Tuesday night’s presidential debate was a reprieve from the hawk-off that the 2024 campaign has become. Rather than trying to out-hawk each other, Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump defended peace on the merits. Harris even bragged about ending an “endless war,” after the Democratic Party took that phrase out of this year’s notoriously hawkish platform.
But when it came to ending current wars, neither candidate could articulate how they would do it. Trump gave a peace plan for Ukraine that amounted to magical handwaving, and Harris delivered a word salad of an answer about a ceasefire in Gaza. Although she praised the end of the Afghan war, Harris also attacked Trump for negotiating the very truce that allowed U.S. forces to leave, accusing him of appeasing terrorists.
The candidates’ hawkish turn over the past few months had put them out of step with the American public. A recent poll commissioned by the Cato Institute found that swing state voters believe that the U.S. is too involved in foreign conflicts, worry about escalating to a world war, and plan to vote accordingly. Harris and Trump tried to appeal to those instincts—while avoiding any commitment to diplomacy and restraint.
“I agree with President [Joe] Biden’s decision to pull out of Afghanistan. Four presidents said they would, and Joe Biden did. And as a result, America’s taxpayers are not paying the $300 million a day we were paying for that endless war,” Harris said.
But she called Trump’s peace deal, which Biden followed through on, as “one of the weakest deals you can imagine.” Harris alluded to a recent interview with Trump’s former national security adviser, John Bolton, attacking the truce. Bolton, for his part, would have preferred the United States stay in Afghanistan indefinitely.
The problem, Harris claimed, was that Trump “negotiated directly with a terrorist organization called the Taliban,” and brought them to “a place where we honor the importance of American diplomacy, where we invite and receive respected world leaders.”
Of course, it’s hard to see how any country could achieve a peace deal without talking to its enemies. “I got involved with the Taliban because the Taliban was doing the killing. That’s the fighting force within Afghanistan,” Trump responded. “They don’t bother doing that because, you know, they deal with the wrong people all the time.”
He also promised to negotiate an end to the war in Ukraine. “It’s the U.S.’s best interest to get this war finished and just get it done, negotiate a deal, because we have to stop all of these human lives from being destroyed,” Trump said. Asked how he would stop it, Trump retreated into wishful thinking.
“I know [Ukrainian leader Volodymyr] Zelenskyy very well, and I know [Russian leader Vladimir] Putin very well. I have a good relationship,” he said. “I will get it settled before I even become president—if I win, when I’m president-elect—and what I’ll do is I’ll speak to one, I’ll speak to the other. I’ll get them together,” Trump added.
In the spring of 2022, shortly after the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, the two sides did get together and even wrote draft treaties. It quickly became clear what the sticking points were: Russia wanted Ukraine to give up territory that Ukrainians would not give up, and Ukraine wanted guarantees of foreign military protection that Russia would not allow. Since then, the positions on these issues have hardened.
At the Trump-Biden debate two months ago, Trump said that Russia’s terms were “not acceptable.” At last night’s debate, he did not explain which demands he would want Russia to drop or how he would get Russia to drop them.
Harris, meanwhile, bragged about the American-made weapons that she has helped flood into Ukraine, and claimed that Trump would “give up for the sake of favor and what you think is a friendship with what is known to be a dictator who would eat you for lunch.” She claimed without evidence that if the U.S. did not back Ukraine’s fight, Putin would have continued on to invade Poland.
As for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, both candidates tried to have their cake and eat it, too. Asked point blank whether her approach would differ from that of Biden, who has promised since February that a ceasefire is right around the corner, Harris dodged the question.
She said that the war in Gaza must end “immediately” with a ceasefire deal that frees Israeli hostages, and that the administration is working “around the clock” for a solution that provides “security for the Israeli people and Israel, and an equal measure for the Palestinians.”
Harris also signaled that the U.S. would support Israel in an expanded regional war. “I will always give Israel the ability to defend itself, in particular, as it relates to as it relates to Iran, and any threat that Iran and its proxies pose to Israel,” she stated.
Trump, on the other hand, said that Harris “hates Israel” and “in her own way, she hates the Arab population, because the whole place is going to get blown up.” He claimed that the war simply never would have started under a Trump administration because “Iran had no money for Hamas or Hezbollah or any of the 28 different spheres of terror” due to the economic embargo that Trump imposed.
Biden has continued to enforce Trump’s economic sanctions, and Trump himself admitted last week that U.S. sanctions are simply eroding their own effectiveness over time. But at the debate, Trump claimed that “Iran has $300 billion because they took off all the sanctions that I had.” It’s unclear where he got that number (or what “28 different spheres of terror” means, for that matter). Two months ago, former Iranian President Hassan Rouhani claimed that Iran had lost $300 billion in oil revenue during the Biden era.
Perhaps the most egregious spin, however, was when Harris claimed that “there is not one member of the United States military who is in active duty in a combat zone, in any war zone around the world, for the first time this century.” U.S. forces continue to fight the older battles of the war on terror, as well as new battles caused by the war in Gaza spilling over into the region.
Two weeks ago, seven U.S. troops were injured during a raid in Iraq.
The Biden administration has simply refused to acknowledge that these conflicts exist, using what former State Department lawyer Brian Finucane calls legal “gamesmanship” to avoid reporting to Congress. For example, instead of admitting that the U.S. is waging a naval war off the coast of Yemen, the administration is treating each clash as a one-off incident. The Trump administration also tried to spin its deliberate escalations against Iran as spontaneous acts of self-defense.
That seems to be the new bipartisan consensus: If you can’t actually end wars, just pretend that they’re not happening.
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