Commentary: As Americans wait for their election, the world waits for it too

This week, as many Americans fret over what our country will look like after the upcoming national election, much of the world is fretting with us. The United States may not be the unipolar power that it was following the Cold War, but it remains the most influential and consequential country on Earth. How our election turns out will affect people well beyond our borders for many years to come.

Just the fact that we are in the election cycle has already affected how we act in the world, and how others act as well.

It’s clear that the election is garbling our positions on Ukraine and the Middle East. A Donald Trump win is widely expected to end U.S. support to Kyiv, so Ukraine’s government is doing all it can to shore up its position in the meantime. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy even did a swing-state road show to rally American support. Meanwhile, Russian President Vladimir Putin is biding his time on that same expectation.

In the Middle East, the stalemate around the U.S. elections has given Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu breathing room to continue his escalation in Gaza and Lebanon, absent concern of a heavy hand from his American friends who don’t want to alienate any voters ahead of such a close contest. Israel continues to use our arms and ammunition to pummel civilians and civilian areas, hospitals and refugee camps and aggressively obstruct the provision of lifesaving humanitarian assistance. Various U.S. agencies and offices have expressed deep concern, but Netanyahu knows that the U.S. government will take no meaningful action to pressure him now, so his no-holds-barred approach continues. Like Putin, Netanyahu is hoping that the next U.S. president will be more friendly to those with less democratic tendencies.

But this election is affecting our engagement almost everywhere we have interests. In Sudan, millions of civilians are bearing the brunt of our political distraction. The war has unleashed the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, but America has failed to play the same leadership role it did in resolving the country’s devastating conflicts in the past. Our close partner, the United Arab Emirates, has fueled this conflict as the leading supporter and supplier of the Rapid Support Forces, the paramilitary group committing the bulk of atrocities and accused of genocide — a fact we have simply tolerated.

The relative absence of America in addressing this conflict is less about political sensibilities than political bandwidth, so a conflict that has put 26 million people at risk of famine simply isn’t rising to the level of urgency that it should.

Electoral stasis isn’t new. U.S. administrations understandably avoid risk-taking during an election period. When I was in the government, conventional wisdom was that any big foreign policy initiatives or changes needed to start in the first two years of an administration, or political distractions would soon obstruct progress. No one wants to inadvertently feed their opponent’s campaign with an October debacle overseas. This means that inertia and inaction tend to increase the closer an election gets.

As a U.S. diplomat posted to Somalia six months before the 2016 election, I recall the frustration we felt when Washington responded to nearly every major diplomatic and administrative proposal we wanted to pursue with “let’s just get past the election.” That election didn’t go as expected, so most of the well-reasoned plans for expanding our diplomacy never materialized.

But even that year, I felt that America’s leadership role could withstand domestic politics and rise above it, and that we maintained the ability to respond to true global emergencies.

This year, we seem wholly incapable of doing so. This isn’t just harming people far away, but it’s also hurting our own interests. Our inability to act meaningfully on the global stage today is costing lives, potentially tens to hundreds of thousands, and allowing instability to fester from Europe to Africa to the Middle East.

Though the United States is no longer a hegemon, we still retain the greatest capacity of any country to promote peace, reduce conflict and assist those in need, not merely on our own resources but also in our ability to draw together coalitions to act.

It’s evident in the brutal wars raging today that we aren’t playing that role right now. It is easy to blame the continuation of these conflicts on the stalemate at the United Nations Security Council and the reduction of America’s influence in a multipolar world. But we still have the capacity and responsibility to make a difference.

As an American with a phone and email address currently under assault by every imaginable political action committee, I’m ready for this election to be behind us. For our sake and that of the millions of people suffering from conflict around the world, I hope dearly that we have an administration ready to play a positive leadership role in the world on the other side of it.

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Elizabeth Shackelford is senior policy director at Dartmouth College’s Dickey Center for International Understanding and a foreign affairs columnist for the Chicago Tribune. She was previously a U.S. diplomat and is the author of “The Dissent Channel: American Diplomacy in a Dishonest Age.”

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