On finance, real estate and the powers of neoliberalism
The Need for a New Political Vocabulary
By Michael Saturday, July 6, 2024 Articles J is for Junk Economics Permalink
[This article posted on 7/6/2024 is available on the Internet, https://michael-hudson.com/2024/07/the-need-for-a-new-political-vocabulary/ ]
The July 4 landslide defeat of the neoliberal pro-war British Conservatives by the neoliberal pro-war Labour Party poses the question of just what the media mean when they describe the elections and political alignments throughout Europe in terms of center-right and center-left traditional parties challenged by nationalist neo-fascists.
Political differences between Europe’s centrist parties are marginal, all supporting neoliberal cutbacks in social spending in favor of rearmament, fiscal stringency and the deindustrialization that support of U.S.-NATO policy entails. The word “centrist” means not advocating any change in the economy’s neoliberalism. Hyphenated-centrist parties are committed to maintaining the pro-U.S. post-2022 status quo.
That means letting U.S. leaders control European politics via NATO and the European Commission, Europe’s counterpart to America’s Deep State. This passivity is putting its economies onto a war footing, with inflation, trade dependence on the United States and European deficits resulting from U.S.-sponsored trade and financial sanctions against Russia and China. This new status quo has shifted European trade and investment away from the Eurasia to the United States.
Voters in France, Germany and Italy are turning away from this blind alley. Every incumbent centrist party has recently lost – and their defeated leaders all had similar pro-U.S. neoliberal policies. As Steve Keen describes the centrist political game: “The Party in power runs Neoliberal policies; it loses the next election to rivals who, when they get in power, also run neoliberal policies. They then lose, and the cycle repeats.” European elections, like this November’s one in the United States, are largely a protest vote – with voters having nowhere else to go except to vote for the populist nationalist parties promising to smash this status quo. This is continental Europe’s counterpart to Britain’s Brexit vote.
The AfD in Germany, Marine le Pen’s National Rally in France and Georgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy are depicted as smashing and breaking the economy – by being nationalist instead of conforming to the NATO/EU Commission, and specifically by opposing the war in Ukraine and European isolation from Russia. That stance is why voters are supporting them. We are seeing a popular rejection of the status quo. The centrist parties call all nationalist opposition neo-fascist, just as in England the media describe both the Tories and Labour as centrists but Nigel Farage as a far right populist.
There are no “left-wing” parties in the traditional meaning of the political left
The former left parties have joined the centrists, becoming pro-U.S. neoliberals. There is no counterpart on the old left to the new nationalist parties, except for Sara Wagenknecht’s party in East Germany. The “left” no longer exists in the way that it did when I was growing up in the 1950s.
Today’s Social Democratic and Labor parties are neither socialist nor pro-labor, but pro-austerity. The British Labour Party and German Social Democrats are no longer even anti-war, but support the wars against Russia and Palestinians, and have put their faith in neoliberal Thatcherite/Blairite Reaganomics and an economic break from Russia and China.
The social democratic parties that were on the left a century ago are imposing austerity and cutbacks in social spending. Eurozone rules limiting national budget deficits to 3% mean in practice that its shrinking economic growth is to be spent on military rearmament – 2% or 3% of GDP, mainly for U.S. weapons. That means falling exchange rates for eurozone countries.
This is not really conservative or centrist. It is hard-right austerity, squeezing labor and government spending that the left-wing parties supported long ago. The idea that centrism means stability and preserves the status quo thus turns out to be self-contradictory. Today’s political status quo is squeezing wages and living standards, and polarizing economies. It is turning NATO into an aggressive anti-Russia and anti-China alliance that is forcing national budgets into deficit, leading social welfare programs to be cut back even further.
What are called extremist right-wing parties are now the populist anti-war parties
What is called the “far right” is supporting (at least in campaign rhetoric) policies that used to be called “left,” opposing war and improving the economic conditions of domestic labor and farmers – but not those of immigrants. And as was the case with the old left, the right’s main supporters are the younger voters. After all, they are bearing the brunt of falling real wages throughout Europe. They see that their path to upward mobility is no longer what it was for their parents (or grandparents) in the 1950s after World War II ended, when there was much less private-sector housing debt, credit-card debt or other debt – especially student debt.
Back then, everyone could afford to buy a house by taking out a mortgage that only absorbed 25% of their wage income, and was self-amortizing in 30 years. But today’s families, businesses and governments are obliged to borrow rising sums just to maintain their status quo.
The old division between right and left parties has become meaningless. The recent rise in parties described as “far right” reflects the widespread popular opposition to the US/NATO support of Ukraine against Russia, and especially to the consequences for European economies of that support. Traditionally, anti-war policies have been left-wing, but Europe’s “center-left” parties are following America’s pro-war “leadership from behind” (and often under the table). This is presented as an internationalist stance, but it has become unipolar and U.S.-centered. European countries have no independent voice.
What turns out to be a radical break from past norms is Europe following NATO’s transformation from a defensive alliance to an offensive alliance in keeping with U.S. attempts to maintain its unipolar dominance of world affairs. Joining America’s sanctions on Russia and China, and emptying out their own arsenals to send weapons to Ukraine to try and bleed the Russian economy has not hurt Russia, but strengthened it. The sanctions have acted as a protective wall for its own agriculture and industry, leading to import-displacing investment. But the sanctions have hurt Europe, especially Germany.
The global failure of today’s Western version of internationalism
The BRICS+ countries are expressing the same political demands for a break from the status quo that national populations in the West are seeking. Russia, China and other leading BRICS countries are working to undo the legacy of debt-ridden economic polarization that has spread through both the West, the Global South and Eurasia as a result of the US/NATO and IMF diplomacy.
After World War II, internationalism promised a peaceful world. The two World Wars were blamed on nationalist rivalries. These were supposed to end, but instead of internationalism ending national rivalries, the Western version that prevailed with the end of the Cold War has seen an increasingly nationalist United States lock in Europe and other satellite countries against Russia and the rest of Asia. What poses as an international “rules-based order” is one in which U.S. diplomats set and change the rules to reflect U.S. interests, while ignoring international law and demanding that American allies follow U.S. Cold War leadership.
This is not peaceful internationalism. It sees a unipolar U.S. military alliance leading toward military aggression and economic sanctions to isolate Russia and China. Or more to the point, to isolate European and other allies from its former trade and investment with Russia and China, making those allies more dependent on the United States.
What may have seemed to Western Europeans a peaceful and even prosperous international order in the 1950s under U.S. leadership has turned into an increasingly self-promoting American order that is impoverishing Europe. Donald Trump has announced that he will support a protectionist tariff policy not only against Russia and China, but also against Europe. He has promised that he will withdraw funding for NATO, and oblige European members to bear the full costs of restoring their depleted supply of armaments, mainly by buying U.S. arms, even though these have turned out not to work very well in Ukraine.
Europe is to be left isolated by itself. If non-centrist political parties do not intervene to reverse this trend, Europe’s economies (and also America’s) will be swept up in today’s domestic and international economic and military polarization. So what turns out to be radically disruptive is the direction in which today’s status quo is heading under centrist parties.
Supporting the U.S. drive to break up Russia, and then to do the same to China, involves joining America’s neocon drive to treat them as enemies. That means imposing trade and investment sanctions that are impoverishing Germany and other European countries by destroying their economic linkages with Russia, China and other designated rivals (and hence, enemies) of the United States.
Since 2022 Europe’s support for America’s fight against Russia (and now also against China) has ended what had been the basis of European prosperity. Germany’s former industrial leadership of Europe – and its support for the euro’s exchange rate – is being ended. Is this really “centrist”? Is it a left policy, or a right-wing policy? Whatever we call it, this radical global fracture is responsible for deindustrializing Germany by isolating it from trading with and investing in Russia.
Similar pressure is being made to break European trade away from China. The result is a widening European trade and payments deficit with China. Along with Europe’s rising import dependency on the United States for what it used to buy at lower cost from the East, the weakening euro position (and Europe’s seizure of Russian foreign reserves) has led other countries and foreign investors to offload their euro and sterling reserves, further weakening the currencies. That threatens to raise the European cost of living and doing business. The “centrist” parties are not producing stability, but economic shrinkage as Europe becomes a satellite of U.S. policy and its antagonism to the BRICS economies.
Russian President Putin recently said that the break in normal relations with Europe look irreversible for the next thirty years or so. Will an entire generation of Europeans remain isolated from the world’s most rapidly growing economies, those of Eurasia? This global fracturing of America’s unipolar world order is enabling the anti-euro parties to present themselves not as radical extremists but as seeking to restore Europe’s lost prosperity and diplomatic self-reliance – in a right-wing anti-immigrant way, to be sure. That has become the only alternative to the pro-U.S. parties, now that there is no more real left.
Debts that can't be paid, won't be paid.
NATO Summit: Collectively Losing Their Minds
By Joe Lauria, Consortium News. Above photo: Blinken at the NATO public policy forum at the NATO summit in Washington on Wednesday. NATO/YouTube.Soon after Russia entered Ukraine, the Pentagon corrected Antony Blinken for saying Kiev would get NATO fighter jets.
Blinken was applauded at the NATO summit yesterday for saying F-16s would soon arrive in Ukraine. What changed?
On March 7, 2022, two weeks after Moscow entered the civil war in Ukraine, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken told CBS News from Moldova that the U.S. would give NATO-member Poland a “green light” to send Mig-29 fighter jets to Ukraine.
Within days the Pentagon shot down the idea. Then U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer also supported the Polish planes scheme, but the Pentagon rejected it because it “could result in significant Russian reaction that might increase the prospects of a military escalation with NATO,” according to then Pentagon spokesman John Kirby.
But yesterday Blinken was applauded when he told a public policy forum at the NATO summit in Washington: “As we speak the transfer of F-16 jets is underway coming from Denmark, coming from the Netherlands and those jets will be flying in the skies of Ukraine this summer to make sure that Ukraine can continue to effectively defend itself against the Russian aggression.”
It is not quite NATO declaring a no-fly zone over Ukraine, which was dismissed by President Joe Biden in March 2022 because “that’s called World War III, okay? Let’s get it straight here, guys. We will not fight the third world war in Ukraine.”
“President Biden’s been clear that … if you establish a no-fly zone, certainly in order to enforce that no-fly zone, you’ll have to engage Russian aircraft. And again, that would put us at war with Russia,” added Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin at the time.
Though not declaring a no-fly zone, these are still NATO fighter jets leaving from NATO countries to operate with Ukrainian pilots against Russian aircraft in Ukrainian airspace. More dangerously, NATO is permitting Ukraine to fly the F-16s to attack inside Russian territory.
Russia says it reserves the right to hit the airfield from which the planes take off, even if it’s in a NATO country, which risks escalation to direct conflict.
So what changed since March 2022 to allow the U.S. and NATO to risk, in the previous words of Biden, “World War III?”
What’s changed is that back then the White House and the Pentagon still thought the strategy of economic and information warfare plus a proxy ground war would defeat Russia in Ukraine, and ultimately bring down Vladimir Putin in Moscow.
But for more than a year now it’s been evident that the U.S. — and NATO — have lost the economic and information war, as well as the proxy fighting on the ground in Ukraine. One year into the war, French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at a dinner in February 2023 that he had to face facts: Ukraine would lose the war and should negotiate a settlement with Moscow.
The Wall Street Journal quoted Macron as telling Zelensky that “even mortal enemies like France and Germany had to make peace after World War II.” Macron told Zelensky “he had been a great war leader, but that he would eventually have to shift into political statesmanship and make difficult decisions,” the newspaper reported.
The Big Lie
U.S.-led NATO could not launch its economic, information and proxy war against Russia without cause. That cause would be Russia invading Ukraine to defend ethnic Russians in a civil war that had raged since 2014, sparked when the U.S. helped to overthrow the democratically-elected government that year.
The economic war, intended to spur Russians to overthrow their government, has failed spectacularly. The ruble did not collapse despite sanctions on the Russian central bank. Nor has the economy.
Instead an alternative economic, commercial and financial system that excludes the West has arisen with China, India and Russia in the lead, and most of Asia, Africa and Latin America taking part in what appears to be the final chapter of Western colonialism. The sanctions instead backfired on the West, especially in Europe.
The information war has failed across the world. Only the United States and Europe, which consider itself “the world,” believe their own “information.”
The proxy war is being lost on the ground, though more than $100 billion in U.S. aid to Ukraine has created a bloodbath. There will either be a negotiated settlement in which Ukraine loses territory; a total Russian victory; or potentially the final war.
The U.S. pushed Russia to the brink to provoke its intervention. It began with a 30-year NATO expansion eastward with NATO exercises on Russia’s borders while calling for Ukraine to become a member, a call reiterated at the summit yesterday.
In December 2021 the West rejected Russian treaty proposals to roll back NATO troop deployments and missile installations in Eastern Europe, creating a new security architecture in Europe.
NATO’s aim is to regain control of Russian resources and finances as the West enjoyed in the 1990s, when it asset-stripped formerly state-owned industries, enriching themselves and a new class of oligarchs while impoverishing the Russian people. Putin is now standing in their way.
Realizing it is losing, NATO has permitted Ukraine to attack Russian territory with its long-range missiles, which it had previously refused to do, and is now delivering the F-16s, which the Netherlands recklessly will allow Ukraine to fly inside Russia to strike targets there.
Accompanying these dangerous moves, putting the entire world at risk, NATO is ramping up the fantasy that Putin, like Hitler before him, is bent on conquering all of Europe, a continuation of the decades-long exaggerated Soviet threat that justified NATO’s existence to begin with.
Still desperate for direct NATO intervention, Zelensky’s hallucination at the summit was that the line of defense against Russia attacking the West lies in Ukraine. Macron has changed his tune from his dinner with Zelensky, now advocating sending French troops to the battlefield. And Biden, striving to appear lucid, made it a central theme of his address.
Faking Defense For Offense
In his speech to the summit, Biden on Tuesday couched NATO’s aggressive designs as defensive moves to counter a non-existent Russian threat to the rest of Europe. It’s similar to dressing up Israel’s genocide as “self-defence.” He said:
“In Europe, Putin’s war of aggression against Ukraine continues. And Putin wants nothing less — nothing less than Ukraine’s total subjugation; to end Ukraine’s democracy; to destroy Uraine’s cul- — Uraine — Ukraine’s culture; and to wipe Ukraine off the map.
And we know Putin won’t stop at Ukraine. But make no mistake, Ukraine can and will stop Putin — (applause) — especially with our full, collective support. And they have our full support.
Even before Russian bombs were falling on Ukraine, the Alliance acted. Or- — I ordered the U.S. reinforcements at NATO’s eastern flank — more troops, more aircraft, more capabilities. And now the United States has more than 100,000 troops on the continent of Europe.
NATO moved swiftly as well, not only reinforcing the four existing battle groups of the east but also adding four more in Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania, and Slovakia, essentially doubling NATO’s strength on the eastern flank.”
Biden ridiculed Putin recently, saying he couldn’t even take the Ukrainian province of Kharkiv and now we are supposed to believe Putin has the absurd desire and capability to take Paris and beyond.
Somebody Tell Washington The WWII Era Is Over
Until the U.S. and its Western allies accept that the World War II era is ended they will continue to lead the world towards a Third World War.
At the end of the second one, the U.S. was the only major combatant undamaged at home and left with military bases flung around the world. The U.S. stood astride a devastated globe. It was faced with a choice: make good on its rhetoric of international social progress, or fortify those bases into the nodes of a global military and economic empire. Over the decades since, the U.S. has sought to control world resources by installing the governments they need, through electoral interference, coups or invasions.
World War II was the last just American war. That is why Washington brings it up every time the U.S. is gearing for a fight. It whitewashes its true intent — which is not to spread democracy.
Before the 1989 war on Panama, Gen. Manuel Noriega was called Hitler; before the 1999 attack on Serbia, Slobodan Milosevic was compared to Hitler; as was Saddam Hussein before the 2003 invasion of Iraq. As tensions rose with Russia during her presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton called Putin Hitler, leaving the impression she too was itching for war.
World War II imagery and rhetoric has been so crucial to American imperial leaders since 1945 that they can’t let go. They have little else to sell themselves with.
They have also ritually inflated the role the U.S. played in defeating Nazi Germany. The Soviet Union’s outsized contribution to destroying the Nazis has been airbrushed out of history and U.S. allies are relegated to a supporting cast, fitting for the vassals they’ve since 1945 become.
But that era is ending. The U.S. can no longer use the Second World War to justify its aggression and demonize its enemies. Until the U.S. acknowledges it is no longer the preeminent power of the world and instead becomes a responsible international player, it will risk nuclear devastation to preserve its hubris.
NATO’s Dangerous Declaration
The joint communique of the 32 NATO members reads:
We stand in unity and solidarity in the face of a brutal war of aggression on the European continent and at a critical time for our security. We reaffirm the enduring transatlantic bond between our nations. NATO remains the unique, essential, and indispensable transatlantic forum to consult, coordinate, and act on all matters related to our individual and collective security. NATO is a defensive Alliance. […]
The People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) stated ambitions and coercive policies continue to challenge our interests, security and values. The deepening strategic partnership between Russia and the PRC and their mutually reinforcing attempts to undercut and reshape the rules-based international order, are a cause for profound concern. We are confronted by hybrid, cyber, space, and other threats and malicious activities from state and non-state actors.
Russia’s boldest red line is Ukraine joining NATO. As former C.I.A. analyst Ray McGovern wrote last week in a piece for Consortium News, Ukrainian negotiators understood this when they reached the outlines of a settlement of the war in April 2022, just weeks after it started. It was scuttled by the U.S. to keep the war going. Despite this, the NATO communicate vows to make Ukraine a member.
That is like challenging Moscow to a nuclear duel.
“We fully support Ukraine’s right to choose its own security arrangements and decide its own future, free from outside interference. Ukraine’s future is in NATO. Ukraine has become increasingly interoperable and politically integrated with the Alliance. We welcome the concrete progress Ukraine has made since the Vilnius Summit on its required democratic, economic, and security reforms.
As Ukraine continues this vital work, we will continue to support it on its irreversible path to full Euro-Atlantic integration, including NATO membership. We reaffirm that we will be in a position to extend an invitation to Ukraine to join the Alliance when Allies agree and conditions are met. The Summit decisions by NATO and the NATO-Ukraine Council, combined with Allies’ ongoing work, constitute a bridge to Ukraine’s membership in NATO.”
The Mad Path To Annihilation
All this adds up to a collective madness. After innumerable wars since history began, the world is being led to perhaps its final confrontation.
At the core is NATO’s apparent belief that Putin is bluffing about using nuclear weapons to defend Russia’s sovereignty. It is simply a bluff that cannot be tested.
The only solution is the two treaties Russia offered in December 2021 and a neutral Ukraine as it was under President Viktor Yanukovych, whom the U.S. helped overthrow in 2014 in part because of it.
NATO leaders haven’t demonstrated a willingness to give up any of their collective or individual power, which is devolving rapidly into collective and individual madness.
They don’t want to lose their role in Biden “running the world.”
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Even if realists in Washington prevailed over the neocons in arguing that Ukraine can’t win this war, NATO leaders proclaim they can’t afford to lose it. Not because Putin will be at the Eiffel Tower by Christmas, but because so many political careers in the West would be ruined.
From Keir Starmer to Olaf Scholz, to Giorgia Meloni, Emmanuel Macron and Joe Biden, a defeat in Ukraine would signify that they gambled their personal ambition — as well as their nations’ treasure and the lives of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian men — and lost it all.
Instead of settling, they’re willing to drag us into the existential crisis that could end it all.
A second term in office?
Republicans nominate Trump as presidential candidate
by editors of Sozialismus.de:
[This article posted on 7/18/2024 is translated from the German on the Internet, https://www.sozialismus.de/kommentare_analysen/detail/artikel/vor-einer-zweiten-amtszeit/.]
Two days after the assassination attempt on former US President Donald Trump, he was officially nominated as the Republican presidential candidate at the party convention in Milwaukee. Even Republicans who had previously been critical of him rallied behind him after the shooting. He is receiving support from former intra-party rivals such as Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley.
The cult of Trump has always had a borderless character, but now that he has survived an assassination attempt, his supporters are increasingly convinced that they are dealing with a martyr and a chosen one. A bullet hit Trump in the ear at a campaign event, and numerous security guards wanted to escort him to his van as quickly as possible, but he stopped: “Wait, wait, wait,” he said, clenching his fist and shouting at his supporters with blood splattered on his face: “Fight, fight, fight!”
Trump is a political professional
and is adapting to the role that the assassination attempt has changed. This
could enable him to win over moderate voters. The Republican National
Convention in Milwaukee provides the perfect stage for him to present himself
as a moderate statesman. He cannot win the election with his core voters alone,
but must win over additional voters.
Many campaign experts believe the election has already been decided. Trump is
using his instinct to use images, gestures and words as an “iconic moment”,
which is likely to be decisive in the election. If Trump is elected in
November, it will be the moment when “he finally became president”.
Attacks on presidents or prominent politicians remain – especially in the USA – firmly anchored in the collective consciousness. This is because a threat to the person also appears to be a threat to the community and the state, and almost the entire country usually rallies around them. Americans speak of a “rally 'round the flag” effect. A national trauma leads to unity. The question is whether this also applies to the ex-president of a US nation that is divided not least by his policies.
Trump will do everything in his
power to return to the White House. He was officially nominated as the
Republican Party's presidential candidate in Milwaukee and is using the unity
at the party convention as a launch pad. Political scientist Ian Bremmer told
CNN that Trump would appear before his supporters as the nation's savior after
the attack. Many commentators thought it was impossible for Trump to become
president again after his first term in office. Now he is both a victim and a
hero.
He has also hinted that he will strike a more conciliatory tone and has
reportedly completely rewritten his speech after the nomination in Milwaukee.
Whether this is true remains to be seen. But the first effects are already
visible. Former party rival Nikki Haley addresses Trump skeptics in her speech
at the party convention. “We should recognize that there are some Americans who
do not fully agree with Donald Trump. I happen to know some of them, and I want
to speak to them tonight.« She is one of them, says the former governor of the
US state of South Carolina. »I am here tonight because we have a country to
save, and a united Republican Party is essential to save it.«
“I have not always agreed with President Trump. But we agree on much more than
we disagree. We agree that America must remain strong. [...] And we agree that
the Democrats have moved so far to the left that they are endangering our
freedoms.”
A tough stance on immigration policy
Former rival Vivek Ramaswamy sums up the transition as follows: “If you want to close the border, vote for Trump. If you want to restore law and order, vote for Trump. If you want to boost our economy, vote for Trump. If you want to revive national pride, vote for Trump. If you want to make America great again, vote for Trump.”
The central themes of the election campaign and the intended change in policy have already been made clear at the party conference in Milwaukee thanks to demonstrative unity and agreement: crime and illegal immigration. Trump has declared migration policy to be his central election campaign theme. The party program repeatedly refers to a “migrant invasion” and to the fact that the Republicans are planning the largest wave of deportations in American history.
“We are facing an invasion at our southern border. 11.5 million people have crossed our border illegally during the Biden administration,” Ted Cruz, a senator from Texas, complained, earning him the cheering approval of the delegates: ‘Stop Biden's border bloodshed’ is written on the blue, white and red signs they held up. The Republicans also want to score points with the issue of inflation. Time and again, speakers such as Ron DeSantis, governor of Florida, claim that life was significantly cheaper during Trump's term in office.
However, immigration and crime
remain at the center of the debate. “We cannot survive with the increase in
violence, crime and drugs that the Democrats' policies have brought to our
communities,” said House Speaker Mike Johnson. Kari Lake from Arizona, who
wants to be elected to the Senate in November, blames the Biden
administration's immigration policy for drug smuggling into the US and the
fentanyl crisis in the country: “We are being inundated with criminals and
deadly drugs, and our children are dying,” she says. There is a simple solution
to this, she says: “Build the wall!”
And the dimensions of a new foreign and alliance policy are also becoming
clear. Trump is cautious about US support for Taiwan in the event of a Chinese
attack. “I think Taiwan should pay us for the defense. We are nothing more than
an insurance company. Taiwan gives us nothing,” Trump told the agency Bloomberg
in response to the question of whether he would defend Taiwan against China.
Under a new President Trump, the international arena is likely to change
significantly. The foreseeable contours of a “Trump 2.0” foreign policy could
lead to the USA giving up its role as a guarantor of security for Europe.
While the Republicans are united in their rejection of climate cooperation and free trade, they are still divided into three camps on other foreign policy issues, including European security and Ukraine: those who want to continue US dominance, those who want to give priority to the Indo-Pacific over Europe, and those who want the US to be less involved overall.
In Congress and the Washington
establishment, the traditional alliance politicians who want to maintain the leadership
role and the global military presence necessary for it are still dominant. They
include senators such as Mitch McConnell from Kentucky, Mitt Romney from Utah,
Lindsey Graham from South Carolina, James Risch from Idaho and Nikki Haley.
They support the US remaining in NATO, continued military engagement in Europe
and continued support for Ukraine.
The critics of this approach, who are predominantly represented in the
Republican base and in the “Freedom Caucus”, a subgroup of Republicans in the
House of Representatives, on the other hand, are calling for a radical
reduction in American security cooperation in Ukraine and Europe and want to
reduce the role of the United States in NATO to the absolute minimum. Finally,
the proponents of a hard line on China have gained weight, including Senators
J.D. Vance of Ohio, Josh Hawley of Missouri, and Ron DeSantis of Florida. They
argue that foreign policy should focus heavily on Asia and China.
The Republican campaign so far suggests that critics of traditional alliance
politics and proponents of a focus on containing China are closer to the pulse
of Republican voters. Although US elections are not usually decided on foreign
policy issues, it is important to remember that in the 2016 presidential
election, there was a strong correlation between the rate of US casualties in
Iraq and Afghanistan and support for Trump in key swing states.
In other words, winning in states like Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin
also requires winning over the votes of veterans and their families, who are
deeply skeptical of the US military engagement in Europe and the Middle East.
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