Today is election day in the United States of America. Americans will choose between two presidential candidates. On the Republican side is the former president, Donald Trump, a man whose closest advisers have said would ideally rule as a fascist dictator, a man who has proven that he is easily manipulated by flattery from other strongmen, and who has promised to punish and silence his critics. For the Democrats, it is the vice-president, Kamala Harris, a former prosecutor born to Indian and Jamaican immigrant parents, who, unlike her opponent, will work to maintain the core features of a 21st-century democracy.
Americans are unique voters. Decisions that impact the lives of millions thousands of miles away rest on their shoulders in every presidential election. And yet, foreign policy has been long considered the broccoli on the plate of Americans, both in terms of news consumption and voting issues.
Although America is the most powerful nation on earth, both economically and militarily, millions of Americans struggle to make ends meet day to day. Nearly 12% of Americans live below the poverty line, according to 2022 census statistics, while another one-third of the country, some 95-100 million Americans, live in a state of chronic economic precarity. It only makes sense that domestic concerns are top of mind for these voters.
The first election I was eligible to vote in, I did so from abroad as a student living in Paris in 2008. I was travelling in Morocco when the results came in and at the bakery where I was picking up breakfast, the baker excitedly gave me and my friends bread for free, smiling and cheering for “Obama!” When I returned to Paris, there were revellers on the streets celebrating the historic day on which a black man had been elected president of the US. Today I am headed towards Kyiv, being rocked to sleep by the churning of the night train from the Polish border headed into Ukraine. It is an unsettling fact that the decision of a handful of voters in just a few swing states may spell the difference between survival and annihilation for Ukraine.
The US has given $113 billion in total aid to Ukraine since the full-scale Russian invasion began in February 2022. If the vice-president, Kamala Harris, is elected, that aid will likely continue, at least to some degree. If Donald Trump wins this election, Ukraine is unlikely to receive much, if any, aid going forward. Trump has repeatedly sidestepped questions about aid to Ukraine and his vice-presidential running mate, J.D. Vance, laid out a peace plan that sounded a lot like the one proposed by the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, earlier this year, saying that Ukraine would need to forfeit territory gained by Russia as well as its plans to join NATO. Both of these stipulations would leave Putin with ample time to reinvade, just as he did when he annexed Crimea in 2014 and then launched his invasion eight years later in 2022.
The Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, has warned against the cost of this kind of appeasement. “If this were a plan, then America is headed for global conflict. It would imply that whoever asserts control over territory — not the rightful owner but whoever came in a month or a week ago with a machine gun in hand — is the one who’s in charge.”
“We’ll end up in a world where might is right,” Zelensky continued. “It will be a completely different world, a global showdown.”
Zelensky still is the leader that captured the world’s attention as an ardent communicator and straightforward statesman. But it is clear that Zelensky cannot win this war alone. And although there have been times of significant Ukrainian gains that could signal a turning point, a major Ukrainian counter-offensive last year produced little result. Despite heavy losses, Russian troops have become increasingly entrenched in their foothold in the Donbas in Ukraine’s east. Ukraine is struggling to mobilise and train new soldiers and fatigue for the war is felt at home and abroad as headlines turn to the conflict in Palestine.
If Ukraine were to fall, Europe would undoubtedly be under threat. As a young agent in the KGB stationed in East Germany, Putin saw the dissolution of the Soviet Union as a great humiliation and he has made many references to wanting to re-establish the borders of the former Russian empire, which include much of Poland and the Baltic states. It is also a very real possibility that Trump would withdraw from NATO, something he has long threatened to do, citing long-standing frustrations that Europe doesn’t pay its fair share for its own defence.
American voters may see spending on Ukraine or NATO as a zero-sum matter of dollars that could be spent at home. But Trump is unlikely to cut military funding in favour of expansion of spending initiatives that would alleviate the financial stress felt by millions of Americans. Abdicating American involvement in maintaining diplomacy and peace in the world beyond America’s borders would be far more costly to Americans than its current spending.
At the core, Americans need to feel the wealth of their nation to accept their responsibility to the world. Trump’s isolationism might feel like a short-term fix, but it is a path to disaster — for the US and for global democracy. And that is a price that Trump seems all too willing to pay.
In 1940, the democratic socialist British author, George Orwell, offered a chilling insight into the authoritarian mindset. Reflecting on Adolf Hitler’s appeal in a book review of Mein Kampf, he observed that people don’t crave only “comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth-control and, in general, common sense.” They also yearn for “struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flags and loyalty-parades,” which Hitler had promised them in spades.
Today, the choice before America is clear. It is a choice between comfort and conflict, between isolationism and global engagement, between appeasement and defence of democracy. As Americans cast their votes, let them remember: their choices echo far beyond their shores, shaping a world where either ‘might is right’ or democracy endures.
Carol Schaeffer is a journalist based in Berlin, Germany, and is a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council in Washington D.C.
