This week, as many Americans fret over what our country will look like after the upcoming national election, much of the world is fretting with us. The United States may not be the unipolar power that it was following the Cold War, but it remains the most influential and consequential country on Earth.
How our election turns out will affect people well beyond our borders for many years to come.
Just the fact that we are in the election cycle has already affected how we act in the world, and how others act as well.
It’s clear that the election is garbling our positions on Ukraine and the Middle East. A Donald Trump win is widely expected to end U.S. support to Kyiv, so Ukraine’s government is doing all it can to shore up its position in the meantime.
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy even did a swing-state road show to rally American support. Meanwhile, Russian President Vladimir Putin is biding his time on that same expectation.
In the Middle East, the stalemate around the U.S. elections has given Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu breathing room to continue his escalation in Gaza and Lebanon, absent concern of a heavy hand from his American friends who don’t want to alienate any voters ahead of such a close contest.
Israel continues to use our arms and ammunition to pummel civilians and civilian areas, hospitals and refugee camps and aggressively obstruct the provision of lifesaving humanitarian assistance.
Various U.S. agencies and offices have expressed deep concern, but Netanyahu knows the U.S. government will take no meaningful action to pressure him now, so his no-holds-barred approach continues.
Like Putin, Netanyahu is hoping that the next U.S. president will be more friendly to those with less democratic tendencies.
But this election is affecting our engagement almost everywhere we have interests.
In Sudan, millions of civilians are bearing the brunt of our political distraction. The war has unleashed the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, but America has failed to play the same leadership role it did in resolving the country’s devastating conflicts in the past.
Our close partner, the United Arab Emirates, has fueled this conflict as the leading supporter and supplier of the Rapid Support Forces, the paramilitary group committing the bulk of atrocities and accused of genocide — a fact we have simply tolerated.
The relative absence of America in addressing this conflict is less about political sensibilities than political bandwidth, so a conflict that has put 26 million people at risk of famine simply isn’t rising to the level of urgency that it should.
Electoral stasis isn’t new. U.S. administrations understandably avoid risk-taking during an election period.
When I was in the government, conventional wisdom was that any big foreign policy initiatives or changes needed to start in the first two years of an administration, or political distractions would soon obstruct progress.
