It’s a golden rule of politics that national leaders do not interfere in other countries’ elections. Tell that to Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who jumped into the middle of America’s presidential campaign last week with both feet, wearing size 10 combat boots. The resulting, resounding thud could be heard as far away as Kyiv (which was perhaps the point).
Visiting an ammunition factory in pivotal Pennsylvania, Ukraine’s war-weary president told Republican nominee Donald Trump that, when it came to his appeaser’s policy of cutting off arms supplies and accepting peace on Vladimir Putin’s terms, he was talking out of his posterior. And Trump’s oddball running mate, JD Vance, was just plain “dangerous”, he said.
Zelenskyy’s blunt comments, and his warm embrace of Josh Shapiro, Pennsylvania’s governor and close ally of Trump’s Democratic rival, Kamala Harris, had Republicans spitting blood. House speaker Mike Johnson denounced the visit as a “partisan campaign event designed to help Democrats”.
Trump’s mouthy son Donald Trump Jr was also outraged by the popular Zelenskyy’s coruscating intervention. “A foreign leader who has received billions of dollars in funding from American taxpayers comes to our country and has the nerve to attack the GOP ticket for president? Disgraceful!” he fumed.
Entertaining though all this is, it illustrates a wider, problematic modern phenomenon. In an inescapably inter-connected world, to twist a well-known phrase, all politics is global. Ukraine’s war matters in the US election. Many Ukrainian and Polish-Americans live in too-close-to-call Pennsylvania. Their votes could decide who wins the state and thus the White House.
It’s much the same with the war in Gaza and Lebanon, where Joe Biden’s perceived connivance with Israel’s criminally aggressive, hard-right government has alienated Democratic and independent US voters. Conversely, the future approach of Trump and Harris affects the calculations of leaders in Jerusalem – and Tehran, too. Does prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu bow to American-led pressure to agree an overall ceasefire, or does he keep fighting in the hope the less scrupulous, more ideologically compatible Trump wins in November? Doubtless Putin is following a similar thought process, looking for a Trump-facilitated way to escape his Ukraine quagmire while still claiming victory.
Iran’s president, Masoud Pezeshkian, offered a notable olive branch to the west at the UN general assembly last week, proposing to revive the nuclear pact wrecked by Trump in 2018. He understands that, if Trump returns, the fate of his Hezbollah allies in Lebanon may be the least of his worries. Direct Israel-Iran-US confrontation will be back on the agenda.
No two wars are the same, and that’s true of Ukraine and the Middle East. Yet US politics aside, several other external aspects are common to both. One is the widening divide, on view at the UN general assembly in recent days, between the west and the global south – countries such as Brazil, Mexico and India – over how best to address the conflicts.
This standoff partly reflects the paralysis, caused principally by the US, Russia and China, that has rendered the chronically unreformed, un-enlarged UN security council unfit for purpose. Ceasefire resolutions in both wars have been repeatedly, irresponsibly vetoed. Multilateralism is on its last legs, warns UN secretary general António Guterres.
Yet the main criticism levelled at western governments – that they pursue a double standard in decrying huge civilian casualties in Ukraine while continuing to arm Israel as it inflicts similar destruction – is hard to refute. It feeds a broader narrative of western exceptionalism that, for example, undermines collaborative action on climate.
What else do the conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza and Lebanon have in common? Both are economically disastrous for all concerned. Russia has sustained serious damage, partly from western sanctions but mostly from the war’s enormous financial cost. Israel’s GDP contracted by 4.1% after 7 October, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development says, and the slump is continuing. Extreme Palestinian suffering in Gaza requires no elaboration here.
Both conflicts are a diplomatic graveyard. Frustrated Egyptian and Qatari mediators on Gaza have all but given up. Pity Antony Blinken, the US secretary of state, who has made multiple trips to the Middle East and gone home empty-handed each time. Turkey, Brazil and China have floated Ukraine peace plans. Zelenskyy has a “victory plan”. None has prospered.
Protagonists in both conflicts continue to flout the Geneva conventions and international humanitarian law to a possibly unprecedented degree. Civilians are routinely targeted – while lying officials flatly deny targeting them. Tens of thousands have died. Hostages have been taken in both conflicts. No one is spared. In Gaza, more than 16,000 children have been killed.
Shocking, too, is the impunity enjoyed by war leaders. Putin was charged with alleged war crimes last year by the international criminal court (ICC). Not only has he not been arrested, he recently received the red carpet treatment in Mongolia, an ICC signatory.
Likewise, the ICC chief prosecutor requested an arrest warrant in May for Netanyahu, along with Hamas leaders, for alleged war crimes. It has still not been issued. Why? A ruling in July by the UN’s international court of justice declaring Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory illegal and ordering a withdrawal is contemptuously ignored.
Brutal post-invasion repression of dissent, free speech and independent media in Russia, and the hounding and assassination abroad of regime critics finds an echo in the Israeli army’s wilful killing and banning of journalists, the government’s recent assumption of special powers and the shutting down of critical news outlets such as Al Jazeera.
These are alarming precedents for the wars of the future. More than ever, modern-day warmongers such as Putin and Netanyahu use conflict to cement their power, defying democratic accountability, tearing up the international rulebook, breaking taboos and pushing the outer limits of inhumanity. War becomes the justification for the unjustifiable. War becomes an end in itself.
• Simon Tisdall is the Observer’s Foreign Affairs Commentator
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