A traditional hallmark of winning Presidential re-election campaigns is a candidate's ability to market to the American people a persuasive narrative of success in both foreign and domestic policy. To be effective such narratives must be simple, powerful, and essentially true.
One such example would be Ronald Reagan's 1984 slogan, “It's Morning Again in America," which persuasively reflected the fact that he had lifted the national gloom over economic misery and foreign humiliation that characterized the administration of his predecessor. Another would be Woodrow Wilson's 1916 slogan, “He Kept Us Out of War,” which irrefutably reflected the fact that he had held America aloof from the global conflagration of World War I while economically benefiting greatly from said conflict.
In the current Presidential campaign, the narrative being advanced by the Biden/Harris administration in hopes of gaining a second term seems to be falling somewhat short of the Reagan/Wilson standard. On the domestic front, which unlike foreign policy voters experience firsthand, issue-by-issue polling strongly suggests that to date the American people are not persuaded that “Bidenomics “ is working, that crime rates are falling, or that the Southern border is secure. As regards foreign policy, which earlier had shown more promise as a domain where policy success could be plausibly claimed, there are now trend lines which do not augur well for the Democratic Party.
The problem is the Ukraine war, which has long been represented as a shining example of bipartisan foreign policy success and clear proof of President Biden's great stature as a world leader. The narrative loudly proclaimed by Democrats was that Biden had unified and reinvigorated the NATO alliance in resolute opposition to wholly unjustified Russian aggression and open-ended support for the fledgling Ukrainian democracy. Unfortunately, that much-touted narrative is now steadily unravelling.
This circumstance has manifested itself in a series of events in the last few months - no one decisive in itself - that taken together constitute a clear pattern of disarray within the alliance. These include widespread discontent among the peoples of the European Union as revealed by June's EU Parliament elections, negative election results in individual member states, failure of the sanctions policy, economic stresses caused by the metastasizing costs of the war, and not least realities on the battlefield that have turned against the outmanned and outgunned Ukrainian military.
Recent events include three NATO members - Finland, Poland and Slovakia - announcing that they would no longer be sending weapons to Ukraine owing to the need to refurbish their own military forces. The defection of Poland, which also stated it was no longer supporting Ukraine's bid for NATO membership, was particularly alarming as the Poles had long been a leading advocate for Ukraine. The deteriorating relations between Warsaw and Kiev has also been exacerbated by the uprising of Polish farmers angered at being undermined by Ukrainian grain “dumping,”
The greatest threat to NATO unity regarding the Ukraine war, however, is clearly coming from the shifting political winds in Germany, where the tripartite ruling coalition (Greens, Socialist, and Free Democrats) - already badly wounded in the EU Parliament balloting - is now being pummeled in regional state elections by parties, both left and right, hostile to the continued support for that war.
The German government has already announced that their new budget will include a 50% reduction in weapons expenditure for Ukraine, while ironically justifying this by their need to make progress toward the NATO mandated goal of spending 2% of GDP on defense. A further embarrassment to Chancellor Olaf Schultz was the revelation that Ukrainian President Zelensky had initially approved the destruction of the Nord Stream II pipeline which resulted in dramatically increased energy prices for German consumers.
Finally, the hopes of the Biden/Harris Administration that its Ukraine policy would be a winner on the campaign trail have faded, as that policy has now become a liability as evidenced by an August 27th Rasmussen poll showing only 37% of Americans approve of Biden's handling of the Ukraine war while 45% disapprove, and further that a plurality of voters think that Trump would handle the Russia-Ukraine conflict better than Harris.
These trend lines have ominous implications not just for Democratic election prospects but also for the future of NATO. Thus it is sad to reflect that NATO, which at its zenith - the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990 - was undeniably the most enduring and successful military alliance in history, has now fallen upon lean years owing to what Henry Kissinger famously described as “a series of unforced errors.”
William Moloney studied history and politics at Oxford and the University of London and received his doctorate from Harvard University. His columns have appeared in the Wall St. Journal, the Hill, USA Today, Washington Post, Washington Times, Philadelphia Inquirer, Baltimore Sun, Denver Post, and Human Events.