Image Source: Screenshot from CSPAN.
Either Donald Trump or Kamala Harris will be the next commander-in-chief of the United States military forces. Article II, Section 2, Clause 1 of the Constitution says; The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States.” While Donald Trump and Kamala Harris debate and campaign about whether migrant hordes are eating pets and destroying the United States from within or the size of their rally crowds, President Biden and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer were discussing whether or not to send U.S. and British long-range missiles to Ukraine. President Putin has warned that if NATO countries provide Ukraine with weapons that could strike inside Russia, “then taking into account the change of nature of the conflict, we will take the appropriate decisions based on the threats that we will face.” The Biden/Starmer talks, and Putin’s threat are serious businesses of state, something that was missing from the debate and missing from the campaign.
The burning issues surrounding the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East cannot be ignored. Donald Trump says he will end the Russia/Ukraine conflict as soon as he wins the election. How? Isn’t that a viable question? Kamala Harris says she is for a ceasefire in the Middle East, Israel being able to defend itself and a Palestinian state. How is this going to happen? Isn’t that a viable question?
And China? To tariff or not to tariff is not the question. There is a serious build-up of Chinese forces outside Taiwan. Military cooperation with Asian countries to try to contain China is an actuality.
The trivialization of the debate and campaign should not be allowed to continue. The United States president is commander in chief of the largest and most powerful fighting force in history. At least Kamala Harris acknowledged that. But no one has questioned what to do about that force except respecting it and making sure it stays as lethal as it is now.
Neither Trump nor Harris seems to be concerned about the United States’s potential and continuing use of force. (I should quickly add that neither candidate seems concerned about multilateralism or the United Nations either.) This is not just a critique of the candidates; journalists have not pushed the candidates on these issues.
Presidential campaigns may be won or lost on domestic matters. Everyone knows “It’s the economy, stupid.” But is it realistic and responsible to ignore questions relating to the role of the president as commander in chief when the United States is significantly involved in Ukraine and the Middle East by supplying money and weapons to President Zelensky and Prime Minister Netanyahu?
This has nothing to do with Donald Trump’s personal relations with Vladimir Putin. Nor does it have anything to do with Kamala Harris’s owning a gun. This has to do with the future president of the United States as commander in chief who is ultimately responsible for 1.3 million active-duty military personnel as well as 3,708 nuclear warheads.
The current presidential campaign, as evidenced by the debate, continues to be superficial. Kamala Harris was right to chortle when Trump went off the rails about migrants eating pets. But that level, both the comment and the chortle, do not reflect the gravitas of being president of the United States.
The debate and current campaign are dangerously superficial. It is as if the candidates, and evidently the voters, don’t want to talk about or hear about foreign dangers. There is an obsession with invented domestic matters by Trump and a call for a more positive, joyful future by Harris.
But Putin, Netanyahu, Xi or Kim Jong Un are not going away. Trump calls Harris a communist and her father a Marxist. All Cold War rhetoric. Today’s geopolitical realities are not the 1950s. They are much more complex. And they deserve serious discussion and positions.
As Matthew Stevenson rightly reminded Counterpunch readers last week; “When Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas debated the slavery question in 1858, when both were running for the U.S. Senate in Illinois, they met on seven occasions and spoke on average for about four-to-five hours at each meeting (there was a break for dinner).” That was serious talk and serious business just before the outbreak of the Civil War. The debates were printed as a book in 1860 and used as a campaign document when Lincoln and Douglas competed for the presidency in 1860.
How far have we come from that? Trump claims “I have nothing to do” with it, “I haven’t read it. I don’t want to read it,” concerning Project 2025, a 922-page government policy proposal put out by the Heritage Foundation, a think tank that served as one of the largest sources of staffers for the first Trump administration and was influential in the Reagan and Bush administrations.
What does Trump read? What does Harris read?
This is not the time for Amateur Hour. As an example of horrendous presidential decisions: According to the Costs of War project at Brown University, the Bush administration’s decision to oust Saddam Hussein wound up costing $2.9 trillion. About 500,000 Iraqis and Syrians were killed, almost eight thousand American troops and contractors were also killed, and ISIS was born.
Donald Trump or Kamala Harris will be the next commander in chief of the United States armed forces. That role entails global military decisions. Let’s get serious. If Michelle Obama asks us to go high when they go low, the bar has been set so low by both candidates that we have trouble imagining either candidate going high enough to be responsibly presidential.
