The approval of aid to Ukraine gives a political victory to Biden over Trump

A strong storm over South Carolina forced Donald Trump this Saturday to cancel the rally he had scheduled after a week in the dock. The former president of the United States has remained hyperactive on social networks, but not a single one of the dozens of messages he has published on Truth, his platform, has mentioned the approval by the House of Representatives of a package that includes aid to Ukraine for 60,840 million dollars (about 57,000 million euros). Silence is eloquent. The approval is a defeat for the most Trumpist wing of the party and a political victory for Joe Biden. The president achieves a respite in foreign policy with this package and with the apparent containment of Iran and Israel in their confrontation, which dilutes the fear of a regional war.

Biden has been fighting for more than six months for a package in which the essential thing was aid to Ukraine, both because of its volume and its urgency. It was, at the same time, what caused the greatest division between the two souls of the Republican Party. When the war began, its legislators almost unreservedly supported assistance to kyiv, appealing to American responsibility as a great world power. Over time, however, a good part of the Republicans began to show boredom and embrace the isolationist impulses that Trump himself has nurtured.

Since Republicans took over the House majority in January 2023, Congress had not approved any significant assistance to Ukraine. The budget extensions had expressly left the issue aside. When, shortly after the Hamas attack on Israel, Biden called on Congress to approve an important aid package for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan, Republicans initially demanded that it include funds to strengthen the border against illegal immigration.

The Democrats agreed. But after a bipartisan agreement was reached in the Senate, Trump himself torpedoed it out of pure political calculation: he preferred to campaign on immigration than try to fix the problem. In the end, the Senate bill left out $20 billion for the border and focused on international aid.

The president of the House of Representatives, Republican Mike Johnson, kept that project approved in the Senate in the drawer. Finally, he became convinced that aid was necessary and divided the package into four laws: one for Ukraine, another for Israel, a third for Taiwan and a fourth with popular measures for the Republicans (veto of TikTok, sale of seized Russian assets to pay with that money for aid to Ukraine, sanctions on Iran…) to try to sweeten the package.

However, aid to Ukraine was rejected by most Republicans. They voted 101 in favor and 112 against. The law passed with 311 votes in favor and 112 against thanks to strong Democratic support. By relying for the second time in just over a month on Democratic votes for a major decision (the first was the approval of the budget laws), Johnson put his position at risk. “We have done our job, and I think history will judge it well,” he said after the vote.

Anger of the radicals

The approval of the aid unleashed the anger of the most radical Republicans, led by Marjorie Taylor Greene, Trump’s faithful squire. However, she herself realized that the vast majority of her colleagues are not in favor of repeating the spectacle of chaos and misrule that followed the dismissal of the previous speakerKevin McCarthy, so for the moment he has not decided to activate the motion of censure with which he has been threatening for a month.

Trump, who saw the outcome coming, toned down his opposition to aid: “As everyone agrees, the Survival and Strength of Ukraine should be much more important to Europe than it is to us, but it is also important to us! us!”, he wrote last week on his social network, to ask that Europe be the one to put up more money.

In Trump’s stance towards Ukraine there is a mixture of isolationism (his “America first”) with antipathy carried over for years. Due to his pressure on a then unknown Volodymyr Zelensky to find dirt against Biden, he suffered his first political trial. And the hopes of finding something shady with which to subdue a impeachmentto the current president seem to have evaporated after the accusation of false testimony of the one who was the only witnessof charge.

For Biden, the approval of the package is a great victory. The president spoke separately on Saturday with Johnson and Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries to thank them for their “leadership” and for “putting national security first” in approving the package, the White House said. The package is expected to be voted on in the Senate this week (possibly Tuesday) and Biden is expected to sign the bill as soon as it reaches him.

After months of delay, the approval of the aid comes in the month of NATO’s 75th anniversary. The US president has reinforced his commitment to the Atlantic Alliance, supporting the incorporation of Sweden and Finland. Arriving in July as host of the NATO summit with a Ukraine unassisted and at the mercy of the Russian offensive would have confirmed the failure of its foreign agenda just a few months before the presidential elections.

The package also includes aid to Israel. Support for Benjamin Netanyahu’s government is having a high political cost for Biden. There is no electoral event held where pro-Palestinian protests are not visible. Polls and primaries reveal the rejection of young people, Arab Americans and other minorities. However, the bulk of the money going to Israel is going to strengthen its defenses against rockets and missiles. In addition, the package also includes important items for humanitarian aid to civilian victims in Gaza.

In the Middle East, in reality, the respite for Biden’s foreign policy comes from the apparent containment of Iran and Israel in their mutual confrontation. The two countries appear to be trying to turn the page, diluting fears of an imminent regional war after Iran, for the first time in the history of the two countries, launched an attack from its territory against Israel, with more than 300 drones and missiles. It was the response to the Israeli attack on an Iranian consular building in Damascus in which 16 people died, including seven members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. The Israeli response to the drone attack was almost symbolic.

With the risk of regional escalation averted for now, US diplomacy continues trying to dissuade Netanyahu’s government from undertaking a major ground operation in Rafah that would further aggravate the situation for the civilian population in Gaza.

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