🔒 With allies like the US, Ukraine hardly needs enemies: Kluth

In a candid exploration of the US political landscape, Andreas Kluth captures the ongoing tumult within the US Capitol, viewed as a spectacle of dysfunction from both near and afar. Amidst this chaos, Congress faces pivotal decisions on aid packages critical to international allies like Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan. Kluth weaves through the fractious political climate, where ideological divides and external pressures from adversaries add layers of complexity to passing crucial legislation. His analysis not only reflects the challenges of governance in polarized times but also the global consequences of domestic political strife.

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By Andreas Kluth

If you’ve been watching the clown show unfolding inside the US Capitol for the past six months from afar — from friendly capitals like Kyiv, say, or hostile ones such as Beijing, Moscow, Tehran and Pyongyang — you’ve seen proof of tragicomic dysfunction: the late-stage symptoms of a former superpower in chaotic decline. If you’ve been watching from up close in Washington, as I have been, it looks exactly the same. ___STEADY_PAYWALL___

Several times in those months, during which the world around Congress changed so much and mostly for the worse, hopes rose that America might resolve this governance crisis, allowing it to make friends from Ukraine to Israel and Taiwan stronger and the whole world a little bit safer. But each time such hopes were dashed, and the mess only got messier.

This weekend brings another such moment when things could go either way. On Saturday evening, Mike Johnson, the Republican speaker of the House, plans to bring four bills to the floor that could finally secure aid to these American allies, besides legislating a list of unrelated items that don’t make sense unless you’ve been following along, and not even then.

This saga began in early October. Ukraine was already in the second year of its heroic self-defense against Russian President Vladimir Putin, and in dire need of more weapons, ammo and cash. But House Republicans were also at war — with one another. One faction, beholden to former and perhaps future president Donald Trump and confused by Russian disinformation, had grown skeptical of helping Ukraine. These extremists rebelled and ousted their own Speaker. It took weeks for the party and House to pluck a new leader out of obscurity. Voila, Johnson.

Then, on Oct. 7, Hamas attacked Israel in one of the most sadistic terrorist rampages ever. A new conflict, previously considered dormant but now threatening to escalate into a regional war between Iran and the US, joined the crisis in eastern Europe. Other confrontations loomed in the Taiwan Strait and South China Sea, where China keeps bullying America’s friends. Separate from all that, but also grave, a migrant crisis continued to unfold at America’s own border with Mexico.

The nation’s Founders would have wanted the White House and Congress to debate and then act on each of these discrete challenges separately. But today’s polarization won’t allow it. MAGA Republicans looked askance at Ukraine, embraced Israel and hyperventilated about the border, whereas many Democrats did the obverse.

So President Joe Biden bundled all these problems into one package, which he sent as a supplemental budget request to Congress on Oct. 20. He asked for about $61 billion in aid to Kyiv (much of it in the form of money to American companies so they can replenish US ammo sent to Ukraine), as well as dollops for Israel, Taiwan, border control and more. Everyone in Congress could find something to hate, but also something to love. And Biden strung it all together with a plausible narrative that the US and its allies are in a global struggle against authoritarian aggressors — plausible because Moscow, Tehran, Beijing and Pyongyang are indeed behaving as a new axis of evil.

This attempt at balance and compromise — the gall! — only incensed the MAGA types in Congress more. With many of their conditions on border security met, they upped their demands. It briefly looked as though the US, in trying to restore world order, would also come to grips with its migrant crisis as a byproduct.

That was obviously out of the question — for Trump, that is. He needs the chaos at the border, because he wants to slam “weak” Joe during their upcoming rematch. So he called his cronies in Congress and told them to reject the package. Traditional Republicans were aghast — only a Swiftian quill could do justice to this MAGA flip — and took the border element out again. The Senate eventually passed that package, still quite close to Biden’s original. All the House had to do is say OK.

Just kidding. Of course the House’s MAGAs balked and began threatening to oust Johnson just as they had kicked out his predecessor. But Johnson, despite his obeisance to Trump, has by now figured out that Ukraine, vastly outgunned by Russia, is on the brink of defeat, and Israel could also use some help now that it’s using up its air defenses against Iran faster than expected.

So Johnson has unbundled the package again and wants to force a decision on the House floor on Saturday. Just to get that vote through arcane House rules, he’ll need help from Democrats. That’ll make the MAGA bay even louder for his blood. But the House could then vote separately on aid to Ukraine, Israel and the Indo-Pacific, and also — and why not? — on a forced divestiture of the social-media app TikTok.

The legislators may also turn some of the Ukraine money into loans, seize frozen Russian assets, impose new sanctions on Iran and increase humanitarian aid to Gaza. Or they could add in any number of other tweaks, from the fathomable to the bonkers. In a fifth bill the border may get another look. If most of this goes through, the first four bills will get stitched into a bundle again and go to the Senate, and then to Biden’s desk. Or not.

If you had, not so long ago, written this plot as a Beltway parody, critics would have slammed the script as unsubtle and overwrought. But here we are. Maybe politics never actually “stopped at the water’s edge,” as another Republican senator, Arthur Vandenberg, once proclaimed when he supported a Democratic President, Harry Truman. But for most of the past seven decades, the US was at least reasonable, decisive and united enough to reassure its friends and deter its foes, thus maintaining a modicum of world order.

That era now seems bygone. I pray that Congress passes the aid to Ukraine. Even in the best scenario, though, it’s hard to know whether to laugh or cry at what Congress and America have become. My guess is that they’re crying in Kyiv, and laughing in Moscow and Beijing.

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