On Israel and Ukraine, Harris and Trump are mirror images

A debate moderator first asked Harris about Israel’s war against Hamas. Her answer, after a preamble denouncing Hamas’s Oct. 7 terrorist attack and criticizing Israel for civilian casualties in Gaza: “What we know is that this war must end. It must end immediately, and the way it will end is we need a cease-fire deal and we need the hostages out. And so we will continue to work around the clock on that.”

It was a nonspecific answer, but the gist was clear enough: Israel should cut a deal with Hamas, pronto. The terms of any deal are an afterthought. Whatever it takes to get the hostages. Just make it stop. (Trump responded by claiming Harris “hates” Israel.)

Next it was Trump’s turn on Ukraine. The question for him was more pointed: “I want to ask you a very simple question tonight. Do you want Ukraine to win this war?”

Trump, echoing Harris on Israel, focused only on ending the war for humanitarian reasons: “I want the war to stop. I want to save lives.” Unlike Harris, he was pressed for more: “Just to clarify the question, do you believe it’s in the U.S.’s best interests for Ukraine to win this war? Yes or no.” Trump doubled down: “I think it’s in the U.S.’s best interest to get this war finished and just get it done. Negotiate a deal. Because we have to stop all of these human lives from being destroyed.”

Harris said Trump would “give up” on Ukraine. But Trump talks about the war in Eastern Europe in much the same way Harris talks about the war in the Middle East: As a tragic excess that should be wound down, not won. The U.S. interest, both candidates seem to believe, is in stopping a war involving an American ally — not in the American ally achieving its war objectives.

Trump said last year that he would stop the war in Ukraine by pressuring both Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Russian President Vladimir Putin, apparently using the flow of U.S. weapons as leverage. “I would tell Zelensky, ‘No more. You got to make a deal,’” Trump said on Fox News, adding: “I would tell Putin, ‘If you don’t make a deal, we’re going to give him a lot. We’re going to give [Ukraine] more than they ever got if we have to.’” By straddling the belligerents, he thinks he can strong-arm them into a negotiated settlement he favors.

That idea has been received with indignation and apoplexy in the foreign-policy establishment. But it’s not so different from the Biden administration’s approach to Israel and Hamas, which — unlike Russia and Ukraine — are already negotiating under U.S. supervision as they fight. The Biden administration has helped Israel put pressure on Hamas with large-scale arms shipments, but it has also leaned heavily on Israel to cut a cease-fire deal with the Iran-backed group and, to send Israel a message, delayed the delivery of some weapons.

And, of course, a Harris administration might well be tougher on Israel than the current one, as people close to Harris have intimated. In an interview this year, she left the door open to what the interviewer called “consequences” for Israel if it went into Hamas’s Rafah stronghold. Trump might try to bring Ukraine to the negotiating table in a similar way.

He might well fail, just as the Biden-Harris administration has failed to extract a cease-fire in Gaza. In some wars, no negotiated settlement is available for a long time because the two sides’ objectives are so incompatible.

Trump the pragmatist probably sees Ukraine’s war as less winnable than Israel’s; at the debate, he mentioned Russia’s nuclear weapons and the war’s cost to the United States. Harris the liberal probably sees defeating Russia as an ideological imperative; she accused Trump of adoring “strongmen instead of caring about democracy.” Trump also probably aligns instinctively more with conservative, nationalistic Israel, while Harris’s coalition contains many voters outraged by the suffering of Palestinians.

Gone are the days when the United States had one hawkish and one dovish party. Instead, in Trump and Harris, we see partisan selectivity about where in the world to pressure anti-American forces, and where to seek compromise with them, based on increasingly polarized political sympathies.