An Orwellian disconnect haunts the 2024 Democratic National Convention. In the isolation of the Chicago convention hall, shielded from the outside world behind thousands of armed police, few of the delegates seem to realize that their country is on the brink of direct involvement in major wars with Russia and Iran, either of which could escalate into World War III.
Inside the hall, the mass slaughter in the Middle East and Ukraine are treated only as troublesome issues, which “the greatest military in the history of the world” can surely deal with. Delegates who unfurled a banner that read “Stop Arming Israel” during President Joe Biden’s speech on Monday night were quickly accosted by DNC officials, who instructed other delegates to use “We [heart] Joe” signs to hide the banner from view.
In the real world, the most explosive flashpoint right now is Gaza, where U.S. weapons and Israeli troops have slaughtered more than 40,000 Palestinians, mostly children and families, at the bidding of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. And yet, in July, Democrats and Republicans leaped to their feet in twenty-three separate standing ovations to applaud Netanyahu’s warmongering speech to a joint session of Congress.
In the week before the DNC started, the Biden Administration announced its approval for the sale of $20 billion in weapons to Israel, which would lock the United States into a relationship with the Israeli military for years to come.
Joeff Davis
A woman carries a Palestinian flag at a rally at Union Park before the March on the DNC in Chicago, August 19, 2024.
Netanyahu’s determination to keep killing without restraint in Gaza—along with Biden and Congress’s willingness to keep supplying him with weapons to do so— always risked exploding into a wider war, but the crisis has reached a new climax. Since Israel’s original plan to expel the Palestinians from Gaza into Egypt failed and Hamas has not surrendered, it now appears to be trying to draw the United States into a war with Iran to weaken Israel’s enemies and restore the illusion of military superiority that it has squandered in Gaza.
To achieve its apparent goal of triggering a wider war, Israel assassinated Fuad Shukr, a Hezbollah commander, in Beirut, and Hamas’s political leader and chief ceasefire negotiator, Ismail Haniyeh, in Tehran. Iran has vowed to respond militarily to the assassinations, but its leaders are in a difficult position. They do not want a war with Israel and the United States, and they have acted with restraint throughout the massacre in Gaza. Failing to respond strongly to these assassinations, however, would encourage Israel to conduct further attacks on Iran and its allies.
This is an incredibly dangerous moment. A ceasefire in Gaza would resolve the crisis. The United States has dispatched CIA Director William Burns, the most experienced and senior diplomat in Biden’s cabinet, to the Middle East for renewed talks for a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, and Iran is waiting to see the result of the negotiations before responding to the assassinations.
Burns is working with Qatari and Egyptian officials to come up with a revised ceasefire proposal that Israel and Hamas will both agree to. But Israel has repeatedly rejected every proposal that calls for more than a temporary pause in its assault on Gaza, while Hamas will only agree to a real, permanent ceasefire.
The United States has always had the option of halting weapons shipments to Israel to force it to agree to a permanent ceasefire. But it has refused to use that leverage, except for the suspension of a single shipment of 2,000-pound bombs in May, after it had already sent Israel 14,000 of those horrific weapons, which Israel’s military uses to systematically smash children and families into unidentifiable pieces of flesh and bone.
Joeff Davis
Protesters hold signs in support of Palestine and against U.S. imperialism at the March on the DNC in Chicago, August 19, 2024.
Meanwhile, the war with Russia has also taken a new and dangerous turn, with Ukraine invading Russia’s Kursk region. Some analysts believe this is only a diversion before an even riskier Ukrainian assault on the Russian-held Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant. Ukraine’s leaders see Russia advancing steadily in Eastern Ukraine, and they are increasingly ready to take any risk to improve their negotiating position.
But Ukraine’s recent incursion into Russia, while applauded by much of the West, has actually made negotiations less likely. In fact, talks between Russia and Ukraine on energy issues were supposed to start in the coming weeks. The idea was that each side would agree not to target the other’s energy infrastructure, with the hope that this could lead to more comprehensive talks. But after Ukraine’s invasion of Kursk, the Russians pulled out of what would have been the first direct negotiations since the early weeks of the Russian invasion.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy could also take a page from Netanyahu’s playbook and try to draw U.S. and NATO forces into the war with Russia—a war that Biden promised to avoid in 2022 but continues to creep toward with ever escalating military assistance.
A 2023 U.S. Army War College study found that even a non-nuclear war with Russia could result in as many U.S. casualties every two weeks as the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq did in two decades, and it concluded that such a war would require a return to conscription in the United States.
While Gaza and Eastern Ukraine burn in firestorms of American and Russian bombs and missiles, and the war in Sudan rages on unchecked, the whole planet is rocketing toward catastrophic temperature increases, ecosystem breakdowns, and mass extinctions. But the delegates in Chicago are in la-la land about U.S. responsibility for that crisis, too.
Despite signing on to multiple climate agreements, Americans’ per capita CO2 emissions are still double those of our Chinese, British, and European neighbors, while U.S. oil and gas production has soared to all-time record highs.
The combined dangers of nuclear war and climate catastrophe have pushed the hands of the Doomsday Clock all the way to ninety seconds to midnight. But the leaders of the Republican and Democratic parties are in the pockets of the fossil fuel industry and the military-industrial complex. Behind the election year focus on what the two parties disagree about, these policies they both agree on are the most dangerous of all.
The people inside the convention hall should shake themselves out of their complacency and start listening to the thousands of people marching in Chicago’s streets. Therein lies the real hope, maybe the only hope, for America’s future.