Ahead of the 2024 presidential election in the United States, voters in key states are increasingly weary of their country’s involvement in foreign conflicts, a US media report acknowledged.
Protesters have been flooding the streets of American cities as the latest deadly spiral in the Palestine-Israel conflict claims a growing civilian death toll. With Israel pummeling the Gaza Strip with retaliatory strikes in the wake of the surprise Hamas attack on October 7, Jewish and Palestinian communities in the US and college campuses have been engulfed by emotions, with threats against synagogues and mosques surging. In Detroit, synagogue President Samantha Woll was discovered dead outside her home early Saturday morning with multiple stab wounds.
Demonstrators in support of Palestinians and Israel hold opposing protests near the Consulate General of Israel in New York on October 9, 2023.
© AFP 2023 / ADAM GRAY
As US President Joe Biden called on his nation to stand with Israel and with Ukraine in an address from the Oval Office, warning that “we are facing an inflection point in history.” He also pitched to Congress a $105 billion military aid package, and referred to further assistance funneled to the Kiev regime as a "smart investment" that would pay dividends for future generations.
But a majority of Americans fail to see just how the well-being of their country ties in with the endless support being given to Ukraine and Israel. Interviews with voters in key swing states have revealed the consternation they feel over the implications of widening conflicts in the Middle East and Europe, the report said.
Many reportedly unabashedly revealed that they are “disgusted” with the ongoing political process in the country, and believe that domestic problems, such as inflation, hit closer to home, and that is what the Biden administration, and whosever enters the White House after the 2024 election, should be directing their efforts towards.
The White House has asked Congress to allocate $105 billion in additional funding for the Ukraine proxy war, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Taiwan and the crisis at the US’ southern border with Mexico. Meanwhile, the US has a national debt amounting to a whopping $33 trillion, inflation remains high, and the US president’s much-touted “Bidenomics” appear to be steering his country into a recession, as per economists.
Voters in Georgia, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Arizona, were described as having deliberately turned their television screens "on mute" while the 80-year-old Democratic POTUS made the case for splurging taxpayers’ hard-earned cash on aid abroad. In fact, some 20 million people took the time to watch President Biden’s prime time address on Thursday on major television networks, according to data from Nielsen. This is half the number that listened to ex-President Donald Trump’s 2019 prime time address.
18 October 2023, 17:09 GMT
When questioned about Biden’s speech, given against the backdrop of a speakerless House, a narrowly-dodged and still looming government shutdown, and economic woes plaguing the country, wondered why the commander-in-chief wasn’t “talking about the homeless problem or gang violence,” or trying to solve the "opioid crisis."
“Why aren’t people noticing what’s going on around them? We’re at war with ourselves,” one entrepreneur was cited as saying. Other voters agreed that the president’s appeal for mind-boggling supplementary military aid to Ukraine and Israel was “going to be a hard sell.”
“We’ve got two wars going, everything’s screwed up; now we’ve got to give money to Israel? We’ve got to give money to Ukraine? We’ve got to take care of the whole world?” a voter was cited in the media report as fuming. Other voters voiced the opinion that Joe Biden’s "weakness" as a president had fed into the war and chaos and “people don’t fear us.”
Many were not at all optimistic about what the future held amid the turmoil in the Mideast, coupled with America’s internal problems, saying that, “It’s going to get worse.”
'Washington’s War Party's' Argument for' Endless War'
As recent policymaking regarding Ukraine and the Middle East conflagration has shown, Washington’s "War Party" threatens military action should other states reject the US-constructed so-called “rules-based order,” Doug Bandow, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and former special assistant to then-US President Ronald Reagan, wrote in a US media report. Some members of this militaristic machine “avidly campaign for war: the bigger, the better,” he underscored. “There is no intelligible argument for taking America and the rest of the planet to the nuclear brink in most conflicts,” argued Bandow.
Pointing out that such warmongers in Washington “care little about the lives of others, at least if they are Africans, Arabs, and Asian,” he emphasized how the American administration, like in the recent case with Biden’s Oval Office address to the nation, position “almost every fight” abroad to be in the country’s “vital” or “existential” interest. “Most of the cases are anything but,” he said, adding:
“Ukraine’s collapse… would have minimal impact on American security. Moscow has no reason for war with the US: there are no territorial disputes.”
In Washington, he stressed, the “credibility” issue has become the “kitchen-sink argument for endless war.”
“Yes, the conflict might not be in America’s interest. It might be consuming good lives after bad interventions. It might be wasting vast amounts of cash. It might have no apparent end point after months, years, or even decades of fighting,” Doug Bandow wrote.
“Washington’s adversaries most likely celebrate a decision-making process so contorted as to squander so many lives and so much wealth in secondary and tertiary theaters,” he pointed out, like Americans funding “an endless proxy war against Russia.”
“Stupid and unsustainable commitments” that no longer serve its interests need to be abandoned by Washington, said Bandow, allowing it to serve its own people. He added that, "Young Americans’ lives should not be sacrificed to pay for the War Party’s misdeeds.”
20 October 2023, 16:46 GMT