Of all the straightforward questions Kamala Harris dodged in her debate with Donald Trump, and there were many, the one focused on her muddled outlook toward the war in the Gaza Strip might have been the starkest. If there is “not a deal in the making” and President Joe Biden has been unable to “break through the stalemate,” ABC News anchor Linsey Davis asked Harris, how would she secure a cease-fire between Israel and the terror group Hamas?
Davis might as well have been interrogating an inanimate object. “What we know is that this war must end,” Harris replied, “and the way it will end is we need a cease-fire deal, and we need the hostages out.” If the vice president had ever thought about Hamas’s rejection of five distinct peace overtures from the Biden administration and its counterparts, she kept her conclusions to herself. Instead, Harris pitched Americans on the notion that there will be a cease-fire only because there must be a cease-fire. And when that goal is somehow achieved, “we must have a two-state solution where we can rebuild Gaza.” Those shibboleths appeared to satisfy ABC’s moderators, but anyone who’s following the conflict in any detail was probably less impressed.
Turning to another war, Russia’s campaign of conquest and subjugation of Ukraine, ABC anchor David Muir pressed Donald Trump to clarify his views. “You have said you would solve this war in 24 hours. . . . How exactly would you do that?” he asked, adding, “Do you want Ukraine to win this war?” The simple yes-or-no question produced neither. Instead, Trump replied with a meandering tirade that had something to do with the “fake numbers” around Europe’s collective contributions to Ukraine’s defense. Nevertheless, he recommitted to his pledge to put an end to the war in Europe “before I even become president” by simply sitting down with Russia’s and Ukraine’s leaders and hammering out a deal. Much like Harris, Trump supposes that there will be a deal only because there must be a deal. After all, he warned, “you have millions of people dead, and it’s only getting worse, and it could lead to World War III.”
Unnervingly enough, one or the other of these people will be elected to serve as commander in chief of the armed forces, but neither of them seems willing to acknowledge the world as it is, preferring instead one that their imaginations have conjured.
Hamas will not consent to its own destruction and submit itself to Israeli justice. Moreover, it has no interest in a “two-state solution.” It does not seek to exist in cooperative harmony with the Palestinian factions that govern the West Bank, much less with Israel. Consequently, there will be no permanent cease-fire in the Gaza Strip until Hamas is neutralized, because Hamas’s destruction is the objective desired by the Israeli people.
This is all rather inconvenient. Sure, it is in America’s strategic interests to see this State Department–designated terrorist group defeated — an outcome that would take one of Iran’s most lethal pieces off the geopolitical chessboard. But the far-left fringes of the Democratic Party’s base are besotted with the notion that Israel is an apartheid state, a human-rights abuser, and the enemy of civilizational norms. Harris dares not acknowledge the realities that have brought the Middle East to the brink lest she offend that faction and risk its ire. So she retreats into the unreality she and they prefer.
Trump faces a parallel situation. A vocal but unrepresentative contingent of right-leaning activists have convinced themselves that the victim of Vladimir Putin’s war was asking for it. Ukraine’s selfish desire to throw off the Russian yoke and integrate economically with Europe was too provocative, they tell themselves. Ukraine’s NATO-accession plan, which stalled out at the Bucharest Summit in April 2008, somehow represented an intolerable threat to Russian national security, they maintain. What was Moscow to do but stage a second invasion of Ukraine, slaughter its people, abscond with and reeducate its children, and erase the Ukrainian language from the face of the earth? Really, who wouldn’t?
Ukraine, too, is America’s partner. Indeed, its desire to fold itself into the American-led world order is what the Kremlin seeks to prevent. It is reasonable to expect presidential aspirants to value and preserve that order against external threats — even to build on it, as both Trump and Biden did by presiding over the admittance of four new NATO members (none of which provoked Putin to arms) in the space of eight years. That proposition might appeal to most voters, but it is anathema to the fringes that have hijacked American politics.
Failure in Ukraine could have severe consequences. A cessation of hostilities that leaves Moscow in control of the industrial regions in eastern Ukraine would leave the country more dependent on the West and more vulnerable to future Russian attacks. It would unnerve America’s NATO allies on the alliance’s frontier, some of whom would prepare to defend their own borders with or without America’s support or even input. But just as Harris dares not offend the sensibilities of some of the most aberrant elements of the American political landscape by backing Israel’s mission, Trump prefers to dance with the eccentrics who brung him.
Harris and Trump are beholden to remarkably similar fictions. “He’s got nuclear weapons,” Trump said of Putin in the last presidential debate. “Nobody ever thinks about that. And eventually, uh, maybe he’ll use them.” A paralyzing fear of Russia’s nuclear saber-rattling is precisely what led the Biden administration to mishandle the crisis Moscow inaugurated in February 2022. “There was a moment in the fall of 2022 when I think there was a genuine risk of the potential use of tactical nuclear weapons,” CIA director William Burns confessed at a recent event alongside the U.K.’s intelligence chief. Indeed, throughout the course of Russia’s war, Biden-administration officials cited a variety of inviolable Russian red lines that they had wholly imagined. The U.S. couldn’t possibly supply Ukraine with long-range rocket and artillery systems, tanks and half-tracks, fixed-wing aircraft, or cluster munitions. How would Russia respond? Only when Ukraine’s position deteriorated did Biden relent. And when he did, he found that Russia’s threats were a hollow scare tactic.
Even today, the Biden White House hems and haws when asked to lift restrictions on Ukraine’s use of U.S. ordnance on targets inside Russia from which Moscow stages its invasion. Russian territory is sacrosanct, they had long assumed. But when Ukraine invaded Russia’s Kursk and Belgorod Oblasts, Putin downplayed the incursions lest he unnerve his domestic constituents. Somehow, that failed to produce a eureka moment for either the Biden White House or its chief Republican critic. Only when Russia finally began to retake its own territory did Biden see the value of lifting restrictions on Ukraine’s use of U.S. weapons platforms — which is to say, too late.
To his credit, Trump is far more clear-eyed than Harris has been about Israel’s virtues as a reliable U.S. partner. That might have something to do with the Abraham Accords: the normalization of diplomatic relations between Israel and its Sunni Arab neighbors, which succeeded only by the Trump administration’s cleverly pushing the intractable Palestinian issue to the back burner. The outbreak of war arrested the tempo of those agreements, and they will not resume in the absence of an Israeli victory over its Iran-backed adversary. After all, what were the Abraham Accords but a regional security framework designed to check Iran and the terrorist groups in orbit around the Islamic republic? Why would Israel’s Arab neighbors proceed toward normalization with Israel if Jerusalem isn’t the strong horse they thought it was?
Harris and her fellow Democrats seem to prefer a world in which Iran can be bribed and cajoled into abandoning its nuclear ambitions, and its genocidal terrorist proxies tamed by integrating them into the community of responsible state and non-state actors. Honestly, it sounds like a lovely dream. But when deterrence has broken down, it is not restored by the offering of carrots alone. Sticks come first. If Harris is blind to that reality, it’s a truth to which Trump, too, is allergic.
Trump is the first to tout his justified and laudable decision to order the 2020 air strike that eliminated Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commander Qasem Soleimani. But that successful attack was preceded by long stretches of dithering and inaction from the president in the face of naked Iranian aggression.
In the months preceding that operation, Iran had pirated foreign-flagged vessels in the Strait of Hormuz. It had engaged in “sophisticated and coordinated” strikes on oil tankers. It had downed a multimillion-dollar American surveillance drone over international waters. And it had executed a daring direct attack on Saudi soil, targeting two major petroleum-processing facilities. Trump absorbed it all. Why? “In the days leading up to this moment, he had talked with Tucker Carlson, the Fox News host, who reminded him that he had come to office to get out of endless wars, not start a new one,” the New York Times reported at the time. Trump blinked, and Iran took its cues. Soon enough, Tehran-backed Shiite militias began targeting U.S. positions in Iraq with rocket and artillery fire, and one of those attacks resulted in the death of a U.S. contractor. To this, Trump finally responded, albeit only against those militias. Predictably, Iran was not deterred. In short order, Tehran orchestrated a mob attack on the American embassy in Baghdad in which well-armed rioters breached the outer perimeter. Only then did Trump get serious about the danger posed by Iran, and only after the Soleimani strike did Iran draw down its attacks on U.S. interests.
This saga should have imparted some lessons about how authoritarian revisionists respond when confronted by Western military power. It seems they went unlearned.
The next president will inherit a Middle East defined once again by an undeterred Iran. American soldiers are defending themselves against a campaign of attacks on U.S. positions in Iraq and Syria. Three U.S. service personnel died in a January attack on an outpost in Jordan. The American naval assets parked off the coast of Yemen are under constant assault by the Iran-backed Houthi terrorist sect, which “has turned into the most intense running sea battle the Navy has faced since World War II,” according to the Associated Press. U.S. naval assets are patrolling off the coast of Lebanon, bottling up the well-armed Hezbollah terrorist group that Israel will have to disarm or else functionally cede the territory in its north, which Israeli citizens evacuated after the October 7 massacre.
The next president will also be bequeathed a war on the European continent to which NATO states have responded by boosting their military presence along the alliance’s periphery. At summits in Madrid and Vilnius, the alliance agreed to scale up its multinational battle groups to brigade size and augment integrated regional-defense plans. NATO’s European and North American members have already committed vast sums of capital and prestige to Ukraine’s defense — investments that cannot be simply withdrawn. They will either generate a return or they will be lost.
The distinctions the Trump and Harris campaigns are wont to emphasize between Russia and Iran have proven no obstacle to these countries’ close coordination. On at least two occasions in the lead-up to October 7, 2023, the Kremlin welcomed high-level delegations from Hamas for consultations. Moscow has maintained warm relations with Iran’s proxies for years, but that relationship was operationalized amid Russia’s all-out effort to save Tehran’s cat’s-paw, Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, from his own people’s wrath. Russia contributes to Iran’s objectives in the Middle East, and Iran repays the favor by transferring drones, helicopters, radar systems, and ballistic missiles for use on Ukraine’s battlefields.
Meanwhile, China, which has embarked on an increasingly reckless campaign of naval adventurism targeting Philippine merchant vessels in the South China Sea, provides both Iran and Russia with weapons and dual-use materials and conducts joint military exercises with their armies and navies. Last year, a flotilla of Chinese and Russian vessels unnerved American war planners by descending on Alaska’s Aleutian Islands in a menacing formation — an approach that compelled the U.S. to dispatch four destroyers and a P-8 Poseidon surveillance aircraft.
China is sending all the signals that preceded Russia’s and Iran’s escalatory behavior, but neither Trump nor Harris is especially receptive to them. One relies on the magic of trade barriers and tariffs to tame the Chinese dragon. The other promises to cut Beijing off from access to U.S. technology — which might further incentivize China to lash out — while doing little to expand America’s blue-water fleet and failing to arm to the teeth our front-line partners in the Pacific.
With two hot wars on as many continents and a third looming on the horizon, these are sobering times. And yet, owing mostly to their parochial political ends, the Republican and Democratic presidential campaigns prefer to draw immaterial contrasts between America’s adversaries and to pick and choose which American interests they plan to defend.
Kamala Harris cannot say that she wants America’s most stalwart ally in the Middle East to win its war against Iran-backed terrorists. Donald Trump will not say that he wants a Western-facing country, which is being dismembered by one of America’s oldest enemies, to win its righteous war of self-defense. Both campaigns pay lip service to the need to confront China without leveling with the American people about what it will take to achieve our objectives. These may be serious times, but they have not generated commensurate seriousness in our politics. Pray that it doesn’t take an epochal disaster for America to come to its senses.
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