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ukraine war
Democrats Have Let Republicans Become the 'Peace' Party
Trump’s successful diplomatic efforts have put the lie to the idea that there was nothing Biden and the Democrats could have done to end the massacre in Gaza, seriously undermining any claim that Democrats might make as the party of peace.
Oct 18, 2025
When President Donald Trump announced that he had helped broker an end to Israel’s onslaught in Gaza, it marked the achievement of a goal many anti-war activists had been struggling toward for two years. Few were bothered by the fact that it was Trump who ultimately presided over the cessation of violence; the goal was always to end the bombing, by any means possible. Whether this deal amounts to a lasting end to violence in the region is all but certain; already, Israel has attacked and killed Palestinians in an apparent breach of the agreement’s terms. But, with a hostage swap underway, there is some reason to believe that this merciless, apocalyptic phase of the genocide in Gaza is coming to an end. As this fragile “ceasefire” takes hold, it is worth considering what this apparent diplomatic success means for Trump, his foreign policy going forward, and for his opposition.
For his part, Trump has long telegraphed his yearning to win the Nobel Peace Prize. As with any policy he pursues, the ends are always self-serving, and this latest round of peacemaking is no different. After his apparent success in Palestine, Trump has already announced his intent to broker a ceasefire agreement between Russia and Ukraine, ending another conflict that dogged his predecessor, Joe Biden. It is unlikely that Trump is earnestly committed to an anti-war legacy (see, for example, his illegal and outrageous attempts to draw Venezuela into open conflict). Rather, Trump is eager to shore up his image as a president who can end seemingly intractable conflicts. That Biden fumbled his handling of both Gaza and Ukraine so badly is just more inspiration for Trump to succeed where his nemesis failed.
Whether Trump can bring an end to the fighting in Ukraine before his term ends is an open question. His newfound enthusiasm for peacemaking, though, leaves his opposition, the Democrats, in a quandary. Biden’s term as president coincided with the onset of the two military conflicts that have come to dominate the 2020s, in Ukraine and Gaza. In both cases, Democrats, and much of the Republican establishment too, quickly lined up behind the US’ nominal allies: Israel and Ukraine. As the conflicts dragged on, though, a strain of isolationist skepticism provided an off-ramp for many Republicans, exemplified by members of Congress like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.). By the time Trump’s 2024 campaign was off the ground, he was running on ending the war in Ukraine, even promising, with typical Trump bombast, to do so within his first 24 hours in office.
Meanwhile, Biden and other Democratic leaders were doubling down on their support for prolonging both conflicts. In Ukraine, Democrats repeatedly advocated for and voted to approve the shipment of weapons, even as the US’ own internal assessments were dubious about Ukraine’s chances for success. By 2024, unfaltering support for President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Ukraine’s army had become largely identified with the Democrats, while Republicans dithered.
The risk, rather, is that Americans who care about peacemaking abroad will find themselves increasingly alienated from both parties.
And then there was Gaza. As Democratic Party leaders pledged undying fealty to Israel, the party’s base began to sour on US complicity in the wanton slaughter playing out in Gaza. While more international bodies confirmed that Israel’s onslaught there met the criteria for genocide, the Biden administration was unstinting in its support. Heading into 2024, signs mounted that Biden’s reelection bid (and, subsequently, Kamala Harris’ campaign) were threatened by constituents’ discontent over the administration’s Israel policy. Despite the gathering storm clouds, the party could not bring itself to depart from its initial hard-line support, even going as far as to bar a Palestinian-American speaker from its 2024 convention floor.
The massive disconnect between the Democratic Party’s leadership and its base is sure to have ramifications far beyond last year’s election. Recent polling has revealed that just 8% of Democratic voters are supportive of Israel’s “military action” in Gaza; meanwhile, just 55 of the 214 Democratic representatives in Congress (only 26%) support a bill to halt weapons shipments to Israel. The dealignment between Democrats’ base and elected leadership on this issue could hardly be more stark.
Now, Trump has succeeded where Biden failed in bringing some measure of peace to the region. The risk to Democrats is not so much that Trump will woo more Democratic constituents to the Republican Party—Trump’s authoritarian tendencies at home and his vile persecution of all perceived political enemies largely foreclose that possibility. The risk, rather, is that Americans who care about peacemaking abroad will find themselves increasingly alienated from both parties. Trump’s successful diplomatic efforts have put the lie to the idea that there was nothing Biden and the Democrats could have done to end the massacre in Gaza, seriously undermining any claim that Democrats might make as the party of peace.
Some Democrats seem to understand what a dire bind the party has put itself in. Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), for example, recently sounded the alarm about Democrats ceding the “anti-war” mantle to Republicans and Trump. Others, like Rep. Delia Ramirez (D-Ill.), have put this opposition to war-making into legislation, authoring the aforementioned Block the Bombs Act.
But, for the Democrats to truly turn the ship around, many more elected representatives will have to follow in the footsteps of Khanna and Ramirez. If the party cannot quickly change its tune on war and peace, it may risk ceding this policy terrain to the Republican Party well into the future.
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Trump Continues the American Tradition of Placing His Faith in War
The nation’s ongoing support for the interminable conflicts in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, along with ever-expanding defense budgets and militarized policing at home, suggests little has changed in the ensuing decades.
Aug 19, 2025
Since inauguration day, the Trump White House has routinely evoked a deep-rooted Cold War framework for expressing America’s relationship with war. This framing sits at odds with the president’s inaugural address in which US President Donald Trump, conjuring Richard Nixon, argued that his “proudest legacy will be that of a peacemaker and unifier.”
From January 2025 on, the administration has instead engaged in a steady drumbeat of aggressive militaristic taunting, threatening real and perceived enemies, foreign and domestic alike. From ordering 1,500 active-duty troops to assist with border patrolling and deportation missions, to the secretary of defense censuring the nation’s armed forces for not focusing enough on “lethality,” the Trump administration is reviving a decades-long trend within an increasingly militarized US foreign policy—a faith in and fear of war and its consequences.
Since the end of World War II, Americans crafted and then embraced a rather disjointed relationship with war, exhilarated by its possibilities to transform the world and make them safe, while also fearing wars they could not prevent or, perhaps worse, win. This tension between faith and fear has haunted Americans and led to a persistent failure to align ends and means in carrying out US foreign relations.
Of course, ideals, interests, and power matter when it comes to foreign policy. Cold War commentators insisted that international politics was a “struggle for power.” True, some critics worried about the consequences of using “raw power” to achieve global dominance while overestimating threats. They fretted that wielding power might actually produce foreign policy crises rather than solve them.
A false faith in war, taken to its extreme, bred not just hyper-patriotism, but xenophobia and nativism.
But in the decades following the Second World War, many Americans feared that if the United States “lost” the burgeoning Cold War, their nation might not even survive. It was a tense time. World War II gave Americans the world… and the faith necessary to rule it. But seemingly new evils emerged that gave pause to policymakers and the general public alike.
Here were inklings of a relationship between faith and fear that would inform US foreign policy ever since. I talk about this in my new book, Faith and Fear: America's Relationship with War since 1945. A secular faith in war to solve any foreign policy problem, coupled with fears of America’s enemies bringing destruction to the nation’s shores, indelibly shaped policy choices when it came to containing communism around the globe.
In short, Americans largely held faith that war would always be utilitarian, a “rational means” for attaining their desired ends.
In such a cognitive framing, war might bring chaos in the dangerous world of which realists warned, but it also lured with the promise of influence, even dominance, the chance to reshape or control whole swaths of the globe.
Now by faith, I’m not talking about religious determinants in US foreign policy. For sure, church leaders used their pulpits in service to both God and the anticommunist cause. Instead, I’m expressing faith as an anecdote for policymakers’ unwavering trust and confidence in war, as a vital tool for achieving policy objectives.
Civilian and military leaders held faith in nuclear arsenals deterring communists’ pursuit of “world domination.” They assumed covert paramilitary operations would stabilize nations in Latin America and the Middle East, enduring nationalist struggles in the postcolonial era. And they faithfully believed that war would aid in modernization efforts aimed at transforming societies abroad, similar to later 21st-century counterinsurgency theorists and regime change advocates seeking to bring liberal democracy and freedom to parts of the world supposedly still living in darkness.
Military force thus became an integral component of how policymakers and citizens alike related with the outside world. After World War II, war occupied a place in America it never relinquished.
Not everyone believed this was healthy for America. Dissenters have long worried about a garrison state emanating from this process of militarizing our foreign policy, but too often their voices were drowned out. The United States had to generate power, so the argument went, and then use that power to advance its political aims against an unyielding, atheistic enemy.
But faith also partnered well with domestic politics. Eager politicians extolled the nation’s military capabilities, diminishing the costs of war while worshipping its benefits. Rarely did they consider the possibility that military intervention might make matters worse, exacerbating local problems instead of solving them.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, those who didn’t accept this compulsory faith were branded as unpatriotic heretics. A false faith in war, taken to its extreme, bred not just hyper-patriotism, but xenophobia and nativism. In the process, dissent was driven to the political periphery. It seemed far easier, and far more patriotic, to embrace false promises of easy, if not eventual victory when the nation committed itself to war.
Aside this essentialist faith in war sat a fear that nearly all national security threats, both foreign and domestic, were existential ones. Americans bounded their faith in war to a kind of Hobbesian, primal fear of the unknown.
So, what were Americans afraid of? What left them in a near constant state of Cold War paranoia? Well, everything. They feared atomic war and “unconventional” war. They feared an anarchic international system seemingly under threat by godless communist forces. They feared arms races and missile gaps, threats abroad and threats at home. They feared depressions and recessions, the future and the past. They feared Soviet spies and Cuban “revolutionaries,” and, perhaps worst of all, they feared each other.
Americans displayed a kind of “neurotic anxiety” born of perpetually exaggerated fear. The parallels to today are striking. Had not the 9/11 attacks, as just one example, also revived long-simmering, stereotypical fears that Muslim extremists, in literary critic Edward Said’s words, might “take over the world”?
And, not surprisingly, as the Cold War persisted, opportunistic politicians and big business realized that existential fear could be a useful tool for persuasion, propaganda, and profit. Taken to its politicized extreme, fear could breed a form of militarized consensus.
In fact, the insidious relationships between legislators and lobbyists became a hallmark of Cold War politics as major defense firms were rewarded for the nation’s increased military posture. As one journalist noted in 1961, the purposes of the military-industrial complex fit “neatly in the atmosphere of crisis… as the United States continued to be held in the grip of wartime thinking.”
These tensions between faith and fear matter because they endure. For Cold War Americans, not unlike today, war was immensely relevant. As George Kennan, the father of “containment,” saw it in 1951, “many people in this country are coming to believe that war is not only unavoidable but imminent.”
The nation’s ongoing support for the interminable conflicts in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, along with ever-expanding defense budgets and militarized policing at home, suggests little has changed in the ensuing decades.
Ultimately, these interactions between faith and fear have the potential to culminate into a spiraling, never-ending militarization of American foreign policy that leaves us far less safe in an uncertain world.
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Ukraine and Gaza Confirm That the Post-War International Order Is Obsolete
Reflections on recent events in this dark and brutal world.
Aug 18, 2025
The war in Ukraine continues unabated and the international community has failed to stop Israel’s genocide in Gaza and its forced replacement campaign in the West Bank. As such, the limits of international law and the ever-declining influence of the United Nations (UN) are there for all to see. Indeed, we live in extremely dark times, and the need for a new world order architecture beyond the nation-state and capitalism is more urgent than ever before, says political scientist, political economist, author, and journalist C. J. Polychroniou in the interview that follows with the French-Greek independent journalist Alexandra Boutri.
Alexandra Boutri: Let me start by asking you about the Trump-Putin summit which ended without a concrete deal. What’s your take on it? Do you agree with the view that sees a Trump alignment with Putin?
C. J. Polychroniou: Among the major takeaways from the Trump-Putin summit in Alaska is that Trump’s image as a dealmaker has suffered yet another massive blow. Of course, we already knew that Trump is the ultimate bullshitter and the slickest con artist in modern political history. His position on the war in Ukraine has changed on numerous occasions, most likely out of frustration for his failure in fulfilling his promise to end the war between Russia and Ukraine, which is now well into its third year. But that’s because he lacks even a rudimentary understanding of how complex of a situation this is since the two sides, i.e., Russia and Ukraine, are diametrically opposed in their positions to end the war. In Alaska, Trump aligned with Putin by dropping his demand for a ceasefire in favor of pursuing a full peace accord. Russia had opposed US and European ceasefire proposals, so Trump’s shift to a peace deal is undoubtedly a win for Putin. In addition, no sanctions against Russia were announced, so the Alaska summit turns out to be a double win for Putin. But that’s not the end of the story. With the Trump-Putin summit, the U.S. has shown Europeans that it and it alone decides how to deal with Russia in ending the Ukraine war. Thus, we may speak of a third major win for Putin.
Alexandra Boutri: What does the Russia’s invasion of Ukraine tells us about the current world order architecture?
C. J. Polychroniou: One may have thought that such aggression would be a thing of the past in the twentieth-first century, but the reality is that not much has changed in state behavior since the end of the Second World War. International law in establishing standards of behavior remains a weak law and collective security as a mechanism to prevent or resolve conflicts is something of an illusion. Ukraine and Gaza are striking examples of the failure of the current world order architecture.
Alexandra Boutri: Is there any justification for Putin’s war?
C. J. Polychroniou: The Russian position on Ukraine had been quite explicit for quite some time before the invasion. Putin had warned NATO against deploying its troops and weapons to Ukraine, saying that this represented a red line for Russia. But the U.S. was obsessed with bringing Ukraine into NATO and the Biden administration backed Ukraine for NATO membership just as strongly as the George W. Bush administration had done in 2008. Obama, of course, was also open to accepting Ukraine as a NATO member and had in fact urged NATO to increase its military support for Ukraine. The point here is that the West in general was always in favor of NATO’s eastward expansion since the end of the Cold War and did not take into account Russia’s security concerns. The US that is principally responsible for the Ukraine crisis although Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is unmistakably a criminal act of aggression.
Alexandra Boutri: Let’s move on to Israel’s barbaric assault on Gaza. What are the cold facts behind this terrible drama?
C. J. Polychroniou; The cold facts? That will require an extensive discussion of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which is impossible to offer here. The “terrible drama” doesn’t start with the atrocious attack and kidnapping by Hamas-led forces in Israel on October 7, 2023. Israel has a long history of occupation and dispossession, coupled with systematic violation of human rights against Palestinians. Anyone denying this “cold fact” is either ignorant of history or simply an Israeli propagandist. Nonetheless, it was the criminal and shockingly stupid cross-border raids by Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups on October 7, 2023, that led to Israeli vows of greater retaliation, which eventually took the form of ethnic cleansing and genocide. Another “cold fact” behind this terrible drama is that the Israeli occupation, dispossession, and killing of Palestinians would not have been possible without the backing and support of the US and major European powers. The western governments are fully complicit in Israeli crimes and the genocide taking place in Gaza today. Yet another “cold fact” is that the holy mantra of the “two-state solution,” cited for many years now by western powers and even so-called progressives in the western world as the only way forward for the Palestinian question, is a delusion as it has ignored the facts on the ground. Israel has always been bent on the creation of an ethnic state and a "greater Israel" and thus would never accept a Palestinian state near its own borders.
Alexandra Boutri: You described the Hamas-led attacks of October 7 not only as criminal but also utterly stupid. Yet, there are many siding with the Palestinian cause who feel that the case for Palestinian self-determination stands now a better chance precisely because of the global condemnation against Israeli actions in Gaza.C J. Polychroniou: This is utterly absurd. Complete rubbish, I must say. Palestinians in Gaza are faced with total extinction because of the Hamas-led attacks on October 7. Israel has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians (it’s more likely than not that the actual death toll in Gaza is much higher than what the Gaza health ministry has reported) and the number of injured exceeds 150,000. More carnage is sure to follow with Israel's plan to take control of all of Gaza. And bear in mind that most of Gaza’s infrastructure is totally destroyed as it has experienced one of the most intense bombardments in history. Israel has dropped more than 90,000 tons of bombs on the Gaza Strip, which happens to be one of the most densely populated territories in the world, exceeding World War II bombings in Dresden, Hamburg, and London combined. Indeed, it has been estimated that the Israeli bombardment of Gaza is the equivalent of six atomic bombs dropped in Hiroshima. How anyone can speak of “progress” on the Palestinian front in the midst of such immense human tragedy is mind-boggling to me. Israel is now more determined than ever before not to co-exist with Palestinians in its midst. You have a neo-Nazi government in power, actually using Nazi-like tactics against Palestinians, while a sizeable majority of Israeli citizens appear to be applauding the government’s campaign to liquidate them because they feel that “there are no innocent civilians” in Gaza. The fact that the western governments not only tolerate but support the actions of a neo-Nazi regime in Israel speaks volumes of their moral depravity. But, yes, Hamas’ actions have been not only criminal but utterly destructive for the Palestinian cause.
Alexandra Boutri: Under what circumstances can you imagine the restructuring of the current world order architecture and the end of capitalism?
C. J. Polychroniou: Unfortunately, I cannot imagine the restructuring of the world order architecture or the end of capitalism in my own lifetime. Such radical transformations would mandate, first and foremost, the end of the nation-state and the subsequent rise of cosmopolitanism. The driving force behind the formation of the nation-state was capitalism itself, so the two are deeply intertwined even though global capitalism gives the impression that it seeks to transcend the nation-state framework but, in reality, depends on it for its own expansion. Be that as it may, the point is that neither international law nor the UN collective security system work in preventing wars and resolving conflicts. Certain progress in human affairs notwithstanding, we continue to live in a dark and brutal world.
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