The former US envoy to the UN won praise for his work freeing detained Americans around the world.

Jack Draper continues to put his recent injury problems behind him by reaching the US Open fourth round in a career-best run at a major.

Editor’s Note: Washington Week with The Atlantic is a partnership between NewsHour Productions, WETA, and The Atlantic airing every Friday on PBS stations nationwide. Check your local listings or watch full episodes here.

Events this week delivered further proof that the 2024 presidential race could be one of the most unusual in U.S. history. On Monday, D.C. District Court judge Tanya S. Chutkan set former President Donald J. Trump’s federal election-interference trial for March 4, 2024—the day before Super Tuesday. And on Thursday, Trump pleaded not guilty to charges in Georgia for his alleged efforts to overturn the state’s 2020 presidential election results. It’s unclear whether the collision between Trump’s trials and the political calendar will influence voters, as Trump remains the runaway leader in the GOP polls.

Concerns are also growing about the advanced age of America’s influential political leaders. On Wednesday, for the second time in as many months, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell froze while answering questions from reporters. McConnell’s health issues come at a challenging time for President Joe Biden; a new Associated Press–NORC poll found that three-quarters of the public think he is too old to serve another term.

Joining editor in chief of The Atlantic and moderator Jeffrey Goldberg to discuss this and more are Kyle Cheney, senior legal-affairs reporter at Politico; Asma Khalid, White House correspondent for The NPR Politics Podcast; Susan Page, Washington bureau chief at USA Today; and Mark Leibovich, staff writer at The Atlantic.

Founder of defunct channel 8 Passengers Ruby Franke and her business partner arrested this week.

Europe and the United States are on the verge of the most momentous conscious uncoupling in international relations in decades. Since 1949, NATO has been the one constant in world security. Initially an alliance among the United States, Canada, and 10 countries in Western Europe, NATO won the Cold War and has since expanded to include almost all of Europe. It has been the single most successful security grouping in modern global history. It also might collapse by 2025.

The cause of this collapse would be the profound difference in outlook between the Republican Party’s populist wing—which is led by Donald Trump but now clearly makes up the majority of the GOP—and the existential security concerns of much of Europe. The immediate catalyst for the collapse would be the war in Ukraine. When the dominant faction within one of the two major American political parties can’t see the point in helping a democracy-minded country fight off Russian invaders, that suggests that the center of the political spectrum has shifted in ways that will render the U.S. a less reliable ally to Europe. The latter should prepare accordingly.

[Read: What America’s great unwinding would mean for the world]

The past few weeks have revealed that Trump’s pro-Russian, anti-NATO outlook isn’t just a brief interlude in Republican politics; suspicion of American involvement in supporting Ukraine is now the consensus of the party’s populist heart. During last week’s GOP presidential debate, Ron DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy—the two candidates most intent on appealing to the party’s new Trumpist base—both argued against more aid for Ukraine. DeSantis did so softly, by vowing to make any more aid conditional on greater European assistance and saying he’d rather send troops to the U.S.-Mexico border. Ramaswamy was more strident: He described the current situation as “disastrous” and called for a complete and immediate cessation of U.S. support for Ukraine. Ramaswamy later went even further, basically saying that Ukraine should be cut up; Vladimir Putin would get to keep a large part of the country. Trump did not take part in the debate, but he has previously downplayed America’s interest in an Ukrainian victory and has seemed to favor territorial concessions by Ukraine to Russia. He, DeSantis, and Ramaswamy are all playing to the same voters—who, polls suggest, make up about three-quarters of the Republican electorate.

Another bellwether is the Heritage Foundation, a prominent conservative think tank that has played an outsize role in GOP policy circles since the Reagan years. Before Russia launched its full-scale invasion, in February 2022, Heritage had been on the hawkish wing of the Republican Party, even publishing a call for Ukraine to be accepted into NATO. More recently, Heritage officials have called for halting aid until the Biden administration produces a plan to end the war—which is an impossible goal unless Russia agrees. Demagogues on the right are taking Putin’s side even more overtly. The talk-show host Tucker Carlson, for instance, in a August address in Budapest, maintained that anti-Christian bias motivated American opposition to Russia.

Such claims are ridiculous, not least because Russia is one of the least religious societies on Earth. But the growing sentiment on the American right against supporting Ukraine represents an extraordinary challenge to the future of NATO. European states have been moving in the opposite direction: As evidence mounts of Russian atrocities in Ukraine, and Russia shows itself willing to commit almost any crime in its desire to seize the territory (and people) of an independent, internationally recognized country next door, many European countries (particularly many of those close to Russia) have come to see this war as one that directly challenges their future. If Putin were to keep large pieces of Ukraine, that outcome would represent not peace, but a form of perma-war, in which a revanchist Russia would have established its ability to seize the land of its neighbors.

Even if Joe Biden wins reelection, Republican control of the House, Senate, or both could substantially weaken U.S. support for the Ukrainian effort. And if Trump or one of his imitators wins the presidency in November 2024, Europe could find itself faced with a new American administration that will halt all support for Ukraine.

Such a move would make the U.S. itself an obstacle to a long-term free and stable Europe. It would split the Atlantic alliance, and European states have not prepared themselves for that possibility.

[From the July 1861 issue: The United States and Europe]

The reality is that, for many years, Europe has largely slipstreamed behind the U.S. on security matters. This has provided real benefits to the U.S., by solidifying American leadership in the world’s most important strategic grouping while allowing European states to spend far less on defense than they would otherwise have to. The differential also means that Europe, on its own, lacks the breadth and depth of U.S. military capabilities.

The Western aid given to Ukraine highlights the difference between the two sides. Over the past year, leaders in Europe have been more insistent than Washington about the need to provide powerful, advanced equipment to Kyiv, but their reliance on European-made systems has limited their ability to deliver. The U.K. and France have supplied long-range cruise missiles—known as Storm Shadow in Britain and SCALP in France—that they jointly developed, but the two countries have substantially less equipment to spare than the U.S. does. Although the greatest amount of military aid has come from the U.S., the Biden administration has slow-walked the transfer of more advanced material such as Abrams tanks (which have yet to appear on the battlefield in Ukraine), F-16 fighter jets (which won’t show up until 2024), and Army Tactical Missile Systems equipment (for which the administration continues to make spurious arguments for withholding).

What leaders in Europe have to face, as a pro-Russia, anti-Ukraine position solidifies in the Republican Party, is the prospect of having to do most of the heavy lifting to help Ukraine win the war. That is no small task. Europe would have to expand its manufacturing capacities both for ammunition and other nuts-and-bolts military needs and for the more advanced systems, such as long-range missiles, that it would have to supply on its own.

If the United States simply abandons Ukraine a year and a half from now, there is no way whatsoever that Europe could make up for the loss of aid. But European governments would have to come up with ways to ameliorate that withdrawal. This would require tact and skill—and the preparations would have to start soon. European military officials need to quietly ask their Ukrainian counterparts what the latter would need that the former could supply if American assistance wanes, and then start figuring out how to ramp up production. Such planning would also allow European militaries to start thinking about how they, alone, could defend Europe against Russian aggression. For years, military planners on the continent have debated whether, in the interest of maximizing overall security, individual European nations should specialize their military operations; instead of most states operating a small army, navy, and air force of their own, each would concentrate on the roles that best fit its location, population, and production base, and then rely on other states with complementary capacities. A continent-wide effort to accelerate weapons production for Ukraine would force the question.

Without committing itself to such comprehensive military planning, Europe could also find itself in an internal diplomatic crisis. Countries in the east (such as Poland and Romania) and North (such as the Baltic and Scandinavian nations) are desperate to see Russia defeated. But if Europe fails to embark soon on a unified, collective military-production plan, countries in the west and south that feel less threatened by Russian aggression might be inclined to follow the lead of a new American administration that backs away from Ukraine and tries to cut a deal with Russia. The result could be a legacy of bitterness and distrust at best, and a permanent fracturing of European cooperation at worst.

Hopefully these scenarios won’t materialize. The election of a pro-NATO and pro-Ukraine U.S. president in 2024 should be enough to see Ukraine through to a military victory and peace deal (which would involve Ukraine’s admission into NATO), leading to security on the continent. But that possibility doesn’t absolve European leaders of the obligation to plan for an alternate reality in which an American administration scuttles NATO and seeks a rapprochement with Putin, despite Russia’s genocidal crimes against a European state. If the Europeans don’t start planning for the worst-case scenario, they will have no one to blame but themselves.

Like so many bands of wind and rain, hurricane-strength squalls of bad news have battered former President Donald Trump all year. Since April, he’s been indicted four times, on 91 separate felony charges, compared with zero counts for all of his White House predecessors. Trump often likes to claim that anything associated with him is the most spectacular, even when it’s not, but when it comes to accumulating criminal charges, he’s the undisputed champ of former presidents.

President Joe Biden, by contrast, has been basking in mostly good news. Over recent months, inflation has mostly moderated, job growth has remained steady, and the stock market has recovered briskly. Seemingly every week, Biden cuts a ribbon for an ambitious infrastructure project or new clean-energy plant made possible by a trio of sweeping laws he signed during his first two years. The chaos predicted at the southern border when Biden ended Title 42, the pandemic-era Trump policy, never materialized. Crime rates are declining in many major cities.

And yet national polls, as well as surveys in the key swing states, consistently show Biden and Trump locked in a dead heat when voters are asked about a possible 2024 rematch between them.

“It is a sad reality that the race could be this close given Trump’s position, but it is. And I think it’s very clear that Trump can win this race if the election was tomorrow,” the Democratic pollster Andrew Baumann told me.

Political operatives and scientists agree on one key reason Biden and Trump remain so closely paired in a potential rematch: In our polarized political era, far fewer voters than in the past are open to switching sides for any reason.

But more than structural “calcification,” as three political scientists called this phenomenon in a recent book on the 2020 election titled The Bitter End, explains the standoff in this summer’s polls between Biden and Trump. The two men are pinioned so close together also because they are caught between the four forces that have most powerfully reshaped the electoral landscape since they first met, in the November 2020 presidential election. Two of these dynamics are benefiting Democrats; two are bolstering Republicans. Combined, these four factors appear to be largely offsetting each other, preventing either man from establishing a meaningful advantage as they proceed toward their seemingly inevitable rematch.

[Read: What the polls might be getting wrong about Trump]

“Look, anybody who thinks this is not going to be very competitive … they are not paying attention to American politics,” Mike Madrid, a Republican consultant who has become a prominent critic of Trump, told me. “It’s going to be close. It’s going to be close for the next 20 years.”  

What are the biggest factors benefiting Democrats since Election Day in 2020? The first is Trump’s efforts to overturn his loss in that election and his continued claim that he was the victim of massive fraud. Polls show that after Trump’s sustained campaign to subvert the 2020 result, culminating in the January 6 insurrection, many Americans view the former president as a threat to U.S. democracy. In an early-August CBS/YouGov national poll, just over half of Americans agreed that Trump tried to stay in office after the 2020 election “through illegal and unconstitutional activities.”

Other voters who do not see Trump as an aspiring authoritarian appear exhausted by the controversy and contention that he constantly stirs. For them, January 6 may not have been proof that Trump wants to shred the Constitution, but it is a symbol of the turmoil that returning him to the White House might unleash. “There are people who may like his agenda but do not want to go back to the chaos,” John Anzalone, a pollster for Biden, told me.

The other big change in the electoral environment since 2020 that benefits Democrats is the decision by the GOP-appointed majority on the Supreme Court last year to rescind the constitutional right to abortion. Polls have repeatedly found that three-fifths or more of Americans opposed that ruling and prefer to keep abortion legal in all or most circumstances.

The broad backlash to the Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade hasn’t been a silver bullet for Democrats in campaigns. But in swing states such as Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, widespread support for legal abortion was a major factor in Democratic gubernatorial victories last year.

As Madrid notes, the decision overturning Roe has reinforced the movement of college-educated white women toward Democrats, which has been evident since Trump became the GOP’s defining figure. While “country-club women” always chafed at some conservative social policies, Madrid told me, before Trump the party could still hold a respectable share of them by reminding them that they benefited from Republican economic policies. But since Trump stamped his imprint on the GOP, Madrid added, “now they are more concerned about the social stigma about being associated with a party that is overturning Roe, supporting Confederate monuments, and attacking gay marriage.” Though less dramatically, the same dynamic has weakened the GOP’s position with college-educated white men in the Trump years.

On the other side of the ledger are two factors that have weakened Biden and bolstered Trump since 2020. The most powerful is discontent over inflation. For most Americans, polls show, higher prices in the past few years have overshadowed the consistent job growth and accelerating pace of new plant openings that Biden is now touting under the label “Bidenomics.”

Stanley B. Greenberg, a Democratic pollster who has worked for left-leaning parties around the world, says that sustained inflation, like the U.S. has experienced since 2021, is especially corrosive for the party in power. “I’ve watched it in Greece; I’ve watched it in the U.K.: The longer the inflationary period goes on, the more frustrated people are, the more negative they are about the economy, the more they are in trouble” financially, he told me. Many politicians, he said, fail to understand how long it takes for voters to feel that they have restored their financial stability after a period of inflation, a mistake he worries the Biden White House is repeating now. As Greenberg put it, “You don’t catch up because for one or two months your wages have gone up above the rate of increase for prices.”

Ben Tulchin, who served as the lead pollster for Senator Bernie Sanders’s two presidential bids, told me that inflation exacerbates some of Biden’s longest-standing electoral problems. Biden, he notes, has always struggled to connect with younger voters and Latinos, and because many in both groups have limited incomes, they are especially frustrated with and squeezed by higher prices.

In focus groups he’s conducted this year, Tulchin told me, even many younger voters who revile the former president’s values “will say the economy seemed to be better under Trump.” Madrid says preference for Republicans on the economy is the central factor driving younger Latino men toward the GOP, a shift that’s helping the party counter the Democratic drift among college-educated white women.

Polls reinforce Biden’s vulnerability on this front. In an ABC/Washington Post national survey this spring, Americans preferred Trump by an 18-percentage-point margin when asked whether he or Biden managed the economy better. Younger adults preferred Trump over Biden on that question 2-to-1.

To Jim McLaughlin, a Trump pollster for 2024, those views largely explain how Trump is still standing after his multiple indictments. “It’s not hard to figure out why Donald Trump is as popular as he is: People actually thought he did a good job as president,” McLaughlin told me.

He offered an unusual analogy to explain the thought process he believes voters are employing to evaluate Trump’s repeated indictments. He contends that Americans are responding much as they did when House Republicans impeached then-President Bill Clinton over his affair with an intern while the economy was booming in the late 1990s. “You and I have seen this movie before,” McLaughlin said, arguing that while most Americans may have disapproved of Clinton personally, they supported him during impeachment “because they thought the trains were running on time. They thought he was doing a good job.”

The other big change weakening Democrats is that Biden is older now. In polls, as many as three-fourths of Americans have said they believe Biden is too old to serve effectively as president. (Far fewer Americans express that concern about Trump, though he’s only three years younger than Biden.) Images of Biden walking stiffly, or clips of him intermittently mangling his sentences, which he was prone to do even when younger, leave many Democratic strategists in a perpetual state of anxiety, fearful that the president is one slip, physical or verbal, from political disaster.

Other factors have also changed the landscape since Biden and Trump faced off. Biden’s mishandling of the withdrawal from Afghanistan dented one of his key strengths in 2020—a reputation for foreign-policy expertise. (Since then, Biden’s effective marshaling of Western support for Ukraine may have mended some of that damage.) Conversely, a shift that should advantage Democrats is that white voters without a college degree, the foundation of the modern GOP coalition, are continuing to shrink as a share of the electorate, while Generation Z, whose members have mostly backed Democrats, is rapidly growing.

[From the October 2023 issue: The final days]

There’s also a chance that new dynamics will break this equilibrium before November 2024. If Republicans nominate anyone other than Trump, that would create fresh opportunities and challenges for each side. A recession, though it seems less likely than it did earlier this year, could be devastating for Biden. And if a jury convicts Trump on any of the charges against him before the election, Democrats are cautiously optimistic that that could influence voters more than the indictments have. (McLaughlin counters that even with a conviction, independents might still prefer Trump, because many of them consider the charges politically motivated and also “because he’s viewed as better on the economy” than Biden.)

Yet many on both sides believe the most likely scenario is that the two parties remain mired in a form of trench warfare that leaves the White House within reach for either. A historically large number of states appear safely locked down for each party, leaving the result to be decided by a small group of swing states. That inner circle of the most competitive states would consist of Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, and Wisconsin; the wider group would add Michigan and Pennsylvania, which lean blue, and North Carolina, which tilts red.

Democrats generally ran well in these swing states in 2022 (except North Carolina), generating optimism among most party strategists that despite all of Biden’s difficulties, he retains the advantage over any Republican in reaching 270 Electoral College votes. But these few purple states are likely to be decided by small margins, creating an overall situation that many Democrats find unnervingly precarious given the magnitude of both Trump’s vulnerabilities and the threat he has presented to American democracy.

Amid these competing considerations, all signs suggest that Biden and Trump would begin a prospective rematch considerably diminished from their first encounter, like boxers reentering the ring long after their prime. In a second Biden-Trump bout, the result may turn less on which candidate is stronger than on whose weaknesses are unacceptable to more voters in the states that will decide the outcome.

Novak Djokovic avoids a shock as he recovers from a two-set deficit to beat fellow Serb Laslo Djere in the US Open third round.

Missile launches come as South Korean and US forces conclude joint military exercises on Korean Peninsula.