With or without Trump, the United States is turning its back on the world

By Hal Brands

It's one of the classic sayings of American cinema. In Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Paul Newman and Robert Redford are cornered by a squad of police officers and their only escape is to jump off a cliff into the river. When Sundance said he wouldn't jump because he couldn't swim, Butch reassured him, saying, “Falling would probably kill you.”

It's a sad analogy for American foreign policy. As Donald Trump marches toward the Republican presidential nomination, it's natural to wonder what would happen if the United States once again had a volatile, impulsive, and often destructive president at the helm. But speculating about Trump's effects is like wondering what might happen after a hard landing.

The major crisis facing American foreign policy is not something that will materialize unless Trump wins in November. This is happening now as America struggles to provide the assistance Ukraine needs.

On Capitol Hill, there does not appear to be a sense of great urgency. The vital funding decision was delayed, first because lengthy negotiations in the Senate — over a deal that combined border security with aid to Ukraine — ultimately came to nothing, and then because the Republican-led House of Representatives adjourned for two weeks. After the House finally approved the bill in the Senate, it was a last-minute effort to keep the US government open for a few more weeks. As Washington falters, the effects on the battlefield accumulate.

The eastern city of Avtneivka fell late last month because Ukrainian forces lacked the missiles and bullets they needed to stop endless Russian attacks. Now Moscow is moving forward. The Russian Air Force, which previously played a limited role in this war, enters the battle by bombing areas where the Russian army can then advance. Naturally, Russian President Vladimir Putin's planes would be highly vulnerable to Ukrainian air defenses — if Ukraine still has enough of these systems to keep the Russian air force at bay.

For Ukraine, the cost of a lack of US aid is neither future nor hypothetical. It's real, and the cost is growing by the day, in lives and territory lost. To put it bluntly, we see Ukraine losing this war – not because of a brilliant Russian blitzkrieg, but because of a gradual accumulation of developments that deprive the country of any hope of victory and thus force it to accept a peace that will essentially be peace. Strategic defeat.

All of this brings us back to American politics. At the Munich Security Conference held last month and in capitals around the world, the specter of Trump's return weighed heavily on US allies. And for good reason, since Trump is doing the same things – talking about throwing allies to the wolves and attacking America's democratic institutions – that worried many of America's friends the first time around. But the impasse in Ukraine should be of greater concern to those who depend on the United States for their security.

This is because it is difficult to believe that America will send its men and women to defend US allies when the next crisis comes, if it does not even send money and weapons to support Ukraine in a conflict that it does not have. Not a single American service. The member was killed. The impasse in Ukraine also shows that the rot in the US political system runs deeper than the delusions of a mentally ill president.

Indeed, Trump played his ugly role in the Ukraine debate: his resistance to America's southern border, because he wants to run on the issue in November, helped scuttle the bipartisan agreement reached by Senate negotiators. His opposition to Ukraine aid would embolden his allies and scare international Republicans in the House of Representatives right now.

But the current debate demonstrates that the US political system can be paralyzed on crucial strategic issues, even as the US president has described Ukraine as the central front in a great battle between authoritarianism and democracy, and even as a strong majority of members of the House of Representatives wins the vote. The Senate supports providing assistance to this country. If this is the best the United States can do under Joe Biden, it will not take a second Trump presidency to call into question America's global role.

In a recent op-ed in Foreign Affairs, former Defense Secretary Robert Gates argued that political dysfunction in the United States is fueling geopolitical instability – and that a divided America lacks the stability and commitment needed to contain the forces of global unrest. The longer the impasse in Ukraine lasts, the more prophetic this warning will seem.

We live in an era in which many old certainties in world affairs – the advance of democracy, the absence of war between great powers, and relative stability in key regions – are in doubt. And so is the condition that governs all other conditions: that the American political system, with all its weaknesses and absurdities, will eventually produce policies capable of moving the world in a positive direction. Whatever happens in November, the aid deadlock to Ukraine is disappointing because it gives America's friends and foes alike a glimpse of what the world might become when that is no longer the case. It can be a very long way down.