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President Trump has long complained about America’s outsized role in NATO and has expressed support for President Biden, saying Ukraine’s fight against Russian aggression is a huge burden on American taxpayers. . This sentiment has captured some Republicans, who are blocking the Biden administration’s attempt to allocate about $61 billion in new funds to Ukraine.
For European onlookers, President Trump’s declared hostility is a fine line. “Everyone should watch this video of President Trump and understand that Europe may soon have no choice but to defend itself,” said Norbert Röttgen, a senior German lawmaker and former head of the German Parliament’s foreign affairs committee. ” he wrote on his Facebook page. “We must manage this because anything else would be surrender and self-abandonment!”
In the eyes of some European critics, President Trump is an existential threat to the Western alliance and its political ethos. “The current presidential campaign only confirms that he has not changed his reckless attitude towards his allies,” Marko Mikkelson, head of the Estonian parliament’s foreign affairs committee, told his colleagues. “Unfortunately, he has therefore become a very convenient tool for Putin’s Russia, which is at war with the West.”
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said in a statement: “Any suggestion that allies will not defend each other undermines our overall security, including that of the United States, and puts American and European soldiers at further risk.” “It will be.”
During his term, Biden reinvigorated the transatlantic alliance. Assure European stakeholders of the United States’ commitment to their security while coordinating a strong joint effort to support Kiev. European diplomats in Washington have barely concealed their confidence and faith in the Biden administration and their concerns about what will happen if President Trump is defeated in November.
But on another important front in the global debate, Biden is perceived as complicit in Israel’s relentless war against Hamas in Gaza, which has upset countless political elites. The Israeli operation, which has killed more than 27,000 Palestinians, many of them children, took a deadly new turn on Monday with the expansion of the operation in the southern city of Rafah, along the border with Egypt. Rafah currently hosts more than one million cornered Gaza refugees. .
Biden is reportedly unhappy with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s uncompromising approach to the conflict. But aides have called for further restraint on Israeli operations following the Oct. 7 invasion of southern Israel by the militant group Hamas, let alone conditions on future military aid to the Jewish state. He has also resisted internal pressure from the Democratic Party of Japan and its allies.
“Aides say Mr. Biden has an instinctive attachment to the Jewish state, but people familiar with his thinking say he tends to equate the prime minister with the state of Israel, and the idea of criticizing it is… “He has had a difficult time, especially during the war, as the incumbent prime minister,” his colleagues reported.
Even Europe’s top diplomats issued thinly veiled rebukes for Biden’s chaotic behavior. “How many times have we heard the most prominent leaders and foreign ministers around the world say that too many people are being killed?” EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell told reporters on Monday. He motioned to the group about Biden’s recent comments that Israel’s war effort has gone “too far.”
“If the international community believes that this is a genocide and that too many people have been killed, then perhaps they should think about providing weapons,” Borrell added.
But Biden and many European countries have largely ignored calls from protesters and some lawmakers in their own countries to force a ceasefire or take action to stop Israel’s latest attack in Rafah. Ignoring it. It also ignored an injunction from the United Nations’ highest court, the International Court of Justice, which called on Israel to take steps to better protect the lives of civilians in the Gaza Strip. Some U.N. officials already believe Israel is violating these demands.
According to the UN commission, one in 100 people died in the first 100 days of war in Gaza, a higher rate than in any other armed conflict in the 21st century. The United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia said: “The ongoing war is unprecedented in its scale of death, destruction and suffering, and its effects will be felt for generations to come.”
The cost of conflict is changed public opinion against Israel in many parts of the world. This has also sparked anger at Israel’s perceived Western enablers, primarily the United States, for their selective approach to the “rules-based international order.” Biden has put this concept at the heart of why he says the United States must protect Ukraine, arguing that Putin cannot be allowed to demonstrate his ability to bring about justice.
For onlookers outside the West, especially in the Middle East and the Arab world, the double standards become even more acute as the death toll of Palestinian civilians rises.
“The Arab and Muslim world has lost faith in Western norms of international law and institutions, human rights and democratic values,” Mohamed ElBaradei, a former Egyptian diplomat and former head of the United Nations Atomic Energy Agency, said last month. I wrote it in a column. “In their view, the West itself has shown that violence trumps everything else.”
Nesrin Malik, a columnist for the Guardian, said: “When a less secure world becomes an acceptable price to pay for loyalty to allies, the West’s assertion of authority as political and military guardians of law and order… appears increasingly tenuous.”
The stakes are probably as high, if not higher, than what Europe is considering regarding its future collective security. Renad Mansour, of the British think tank Chatham House, said if the rules-based international order “fails in public again”, “we will not be able to agree to an end to the unprecedented bloodshed in Gaza”. “This will further erode world trust in Gaza’s institutions.” They will be constructed to serve it and perhaps contribute to its complete elucidation. Western leaders should think seriously about this historic moment and what happens next. ”
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