Kyiv had accused Moscow of being a 'terrorist' state and claimed it funded separatists in eastern Ukraine.

On January 17, House Speaker Mike Johnson led a candlelight vigil at the Capitol to mark the recent passing of the 100th day of hostage-holding by Hamas terrorists in Gaza. Members of Congress assembled shoulder to shoulder with families of hostages. The Republican speaker delivered a heartfelt speech. “We must stand together in solidarity with the Jewish people,” he said. “And we will, from the synagogues in Brooklyn to the country churches of my home in northwest Louisiana, from the Senate to the House—we support Israel, believing that we can overcome the darkness with light.”

This weekend, Congress sees another 100-day anniversary go by—this one dating from when President Joe Biden requested $106 billion in emergency defense aid for Israel and Ukraine, as well as additional funding for border enforcement.

For those 100 days, Congress has refused to act on Biden’s request. The main obstacle is the House of Representatives, and within the House, the pro-Trump MAGA caucus that toppled the previous speaker, Kevin McCarthy. The MAGA caucus then vetoed McCarthy’s most eligible successors, eventually bringing the ultra-Trumpist Johnson to his high office, which is second only to the vice president in the presidential succession.

Johnson has advertised himself as a friend of Israel. He scheduled hearings so that House members could interrogate college presidents about their failure to prevent anti-Semitic harassment on campus. Two of those presidents ultimately lost their job: the University of Pennsylvania’s Liz Magill and Harvard’s Claudine Gay.

But when it comes to aiding allies in a shooting war, rather than a culture war, suddenly Johnson and his caucus are nowhere to be found.

[Read: Elise Stefanik’s Trump audition]

Ukraine depends on U.S. aid to keep fighting. Congress’s inaction—meaning, again, the inaction of Johnson and his MAGA caucus—has curtailed the flow of supplies to Ukraine. Frontline reports say that Ukrainian units are compelled to ration ammunition, conceding the artillery advantage to the Russian invader.

Israel has mobilized so much of its population to fight Hamas and deter other terrorist groups that its civilian economy is greatly impaired. As of mid-November, Israel reported almost $8 billion in emergency borrowing to fund its defense spending. The national budget approved in January projects a $19 billion increase in government expenditures and a $10 billion drop in government revenues in the year ahead.

Republicans insisted on linking Ukraine and Israel aid to border enforcement. In deference to their wishes, Biden also sought $14 billion for border enforcement. Among other purposes, the money would fund the hiring of nearly 6,000 new employees, including 375 additional immigration judges. Many of today’s border-crossers will claim asylum, a status protected by U.S. law and treaties. A large majority of those claims will ultimately be rejected. But because of the new mass of claims, processing has greatly slowed. Once a claim is filed, an asylum seeker can look forward to being released into the country and a delay of years before they are ordered to leave.

Congress can and should reform the much-abused asylum system. Pending a rewrite of the law, the executive branch needs resources to hasten the adjudication of claims that lack merit. The more judges deployed, the faster the claims will be heard. The faster the claims are heard, the sooner rejected applicants can be removed. The prompt removal of rejected applicants will in turn send a strong message around the world that would-be migrants should stay home rather than pay a human trafficker thousands of dollars to help them game the U.S. immigration system.

[George Packer: ‘We only need some metal things’]

In November, House Republicans passed an Israel-only aid bill. But the bill was written to be rejected. It appropriated $14 billion of Israel aid only by cutting $14 billion out of the IRS budget. Not only would this have been a gift to tax cheats, but the cut specified that the IRS must zero out its pilot program designed to spare taxpayers the expense of software and tax professionals. The big tax-preparation companies have spent millions of dollars lobbying Congress to prevent direct filing. So when Hamas murdered 1,200 people in their homes and workplaces, House Republicans seized the opportunity to come to the rescue not of Israel but of TurboTax.

The Biden record on national-security policy gives plenty of basis for criticism. A normal opposition party would have been investigating why the administration was caught so unprepared by the collapse of the Afghan military in 2021. U.S. military assistance to Kyiv was dangerously stingy in the year before Russia’s invasion in February 2022, as Adrian Karatnycky’s forthcoming history of contemporary Ukraine details.

Since the invasion, the Biden administration has hesitated on many occasions to provide potentially decisive weapons for fear of aggravating Moscow. When the White House eventually got over those qualms, the fears were each time exposed as groundless. Yet the lesson was never learned for the next round. And now, in the Red Sea, the Biden administration has so far refrained from decisive action to deter the attacks on international shipping by Iran’s Houthi proxies in Yemen.

Some Republicans—those still willing to act as members of a normal opposition party—have indeed criticized the Biden administration for being too tardy or too timid against this threat or that. In October, the Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, rightly accused the president of “prolonging” the war in Ukraine by offering only half measures.

It’s a valid complaint that Biden failed to send all he could, when he could. But why is the complaint valid?

[David Frum: They do it for Trump]

Because the background political reality is that Donald Trump is an enemy of Ukraine and an admirer of the Russian dictator Vladimir Putin. As Trump has neared renomination, his party—especially in the House of Representatives—has surrendered to his pro-Putin pressure. Biden overestimated the time available to keep aid flowing to Ukraine because he underestimated the servility of House Republicans to Trump’s anti-Ukraine animus.

At the same time, the GOP’s presumptive nominee has reportedly been pressuring Senate Republicans to reject a deal on the spending package, because candidate Trump does not want Biden awarded any win, particularly one that involves enhancing border security, in this election year. So vital aid to Israel and Ukraine must be delayed and put in further doubt because of a rejected president’s spite and his party’s calculation of electoral advantage.

The true outcome of the fiasco in Congress will be the collapse of U.S. credibility all over the world. American allies will seek protection from more trustworthy partners, and America itself will be isolated and weakened.

The 100 days of shame that have already passed are a prelude to worse disasters to come. The House Republicans have a majority of only six (219 to 213). On that slim margin hangs the good name of the United States and the security of countries that have been able to trust American promises for decades. All the candles in the world will not compensate for the betrayal under way.

Moscow and Kyiv trade blame after Il-76 plane crashed, reportedly killing 65 Ukrainian POWs said to be on board.

Moscow says the aircraft was shot down by Kyiv military forces and has Ukrainian POWs on board. But Ukraine says it doubts they were on board.

Ukraine responds to Moscow's accusation that it shot down a military plane with 65 Ukrainians PoWs on board.

A Russian transport plane with 65 Ukrainians onboard crashes in a region bordering Ukraine, says Russia.

Informed Americans finally seem to understand that the macabre slogan of Yemen’s Houthi militia group—“God is the greatest, death to America, death to Israel, a curse upon the Jews, victory to Islam”—is more than empty rhetoric.

The Houthis are a potent Iranian proxy group, and their slogan, adapted from Iranian revolutionary propaganda, is being made manifest in action. They’ve attacked Red Sea shipping lanes more than 30 times since October 17, under the implausible pretext of aiding Hamas and protesting Israeli military actions in Gaza.

Washington long held, against Saudi protestations, that the Houthis didn’t or couldn’t possibly pose a significant threat beyond Yemen. Now the United States is leading a large coalition of countries determined to restore maritime security against Houthi piracy in the Red Sea. Surely those behind Washington’s efforts are asking themselves: Were the Saudis right about the Houthis all along?

Saudi Arabia has taken the Houthi threat seriously since 2015, when Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman first emerged as an important Saudi decision maker. That March, Riyadh organized a coalition of Arab states, including the United Arab Emirates, to stop the Houthis from taking over Yemen during that country’s civil war. The intervention was consistent with UN Security Council Resolution 2216, but it met with only cautious approval from Washington. Barack Obama’s administration later reluctantly decided to support the action in exchange for Saudi Arabia’s help in getting Gulf Arab countries to approve, with even greater misgivings, Washington’s nuclear negotiations with Iran. Many Arab countries and Israel worried that the resulting nuclear deal would unduly strengthen Tehran.

[Read: The Houthis have backed Iran into a corner]

Soon the war produced a humanitarian crisis, and American support began to erode. The UAE was relatively successful in the south of Yemen, but Saudi Arabia got badly bogged down in the north. Then came the brutal assassination of the Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey, in October 2018. That incident, together with the war, became Exhibit A in the bill of particulars that Democratic Party candidates, including Joe Biden in 2020, presented against Riyadh.

In Yemen, Saudi Arabia met with a fate common to large powers confronting guerrilla forces abroad. Unable to develop reliable local allies who could successfully counter well-disciplined, albeit extreme, forces on the ground, Saudi Arabia relied on airpower, which was largely ineffective in holding territory against the Houthis and wound up hitting many inappropriate and unjustifiable targets. Saudi Arabia was plausibly accused, much as Israel is at the moment in Gaza, of using air strikes indiscriminately in Yemen. Groups such as the International Red Cross, Doctors Without Borders, and UNESCO condemned the actions of both sides, but only Saudi Arabia was vulnerable to the negative fallout of this criticism, as its erstwhile friends in Washington became alienated.

The U.S. media and Congress blamed Saudi Arabia almost exclusively for the humanitarian crisis in Yemen, and they did so with mounting anger. Saudi Arabia was, after all, a U.S. ally, while the Houthis were a virtually unknown entity. What was known about them—for example, that they conscripted child soldiers, who still make up much of their fighting force, and that they systematically abuse women and girls—was shrugged off as irrelevant because Washington did not in any way support the organization. For a time, prominent Democrats, including Senator Bernie Sanders, attempted to deploy a War Powers Resolution to require the administration to cut off all forms of support for Saudi involvement in Yemen, but they never amassed enough votes.

Saudi Arabia came under further criticism from Democrats in Congress in 2022, when Riyadh and Moscow made an agreement to restrict oil production to maintain a floor on the price of oil on the world markets (the corresponding jump in prices at the pump that many critics feared never materialized). But whatever the complaint, the Yemen war always featured prominently in the indictment—in fact, the Biden administration suspended sales of offensive weapons to Saudi Arabia two years ago, and both the Trump and Biden administrations were repeatedly urged to suspend all military cooperation with Riyadh because of the war against the Houthis.

Now Washington finds itself not only in a conflict with the selfsame Houthis, but even striking a number of the very targets that Saudi Arabia hit, most notably in and around the crucial port of Hodeidah, prompting considerable criticism.

So were the Saudis right about the Houthis, and by extension, Yemen, all along? Yes and no.

[Read: The Middle East conflict that the U.S. can’t stay out of]

Riyadh grasped the genuine fanaticism and growing power of the Houthis in a way that many in Washington did not. The threat the Saudis perceived applied as much to U.S. interests as to Saudi ones—especially if U.S. interests in the Middle East are understood to no longer be limited to oil, Israel, and counterterrorism. Three of the world’s great maritime choke points surround the Arabian Peninsula: the Strait of Hormuz, which controls ingress and egress from the Gulf; the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, at one end of the Red Sea; and the Suez Canal, at the other, leading to the Mediterranean. At least 12 percent of global commerce passes through the Suez Canal. The Houthis have been wreaking havoc in and around the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, disrupting global supply chains and sending even the price of flavored coffee beans soaring this January.

The Houthis pretend that they are bolstering Hamas and striking Israel by disrupting international commerce that is apparently connected to neither. But what they may really be doing is expressing their enthusiasm for the so-called axis of resistance and, at the same time, legitimating the power they have grabbed by force in much of northern Yemen. The Houthis could even be seeking to compete with Hezbollah for primacy among the pro-Iranian Arab militias in the axis.

Iran, whose Quds Force maintains and coordinates this alleged axis, may be sending a message through the Houthis, too. The first part of that message is that there will be no maritime-security framework in the Gulf or the waters surrounding the Arabian Peninsula unless Iran and its Arab proxies are included in it; the second is that if Tehran is not at liberty to freely sell its oil—because of U.S. or international sanctions, for example—no one else will be able to engage in commerce unmolested, either. The Houthis may be the ones acting, under cover of the Gaza crisis and in the entirely unconvincing name of supporting Hamas and lashing out at Israel, but they are making a long-standing point of Iran’s.

Past experience, including with Somali pirates, has shown that attempting to patrol large bodies of water with a limited naval force isn’t enough to suppress piracy. Rather, the cost of such aggression has to be rendered unsustainable for the culprits. The Biden administration is now leading the international demand that the Houthis desist and that the security of international shipping and commerce in this all-important waterway be restored. The Houthis, for their part, appear to be relishing the prospect of a confrontation with the United States. That is, or at least must be made to be, their problem.

Virtually no one is publicly admitting that, although Saudi Arabia blundered into a quagmire in Yemen that it either should have avoided or been much better supported in by the West, Riyadh was essentially right about the nature and danger of the Houthis. And those who claimed that the Saudis were on a madcap, totally avoidable, and inexplicable adventure had no idea what they were talking about.

“We’ve got to prove democracy works,” Joe Biden declared in his first press conference as president. He has dedicated his administration to this task. Biden took office weeks after his predecessor tried to overturn an election and sparked an insurrection. The violent transition of power confirmed America’s spot in the “democratic recession” that has beset dozens of countries since the mid-2000s. Several times since, Biden has remarked that future generations will see that the global contest between democracy and autocracy was in no small part decided during his presidency. Democracies, as he told world leaders at the inaugural Summit for Democracy, which he convened in December 2021, must show that they “can deliver for people on issues that matter most to them.”

Yet what matters most to the American people? Not the fortunes of democracy overseas. During the same nearly two decades in which democracy has declined globally, the public has turned against attempts to remake other countries in America’s image, especially through military intervention and nation building. In surveys, Americans rank democracy promotion among their lowest foreign-policy priorities. Biden may think he’s unifying the country by defending distant democracies, but his democracy-first framing is divisive—and may be making overseas conflicts worse.

Biden and his team are aware of the public’s long-simmering discontent. Even before he took office, they had formulated a response. The national-security establishment would finally heed what the American people were demanding: no more long and bloody campaigns to “make Western democracies out of countries that had no experience or interest in becoming a Western democracy,” as Donald Trump put it in 2016. Instead of promoting democracy in new lands, the United States would protect democracies where they exist. The costs of American global leadership would fall, public support would rise, and Trump and his fellow populists would lose a rallying cry.

Biden has tried to act accordingly. After terminating America’s nation-building mission in Afghanistan, he has framed each focal point of U.S. foreign policy—Ukraine, Israel/Palestine, and Taiwan—around the imperative to defend democracies against forces that seek their destruction. The problem is that his approach is not delivering, either abroad or at home. The war in Ukraine has reached an impasse and is shedding domestic support. The war in Gaza is a humanitarian disaster and even threatens Biden’s reelection by repelling a segment of his voters. And a catastrophic war over Taiwan looms as a larger prospect than ever.

[Read: The threat to democracy is coming from inside the U.S. House]

Biden’s “defend democracy” credo did not create these challenges, but it has aggravated them. It fosters one-sided, maximalist policies that intensify conflicts without resolving them, while entangling the United States within them. Not since George W. Bush has a president so tightly linked democratic ideals with military instruments. And Biden’s effort is failing for similar reasons as Bush’s did, only in a more divided America and a more competitive world.

Vladimir Putin’s dictatorship in Russia undoubtedly seeks to undermine Ukrainian democracy. But that does not mean the war is best understood as a “battle between democracy and autocracy,” as Biden casts it. Ukraine was a fledgling democracy for decades, mixing competitive elections and a vibrant civil society with entrenched corruption, before Putin sent his forces toward Kyiv. He invaded mainly because Ukraine was drifting out of Moscow’s orbit, in reaction to Russia’s own actions, and closer to the institutions of the West. Such aggression is illegal and unacceptable, not because one party is an autocracy and the other a democracy, but because one state invaded another and then sought to overthrow its government and absorb some of its territory. Russia’s aggression implicates two vital principles of international life: that disputes should be resolved peacefully and that sovereign states should enjoy independence.

When Biden instead appears to make democracy his first principle, much of the world hears that an aggressive war is wrong only when conducted by an autocracy against a democracy. Many countries outside the West have little interest in supporting such a principle. They would like to resist an illegal invasion of their country regardless of whether their form of government meets with Washington’s approval. It should be no surprise that dozens of nations have stayed neutral toward the war in Ukraine, finding fault with both Russia and the West; several countries have even shifted away from Kyiv’s side since the fighting began. Having avoided international isolation, Russia has weathered Western sanctions and ramped up production of artillery rounds, missiles, and drones.

Worse, Biden’s democracy framing inhibits U.S. policy. After the past year of fighting barely moved the battle lines, the government of Ukraine insists that its objective is still to eject Russian forces from every inch of territory occupied since 2014. Rather than induce a sense of realism in its partner, the Biden administration has vowed to support Ukraine “as long as it takes” and refused to put forward territorial aims of its own. It has not, for example, ruled out U.S. support for a campaign to recapture Crimea, which Russia has controlled for a decade and might plausibly resort to nuclear weapons to retain.

Biden’s “defend democracy” rhetoric has boxed him in: If democracy is the central value at stake, the notion of pressuring Ukraine’s elected leaders sounds illegitimate, even if Kyiv should adopt more achievable goals or explore negotiations with Russia. Indeed, Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, has stated that “we’re not going to pressure” Ukraine into negotiations, as though the U.S. should keep supplying Ukraine to do as it likes, as long as it likes, without regard for costs, risks, effectiveness—or American interests.

[Stephen Wertheim: The one key word Biden needs to invoke on Ukraine]

The United States does in fact require Ukraine to use U.S.-provided equipment as Washington prefers, and policy makers appreciate that U.S. and Ukrainian interests are not identical. But Biden’s democracy rhetoric makes it harder to apply overt leverage or contradict Kyiv’s positions, steps that may be needed to show that he is serving his own citizens and steering the war toward an acceptable close in the coming months or years. Already, Trump, Biden’s presumptive challenger in this November’s presidential election, has accused Biden of “sending American treasure and weaponry to fuel endless war,” and Republicans in Congress are holding up Ukraine aid as public support for it wanes. For the sake of American democracy, Biden should say less about Ukraine’s democracy and more about a strategy to preserve its independence and end the killing.

The idea of defending democracy has played a more superficial but still damaging role in the wake of the heinous October 7 attack in southern Israel by Hamas, which massacred about 1,200 people, most of them civilians. Weeks later, Biden appealed to the American people from the Oval Office to support his request for $105 billion of emergency aid, mainly for Israel and Ukraine. Those two countries deserve America’s support, he argued, because they are democracies facing foes who seek their annihilation. The claim was arguably accurate but beside the point (which is perhaps why U.S. officials under the president have tended not to invoke democracy to rationalize U.S. policy). Hamas seeks through terrorist violence to establish a Palestinian state on land Israel controls. It opposes Israel because Israel is a Jewish state, regardless of whether it is a democratic one. Israel, in turn, seeks to protect itself and preserve control over the occupied territories. The conflict is principally about who gets what land, not about which form of government they establish on that land.

Biden has wielded the defense of democracy as a justification to back Israel as Israeli forces have bombarded and invaded Gaza. Yet Biden’s touting of Israel’s status as a democracy, without qualification, is questionable given the country’s recent backsliding. For most of last year, the right-wing government attempted to curtail the independence of Israel’s judiciary, provoking huge protests in the name of saving Israeli democracy. Biden himself had reportedly told Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu not to rush his reforms.

Biden’s democracy-mongering deflects not only from the reality of the problem but also from how to solve it. A more farsighted American president would oppose Palestinian terrorism and Israeli occupation as mutually reinforcing injustices that must be challenged together. The United States could still provide significant support for Israeli retaliation after October 7, but only if Israel created conditions for peace—by using far greater discrimination in targeting Hamas leaders and minimizing the killing of civilians, by freezing settlements and halting settler violence in the West Bank, and by announcing a multiyear plan to facilitate a viable Palestinian state. The watchwords of this approach would be statehood and security for Israel and Palestine alike. Anything less than this, after all, would almost certainly perpetuate the conflict, at great cost to the United States.

[Read: The anticlimactic end of Israel’s democracy crisis]

As the Israel Defense Forces lay waste to Gaza, one should hope that the world takes Biden’s democracy rhetoric no more seriously than Netanyahu has taken his suggestions that Israel exhibit restraint. Israel’s democracy does not justify its brutality. Democratic wrongs are still wrongs, and if democracies act with impunity, autocracies can do so more easily. Indeed, by being too tolerant of the occupation and annexation of Palestinian land, Biden has undercut his principled stand against the occupation and annexation of Ukrainian land. The world has noticed, and so have Americans. Since he linked the two conflicts under the dubious banner of “defending democracy,” Biden has not united the country to support both causes but has seen it divide further: Young and progressive Democrats have grown more critical of backing Israel’s war, while conservatives have become more hostile toward Ukraine’s.

The misguided moralism that has intensified two conflicts also increases the risk of bringing about a third and even worse one. Taiwan, a self-governing island of nearly 24 million people, is a thriving democracy and held its latest free and fair election earlier this month. But Taiwan became democratic only after the Cold War, whereas its dispute with China dates back to 1949, when the Communists took over the mainland and sent their Nationalist opponents fleeing to Taiwan. For decades, the two governments—one in Beijing, the other in Taipei, and both one-party dictatorships—each claimed to be the legitimate ruler of all China and threatened to invade the other.

Beginning in the 1970s, the United States devised a policy that has helped the fraternal adversaries live and let live. Washington recognized Beijing as the sole legal representative of China and acknowledged that only “one China” exists. The U.S. also agreed to maintain strictly unofficial relations with Taipei, while sending it arms for self-defense. Under this evenhanded, pragmatic framework, the U.S. has prevented both sides from upsetting the status quo—deterring Beijing from launching an invasion across the strait and deterring Taipei from making unilateral moves toward independence. This policy has allowed Taiwanese democracy to emerge and flourish, but as a by-product of the main priorities: stability and peace.

Biden has degraded this successful approach by framing U.S.–China relations around an “ongoing battle in the world between autocracy and democracy.” Although he has avoided applying this terminology specifically to Taiwan, members of Congress in both parties have done so—most notably former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat from California. “Today the world faces a choice between democracy and autocracy,” Pelosi declared when she met with Taiwan’s president in 2022. “America’s determination to preserve democracy, here in Taiwan and around the world, remains ironclad.” Her visit induced China to conduct major military exercises around the island.

[Read: Beijing won’t allow Taiwan’s democracy to survive]

The president himself has risked the stability achieved by America’s long-standing policy. Twice he has said that the people of Taiwan should decide whether to declare independence, remarking in 2022, “That’s their decision.” (On top of this, Biden has vowed four times to use military force if China invades Taiwan, contradicting the U.S. policy of maintaining “strategic ambiguity” over whether to intervene.) Biden’s principle is unimpeachably democratic, but its consequences could be calamitous. For the president to assign such a prerogative to Taiwan’s public risks giving Taipei license to take provocative actions and making Beijing fear it cannot achieve unification peacefully. Overwhelmingly, experts believe that if Taiwan declared independence, China would promptly invade.

Thankfully, the official policy remains that the U.S. “does not support Taiwan independence,” a formula that Biden has used subsequently, including immediately after Taiwan’s latest election. Yet the president’s supposed gaffes, when repeated, become difficult to ignore, and Chinese officials complain that the U.S. is adopting a “hollowed out” and “fake” one-China policy. If they conclude that Washington and Taipei seek the island’s permanent separation from the mainland, Beijing could resort to war as the only way to prevent an unacceptable outcome.

That is why many U.S. partners in Asia bridle at Biden’s democracy rhetoric. Putting democracy first increases the odds of a terrible war, one that countries in the region might blame the United States for provoking.

Americans, of course, should not be indifferent to the fate of democracy abroad, but their government needs to get the order of operations right. Channeling investment and aid to countries already moving toward democracy, as the administration is doing through its Democracy Delivers Initiative, is a constructive measure. Likewise, Biden served the cause of democracy well by publicly affirming the integrity of Brazil’s presidential election in 2022 and privately warning military leaders not to back a coup. When supporting democracy aligns with countries’ sovereign status and serves U.S. interests, the U.S. can play a positive role.

But privileging democracy above sovereignty leads to grief. It injects an endlessly destabilizing principle into international relations, implying that states do not have legitimate rights unless they are democracies, as defined by Washington. Under Biden, the United States has abandoned the disastrous foreign-policy choices of the post-9/11 era—invading other countries to overthrow their governments and install democratic ones—yet it continues to speak as though it reserves the right to do so. The point is not lost on states around the world. And one day, Americans will not want a yet more powerful China to assert the same principle of intervening abroad on behalf of the form of government it favors.

[Read: Why these progressives stopped helping Biden]

Right now, as Biden rightly urges, Americans must preserve their own democracy. This is the overriding imperative, and it won’t be decided in Ukraine, Israel, or Taiwan. Large majorities of Americans are dissatisfied with the way things are going and find the federal government unresponsive to their needs. In that context, national leaders who choose to send billions of dollars to fund other countries’ wars had better have realistic goals and high odds of success, and ensure that core U.S. interests guide their policy.

The “defense of democracies” concept does the opposite of that. It inclines the U.S. to over-identify with certain foreign countries and become partisans in their fights. This kind of global leadership divides not only the world but also the nation it is supposed to serve. The United States needs a foreign policy that helps democracy deliver for Americans, not one that asks Americans to deliver ever more for democracies abroad.

Moscow said on Wednesday that its forces had carried out a strike on a building housing 'foreign fighters' in Kharkiv.

The academic was allegedly on Moscow’s payroll for years, collecting intelligence aimed at undermining Tallinn's national security.