The World Doesn't Get a Vote

Trump is racing toward November 3, Putin can afford to wait, and people from Kyiv to Paris are living with the consequences of decisions made in our name.

Good morning! “He’s desperate for that,” Jim Townsend said. “He’s willing to do anything.”

Permit me a brief, entirely immodest moment.

Yesterday, I followed a trail of Russian diesel, American sanctions, Moscow newspaper commentary, and Donald Trump’s increasingly urgent political calendar to a conclusion that required no secret dossier, anonymous intelligence official, or elaborate conspiracy theory. Trump needs a victory before November 3. Vladimir Putin knows the American president is operating on a deadline that he doesn’t share. And the man who calls himself the world’s greatest negotiator is giving Moscow concessions before securing much of anything in return.

Then along came Jim Townsend, a former U.S. deputy assistant secretary of defense for Europe and NATO, who reached essentially the same conclusion. (I suspect it took him considerably less time than it took me to work up the nerve to hit Publish.)

Townsend approached the problem through decades of experience with military strategy, NATO, and international negotiations. I came at it through Trump’s long history of pursuing Russian business, the economics of his diesel arrangement, Moscow’s remarkably candid commentary, and the political incentives created by a deeply unpopular war with Iran.

The administration, helpfully, has confirmed the bargaining strategy, if not the electoral motive. Trump spent Sunday accusing Zelenskyy of striking Russian refineries “knowing that these attacks are seriously hurting the world diesel markets, including those in the United States.” According to Reuters, his envoys told Ukrainian officials the diesel deal was intended to help soften Moscow and bring Putin back to negotiations. Nobody has to guess what Washington is offering or why it says it’s offering it. They keep saying it out loud.

Putin has no November 3 election to worry about. Trump’s party does, and in negotiations, the side in a hurry tends to pay a premium. To see what a president racing his own political clock looks like, consider what he promised Kansas on Monday night.

Picking the three most absurd moments from Trump’s nearly hundred-minute performance in Kansas was no easy task. The competition was fierce. His heroic identification of a giraffe on a cognitive test, his generous offer to let Canada keep its national anthem if it became our 51st state, and his continuing concern that migrants in France don’t appreciate the country’s architecture all deserved consideration. But I settled on three that were more than ridiculous. Each came with a price tag, a political condition, or a threat.

First came the “electoral bribe.” Trump promised every adult American $5,000 if Republicans retained both chambers of Congress. If Democrats won, he warned, the country would plunge into a 1929-style depression.

Trump assured the crowd that it was affordable because his administration had secured $22.2 trillion in investment commitments, once again confusing private investment announcements with actual money available for congressional appropriation.

Then came $8 billion in emergency assistance for farmers struggling with soaring diesel costs. This one is a real program. The Agriculture Department has announced its Harvest Fuel Relief initiative, although payment rates won’t be announced until November. Trump credited Senator Roger Marshall with securing the money and reminded the crowd that he’d already provided farmers another $12 billion in assistance late last year.

It’s a peculiar golden age that requires $20 billion in extraordinary farm assistance to get through the year. The farmers’ financial troubles are real, of course. Diesel prices have soared, production costs are climbing, and Trump’s war with Iran has made an already difficult agricultural economy considerably more expensive. But the president who keeps announcing the greatest economic prosperity in human history is now handing out billions to cushion Americans from its consequences.

He then dispensed with even the pretense that federal policy should be independent of electoral outcomes.

Year-round E15 ethanol sales matter enormously to Kansas corn growers, and Trump promised to make them permanent with Roger Marshall in the Senate. “But if Adam Hamilton is in, I’m not doing it. That’s it. I’m only doing it for him.”

Earlier, Trump had promised to help “a certain air company” he had always considered Canadian, because Marshall had personally called him. He meant Bombardier, whose U.S. headquarters and defense operations are in Wichita. This was the same company Trump threatened with a sales ban just last month. Apparently, federal favors are now being advertised as rewards for electing the right people, and the president is announcing the terms from a campaign stage.

But the threats weren’t confined to Kansas. Earlier in the evening, amid warnings about migrants, Trump turned to America’s European allies. If Europe doesn’t “find their way,” he said, “we will have no choice but to leave.” In April, his complaint against NATO was that allies wouldn’t join his war with Iran. Now he’s raising the possibility of walking away from Europe while lecturing its governments about immigration. An alliance founded in 1949 to deter armed aggression is being discussed as though its future depends on who Trump thinks belongs in Paris.

On Monday, while Trump was promising cash and political favors in Kansas, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was briefing a bipartisan group of American lawmakers about what was happening on the battlefield. His forces, he said, were recapturing more territory than Russia was gaining, despite increasingly ferocious attacks. But Ukraine’s ability to defend its cities was being compromised by decisions in Washington that nobody seemed willing to explain.

Drones have become the backbone of Ukraine’s military operations, both for combat and frontline logistics. Yet Starlink and its military counterpart, Starshield, were still losing connectivity when drones exceeded 100 miles per hour, interfering with Ukraine’s ability to intercept the fast-moving Iranian-designed Shaheds Russia launches by the hundreds. Reuters reported that the order to restrict Starshield originated inside the White House, although officials did not identify who issued it, and the administration has disputed responsibility.

More alarming, Zelenskyy said Ukraine had failed to receive American early warnings before three recent Russian missile attacks. The latest involved 16 ballistic missiles, six cruise missiles, and numerous drones. Meanwhile, Patriot interceptors already purchased by European allies remained stalled awaiting American approval. According to Zelenskyy, one shipment needed only Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s signature.

Zelenskyy’s conclusion was pointed, if carefully qualified: “All of this suggests that some political decision has been made to slow down support for us.” Washington denies deliberately suspending intelligence sharing, and the reasons for the missed warnings remain disputed. Then Zelenskyy described an offer that made Trump’s accusations about Ukrainian intransigence considerably harder to sustain.

Ukraine, he explained, had already briefly suspended strikes on Russian oil facilities in pursuit of a reciprocal energy ceasefire. Russia continued attacking Ukrainian electricity infrastructure anyway. Now Zelenskyy was offering Washington the very thing Trump blamed him for withholding: a thirty-day halt to the Ukrainian refinery strikes that Trump says are rattling diesel markets. In return, he asked for Patriot interceptors to protect Ukrainian cities during those same thirty days. Washington has not agreed. Across the negotiating table, Putin has received a diesel deal and relief from newly authorized sanctions, with no publicly verified concession in return.

If this is pressure for peace, the publicly visible pressure is falling on the country being invaded.

While Zelenskyy was trying to understand what Washington was doing, America’s European allies were asking a much larger question: whether the United States could still be relied upon to uphold the security arrangements it had spent eight decades helping to build.

Monday’s threat to leave Europe did not land in a vacuum. European officials have spent months watching Washington use its leverage against allies rather than adversaries, and some are now saying out loud what used to be said only in private.

Tobias Ellwood, a former Conservative defence minister and no one’s idea of a peacenik, told British television this week that America is no longer Britain’s closest ally, calling that comfortable assumption a romantic slogan now out of date. He pointed to the Starlink restrictions as a warning of what Washington could do to its partners. When the host compared a possible Trump–Putin–Xi summit to Yalta, Ellwood challenged the analogy. At Yalta, the Allies were planning for the aftermath of Nazi Germany’s anticipated defeat. Ukraine, by contrast, is a democracy still fighting to defend itself. The host summed up the shift with a neat inversion of the old Western rule: “nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine” has become everything about Ukraine without Ukraine.

The venue and dates are available, even if the meeting isn’t yet on the calendar. Putin has floated a three-way meeting with Trump and Xi during the APEC summit in Shenzhen on November 18 and 19, two weeks after the midterms. The Kremlin acknowledges discussing the possibility but says no agreement or agenda exists. Townsend identified another practical problem for Europe: its dependence on American satellite-based missile warnings. The Starshield restrictions are a separate matter, but together they raise an uncomfortable question about technologies Washington can control and Europe cannot readily replace. Building European alternatives would take years and considerable money. It all comes back to trust.

The economic cost is already in the streets. On October 17, more than half a million people marched across France, according to the Interior Ministry. Trade unions and a revived yellow vest movement, the grassroots revolt born in 2018 over a diesel tax, protested a cost-of-living crisis that Euronews ties directly to fuel prices driven up by the US-Israeli war on Iran and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly a fifth of the world’s oil normally passes. High school students, who had spent four weeks blockading crumbling, understaffed schools, held their own march the same afternoon. Within hours the two protests merged into one mass demonstration at Place de la République. One protester’s placard read: “We inherit the crap of our leaders, and it trickles down onto our children.”

This is the France Trump described in Kansas as a once-great nation being “conquered” and “burned to the ground by migrants, jihadists, and communists.” The French have a different diagnosis. Even Marine Le Pen, Europe’s best-known anti-immigration politician, blamed the violence on the far left and described the marches as a defense of purchasing power. She didn’t mention migrants. When the leader of the National Rally won’t make Trump’s argument for him, the argument is in trouble.

So the same war produces the same diesel shock on both sides of the Atlantic, and two very different responses. Kansas gets $8 billion, a fuel deal with the Kremlin, and the promise of $5,000 checks. France gets a lecture about architecture.

Europe has no vote on November 3, and neither does Ukraine. The only people who can rein in this administration are American, which brings the responsibility back to where it belongs.

There’s a temptation, reading all this, to wait for someone else to fix it. Congress could, and most definitely should. The Graham sanctions bill passed with overwhelming bipartisan support and was waived on deadline. Ellwood says Republican senators he met in Warsaw privately agree that Trump is bad for America, but won’t say so publicly because their party controls the money they need to keep their seats. Townsend put the problem plainly: Republicans quietly telling Zelenskyy “we stand with you” doesn’t give him Patriot missiles. A silent revolt does nothing.

Our allies can’t fix it either. Europe can buy interceptors and build its own satellites, but it can’t vote in an American election or make an American president keep his word. Which leaves the people who can.

France has something to teach here, though maybe not the lesson the news footage suggests. Some of the clearest examples of government concessions came from the pressure applied during the working week. In September, Mediterranean fishermen blockaded ports and fuel facilities. After six hours of negotiations on September 17, the government promised additional fuel assistance tied to rising prices and interest-free loans to help fishermen awaiting overdue payments. The fishermen agreed to lift their blockades, although negotiations continued over other demands. Earlier that week, the government had also extended emergency fuel subsidies for farmers, fishermen, and construction workers through December. High school students were disrupting classes across France. On October 6, their union reported that more than half the country’s high schools were blockaded or closed. The government subsequently promised 3,000 additional substitute teachers. Marches show how many people agree. Sustained noncooperation can turn numbers into leverage.

The research supports what the fishermen already knew. Erica Chenoweth’s work on civil resistance found that nonviolent campaigns succeed more often than violent ones, and that sustained mass noncooperation, meaning strikes, boycotts, and work stoppages, is what turns numbers into leverage. France also shows the other side. The fires, looting, and town-hall break-ins gave the government its “urban violence” framing, brought curfews, and handed Le Pen an opening. The fishermen won without throwing anything.

The American version will look different. Federal labor law sharply restricts secondary boycotts, many political work stoppages lack legal protection, and numerous public employees cannot legally strike at all. But this country has its own tradition of nonviolent disruption. A bus boycott in Montgomery lasted more than a year. Students sat at lunch counters until the counters changed. Consumers have shut down business models by refusing to pay for them. None of it happened on a Saturday afternoon and then went home.

The first deadline is November 3. Voting is the floor, not the ceiling. Whatever happens at the ballot box, decisions made in Washington will continue reaching into homes and communities far beyond our borders. Ukrainian families will still need protection from Russian missiles. French workers will still be struggling with fuel prices. Our allies will still be wondering whether American commitments mean anything.

None of those people gets a vote in our elections. We do. But a ballot cast on November 3 is a single act, and this administration has shown it can absorb single acts. What it can’t absorb is sustained, peaceful, inconvenient pressure: the boycott that doesn’t end, the work that doesn’t get done, the business that can’t proceed as usual. The fishermen of Sète understood that. So did the people of Montgomery.

That is an extraordinary privilege, and it carries an extraordinary responsibility. The world experiences American power not as a campaign speech or a presidential boast, but as the consequences of decisions made in our name. Those decisions can save lives, or put lives at risk. The people living with the consequences are depending, in part, on Americans to hold their government accountable.

We have an opportunity to remind the world that America is more than whoever happens to occupy the White House. That our commitment to democracy, human dignity, and the rule of law is more than a collection of patriotic slogans. That we are capable of recognizing the suffering our government causes, caring about people we will never meet, and doing the difficult, sustained work of demanding something better.

Our allies don’t need another speech about American greatness. They need a reason to believe in the American people.