literalist’s belief in the presence of dinosaurs on Noah’s Ark, and a dubious past as an advocate of “conversion” therapy for gay teens could single-handedly shape the fate of tens of billions of dollars in U.S. military assistance to key allies at war was even more preposterous than the notion that America might soon reëlect its four-times-indicted former President.
But these are not normal times in our politics. As the new Republican Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson now wields outsized power over which bills get a vote in Congress, and he has decided to make the first major fight of his tenure a dispute with the White House and the Democratic-controlled Senate over emergency aid to Israel and Ukraine. In the Senate, meanwhile, Tommy Tuberville, a first-term G.O.P. member from Alabama, who is better known for his years as Auburn’s head football coach, has waged a one-man campaign to block hundreds of military promotions for the past nine months. With a new war in the Middle East and embarrassing vacancies in key Pentagon posts threatening to affect U.S. readiness, his Republican colleagues finally pushed back for real this week, spending much of Wednesday night yelling at Tuberville on the Senate floor. “I do not respect men who do not honor their word,” Joni Ernst, a senator from Iowa, huffed. Dan Sullivan of Alaska complained about Tuberville’s “national-security suicide mission.” He added, “Xi Jinping is loving this. So is Putin. How dumb can we be, man?”
The answer, of course, is very dumb. Even after getting reamed out by his fellow-Republicans, Tuberville refused to relent on his blockade. And, in the House, Johnson is standing firm on a bizarre demand—the first substantive one of his Speakership—that fourteen billion dollars in wartime assistance to Israel be offset by an equal amount in cuts to the Internal Revenue Service. Even a ruling from the Congressional Budget Office that the cuts would actually cost the Treasury nearly twenty-seven billion dollars by reducing the amount in taxes that a budget-constrained I.R.S. could collect did not deter Johnson. The Senate is not expected to approve this approach, and the White House threatened to veto the bill if the House version with the I.R.S. cuts reached the President’s desk. Nonetheless, Johnson plunged ahead.
While picking this fight over urgent—and historically bipartisan—money for Israel, Johnson also refused to include in the emergency spending bill sixty billion dollars in additional Ukraine aid that President Biden has requested. The result is that no one really knows yet where that leaves the money for either Israel or Ukraine. Maybe the Senate, where both parties’ leaders and a bipartisan majority support the broader funding approach, will find a way around the new Speaker, who now claims privately that he isn’t really as opposed to helping Ukraine as his record of voting against previous assistance suggests. Maybe it won’t. Such is the state of American foreign-policymaking. The week’s events on Capitol Hill ought to remind us that not all national-security threats are overseas.
I’ve been watching this all play out from Berlin, where nervous allies are asking once again what the volatile state of American politics means for the rest of the world. Few countries have more at stake in the upcoming U.S. Presidential election than Germany, a favorite target of former President Donald Trump during his four years in office. The conversations I’ve had here inevitably include questions about whether Trump really can overcome his four criminal indictments and the stigma of his lies about the 2020 election to defeat Biden. “There’s a major land war going on a day’s drive from here, and I think that most Germans are more focussed on the fate of American democracy,” Daniel Benjamin, a former American diplomat and head of the American Academy in Berlin, which hosted me for a discussion on U.S. politics, said. “They’re scarred [by Trump], and they worry a lot about it.”
The current American President is arguably much more popular here than he is in the United States—a recent Pew poll found that sixty-seven per cent of Germans trust Biden to do the right thing in international affairs, versus ten per cent of Germans who thought Trump would do so in the final year of his Presidency. (Biden’s current approval rating at home, meanwhile, stands at an average of fifty-four-per-cent disapproval and just thirty-nine-and-a-half-per-cent approval—near the nadir he hit in the summer of 2022.) This is not just about lefty Europeans turning up their noses at a crude right-wing American politician. Biden’s preference for working with allies rather than Trump’s bashing of them; his strong backing for Ukraine in contrast to Trump’s blackmailing of its leader; and his decades of support for NATO at a time when NATO is facing the biggest threat to European security since the end of the Cold War are all real, specific differences. Trump, in contrast, has threatened to pull out of NATO altogether—John Bolton, his former national-security adviser, has said he is likely to do so if given a second term—and just the other day he bragged to an audience in Sioux City, Iowa, that he had threatened not to defend other NATO countries, even in response to a Russian military assault. “Does that mean, if Russia attacks my country, you will not be there?” Trump quoted a fellow NATO leader asking him. “That’s right,” Trump said as his audience cheered. “I will not protect you.” Never mind that the U.S. is bound by the terms of the alliance to come to the aid of its other members. Trump does not consider himself obliged to follow either treaties or long-standing bipartisan traditions of national security—and his views are increasingly shared by other Republicans for whom talking tough on Russia was, until the Trump era, an article of bedrock conviction.
Perhaps the most pressing fear one hears in Europe is about aid for Ukraine. However hard it is to imagine, given the enormous commitment that the West has made to Kyiv’s defense, congressional dysfunction in Washington might mean that American assistance dries up before the current Ukrainian counter-offensive is even over. Polling suggests that enthusiasm for continuing support to Ukraine is waning across the political spectrum in the U.S., especially but not exclusively among Republicans; in a recent Gallup poll, sixty-two per cent of Republicans and forty-four per cent of independents said the U.S. was doing too much to help Ukraine, an increase of ten points since June.
From the start of the war, Biden has worked arm in arm on Ukraine with Chancellor Olaf Scholz. Germany, as part of its so-called Zeitenwende, a painful and not fully complete pivot in its foreign policy since Russia’s invasion, is now committed to spend more than two per cent of its G.D.P. on defense—an increase that Trump loudly demanded but never could achieve. It has also broken its dependence on Russian energy, a radical shift from before the war, when Germany imported around half of its gas and more than a third of its oil from Russia and was set to open the now cancelled Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline.
But its level of military assistance is only a small subset of the large sums that Washington has spent supplying Kyiv. American aid is, for now, irreplaceable on the battlefield.
And yet the more profound worry—here in Berlin, and elsewhere in the West—goes far deeper than how much is spent in sending long-range missiles to Ukraine or on helping Israel eradicate Hamas. It’s about the real possibility of America reëlecting a President who is not committed to the basic principles of either the Western alliance or, for that matter, the American Constitution. In “The Divider,” the recent book that I wrote with my husband, we recounted how John Kelly, the former Marine general and Trump’s chief of staff, was shocked by Trump’s admiration for the Nazi generals who prosecuted the Second World War. “You fucking generals, why can’t you be like the German generals?” Trump told Kelly at one point. Recounting this story to an audience in Berlin elicited only stunned silence.
Germans don’t get a vote in the upcoming U.S. Presidential election, but, as much as anywhere in the world, they get what is on the line. ♦