The crippled United States government

 Regardless of who wins the election, politics will continue to divide the United States into two nations defined by their hostility to one another.  The Democrats are very likely to win back the House of Representatives, while it will take a miracle--a Democratic victory in Montana, Texas, Florida, or Nebraska--for them to stop the Republicans from taking control of the Senate if Harris wins, and a double miracle if she loses.   In either case the filibuster rule in the Senate will kill the chances for any piece of legislation.  Trump's career as a presidential candidate will probably end if he loses--the more likely outcome at this point, but only to a very marginal extent--but Trumpism will still rule the Republican Party and J. D. Vance will be the heir apparent.  The situation has already wrecked our international position.

We would need a re-evaluation of our foreign policy even if one party really enjoyed a consensus.  Men and women like Anthony Blinken have had their entire careers in the post-Cold War era, and Joe Biden's career was less than half over when Communism collapsed..  As major addresses by every president confirm, the US foreign policy establishment in that era has assumed that everything it wants must occur.  Catastrophic outcomes in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan and the rise of a hostile China and Russia have done nothing to shake that view.  That perhaps is why Biden committed himself to supporting Ukraine while repeatedly delaying or refusing to provide weapons and tactics that would give Ukraine a better chance of winning, and why he has ruled out US intervention from the beginning.  He is accustomed to the idea that the word of the United States is law, and now, it isn't.

Nowhere does this problem loom so large as in the Middle East.   For nearly an entire year, the Biden administration has pretended that the Israeli government can be persuaded to see the current war the way the United States government sees it.  Yes, Israel had every right to retaliate for the October 7 attacks, but the US government still proclaims that the region needs a two-state solution, which in my opinion none of the parties want now.  Almost two weeks ago, an Israeli peace activist named Hagai El-Ad published an op-ed in the New York Times  arguing that the Israeli government is pursuing the long-term goal of driving every Palestinian out of both Gaza and the West Bank.  If that is true--and I think that the evidence indicates that it is--the United States government would have to impose significant restraints upon Israel to make peace in the Middle East possible.  (I am not suggesting that the Israeli government is the only or even the bigger obstacle to peace--I have written before that I do not believe that Hamas or Hezbollah wants peace either--but it is one obstacle.)  The US government did that under Eisenhower in 1957, when he insisted that Israel withdraw from the Sinai peninsula; under Nixon and Kissinger in 1973-4, when it forced the Israeli government to accept a cease-fire and begin disengagement talks with Egypt and Syria; and Ronald Reagan successfully pressured Menachem Begin to cut back military operations in Lebanon in 1982.  Biden has made his opposition to much of what Israel is doing clear during the last year, but he has never taken effective action to stop it.  Why  not?

Part of the reason is American politics.  Nearly twenty years ago the power of AIPAC over American elected officials of both parties became a subject of public controversy in the US, but it has faded from view even though AIPAC is more powerful than ever, using its influence and money to mount primary challenges against any Democrat who opposes Israeli government policy, such as Andy Levin of Michigan.  That influence is further magnified by the impending election, which Democrats feel they must not lose, and the closeness of the race, in which the marginally most likely scenario sees Harris winning 270-268 in the electoral college. The same political split delayed help to Ukraine for several months.  If Trump does return to the White House, the US government will probably renounce its world role altogether.

And as in the case of immigration, foreign policy is an area in which Trump has benefited from facing both political and actual reality.   I showed in States of the Union how carefully presidents from Truman through Reagan built up and sustained the Cold War consensus--which they did not interpret to mean that the US government had the power to decide any conflict on earth, or spread democracy everywhere.  That consensus has fallen apart among the public as it has failed to deliver results in one crisis after another.  We have not spent one-tenth of the time analyzing our failures in the Middle East since 9/11 that we spent re-evaluating Vietnam, but the more recent catastrophe is surely more significant than that first one turned out to have been.  The public knows what Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Rodham Clinton refuse to admit, that the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya were total failures.  That is why Trump's open repudiation of the post-1945 consensus has not cost him very many votes.  

In both foreign and domestic policy, the Democratic elite remains utterly convinced of its own righteousness and the evil of the other side.  That characterization denies a lot of Democratic responsibility for our economic and other ills, and the public knows it.  And that is a big reason that Kamala Harris's best-case outcome is a very narrow victory indeed, probably without control of the Congress.