Democrats plot major escalation of Ukraine war after midterm election

BY Andre Damon

The midterm elections in the United States, now less than three weeks away, are expected to deliver a repudiation of US President Donald Trump and his policies of war, dictatorship and social austerity. Trump’s approval rating is at a record low.

While appealing to working-class anger over the cost of living and social inequality, the Democrats are making clear that their central priority is a massive and catastrophic escalation of the war against Russia. The Democrats agree with Trump’s assault on social programs and the working class. Their conflict with Trump turns above all on what they claim is his insufficiently aggressive and consistent pursuit of the global interests of American imperialism.

Representative Jim Himes of Connecticut, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, speaking for the party’s leadership at the Warsaw Security Forum on October 13, declared that a Democratic Congress “means that aid packages [to Ukraine] move not in nine months, but in nine days or nine weeks.” “If Democrats gain control on Capitol Hill, renewed Ukraine aid will be a priority,” the trade publication Breaking Defense wrote, reporting his remarks.

The Democratic Party and the media are preparing for this escalation by whipping up war hysteria among the affluent upper-middle class and denouncing Trump as too soft on Russia.

The Democratic agitation against Trump centers on his temporary “energy ceasefire” with Russian President Vladimir Putin, a political expedient to allow the sale of Russian diesel fuel. The Democrats denounced the deal within hours, and on October 13 a bipartisan group of 12 senators demanded that Trump rescind it as “a gift to our adversary.”

The New York Times, which functions as a house organ of the Democratic Party, has led the campaign. In the first half of October alone it published at least 20 reports, analyses and columns built around supposed Russian threats to Europe, Ukrainian battlefield successes and the danger of easing pressure on Moscow.

Unproven allegations are presented as established fact. On October 2, the newspaper featured a purported intercepted Russian plan to destroy Ukraine’s energy grid, while conceding that it could not authenticate the document. On October 9, Steven Erlanger treated a Russian “shadow war” of sabotage in Europe as settled, acknowledged that many of the incidents are difficult to attribute to Moscow, and then aired proposals for cyberattacks on Russian infrastructure.

Then, on October 15, the Times published two columns that sum up the campaign. Under the headline “Trump’s Democracy-for-Diesel Deal Shames Us All,” Thomas Friedman wrote, “Donald Trump, meet Neville Chamberlain,” comparing him to the British prime minister who appeased Hitler at Munich in 1938. David French wrote that Trump “is throwing Vladimir Putin a lifeline.”

Friedman writes that Trump will enter history among the leaders who “sold out their country’s democratic values to appease a dictator.” Friedman is the last man on earth entitled to lecture anyone about democratic values. During NATO’s bombing of Serbia in 1999 he wrote, “Every week you ravage Kosovo is another decade we will set your country back by pulverizing you. You want 1950? We can do 1950. You want 1389? We can do 1389 too.”

In a manifesto published the same year he declared that “the hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist—McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the builder of the F-15.” 

The US-NATO war in Ukraine that Friedman champions is motivated by similar considerations. American imperialism seeks complete domination of Russia and a regime in Moscow that will give American capital unrestricted access to the country’s vast resources.

The dispute over diesel reveals the class content of the policies of both factions. Fuel prices have been driven up by Trump’s own war against Iran, and his deal with Putin is an electoral stunt that will do little to bring them down. Friedman denounces this by writing that Trump is “desperate to lower diesel prices, which are hurting Republicans in the midterms.” The Times and the Democrats demand instead tighter sanctions that would push fuel prices higher still, with devastating consequences for the working class.

In his column, French states the war aims even more bluntly. He celebrates Ukraine’s success at “striking deep into the Russian heartland” and quotes former CIA Director David Petraeus boasting that Ukraine is “essentially starving Crimea of fuel.” The column drops any pretense that the goal is anything short of the military defeat of Russia.

French also concedes what the Times has spent years denying. Ukraine, he writes, depends “on American intelligence and on American weapons it’s able to purchase with European funds.” The United States and NATO are waging the war, with Ukraine as their instrument.

The hysteria in the press expresses the increasingly desperate situation confronting American imperialism. “Remove that support, and Russia has a chance to win the war,” French writes. The ruling class fears that the front it has built in Ukraine could collapse.

French’s own account of the fighting is an indictment of the war into which US and European imperialism have dragged the populations of Ukraine and Russia. He describes “a bloody stalemate more like the drone war version of World War I’s Battle of Verdun, where the lines barely move and both sides bleed for every inch of ground they take.” He offers the comparison as a case for continuing the slaughter.

French writes that Russia is avoiding “a direct conflict with NATO that Russia would almost certainly lose.” In a column of more than 2,000 words, he never mentions that Russia is the world’s largest nuclear weapons power. Last month, Russia’s embassy in Ireland said Russia “would be ready to use all its arsenal, including nuclear weapons, to defend its territory if NATO countries try to isolate the Kaliningrad region from the rest of the country.”

Since then, the NATO powers have expanded their troop deployments on Russia’s borders. NATO’s supreme allied commander in Europe, US Air Force General Alexus Grynkewich, declared at the Warsaw Security Forum on October 12, in a veiled threat against Russia, that in the event of war the alliance would target “not just the attacking force itself, but anything and everything that supports, sustains, or controls that force.”

Both columns fraudulently present the Ukrainian regime as a democracy, Ukraine is, in fact, governed under martial law. In August a Ukrainian court sentenced Bogdan Syrotiuk, a 27-year-old socialist, to 15 years in prison for high treason, convicting him of opposing the war and calling on Ukrainian and Russian workers to unite against it.

The media campaign is aimed at the upper-middle class, the social base of the Democratic Party. Its purpose is to divert mass opposition to Trump behind the pro-war agenda of the Democrats, so that the political establishment can claim every vote cast against the Republicans is an endorsement of a wider war. The hostility of millions of workers and young people to Trump’s wars and his drive to dictatorship cannot find expression through a party preparing to escalate the war against Russia.

The cost of the escalation of war being prepared after the election will fall on the working class. With the federal debt soaring, every dollar for war will come from Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security and public education.

The fight against war, austerity and attacks on democratic rights cannot be waged through either party of American imperialism. It requires the independent mobilization of the working class, armed with a socialist program.

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/10/16/kthk-o16.html

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Washington’s war consensus survives the midterms

West Asia has little reason to stake its security on a change of hands in Congress.

BY José Niño

Washington's political class has already begun preparing for a Democratic takeover of the House. Erin Covey of the Cook Political Report wrote on September 25 that Democrats will most likely gain five to 15 seats, leaving them with 220 to 230 members next year. Decision Desk HQ's forecast, updated on 13 October, gives Democrats a 77 percent chance of winning the House and a 56 percent chance of flipping the Senate.

A Democratic majority would almost certainly hand the gavel to Hakeem Jeffries. Nothing guarantees it, since the new House must elect its speaker by a majority of members voting for a named candidate. Axios reported in July that a growing set of progressive candidates refuse to commit to him, and one told the outlet, “I hope to have an alternative to Jeffries to vote for.” At the time, no challenger had organized against the Brooklyn Democrat, and he remains the presumptive speaker.

Jeffries and the limits of dissent

Voters who expect Speaker Jeffries to end the Iran war should lower their hopes. Jeffries has attacked the conflict relentlessly, giving voters ample reason to expect opposition from a Democratic House. In a June 24 statement, he declared, “After repeatedly promising to end foreign wars, [US President] Donald Trump and [Secretary of War] Pete Hegseth plunged America into Operation Epic Failure with no objective, strategy or support.”

He has backed efforts to force Iran war powers votes this year and called for an end to the conflict. Jeffries’ objection, however, leaves Washington’s broader policy toward Iran largely intact. He insists that Congress, not the president, holds the power to start offensive wars, while branding Iran a state sponsor of terrorism that must never obtain a nuclear weapon. 

He supported the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) and voted against legislation restricting sanctions relief, yet he voted for military aid to Israel after Iran's 2024 attacks and this year voted to reaffirm Iran as the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism. In March 2023, he joined 148 fellow Democrats and 171 Republicans to defeat a resolution withdrawing American troops from Syria by 103 to 321.

Even a unified Democratic caucus faces serious obstacles to stopping Trump. On 3 June, the House passed a War Powers resolution 215 to 208, with four Republicans joining every Democrat. The Senate also approved the June measure on 23 June, 50 to 48. 

On 23 July, after Trump restarted the war following collapsed peace talks, the House approved another measure, 214 to 208, while the Senate killed Senator Chris Van Hollen’s measure to restrict US military involvement in the conflict, by 47 to 49, with John Fetterman as the lone Democrat voting no. 

Trump mocked the June vote online, writing, “Yesterday, in a meaningless vote, the House voted, 4 bad Republicans and all of the Dumocrats, to limit my War Powers, right in the middle of my final negotiations to end the War with the Islamic Republic of Iran.”

He has every reason for confidence. Binding legislation to halt the war or cut its funding would face a presidential veto. Overriding it requires two-thirds of those voting in each chamber, and neither of the war powers resolutions Trump vetoed during his first term secured an override, as PolitiFact recounts. With all 435 House members voting, 230 Democrats would still sit 60 votes short of the required 290.

The veto shield

Trump’s first term shows how the veto has protected his warmaking in West Asia. Of the 10 vetoes he issued from 2017 to 2021, five blocked congressional efforts to curb military involvement or arms sales in the region. 

He rejected S.J.Res.7, the Yemen War Powers resolution, on 16 April 2019, calling it “an unnecessary, dangerous attempt to weaken my constitutional authorities,” and the Senate override failed 53 to 45. 

On 24 July 2019, he vetoed S.J.Res.36, 37, and 38, which would have blocked arms transfers to Saudi Arabia and the UAE, warning that they would “weaken America's global competitiveness and damage the important relationships we share with our allies and partners.”

Override attempts collapsed 45 to 40, 45 to 39, and 46 to 41. On 6 May 2020, he vetoed S.J.Res.68, Senator Tim Kaine’s (D–VA) Iran War Powers resolution passed after Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani's assassination, insisting in his veto message that “This joint resolution is unnecessary because it rests upon a faulty premise.” That override failed 49 to 44.

Republican dissent never reached the numbers needed to overcome those vetoes. Just seven GOP senators backed final passage of the Yemen measures in December 2018and March 2019, with Mike Lee, Rand Paul, Todd Young, Susan Collins, and Jerry Moran forming the core. 

In the House, 16 Republicans including Thomas Massie, Jim Jordan, and Matt Gaetz backed the April 2019 resolution, but only four Republicans supported the arms sale blocks that July. Lawfare's Scott Anderson observed that half the Republicans who voted to advance the measure in November 2018 “ultimately opposed the joint resolution itself.”

Democrats supplied defectors too, with five Democrats in June 2017, including Joe Manchin and Mark Warner, helping preserve a $510 million munitions sale to Riyadh, while 10 Democrats voted in March 2018 to table the first Yemen resolution.

The party’s hawkish wing endures in the Senate, where John Fetterman, Jacky Rosen, and Chris Coons champion confrontation with Iran and support for Israel, while House Democrats such as Jared Moskowitz, Brad Schneider, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Greg Landsman, and newly elevated Foreign Affairs member Wesley Bell anchor the party's Israel hawks. 

On 29 September, Senate Republicans and Fetterman blocked advancement of Van Hollen’s resolution seeking a State Department report on the killings of nine Americans in the occupied West Bank, 47 to 51, while Rand Paul crossed over in favor.

The escalation Biden kept

This bipartisan consensus explains why Joe Biden failed to reverse Trump’s campaign against Iran. Trump abandoned the JCPOA on 8 May 2018, and launched a maximum pressure campaign that the White House described as “intended to bring Iran's oil exports to zero, denying the regime its principal source of revenue.”

His administration imposed more than 1,500 sanctions, branded Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) a terrorist organization in April 2019, the first such label for another state's military, and assassinated IRGC Quds Force commander Soleimaninear Baghdad's airport on 3 January 2020.

Biden treated that wreckage as leverage through a “compliance for compliance” formula that, according to the Congressional Research Service, envisaged a mutual return to compliance, with the sequencing of sanctions relief and Iranian nuclear steps contested, while Tehran insisted that the party that walked away should lift sanctions first. 

Biden kept the IRGC designation and could not promise that a future president would honor any deal. Ali Shamkhani, then-secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, summed up the impasse in November 2021. “The US President, lacking authority, is not ready to give guarantees,” he wrote. Talks stalled under Ebrahim Raisi’s presidency, with disputes over guarantees and safeguards investigations unresolved; Iranian drone transfers to Russia and the response to the 2022 protests further hardened Washington’s position, and Biden left office without rejoining.

In Syria, he maintained the US military presence and Caesar Act sanctions. The Pentagon disclosed in December 2024 that roughly 2,000 troops were deployed, more than twice the previously stated 900. Carnegie’s Diwan captured this continuity in one line: “The difference between Trump and Biden on Syria is tactical rather than strategic.”

Moscow has a name for this pattern, with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov complaining in February that Washington had backed away from proposals it offered at the August 2025 Anchorage summit, and echoing Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov, who told TASS in 2020 that Russia does not view the US “as a partner who is able to negotiate.” A country that Russian diplomats deem “agreement incapable,” as this author has previously argued, pushes the world toward a multipolar order that Washington can no longer prevent.

Regional powers have also begun acting on their doubts about Washington. On 7 August, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MbS), Turkiye’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif signed the Mecca Joint Defense Agreement, whose collective-defense clause treats an armed attack against any one of the three states as an attack against them all.

Steven A. Cook of the Council on Foreign Relations argued that the pact’s implications extend beyond its formal guarantees. “Rather, it reflects a change underway in the Middle East’s regional order – one that reduces the United States’ decades-long leadership role.”

Cook faulted American policy built on “anything but what the previous President did,” and warned that Trump's swings between force and diplomacy leave Gulf partners wondering “whether they will be left in the lurch to face an empowered Iran on their own.”

Iran and its Axis of Resistance allies have absorbed months of American and Israeli strikes, yet Tehran still retains the ability to restrict traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, while Washington's own clients hedge against its unreliability.

Regardless of who holds the gavel in January, Congress will not abandon its hyper-interventionist foreign policy agenda during Trump’s lame duck phase as president. Its anti-war bloc lacks the votes to override a veto on binding legislation, its leaders share the White House's hawkish premises, and both parties have spent eight years ratifying each other's escalations. 

Any durable settlement will come from the region itself, from governments that have stopped waiting for Washington to keep its word and from an Axis of Resistance that will no longer tolerate the Washington-Tel Aviv axis’s flagrant violations of international law and supremacist ambitions in West Asia.

https://thecradle.co/articles/washingtons-war-consensus-survives-the-midterms

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT — SINCE 2005.

         Gus Leonisky

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         RABID ATHEIST.

         WELCOME TO THIS INSANE WORLD….