Are we at the end of an eighty-year period of US global leadership? The United States emerged as a global leader—no, the key global actor—when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt overcame a long tradition of US isolationism by moving forward with the Lend-Lease program that provided essential aid to keep the United Kingdom in the war against Nazi Germany. After World War II, the United States solidified that leadership by playing the decisive role in the creation of interlocking international institutions—such as NATO, the United Nations, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund—that provided the basis for an unparalleled period of global and US peace and prosperity.
But big changes sometimes come in small bites—as Americans have been reminded with the failure of a Senate procedural vote on a long-negotiated package deal combining aid to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan with a program to fix the crisis at the US border with Mexico. Bundling all these difficult issues was not necessarily a good idea; it was the consequence of the refusal of a small number of Republicans in the House of Representatives to approve aid to Ukraine so long as there was no plan to fix the border. While this was a ploy by that small group to block aid to Ukraine, other representatives and senators in both parties were willing to see if this package might ensure the aid that Ukraine needs to defeat Kremlin aggression. With the failure of Wednesday’s vote, Congress has now spent four months failing to provide Ukraine the assistance that it needs to prevent a Russian victory. If the United States does not act in the next few months, catastrophe will follow.