Congress moves on Ukraine aid. Doubts about US leadership persist.

Shortly after the U.S. House of Representatives approved long-stalled military assistance for Ukraine, the country’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, lauded the vote for putting the United States back in its rightful place as leader of the free world.

“Thank you America!” Mr. Zelenskyy wrote on his Telegram channel Saturday. “Democracy and freedom will always have global significance and will never fail as long as America helps to protect it.”

But in reality the vote sent mixed signals about America’s place in the world and Washington’s appetite for maintaining a strong leadership role, some foreign policy analysts say.

“American leadership in the world is not dead yet,” says Peter Feaver, director of Duke University’s Program in American Grand Strategy. “But the fact it took so long and the vote was so close is ominous and shows there’s still something of a fight.”

The Ukraine assistance – part of a larger package of $95 billion in foreign military aid that also helps Israel and Taiwan – was expected to easily win Senate approval Tuesday before President Biden signs it into law. Pentagon officials say Ukraine could start seeing fresh weaponry within days. 

Allies’ relief may be short-lived

Saturday’s House vote prompted a sigh of relief among U.S. allies, who had worried for months that the aid hold-up signaled rising U.S. isolationism and the end of Ronald Reagan’s vision of America as a force for global freedom.

“America’s back, and we have our allies’ back now,” Republican Rep. Michael McCaul, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, promised Sunday in a U.S. television interview.

Ukraine aid proponents praised Speaker Mike Johnson’s shift in attitude, from opposition to support of the aid package, as emblematic of America’s return to its traditional global leadership role. President Zelenskyy singled out Mr. Johnson for a decision that “keeps history on the right track.”

But a majority of House Republicans voted against the $61 billion in Ukraine aid, forcing Mr. Johnson to rely on Democrats to get it passed.

The Republican vote reflects a number of recent public opinion surveys showing that the Republican electorate is increasingly skeptical about a strong U.S. role in global affairs. Many voters are drawn instead to former President Donald Trump’s “America First” approach to the world.

For the first time in nearly a half-century, the Chicago Council on Global Affairs found in its October 2023 survey that a majority of Republicans preferred to see the United States “stay out of – rather than take an active part in – world affairs.”

That marked a stark shift from 2015, when the same survey found Republicans more likely than Democrats to favor a strong international role.

The Chicago Council attributed the change to “Trump Republicans,” but it is not new, says Charles Kupchan, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington who served on former President Barack Obama’s National Security Council.

“Trump is as much a symptom as he is a cause of America’s inward turn,” he suggests.

Calling this new focus “something that is here to stay,” Dr. Kupchan points out that U.S. political leaders have tapped into the shift since President Obama’s campaign issued a bumper sticker declaring “It’s time for nation-building at home.”

U.S. political dysfunction overshadows international role

Dr. Kupchan says he is more worried by what he calls the “bigger message” sent by the long and bitter debate over the foreign aid package.

“What was so painfully on display and what the world now has to grapple with is an America of such political dysfunction and divisions that it will be difficult to predict where we go from here and where the United States will stand on key issues from one week to the next,” Dr. Kupchan says.

Speaker Johnson may have eventually shown the world that “you can count on America to do the right thing,” Duke’s Dr. Feaver says, paraphrasing Winston Churchill. And “there’s still a strong bipartisan majority that says America is able and determined to lead.” But that does not obscure the extent to which a torn and chaotic Republican Party has damaged America’s global standing, he adds.

The approval of Ukraine aid tells the world that while America’s leadership instincts remain intact, says Dr. Kupchan, there is no guarantee they will endure.

“The good news out of this vote is that American internationalism is still robust,” he says. “The bad news is that it took so long – and that while Washington dithered, Ukraine was left to defend itself against Russian aggression.

“That,” he adds, “puts in stark relief the degree to which the internationalism the U.S. has practiced since 1941 can no longer be taken for granted.”