This week, while many Americans are worried about what our country will look like after the next national election, much of the world is worried about us. The United States may not be the unipolar power it was after the Cold War, but it remains the most influential and important country on the planet. The outcome of our elections will affect people far beyond our borders for many years to come.
The mere fact that we are in an election cycle has already affected the way we act in the world, as well as the way others act as well.
It is clear that the elections are distorting our positions on Ukraine and the Middle East. A Donald Trump victory is widely expected to end US support for kyiv. The Ukrainian government is therefore doing everything it can to consolidate its position. President Volodymyr Zelensky even made a roadshow of swing states to rally American support. Meanwhile, Russian President Vladimir Putin bides his time with the same expectation.
In the Middle East, the impasse over the US elections has given Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu room to continue his escalation in Gaza and Lebanon, without fearing a heavy hand from his unwilling American friends. alienate voters ahead of the US elections. such a close competition. Israel continues to use our weapons and ammunition to hit civilians and civilian areas, hospitals and refugee camps and aggressively obstruct the delivery of vital humanitarian assistance. Various US agencies and offices have expressed deep concern, but Netanyahu knows that the US government will not take any significant steps to pressure him at this time, which is why his no-holds-barred approach continues. Like Putin, Netanyahu hopes that the next US president will be friendlier to those with less democratic leanings.
But this election affects our engagement almost everywhere we have interests. In Sudanmillions of civilians are bearing the brunt of our political distraction. The war has triggered 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 main supporter and supplier of the Rapid Support Forces, the paramilitary group that commits the bulk of the atrocities and is accused of genocide – a fact that we have simply tolerated.
America’s relative absence in resolving this conflict is less a matter of political sensitivities than of political bandwidth. 26 million people at risk The famine is simply not reaching the level of urgency it should.
Electoral stagnation is not new. American administrations naturally avoid taking risks during elections. When I was in government, the conventional wisdom was that any major foreign policy initiatives or changes had to begin within the first two years of an administration, otherwise political distractions would quickly hamper progress. No one wants to inadvertently fuel their opponent’s campaign with an October debacle abroad. This means that inertia and inaction tend to increase as the elections draw closer.
As a U.S. diplomat stationed in Somalia six months before the 2016 elections, I remember the frustration we felt when Washington responded to almost every major diplomatic and administrative proposal we wanted to implement with “let’s just move on.” the elections.” This election did not go as planned, so most of the well-argued plans to expand our diplomacy never came to fruition.
But even that year, I felt that America’s leadership role could resist and rise above domestic politics, and that we retained the capacity to respond to real global emergencies.
This year we seem completely incapable of doing it. This not only harms distant people, but also our own interests. Our failure to act meaningfully on the global stage today is costing lives, potentially tens to hundreds of thousands, and allowing instability to fester from Europe to Africa to the Middle East. -East.
Even though the United States is no longer hegemonic, we still retain the greatest capacity of any country to promote peace, reduce conflict, and help those in need, not only through our own resources, but also thanks to our ability to bring together coalitions to act.
It is evident in the brutal wars raging today that we are not playing this role at present. It is easy to blame the continued existence of these conflicts on the gridlock at the United Nations Security Council and the reduction of American influence in a multipolar world. But we still have the capacity and the responsibility to make a difference.
As an American whose phone and email address is currently under attack by every political action committee imaginable, I am ready to put this election behind us. For our sake and the sake of the millions of people suffering from conflicts around the world, I sincerely hope that we have an administration ready to play a positive leadership role in the world on the other side.
Elizabeth Shackelford is senior policy director at the Dickey Center for International Understanding at Dartmouth College and foreign affairs columnist for the Chicago Tribune. She was previously an American diplomat and is the author of “The Dissent Channel: American Diplomacy in a Dishonest Age.”
Submit a letter of no more than 400 words to the editor here or by email letters@chicagotribune.com.
