Lost in all of the horse race coverage of last week’s presidential debate between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris were the most telling and alarming moments of the night.
While it was Trump’s comments about Haitian immigrants that grabbed headlines on the Left and the moderators’ interference on Harris’s behalf that stole them on the Right, it was both candidates’ stated intentions to leave the United States’s allies out to dry that should have captured the country’s collective attention.
Wars are raging in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, and an informal but nevertheless worrisome alliance between Russia, China, and Iran is taking shape. Perceived domestic instability, as well as America’s increasingly submissive posture, especially its haphazard surrender of Afghanistan to the Taliban, has emboldened evil actors around the world.
Those actors represent a threat not just to America’s status as the world’s premier superpower but to the peace and prosperity it underwrites at home and across the globe.
That’s why it’s essential that the next commander in chief stands steadfastly by America’s allies and all those threatened by expansionist authoritarians intent on sowing chaos.
No such leader showed up in Philadelphia last week.
While addressing Trump, ABC News moderator David Muir noted that the former president has said he “would solve [the war in Ukraine] in 24 hours.”
“How exactly would you do that? And I want to ask you a very simple question tonight: Do you want Ukraine to win this war?” Muir asked.
Trump’s response was a rambling mess.
“I want the war to stop. I want to save lives that are being uselessly — people being killed by the millions. It’s the millions. It’s so much worse than the numbers that you’re getting, which are fake numbers,” he answered. “I want to get the war settled. I know Zelensky very well, and I know Putin very well. I have a good relationship, and they respect your president.”
After quite a bit more fanciful word salad, Trump was again asked if he thought it was in America’s best interest for Ukraine to win the war.
“I think it’s in the U.S. best interest to get this war finished and just get it done,” he replied. “Negotiate a deal because we have to stop all of these human lives from being destroyed.”
Peace is an admirable goal, but Republicans, and the wiser of their liberal peers, have long recognized that it’s an objective secured through strength, not some kind of Hakuna Matata-like philosophy.
For her part, Harris posed as a clear-eyed liberal hawk while rebuking Trump over his answer.
“I believe the reason that Donald Trump says that this war would be over within 24 hours is because he would just give it up. And that’s not who we are as Americans,” she declared.
It was a good riposte but evidently not one reflective of her broader view of the world.
When asked about Israel’s effort to protect itself and save Gaza’s population against Hamas, Harris demanded that Israel bend over backward to strike a deal with the terrorist organization.
“What we know is that this war must end. It must end immediately, and the way it will end is we need a ceasefire deal, and we need the hostages out. And so we will continue to work around the clock on that,” she said.
In other words, the war would be over because Harris would just give it up.
Neither Trump nor Harris could express the broader strategic vision behind their positions because there is none. Advocating for giving the Ukrainians or Israelis anything less than the U.S.’s full support is inexplicable. Backing down now risks inviting further aggression from Russia, Iran, and their proxies and encouraging China to act on its designs on Taiwan.
But Trump and Harris are more easily swayed by their own political interests than geopolitical reality. And so they both eschewed the opportunity to do the right thing to appease fringy factions of their coalitions. Instead of meeting the moment and sending a crucially important message to America’s friends and enemies alike, the two major party nominees for president promised to bend U.S. foreign policy to cater to Tucker Carlson and campus radicals, respectively.
If we’re to take them at their word, neither is fit for the White House on that basis alone.
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Isaac Schorr is a writer for Mediaite and a Novak fellow for the Fund for American Studies.