America’s National-Security Threats Are Not All Overseas

Since the outset of this blog, I have argued that Christofascists and evangelicals constitute a clear and present danger to America's democracy and constitutional order because their ultimate goal is to inflict their hate and bigotry driven beliefs - most of which stem from cherry-picked Old Testament passages and racial animus towards non-whites - on the entire nation and establish themselves as privileged with special rights to mistreat others.  Donald Trump's appeal to this demographic stems from his promise to give them political power and to establish an authoritarian regime where the rights of the majority are made subservient to the rights of the minority.  Indeed, Trump's promised model mirror's that of Vladimir Putin's Russia where the Russian Orthodox Church has been granted special rights and Putin has waged a relentless war against LGBT Russians.  Given the Republican Party's reliance on evangelical/Christofascist voter's, a number of Congressional Republicans are transforming the GOP into the party of Putin.  Hence the House Republican opposition to more aid to Ukraine and admiration of dictatorial regimes in Russia and Hungary.  With a delusional Christian nationalist now holding the position of Speaker of the House, the evangelical/Christofascist GOP base and its self-prostituting Republican allies are a threat to America's national security abroad in a time of growing threats across the globe and avowed enemies like Russia and hostile adversaries like China.  A piece in The New Yorker looks at this dangerous and frightening situation.  Here are highlights: 

Nine days ago, the idea that an obscure 2020 election denier from Shreveport, Louisiana, with less than five thousand dollars in his household’s bank accounts, a literalist’s belief in the presence of dinosaurs on Noah’s Ark, and a dubious past as an advocate of “conversion” therapy for gay teens could single-handedly shape the fate of tens of billions of dollars in U.S. military assistance to key allies at war was even more preposterous than the notion that America might soon reëlect its four-times-indicted former President.

But these are not normal times in our politics. As the new Republican Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson now wields outsized power over which bills get a vote in Congress, and he has decided to make the first major fight of his tenure a dispute with the White House and the Democratic-controlled Senate over emergency aid to Israel and Ukraine. In the Senate, meanwhile, Tommy Tuberville, a first-term G.O.P. member from Alabama, who is better known for his years as Auburn’s head football coach, has waged a one-man campaign to block hundreds of military promotions for the past nine months.

With a new war in the Middle East and embarrassing vacancies in key Pentagon posts threatening to affect U.S. readiness, his Republican colleagues finally pushed back for real this week, spending much of Wednesday night yelling at Tuberville on the Senate floor. “I do not respect men who do not honor their word,” Joni Ernst, a senator from Iowa, huffed. Dan Sullivan of Alaska complained about Tuberville’s “national-security suicide mission.” He added, “Xi Jinping is loving this. So is Putin. How dumb can we be, man?”

The answer, of course, is very dumb. Even after getting reamed out by his fellow-Republicans, Tuberville refused to relent on his blockade. And, in the House, Johnson is standing firm on a bizarre demand—the first substantive one of his Speakership—that fourteen billion dollars in wartime assistance to Israel be offset by an equal amount in cuts to the Internal Revenue Service. Even a ruling from the Congressional Budget Office that the cuts would actually cost the Treasury nearly twenty-seven billion dollars by reducing the amount in taxes that a budget-constrained I.R.S. could collect did not deter Johnson.

While picking this fight over urgent—and historically bipartisan—money for Israel, Johnson also refused to include in the emergency spending bill sixty billion dollars in additional Ukraine aid that President Biden has requested. The result is that no one really knows yet where that leaves the money for either Israel or Ukraine. Maybe the Senate, where both parties’ leaders and a bipartisan majority support the broader funding approach, will find a way around the new Speaker, who now claims privately that he isn’t really as opposed to helping Ukraine as his record of voting against previous assistance suggests,

Such is the state of American foreign-policymaking. The week’s events on Capitol Hill ought to remind us that not all national-security threats are overseas.

I’ve been watching this all play out from Berlin, where nervous allies are asking once again what the volatile state of American politics means for the rest of the world. Few countries have more at stake in the upcoming U.S. Presidential election than Germany, a favorite target of former President Donald Trump during his four years in office.

“There’s a major land war going on a day’s drive from here, and I think that most Germans are more focussed on the fate of American democracy,” Daniel Benjamin, a former American diplomat and head of the American Academy in Berlin, which hosted me for a discussion on U.S. politics, said. “They’re scarred [by Trump], and they worry a lot about it.”

The current American President is arguably much more popular here than he is in the United States—a recent Pew poll found that sixty-seven per cent of Germans trust Biden to do the right thing in international affairs, versus ten per cent of Germans who thought Trump would do so in the final year of his Presidency.

This is not just about lefty Europeans turning up their noses at a crude right-wing American politician. Biden’s preference for working with allies rather than Trump’s bashing of them; his strong backing for Ukraine in contrast to Trump’s blackmailing of its leader; and his decades of support for NATO at a time when NATO is facing the biggest threat to European security since the end of the Cold War are all real, specific differences. Trump, . . . . just the other day he bragged to an audience in Sioux City, Iowa, that he had threatened not to defend other NATO countries, even in response to a Russian military assault. “Does that mean, if Russia attacks my country, you will not be there?” Trump quoted a fellow NATO leader asking him. “That’s right,” Trump said as his audience cheered.

Perhaps the most pressing fear one hears in Europe is about aid for Ukraine. However hard it is to imagine, given the enormous commitment that the West has made to Kyiv’s defense, congressional dysfunction in Washington might mean that American assistance dries up before the current Ukrainian counter-offensive is even over.

From the start of the war, Biden has worked arm in arm on Ukraine with Chancellor Olaf Scholz. Germany, as part of its so-called Zeitenwende, a painful and not fully complete pivot in its foreign policy since Russia’s invasion, is now committed to spend more than two per cent of its G.D.P. on defense—an increase that Trump loudly demanded but never could achieve.

And yet the more profound worry—here in Berlin, and elsewhere in the West—goes far deeper than how much is spent in sending long-range missiles to Ukraine or on helping Israel eradicate Hamas. It’s about the real possibility of America reëlecting a President who is not committed to the basic principles of either the Western alliance or, for that matter, the American Constitution. In “The Divider,” the recent book that I wrote with my husband, we recounted how John Kelly, the former Marine general and Trump’s chief of staff, was shocked by Trump’s admiration for the Nazi generals who prosecuted the Second World War. . . . Recounting this story to an audience in Berlin elicited only stunned silence.

Germans don’t get a vote in the upcoming U.S. Presidential election, but, as much as anywhere in the world, they get what is on the line.