The Anzac spirit — especially the resonance of mateship, endurance and courage — settled over the United States Congress this week. Anzac is a powerful export.
Finally, Congress has passed the bill which releases desperately needed aid for Ukraine. How close has Ukraine been to defeat? Volodymyr Zelensky told PBS last week, “I can tell you, frankly, without this support, we will have no chance of winning”. He just got 60 billion new reasons to keep fighting — and to start pushing the Russians back.
Republican Michael McCaul, chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said it plainly: “We cannot be afraid of this moment. We have to do what’s right. Evil is on the march. History is calling and now is the time to act. History will judge us by our actions here today. As we deliberate on this vote, you have to ask yourself this question: Am I Chamberlain or Churchill?”
It took the Republicans a long time to get it. In the seven months since President Joe Biden asked Congress to keep the faith and defeat the Russians in Ukraine, Donald Trump rose, once again, to completely dominate the Republican Party. Trump eviscerated all his competitors, and acted as president-in-waiting by dictating terms to Republicans in Congress on what they should do on his key hot button issues, especially immigration and Ukraine.
Indeed, what Trump presents is the end of American world leadership — as defined by Ronald Reagan four decades ago — and its replacement with an isolationist “America First” pose. Trump has gone to great lengths to help Russia’s Vladimir Putin challenge NATO.
Although the vote in the House was overwhelming for the aid to Ukraine, a majority of Republicans — 112 — voted against it. In the Senate, there was significantly more Republican support.
The key was Mike Johnson, the House Speaker, who knows Trump can get him ousted just as he did with several Republicans who crossed the former president. Johnson, a fundamentalist conservative, finally found, like the Lion in The Wizard of Oz, his courage to do the right thing. “Three of our primary adversaries – Russia, Iran and China – are working together, and they are aggressors around the globe,” Johnson said after the vote. “They’re a global threat to our prosperity and our security.”
Johnson is dead right about Iran. But this military aid package was surprisingly assisted by the Islamic republic. For months after the October 7 attack on Israel, the House of Representatives was paralysed on the military funding package. Iran’s massive April 14 missile attack on Israel — a true game-changer of a threat to Israel and the West — provided last-minute impetus to break the deadlock in Congress.
This meant that Biden has won this war with the Trumpists over his wars in his presidency. But the glaring irony staring Biden in the face is that these wars might yet take him down in November.
After Hamas’ horrific attack on Israel on October 7, Biden invoked a larger strategic framing of these issues. Addressing the nation from the Oval Office, Biden said, “Hamas and Putin represent different threats, but they share this in common: They both want to completely annihilate a neighbouring democracy, completely annihilate it. We can’t let petty partisan, angry politics get in the way of our responsibilities as a great nation. We cannot and will not let terrorists like Hamas and tyrants like Putin win. I refuse to let that happen.”
This is still Biden’s key message to voters as they contemplate the choice between him and Trump.
For Ukraine, the US can get weapons just approved by Congress to that country “within days”. Ukraine is also expected to make the F-16 warplanes, cleared for Ukraine last year, operational from July.
Biden needs Ukraine to start gaining ground. If tens of billions of dollars in weapons and fighter jets cannot reverse Ukraine’s weakened position on the battlefield and stop Russia’s wanton destruction of Ukraine’s cities and energy infrastructure, there will be no lift in prospects for Ukraine’s future.
For Gaza, the war has exacted a catastrophic toll of more than 34,000 dead, including more than 13,000 children, and wholesale destruction throughout the territory. Hamas has been decimated but not vanquished. Hostages are still captive. Israel lost the public opinion war months ago. The war is hurting Biden. Most Americans — 55 per cent — disapprove of Israel’s actions, and only 36 per cent approve. Biden’s approval for his handling of the Middle East is just 27 per cent.
Biden urgently needs an end to the war in Gaza. Without it, anger and resentment will haunt his campaign. This is especially true with younger voters across the country and on college campuses, and with Muslim American voters in several key swing states – Michigan, Arizona, Georgia and Pennsylvania – which Biden must win to be re-elected. Supporters of Palestine are expected to flood the streets of the Democratic convention in Chicago in August, evoking memories of the Vietnam anti-war protesters in that city in 1968.
Democrats lost that election to Richard Nixon. The overhang of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq brought Republican control of the White House to an end in 2008.
This week Biden won a huge battle in the fight against authoritarianism, Russia and Iran. But with an uncertain future for Ukraine, and prospects for a forever war in the Middle East, the world is in turmoil.
Biden’s approval has been under 50 per cent since the withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021. Can he see America through these wars? His re-election may well hinge on it.