The United States House of Representatives has just passed a bloated foreign aid package that will send $25 billion to Israel and a whopping $60 billion to Ukraine. The House also approved legislation that could potentially ban TikTok, the Chinese-made app that is so beloved among members of Generation Z.
We haven’t had a foreign policy election since 2004, when the US was embroiled in the war in Iraq. (2008 probably should have been a foreign policy election; but at least half the country was so punch-drunk on the ascension of Barack Obama, that not much else mattered.)
In recent election cycles, foreign policy has hardly been a factor. We’ve been obsessed with abortion, and LGBTQ this and that, and the personality of a certain Republican candidate.
This election might be different. The Biden Administration has involved the United States in two major conflicts. One is a bottomless quagmire in the former Soviet Union. The other is an apparent fight to the death between Israel and the Palestinians.
The United States is generally seen to be on the “right” side of the Ukraine conflict. But what’s our bottom line? How far are we willing to go, over the question of whether the Russian flag or the Ukrainian flag flies over the Crimean peninsula, and a few oblasts between Ukraine and Russia? How many more billions of taxpayer dollars—and Ukrainian and Russian lives—is it worth? Is it worth the very real risk of World War III?
And then there’s Israel and Palestine. My attitude toward the two sides could best be summed up by Mercutio’s line in Romeo and Juliet: “A plague o’ both your houses! I am sped.” I’m not a Zionist. I’m not a pro-Palestinian. I’m sick to the gills of them both, and their bloody, childish conflict.
The wars in the former USSR and the Middle East could come back to bite us in any number of ways—and I’m not only talking about the taxpayer dollars that could better be spent elsewhere. (But think, for a moment, about all that could be done with that $85 billion: all the highways and bridges, all the medical care, all the education.)
The conventional wisdom used to be: fight them over there, so we don’t have to fight them over here. That old chestnut predates the ICBM and the suicide bomber.
Our entanglements in Ukraine and the Middle East endanger us because by picking sides, the Biden administration has picked two fights. Our government has made each of us a proxy combatant in two wars. If you’re an American citizen, you are now indirectly at war with the Russian Federation and Palestine.
Are those wars in your best interest? That’s a question you should be asking yourself as an American citizen—and as a voter—as Election Day approaches.
-ET