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| Then-President Donald Trump shakes hands with Chinese leader Xi Jinping at the G-20 summit in Osaka, Japan, on June 29, 2019. (Susan Walsh/AP) |
| For much of his time in office, President Joe Biden framed the central challenge of our age as a struggle between “democracy and autocracy.” The liberal democracies of the West and their like-minded allies were arrayed against the threat posed by authoritarian states such as China and Russia, which in Biden’s view were intent on smashing international norms, bending the rules of the road in their favor and exporting their politics elsewhere. The Kremlin’s invasion of Ukraine crystallized this vision, and the White House and European partners cast the fight for Ukraine as an existential clash between ideologies and political futures. Every year of the Biden presidency, the White House convened a “summit for democracy,” with dozens of countries participating. It bolstered partnerships with numerous Asian countries in a bid to reinforce deterrence against China, the world’s most powerful single party state. Then there was Biden’s more delicate reckoning at home, fresh from his victory over Donald Trump (and the lies that stoked the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection). Many Western democracies, gripped by the ascent of far-right nationalist and populist politics, faced their own domestic perils. Biden’s much-touted “foreign policy for the middle class” — centering on an embrace of industrial policy and massive investments in high-tech and green-tech manufacturing — was a bid to address the inequities fueled by years of unfettered globalization. But along the way, the light of Biden’s pro-democracy fire has dimmed — and neither candidate in next week’s presidential election appears set to stoke the flames. Wary of global oil prices, the Biden administration made accommodation with a monarchic Saudi regime that the president had vowed to make a pariah — and later would yoke much of its strategy for the Middle East on tighter ties with Riyadh. Whenever strategic interests came into friction with liberal political concerns, the former always won out, such as in the case of the deepening U.S. relationship with an India under the sway of an illiberal Hindu nationalist government. In the past year, the war in Gaza that followed militant group Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, strike on Israel has reshaped Biden’s legacy. The shocking Palestinian death toll and the ongoing devastation of the Palestinian territory have fueled criticism of the United States’ ironclad support of Israel’s war effort. Outside the West, it led to mounting cynicism over Washington’s insistence on being the custodian of an international “liberal order.” Rights groups have documented alleged Israeli war crimes and even internal assessments by U.S. agencies concluded that Israel had stymied the flow of humanitarian aid to civilians. Yet the United States has not enforced its own laws to condition military support to Israel.
Neither Vice President Kamala Harris nor Trump back the ongoing investigations of Israel for genocide and war crimes at the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court, and Washington does not recognize the jurisdiction of either. But the trauma of the war will leave its imprint on the region for a generation to come and will shadow the next American presidency. Harris and Trump indicate they would take different approaches to the Middle East — Trump has complained that Biden put too many restraints on Israel and, during his presidency, allied himself to Israel’s far right — but both would work to enlist a clutch of Arab autocracies to help forge a peace that eluded successive U.S. administrations. More than a decade after the upheavals of the Arab Spring, democracy has slid from the agenda. Critics have pointed to the apparent double standard between the United States decrying Russia’s blatant violations of international law, while effectively shielding Israel from global censure. In the wake of the Israeli parliament’s decision Tuesday to ban the main U.N. agency responsible for aid to Palestinians, U.N. diplomats said the impunity afforded to Israel made a mockery of the U.N. system and the post-World War II order. (That system was already crumbling, some have argued, after Russia, a permanent member of the Security Council, invaded Ukraine and faced no consequence in the chamber.) There may be deep consequences. “The implications of allowing international law’s fabric — always fragile but extremely precious in the U.S.’s efforts to hold notoriously abusive actors like Russia and Iran to account — to be rent in a manner so alarmingly brazen to so many people across the region and the world, could empower authoritarians and rights-abusers to commit similar abuses,” Monica Marks, a professor of Middle East studies at New York University’s Abu Dhabi campus, told me. Picking through Biden’s record, Kenneth Roth, former head of Human Rights Watch, suggested: “Given the massive suffering and loss of life in Gaza, the outrage at Israel’s exemption from the so-called rules-based order is probably greater than the discontent over the various autocratic exceptions to Biden’s promotion of democracy.” Biden once framed the successful defense of Ukraine as a rejection of a world “where might makes right.” But by next year, the grim reality of the conflict may yield a scenario where Russia largely gets its way. Kyiv’s forces are desperately trying to hold the line in the country’s east but are losing ground in some areas. Visions of an absolute victory are fading. Western support is also sagging. “Western industry cannot produce anything like the number of artillery shells Ukraine needs,” analyst Anatol Lieven noted. “The U.S. cannot provide sufficient air defense systems to Israel and Ukraine and keep enough for a possible war with China. And above all, NATO cannot manufacture more soldiers for Ukraine.” The prospect of Ukraine settling for a compromise with Russia — conceding territory in return for some Western security guarantees — is getting easier to envision. It would lead to an unhappy peace that would roil European politics for years. Trump, it seems, favors such an accommodation. His advisers are open about the need to prioritize U.S. strategic assets against China. It’s a contest they do not frame in terms of “democracy” vs. “autocracy,” but rather as old-fashioned great power competition to match Trump’s broader motte-and-bailey politics. Harris is a more traditional liberal internationalist, but her administration might also feel compelled to strike a humbler pose. She would have to work with nationalist politicians consolidating power in Europe, where ascendant illiberalism could refashion the principles of the European Union. U.S. lawmakers are also aware that American voters in general are no longer keen on their country overasserting itself on the world stage. “The isolationist streak now dominating American body politic is a warning to the rest of the world that has become far too dependent on the U.S. as the key guarantor of global security,” notes Harsh Pant, vice president of the Observer Research Foundation, an Indian think tank. “Even if Trump doesn’t win a second term in the White House, his candidacy is reflective of deeper trends that are shaping American politics today and will have a great bearing on the complexion of the global order in the future.” Trump may not be an actual isolationist, but his transactional approach to international politics and conspicuous rapport with autocrats reflects a departure from the Washington status quo. “It’s all about power,” said Fiona Hill, a Russia expert and former Trump White House staffer, in an interview with Politico, in which she linked Trump’s coziness with tech billionaire Elon Musk to the oligarchic circles around the Kremlin. “These are guys who see themselves in the same class of the rich and powerful, who transact with each other, and the result is a breaking down of the international system.” | ||||||||