Both the State of the World and the State of the Union, that is of the United States, are cause for alarm.
Two days after the end of last week’s NATO Summit in Washington, former president Donald Trump survived, miraculously and I would say luckily, an assassination attempt made during a campaign rally on 13 July in Butler, a small town in Pennsylvania.
The former president wrote on social media that he “was shot with a bullet that pierced the upper part of my right ear.”
The shooter, 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks, was shot dead by the Secret Service seconds after he had fired several shots. The FBI confirmed in a press conference later that the shots were an “assassination attempt” against Trump.
US President Joe Biden then spoke with his predecessor and cut short his weekend stay in Delaware to return to Washington after he wrote on social media that there is “no place in America for this sort of violence.”
The failed attempt on the life of Trump took place days before the Republican National Convention from 15 to 19 July in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to nominate the Republican candidate in the presidential elections on 5 November. Trump has already won the necessary votes from the delegates to be the official Republican Party candidate.
The assassination attempt took place against the background of a highly polarised political scene in the US and in the context of a perilous confrontation worldwide that the Washington NATO Summit exacerbated. Several Trump supporters accused him of being partially responsible for the assassination attempt, referring to remarks he reportedly made at a donors’ gathering last week, where he said that “we’re done talking about the debate [referring to the Atlanta TV debate with Biden on 27 June]. It is time to put Trump in the bullseye.”
Ohio Senator J D Vance, one of the contenders to be Trump’s running mate in the elections, wrote on X that “the central premise of the Biden campaign is that… Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.”
Meanwhile, as expected the Biden administration used the NATO Summit that celebrated the 75th anniversary of the Atlantic Alliance to rally its member countries and its Indo-Pacific partners against what it called “authoritarian regimes” bent on challenging the “rules-based international order,” according to senior US and European officials.
So, it was no surprise that Ukraine was the springboard – also the case for the last ten years since the unrest in Kyiv’s Maidan Square – to contain Russia in the name of democracy and in defence of the independence and territorial integrity of Ukraine.
The presence of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at the summit added to the sense of drama and the urgency of the moment from the standpoint of US and NATO security interests. Zelensky called for the lifting of all “limitations” on the use of long-range missiles provided by NATO to Ukraine to allow the Ukrainian army to aim at targets deep inside Russia.
On the margins of the Washington summit, official announcements were made to provide Ukraine with a multitude of weapons systems, including operational F-16 fighter jets, Patriot air-defence systems, air-defence interceptors, artillery and HIMARS (High Mobility Artillery Rocket System) ammunition.
In a meeting with the leaders of Japan, South Korea, New Zealand, and the deputy prime minister of Australia, Biden discussed the “increasing connectivity” between European and Atlantic and Indo-Pacific security, reaffirming that challenges in one region affect those in the other. In other words, there is now a confrontation with Russia and China extending from Europe to the Pacific through the Indian Ocean.
Against the background of this brinkmanship, the increasing political polarisation in the US is not reassuring in terms of US leadership in international politics and whether the next US administration, regardless of who the winner next November will be, will be in a position to defend international peace and security in a divided world.
To highlight the truly alarming political situation in the US after this week’s assassination attempt, staff writer Benjamin Wallace-Wells wrote in a special edition of the New Yorker magazine that the image of the “bloodied former president, his fist raised, flanked by an American flag, is already an indelible portrait of an era of political crisis and conflict.”
This image, circulated after the assassination attempt, “adds a sense of foreboding,” Wallace-Wells said. “The figures in these images [pictures taken by Evan Vucci of the Associated Press], and anyone who views them, are all waiting, with trepidation, for what comes next.”
They are waiting for what comes next not only in the US, but also in the world as a whole, over the next four years at least. I share this sense of foreboding for the State of the Union and the State of the World, given today’s major concerns related to international peace and security.
The writer is former assistant foreign minister.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 18 July, 2024 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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