President Vladimir Putin paves the way for broader use of atomic weapons.

Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged nearly 350 points Tuesday morning after Russian President Vladimir Putin lowered the bar for the use of nuclear weapons. That came just days after President Joe Biden signed off on the use of American-made long-rage missiles by Ukraine.

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Among Donald Trump’s recent Cabinet nominations is a pick that has alarmed the scientific community: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for secretary of Health and Human Services. With this choice, Trump has further elevated a conspiracy-minded vaccine skeptic with no medical background, whose views are often not rooted in science. I spoke with my colleague Yasmin Tayag, who covers health, about the damage RFK Jr.’s proposals could do to Americans’ trust in public health—whether he is confirmed or not.

The Elevation of Fringe Beliefs

Lora Kelley: As you’ve written, some of Robert F. Kennedy’s concerns—such as taking on ultra-processed foods and removing toxins from the environment—seem appealing to Americans across the political spectrum, yet his proposed solutions for these problems could pose a danger to Americans. Could you help me understand the gap between some of his seemingly commonsense proposals and the fringe ideologies behind them?

Yasmin Tayag: A lot of Kennedy’s health proposals actually make sense to me: investing in regenerative agriculture, and increasing access to preventive health care, and even removing toxins from the environment are things that sound good to pretty much anyone, regardless of their political party. Kennedy, of course, was until recently a Democrat, and a lot of his environmental and health concerns do reflect the things that the left has historically worried about.

The problem is that when you start looking at how he’s going to execute on these goals, you realize that his track record of proposing solutions is not based in science. We can all agree that it’s a good idea to take toxins out of the environment, but we might not all agree that fluoride is a toxin, as Kennedy seems to suggest. And so you have to ask: How is Kennedy going to make these decisions?

He’s a science skeptic, even though he claims to be a champion of science that lets people make their own decisions about their health. His view is that science as an institution has been so corrupted by corporate influence—he’s always railing against Big Pharma—that anything that comes out of the science institution that we’ve long relied on is bad.

Lora: Even if he doesn’t get confirmed, could Kennedy’s nomination still have an impact on Americans’ trust in public health?

Yasmin: Kennedy being so publicly considered for such a prominent health role has already given legitimacy to the fringe ideas that he’s entertained over the years. He’s said in the past that he believes 5G cellular technology controls our behavior, and he has implied that antidepressants are linked to mass shootings.

For a lot of the public, this might be their first time really having to think about health topics such as fluoridation. If this is not something you think about normally, and all of a sudden, here’s this guy all over the news, talking about his doubts about things that have long been accepted as scientific fact, I think it’s reasonable that people would also start feeling confused. The fact that he is in the public eye and getting a lot of airtime to discuss his skepticism is, at the very least, putting a spotlight on these fringe beliefs and, at worst, making them seem more legitimate than they are.

Lora: Given that bird flu may be a growing threat, how do you anticipate Kennedy might respond to a pandemic as the head of HHS?

Yasmin: It’s unlikely that we would see anything close to a streamlined public-health response, in part because Kennedy is so skeptical of vaccines. That could mean a hesitation to invest in the production of vaccines, or a lack of encouragement for Americans to use them. But I think the broader impact might be if he continues to legitimize the view that vaccines are something to be afraid of. People may refuse to take them.

During the height of the coronavirus pandemic, we had people who believed in science leading HHS, and the response was pretty mediocre: inconsistent communication, inadequate testing, little coordination between state and federal agencies. But at least the interventions made sense from a scientific perspective. With someone who does not believe in basic health principles, we may see an unpredictable response—or even no response.

Lora: What kind of power does this role actually come with?

Yasmin: If Kennedy becomes secretary of HHS, he’s going to have an enormous influence on American public health—he would oversee the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control, the National Institutes of Health, Medicare and Medicaid, and the Administration for Children and Families, among others. And on top of overseeing all of those departments, he would also be the primary adviser to the president on health. So he would be the one telling Donald Trump what health priorities should be. That’s a really scary prospect, because a lot of Kennedy’s perspective on the world doesn’t seem to be rooted in any kind of scientific reality, at least not a mainstream one. He wouldn’t always be able to implement his ideas directly—removing fluoride from water, for example, can happen only at the state and local level—but his endorsement alone could go a long way.

His appointment, though he still needs to be confirmed, seems plausible to me. Kennedy’s audience is a big one—MAGA meets woo-woo, as our colleague Elaine Godfrey has called it—that could further expand support for Trump. But there are still a number of Republican senators he’ll have to win over. Some might take issue with his views on health. Others may feel threatened by his plans to remove corporate influence from the government—Big Pharma, for example, has long provided campaign money to both parties. Kennedy’s plans to overhaul food and pharmaceuticals would also require a ton of regulation, which is exactly what Republicans don’t want. The biggest pitfall for Kennedy would be if his goals run up against Trump’s economic priorities. He was an environmental lawyer, so he’s very anti-oil, whereas Trump is deeply pro-oil. In his past speeches, Trump has said that Kennedy can do whatever he wants, as long as he doesn’t “touch the oil.” I could see Trump or others in the party pushing back on him for that reason.

Related:

RFK Jr. collects his reward. The sanewashing of RFK Jr.

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The Onion’s most trenchant headline Israel is fighting a different war now. Get ready for higher food prices. Amazon Haul is an omen.

Today’s News

Speaker Mike Johnson reportedly urged the House Ethics Committee to not publicly release its probe into former Representative Matt Gaetz’s alleged sexual misconduct and illicit drug use. Russian President Vladimir Putin and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz had a call about the future of the Ukraine war. It was their first conversation since late 2022. Trump selected North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum to be the Interior Department secretary last night; if confirmed by the Senate, Burgum would oversee the country’s public lands.

Dispatches

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Evening Read

Illustration by Diego Mallo. Source: Mark Peterson / Redux.

The Man Who Will Do Anything for Trump

By Elaina Plott Calabro

Kash Patel was dangerous. On this both Trump appointees and career officials could agree.

A 40-year-old lawyer with little government experience, he joined the administration in 2019 and rose rapidly. Each new title set off new alarms.

When Patel was installed as chief of staff to the acting secretary of defense just after the 2020 election, Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, advised him not to break the law in order to keep President Donald Trump in power. “Life looks really shitty from behind bars,” Milley reportedly told Patel. (Patel denies this.)

Read the full article.

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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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.

Donald Trump hasn’t filled his Cabinet yet, but evidence suggests he’s looking for two main attributes in his picks: loyalty to him and a loathing for what he calls the “deep state.” On Washington Week With The Atlantic, panelists discussed why there’s a split in thinking over these nominees and their qualifications.

This week, Donald Trump named, among others, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a vaccine denier, to head Health and Human Services; Matt Gaetz, the subject of a federal sex-crimes investigation, as attorney general; and Tulsi Gabbard, an apologist for Vladimir Putin, as director of national intelligence.

Though Trump’s nominations have left some in Washington with a sense of shock, these potential Cabinet members should come as no surprise, Leigh Ann Caldwell explained last night. His picks are exactly what the president-elect promised on the campaign trail: “We have to reorient our mindset of what is normal, what has happened for decades in Washington within the guardrails of tradition, the law,” she said. “Trump is trying to throw all of that out, and he’s doing that by nominating people who will do exactly what he says.”

In addition to his quest for loyalty, Trump has also promised that he will hollow out many federal agencies. Between these potential mass firings and resignations, “it’s going to be night and day” compared with the last Trump administration, Mark Leibovich said last night. And especially because many of Trump’s nominees have never run massive agencies before, “it’s going to make the built-in chaos of what this administration is going to try to do all the more so.”

Joining the editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, to discuss this and more: Elisabeth Bumiller, the assistant managing editor and Washington bureau chief for The New York Times; Leigh Ann Caldwell, the anchor of Washington Post Live; Mark Leibovich, a staff writer at The Atlantic; and Francesca Chambers, a White House correspondent at USA Today.

Watch the full episode here.

Russian drone and missile strikes on Ukrainian targets have increased in frequency in the week since the U.S. election, killing civilians and destroying another dam. Russian troops continued to make incremental gains toward the city of Pokrovsk. The Russian army is preparing a new offensive, this time using North Korean troops. Russian President Vladimir Putin congratulated Donald Trump on his election but implied that he would have discussions only if the U.S. initiates talks, drops its sanctions, and refuses to offer any further support for Ukraine—accepting, in other words, a Russian victory. Meanwhile, Russian state television welcomed news of the election by gleefully showing nude photographs of Melania Trump on the country’s most-watched channel.

How will the new U.S. administration respond? What should the outgoing administration do?

In one sense, nothing will change. For nearly three years, many, many people, from the right to the left, in Europe and in America, have called for negotiations to end the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The Biden administration repeatedly probed the possibility of negotiations. The German government endlessly proposed negotiations. Now a new team will arrive in Washington, and it will be demanding negotiations too.

[Read: Helping Ukraine is Europe’s job now]

The new team will immediately run into the same dilemma that everyone else has encountered: “Land for peace” sounds nice, but the president of Russia isn’t fighting for land. Putin is fighting not to conquer Pokrovsk but to destroy Ukraine as a nation. He wants to show his own people that Ukraine’s democratic aspirations are hopeless. He wants to prove that a whole host of international laws and norms, including the United Nations Charter and the Geneva conventions, no longer matter. His goal is not to have peace but to build concentration camps, torture civilians, kidnap 20,000 Ukrainian children, and get away with it—which, so far, he has.

Putin also wants to show that America, NATO, and the West are weak and indecisive, regardless of who is president, and that his brutal regime represents some kind of new global standard. And now, of course, he also needs to show his country that nearly three years of fighting had some purpose, given that this costly, bloody, extended war, officially described as nothing more than a “special military operation,” was supposed to end in a matter of days. Maybe Putin could be interested in stopping the fight for some period of time. Maybe he could be threatened into halting his advance, or bribed with an offer of sanctions relief. But any cease-fire treaty that does not put some obstacle—security guarantees, NATO troops in Ukraine, major rearmament—in the way of another invasion will fail sooner or later because it will simply give Russia an opportunity to rest, rearm, and resume pursuit of the same goals later on.

Putin will truly stop fighting only if he loses the war, loses power, or loses control of his economy. And there is plenty of evidence that he fears all three, despite his troops’ slow movement forward. He would not have imported thousands of North Korean soldiers if he had an infinite number of Russians to replace the more than 600,000 soldiers whom he has lost to injury or death. He would not have paid American YouTubers to promote anti-Ukrainian propaganda if he wasn’t worried by the American public’s continued support for Ukraine. His economy is in trouble: Russian inflation is rising fast; Russian interest rates are now at 21 percent; Russian industries particularly vulnerable to sanctions, such as liquefied natural gas, are suffering. The Russian navy was humiliated in the Black Sea. The Russian military has still not recaptured territory lost in Russia’s Kursk province, conquered by the Ukrainians last summer.

When the next U.S. president, secretary of defense, and secretary of state take office, they will discover that they face the same choices that the current administration did. They can increase Putin’s agony using economic, political, and military tools and make sure he stops fighting. Or they can let him win, quickly or slowly. But a Russian victory will not make Europe safer or the U.S. stronger. Instead, the costs will grow higher: A massive refugee crisis, an arms race, and possibly a new round of nuclear proliferation could follow as European and Asian democracies assess the new level of danger from the autocratic world. An invasion of Taiwan becomes more likely. An invasion of a NATO state becomes thinkable.

[Karl Marlantes and Elliot Ackerman: The abandonment of Ukraine]

In the final two months of his presidency, Joe Biden, together with Ukraine’s European allies, will have one last chance to push Russia hard, to respond to the extraordinary Russian–North Korean escalation, and to stabilize the Ukrainian front line. This is Biden’s last chance to allow Ukraine to carry out long-range strikes against targets inside Russia. Although the Russians can strike any target, military or civilian, anywhere in Ukraine and at any time, the Ukrainians have been limited to their own drones. They have had some startling successes—their drone operations are now the world’s most sophisticated—including hitting military factories all over Russia, and several targets in Moscow this week. But to stop attacks on their cities and to prevent the Russian military from moving troops and equipment toward their borders, they need to be able to use missiles to hit air bases and logistical hubs inside Russia too.

Even more important is the question of money. Biden must press upon the Europeans, as a matter of urgency, the need to transfer frozen Russian assets to Kyiv—not just the interest but the capital. This money—more than $300 billion—can be used to purchase weapons, rebuild the country, and keep the economy going for many months. Most of this money is in European institutions whose leaders have delayed making final decisions about it for fear that Russia will retaliate against European companies, especially French and German companies that still have assets in Russia. But now time is running short: Perhaps the Trump administration will preserve sanctions on Russia, but perhaps it will not.

Biden’s team says it will expedite the delivery of the remaining weapons and resources that Congress has already designated for Ukraine. The goals should be to stabilize the front lines and prevent a collapse in Ukrainian morale; to provide long-term support, including spare parts so that repairs and maintenance of existing weapons systems can continue; and, most of all, to hit the North Korean troops in Kursk. It’s very important that the North Korean leadership perceives this escapade as a catastrophic failure, and as quickly as possible, so that more troops aren’t sent in the future.

After that? The choices, and the stakes, remain very similar to what they were in February 2022. Either we inflict enough economic pressure and military pain to convince Russia that the war can never be won, or we deal with the far more ominous, and far more expensive, consequences of Ukraine’s loss. Biden has a few more weeks to make a difference. It will then be up to Trump to decide whether he will help Ukraine to succeed and to survive, or whether he will push Ukraine to fail, along with the broader democratic world.

Democrats will spend the next four years debating why the party suffered a sweeping defeat last week. Maybe it was inflation, or the culture wars, or Joe Biden’s hubris, or podcasts, that drove voters in every swing state to the Republican presidential nominee. At least one theory, however, can already be put to rest: Elon Musk did not “steal” the election for Donald Trump.

In the weeks and months leading up to the election, Republican officials and operatives architected a second “Stop the Steal” campaign, ready to deploy should their presidential candidate lose. Musk laid much of this groundwork himself, for instance by aggressively promoting the false narrative that the Democrats had brought foreigners into the United States to vote illegally, among other falsehoods. Yet following Trump’s election, it was the left sowing doubts: “#donotconcedekamala” and “Trump cheated” both trended on X. One post on Threads read, “20 million Democratic votes don’t disappear on their own,” and pointed to Musk, Peter Thiel, and Vladimir Putin as likely culprits. “If anyone could fund a massive election fraud scheme it’s Elon musk. He also has motive,” Dean Obeidallah, a progressive radio host, posted to Threads and X on Friday. Such posts have been viewed tens of millions of times.

[Read: Why Democrats are losing the culture war]

There is no evidence to support these claims—but they’re still fundamentally different from the original “Stop the Steal” movement. Democratic leadership, for example, is not repeating these conspiracy theories, nor is there a coordinated attempt to amplify, validate, or act on them. (Obeidallah himself eventually clarified his position, writing on his Substack yesterday that although skepticism is healthy, “there is currently no credible, objective evidence of fraud or any other criminal conduct” suggesting that the outcome was illegitimate.) In fact, the 2024 election was by all accounts extremely secure. There is no evidence that foreign interference affected the results, nor did any domestic conspiracy materially hurt election administration. “Our election infrastructure has never been more secure,” Jen Easterly, the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, said in a statement on November 6. “We have no evidence of any malicious activity that had a material impact on the security or integrity of our election infrastructure.” Top officials in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, and Wisconsin, all key battlegrounds, have said the election was safe, free, and fair.

That hasn’t stopped some Democrats from implying otherwise. Musk, as one of Trump’s most vocal supporters and an extremely online enemy of the extremely online left, has become an obvious target. Maybe the world’s richest man hacked the election with his Starlink satellite network; maybe Democratic ballots were systematically not counted; even if the mechanism is unclear, the math isn’t mathing. Even if such suspicions are raised in good faith, they are counterproductive. Musk—who is now close enough to Trump to have joined him on a recent call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky—is dangerous. His willingness to amplify brazen lies in order to help advance the outcome he wanted was on display for months leading up to the election. But the misinformation about him or any major Republican figure stealing the election obscures and diminishes the actual threat at hand: The authoritarian bent in American media, business, and politics that Musk represents has profoundly warped many Americans’ political discourse, trust in one another, and grip on reality, all without needing to mess with any ballots.

Believing that Musk rigged this November’s outcome has become, at least for some, easier than accepting the truth: Trump, an openly racist and misogynistic candidate who tried to overthrow the government and has said he wants generals like those of the Third Reich, just won the Electoral College and is poised to claim the popular vote in the United States. Yet fantasies about election fraud are dangerous this time around, not because they will actively undermine or mount a physical threat to democracy, but because they blunt, and even willfully ignore, reality. This is Trump’s party now, everyone knows it, pundits should know that everyone knows it, and the GOP still won back control of the Senate and will likely claim a narrow majority in the House of Representatives. As of Friday, Trump had improved his vote margin in more than nine out of every 10 counties with near-complete results, including many progressive strongholds. Fixating on fraud disregards the material factors that brought the nation and its citizens to this choice, and detracts from the daunting work that must be done to recover.

[Read: Voters just didn’t believe in Biden’s economy]

And Elon Musk, “hacking” aside, played a substantial role in Trump’s reelection campaign by spreading and normalizing a wide range of hateful rhetoric and conspiracy theories. He has been the spearhead of a growing segment of the ultra-wealthy technocratic class that rapidly coalesced around Trump this year. The far-right rhetoric about voter fraud that Musk has amplified helped trigger a wave of death threats against election officials. He is trying to single-handedly replace objective sources of information and reporting with his white-supremacist social network, degrading America’s information environment to the point that it has become unclear how, exactly, to change anyone’s mind about anything.

It is not surprising that suspicion about the election has cropped up. Conspiracy theories frequently emerge around election time, and they have for decades. These Democrats are not being uniquely, or even especially, whiny or hypocritical. Before Trump decried a “steal” in 2020, Democrats blamed Russian trolls and Facebook in 2016. (In that case, to be clear, U.S. intelligence officials did find evidence of Russian interference—but not evidence that it was what decisively swung the outcome in Trump’s favor.) Four years prior, Trump called Barack Obama’s victory a “total sham,” and in 2008 John McCain’s campaign was reportedly collecting reports of “Election Day irregularities” before his overwhelming defeat. Both times, a poll found that roughly half of Republicans thought the election was stolen. In 2004, some Democrats blamed shenanigans in Ohio for John Kerry’s exit-poll-defying loss, and in 2000 the culprit was then–Florida Governor Jeb Bush and the state’s infamous “hanging chads.”

Yet Trump’s political foes should be striving to prove that cognitive flexibility, grounded in reality, is possible. Anyone who believes in democracy, registered Democrat or not, should accept the results—and, instead of retroactively fixating on polling and data, focus all their energy on the economic, social, political, and other aspects of people’s lives that caused this outcome, and on how to make those people’s lives better.

Europeans should pay Donald Trump the compliment of believing what he does and says, not what they desperately want to hear. He has clearly indicated that he wants the United States out of the Ukraine war as soon as possible. Both the president-elect and his most important supporter, Elon Musk, have reportedly been in frequent contact with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Vice President–elect J. D. Vance has outlined a “peace” deal with Ukraine that would serve Russian interests. American aid to Ukraine, which has been vital to the beleaguered country’s ability to resist Russia’s ongoing invasion, could stop not long after Trump is inaugurated. European nations must accept this reality and make their own plans—not just to support Ukraine in its existential fight but also to protect their own security as America’s global role shrinks.

Perhaps the best that Ukraine and its supporters can hope for is that Trump doesn’t walk away from NATO and allows European states to purchase U.S. weapons for Ukraine. This minimal position might represent a victory of sorts for Europeans who believe in democracy and the transatlantic alliance—but it would still signal a historical break. The United States will likely stop leading the global opposition to Russian aggression, and perhaps stop caring about the results of the largest war in Europe since 1945. Indeed, the president of the United States will be closer personally to the head of Europe’s largest dictatorship than to any of the continent’s democratically elected leaders.

[Anne Applebaum: The case against pessimism]

Those leaders should have started preparing for another Trump presidency long ago. They had been warned. But for the past year many Europeans have been surviving on hope. Surely the American people won’t vote for Trump, particularly after the January 6 insurrection. The prudent assumption now is that the U.S. will no longer guarantee Europe’s security from Russia and other threats. Leaders should envisage a world where NATO no longer exists—or where the United States is no longer the leading force in the alliance.

In some ways, this is more scary psychologically than in practice. Europe—which is to say, the democratic countries enmeshed in institutions such as NATO and the European Union—has the economic and technological resources to underwrite a serious defense effort. It has a large and educated enough population to staff modern armed forces. It also has some strong and growing military capabilities. For instance, European states either have received or will receive in the coming years as many as 600 F-35 fighters—the most advanced and capable aircraft in the world. Such a force could dominate the skies against a clearly inferior Russian opponent.

Yet Europe also has many weaknesses. It has developed a shockingly large number of military-hardware systems but then only builds a small number of each. This boutique way of addressing military capability has been exacerbated by a weakness in investing in logistics and a limited ability to produce supplies and equipment quickly and reliably enough to sustain a war effort.

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in early 2022 prompted a lot of dramatic talk. The continent had supposedly reached a turning point—a Zeitenwende, in the phrase of German Chancellor Olaf Scholz. But Europe has frittered away much of the past two and a half years, making the smallest and most incremental of changes even as a grotesque war raged to the east; even as Russian forces regularly attacked civilian targets; even as military technology, particularly relating to drone systems, raced forward. European defense spending has only crept up. Even now, a number of NATO states fail to meet the alliance’s agreed-upon target of spending at least 2 percent of their GDP on defense. The United States, even after a significant decline in defense spending after the War on Terror, spends 3.5 percent. Two percent—a standard set in 2014, when European states felt far more secure than they currently do—won’t cut it now.

[Read: I’ve watched America and Ukraine switch places]

Scaling up defense systems quickly will be difficult, but it is essential. In the meantime, the highest priority from the European perspective should be to keep Ukraine supplied and in the fight in case Trump pulls the plug on American military support for Kyiv. Europe can provide more ammunition and more ground-based air-defense equipment. It can give Ukraine long-range weapons, such as German-made Taurus cruise missiles.

Just as important, European democracies can work with Ukraine to upgrade and expand its drone capacity—and in doing so help establish that industry elsewhere in Europe. Europe and even the United States have much to learn from Ukraine about unmanned aerial vehicles. The innovation cycle in Ukraine is quick; major advances take mere months or even just weeks. In this dynamic environment, where homegrown Ukrainian technology looms so large, few Western systems are of much use if sent whole. What Ukraine needs is the ability to mass-produce the drone technology that its engineers develop, working with European partners. That will require specialized components and equipment—and Europe can help with that.

If the United States abandons Ukraine, European states can start taking steps that the Biden administration, in its excess of caution, did not allow. The four most powerful states in Europe today—the U.K., France, Germany, and Poland—could give Ukraine their blessing to attack any Russian military targets. After all, Russia is using its weapons—and those provided by its allies, such as Iran, to attack targets in Ukraine; the American refusal to let Ukraine use Western systems against military infrastructure in Russia itself makes no sense.

European countries could go still further, by openly deploying their forces at least to western Ukraine. They could take over air-defense responsibilities—shooting down Russian missiles and drones without directly killing Russian soldiers. European forces could also openly assist in training Ukrainian forces in Ukraine and assist with air defense and training. Moves like these will reassure the Ukrainian people that they are not alone if the U.S. withdraws—and that their future is in Europe.

To be sure, the continent suffers from a collective-action problem. French President Emmanuel Macron asked this week, “The question we, as Europeans, must ask ourselves, is: Are we ready to defend the interests of Europeans?” Detractors might ask why he was raising the issue only now. In Germany, Scholz’s government appears on the verge of collapse. Even if it survives, it likely lacks the boldness to move decisively to help Ukraine.

And yet the greatest obstacle is a mental one. After decades of expecting the United States to act wisely and forcefully in defense of the broader democratic world, Europe needs to start thinking and acting on its own and in its own interests. Trump’s return means that things previously inconceivable must be faced. And in Ukraine, a new Europe can be born.

Kremlin denies media reports that Russian President Vladimir Putin and US president-elect Donald Trump spoke last week.

“Ukrainians don’t care who will be president of the United States,” my boss, the editor in chief of one of the largest television stations in Ukraine, told me in 2012 as I headed overseas to cover the American election. I was at the Obama campaign’s headquarters, in Chicago, when the president gave his victory speech that year—but back then, Ukrainian television didn’t broadcast live at night, so my report didn’t air until the next morning, local time.

Covering the 2024 U.S. election for the Ukrainian media was an entirely different experience. People in Ukraine were following every turn. Multiple Ukrainian radio stations called me for reports from the rallies I’d attended in Saginaw, Michigan, and State College, Pennsylvania. Ukraine is at war, and the United States is its biggest provider of military aid; the future of that relationship was at stake. The contest’s eventual winner, Donald Trump, had promised to end the war in 24 hours—which Ukrainians understood to mean that he intended to sell our country out to Russia.

But for me, that was only one dimension of this election’s significance. I’ve covered five American presidential contests for the Ukrainian press, starting in 2008, and in that time, I feel that I have witnessed an American transformation that resonates uncomfortably with the Ukrainian past.

After Ukraine became independent, in 1991, our political parties were for decades run from the pockets of oligarchs. A handful of unimaginably wealthy men, each with holdings in media and industry, controlled factions of political representatives who competed almost exclusively with one another. Political campaigns lacked substance and consisted mainly of personal attacks. In the United States in 2008 and 2012, by contrast, the candidates had real constituencies and actual debates about health care and the economy. Many Ukrainians envied the strength of American institutions, media, and civic engagement.

[Read: ‘They didn’t understand anything, but just spoiled people’s lives’]

Sure, I was a bit stunned when, at a 2008 John McCain rally in Columbus, Ohio, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger warned voters that socialism was on the rise and would destroy America the way it had his native Austria. I had just been to Youngstown, Ohio, where I’d interviewed laid-off workers who lacked basic health care; Austria, meanwhile, was a country I knew well, and it had one of the highest standards of living in the world. Why would an elected official peddle such nonsense to this enormous crowd? Still, American democracy seemed, to an outsider, like the picture of health.

The roles had all but reversed when I came back in 2016. Ukrainians had risen up in 2014 against the corrupt, Russia-backed government of then-President Viktor Yanukovych. Our transition wasn’t perfect, but we elected a government that was at last serious about reform. The Kremlin responded by occupying Crimea and assaulting eastern Ukraine, where it backed separatists in the Donbas region. A low-level war would continue in the Donbas straight up until Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, in 2022. Even so, we were building up our democracy. Something was happening to America that seemed to point in a different direction.

That year, Americans were more divided than I’d ever seen them. And it wasn’t easy to talk with Republicans. Some Trump supporters told me that a European reporter could never understand their views on guns. One shut the door in my face at a campaign headquarters in Asheville, North Carolina, explaining that he didn’t trust the foreign media. I’d reported from the rallies of pro-Russian separatists in Crimea and the Donbas, who considered Kyiv-based journalists suspicious if not outright enemies, and I knew when to leave.  

That feeling wasn’t the only disconcertingly familiar one. The worldviews of many Americans I talked with that year diverged starkly from the visible facts of their lives. Democrats scoffed that nobody would vote for Trump—but the excitement at his rallies was plainly evident. A man at a Trump rally in Wilmington, Ohio, complained to me about unemployment. Neither he nor anybody in his family had lost a job—in fact, the mayor of Wilmington told me that the town had more than 300 job vacancies. A retired prosecutor told me that the only media outlet he trusted was WikiLeaks. I was reminded of Russia’s coordinated disinformation campaign against Ukrainians: Since the start of the war, we’d been flooded with fabricated news. We had struggled to make the international press understand that high-profile politicians were simply inventing stories. Now something similar seemed to be happening in the United States.

As of this fall, Ukraine is two and a half years into an all-out war with Russia, and America is eight years into a style of politics that my American colleagues describe as substanceless. I listened for mentions of Ukraine at the rallies I attended, and heard none. The closest the candidates came was when Trump, in Pennsylvania, promised that his administration wouldn’t get involved in the affairs of “countries you’ve never heard of,” and Kamala Harris reminded a crowd in Ann Arbor, Michigan, that Trump had a strange fascination with Russia. Nonetheless, the Trump supporters I spoke with assured me that their candidate would bring an end to all wars, including the one in Ukraine. I heard this from Bill Bazzi, the mayor of Dearborn Heights, Michigan. And I heard it from rally-goers, including an elderly woman at a J. D. Vance event in Saginaw, who told me that she’d persuaded skeptical family members to overlook Trump’s personality and focus on his leadership qualities and ability to bring peace to the world.

Harris didn’t speak much about foreign policy at the event I attended in Ann Arbor, but she did warn her audience about the risk of fascism. That word surprised me. Since the full-scale invasion of our country, Ukrainians have frequently used it to describe the Kremlin of Vladimir Putin. The international media have been reluctant to pick up the term, perhaps because it is so heavily freighted with historical meaning. But now it has become part of the American political vernacular.

This American campaign season was rife with reminders of a politics that were once routine in Ukraine, and that we are now happy to be mostly rid of. We know very well, from our experience, what happens when billionaires own media platforms: They can withdraw endorsements written by their editorial boards and back political candidates in order to curry favor. In Warren, Michigan, I talked with a man who claimed that he’d earned $80,000 in one month for collecting signatures for Elon Musk’s petition to support the Constitution. In another echo, the Trump camp threatened that it would challenge the election results if they didn’t name him the winner: Ukraine has some experience with elections followed by months of litigation.

Some of the Americans I met on the campaign trail wanted to know if I found the situation in their country disturbing. Sure. But everything is relative. Americans are fortunate not to live through what we do in Ukraine. There were times in the past week when I’d be reporting in the Midwest and, because of the time difference, the air-raid-alert app on my phone would go off in the middle of the day, announcing another nighttime attack on my home city of Kyiv. In between interviews, I’d scroll through photos of the buildings hit, hoping not to see my family’s home.   

Trump has won the contest for the U.S. presidency. If he withholds military aid, Ukraine may suffer huge losses on the battlefield and enormous civilian casualties. But one way or another, Kyiv is going to have to work with his administration. My time reporting on the campaign has convinced me that this election was not an aberration so much as a reality to be accepted. For the foreseeable future, the United States will turn inward, becoming a country more and more focused on itself. Outsiders will simply have to take this into account.

[Listen: Autocracy in America]

As for the threat of encroaching authoritarianism, I remain an optimist. Take it from a member of the generation of Ukrainians who successfully defended democracy: To capture a state requires not just a strong leader but an apathetic society. Democracy survives when citizens actively defend their rights on every level.

I saw a lot of that in Nevada and Arizona, where I spent the last two days of the campaign following canvassers. I went door-to-door with members of the Culinary Union of Las Vegas—a guest-room attendant, a cocktail server, and a porter—and listened as they urged residents to pay attention to the Nevada Senate race. In Phoenix, I followed a group of volunteers from California who’d spent weeks trying to talk with people they disagreed with. They told me they had knocked on 500,000 doors in Arizona. Friends in New York and Washington told me that they or their relatives had done campaign work outside their cities—writing letters, phone-banking. Even those critical of both candidates and the system itself cared deeply about the country; some who were alienated from the national races focused their energies on local ones. I have never seen anything like this in Europe, where elections are all about going to the polls once every few years.

One thing we have learned in Ukraine, confronted with foreign invasion and war, is that life goes on. The same will be true for America after November 5. I’m reminded of the time a foreign journalist asked a Ukrainian general how Ukraine would survive the winter. He confidently replied that after the winter, there would be spring.

Americans voted for change in this week’s presidential election, and in foreign policy, they’ll certainly get it. Donald Trump has shown disdain for the priorities and precedents that have traditionally guided Washington’s approach to the world. He speaks more fondly of America’s autocratic adversaries than of its democratic allies. He derides “globalism” as a liberal conspiracy against the American people. And he treats international agreements as little more than wastepaper.

At stake is not only the survival of Ukraine and the fate of Gaza, but the entire international system that forms the foundation of American global power. That system is built upon American military might, but more than that, it is rooted in relationships and ideals—nations with shared values coming together under U.S. leadership to deter authoritarian aggression and uphold democracy. The resulting world order may be badly flawed and prone to error, but it has also generally preserved global stability since the end of World War II.

Despite its endurance, this system is fragile. It is sustained by an American promise to hold firm to its commitments and ensure collective defense. Trump threatens that promise. His plan to impose high tariffs on all imports could disrupt the liberal economic order on which many American factories and farmers (and Trump’s billionaire buddies) rely. His apparent willingness to sacrifice Ukraine to Russian President Vladimir Putin in some misguided pursuit of peace will strain the Atlantic alliance and undermine security in Europe. By signaling that he won’t defend Taiwan from a Chinese invasion, he could undercut confidence in the United States throughout Asia and make a regional war more likely.

[From the December 2024 issue: My hope for Palestine]

The American global order could end. This would not be a matter of “American decline.” The U.S. economy will likely remain the world’s largest and most important for the foreseeable future. But if Washington breaks its promises, or even if its allies and enemies believe it has or will—or if it fails to uphold democracy and rule of law at home—the pillars of the American international system will collapse, and the United States will suffer an immeasurable loss of global influence and prestige.

The risk that this will happen has been gathering for some time. George W. Bush’s unilateralist War on Terror strained the international system. So did Trump’s disputes with NATO and other close allies during his first term. But world leaders could write off Washington’s wavering as temporary deviations from what has been a relatively consistent approach to foreign policy over decades. They understand the changeability of American politics. In four years, there will be another election and a new administration may restore Washington’s usual priorities.

With Trump’s reelection, however, the aberration has become the new normal. The American people have told the world that they no longer wish to support an American-led world order. They have chosen U.S. policy makers who promise to focus on the home front instead of on the troubles of ungrateful allies. Maybe they’ve concluded that the United States has expended too many lives and too much money on fruitless foreign adventures, such as those in Vietnam and Afghanistan. And maybe now America will reassess its priorities in light of new threats, most of all China, and the potential burden of meeting them.

The problem is that if the United States won’t lead the world, some other country will, and a number are already applying for the job. One is Putin’s Russia. Another is the China of Xi Jinping.

China began to assert its global leadership more aggressively during Trump’s first term and has worked ever harder to undermine the American system since—strengthening China’s ties with Russia and other authoritarian states, building a coalition to counterbalance the West, and promoting illiberal principles for a reformed world order. Trump seems to believe that he can keep China in check with his personal charm alone. When asked in a recent interview whether he would intervene militarily if Xi blockaded Taiwan, he responded, “I wouldn’t have to, because he respects me.”

That’s narcissism, not deterrence. More likely, Putin and Xi will take advantage of Trump’s disinterest. Once appeased in Ukraine, Putin may very well rebuild his army with the help of China, North Korea, and Iran, and then move on to his next victim—say, Georgia or Poland. Xi could be emboldened to invade Taiwan, or at least spark a crisis over the island to extract concessions from a U.S. president who has already suggested that he won’t fight.

[Read: The case for treating Trump like a normal president]

The result will be not merely a multipolar world. That’s inevitable, whatever Washington does. It will be a global order in which autocrats prey on smaller states that can no longer count on the support of the world’s superpower, regional rivalries erupt into conflict, economic nationalism subverts global trade, and new nuclear threats emerge. This world will not be safe for American democracy or prosperity.

The fate of the world order and U.S. global power may seem of little consequence to Americans struggling to pay their bills. But a world hostile to U.S. interests will constrain American companies, roil international energy markets, and endanger jobs and economic growth. Americans could confront bigger wars that require greater sacrifices (as in 1941).

Perhaps Trump will surprise everyone by pondering his legacy and choosing not to pursue the course he has signaled. But that seems unlikely. His messaging on his foreign-policy priorities has been too consistent for too long. Over the next four years, Americans will have to decide whether they still want the United States to be a great power, and if so, what kind of great power they wish it to be. Americans wanted change. The world may pay the price.