Is US support to Ukraine at risk from the Republicans?

Before they were rivals: the two frontrunners for the Republican nomination Ron DeSantis and Donald Trump campaigning together in 2019

The best description of Americans ever given was by historian Bertha Ann Reuter in 1923: “Americans are a people so extreme in politics, or religion, or both, that they could not live in peace anywhere else.” At this turbulent moment in American politics, it’s worth remembering that an America of committed internationalists ruled by statesmen untrammeled by tawdry politics and domestic constraints is largely mythology.

We Americans are always reluctant to care about the world; after all, we won the geopolitical lottery and have good neighbours, wide oceans, a wealth of natural resources, population replacement by immigration, financial esprit (to use Walter Russell Mead’s excellent phrase), and an inventive economy less dependent on foreign markets than most.

In the nearly eighty years of the liberal international order of our creation, we’ve had: two sitting Presidents and two major civil rights leaders shot; forced racial integration of our public schools; a president who resigned in disgrace and at least one more who ought to have (who is currently festooned with legal problems). Politicians of both political parties frequently threaten to default on the national debt. Four of Illinois’ last ten governors have gone to prison for corruption. We’ve fought four wars and lost three of them. We’re an unreliable ally, and yet likelier to fight for most other countries’ freedom than the people of most countries. So it’s not surprising America’s friends worry whether our country’s too riven to continue as the anchor of allied security and prosperity.

The worries expressed by America’s friends and allies have in recent years aren’t new, but they have intensified. No American president before Donald Trump so openly scorned Constitutional restrictions or America’s treaty commitments – yet seventy four million Americans voted for him to serve a second term. Six out of ten Republicans still think well of him. His return to office would signify a very different America in the world, both in what we represent and how we act.