Stephen Wertheim

Election outcomes have multiple causes, of course. Yet foreign policy was one of the reasons Americans gave Trump the largest Republican victory in decades

Last October, Joe Biden made the most significant address of a presidency defined by war. Sitting in the Oval Office, he asked Congress to approve $106 bn in emergency aid mainly to arm Ukraine and Israel in their ongoing wars.

I thought to myself, I must be living in another country than these people.

The president just asked the American public to pay $106bn – almost double the budget of the state department, and on top of about $1tn in annual national security spending – to supply multiple overseas wars whose consequences for ordinary Americans were abstract at best. Not only that: the president seemed to imply that Americans had no choice in the matter because, as all right-thinking people knew, we are the indispensable nation.

I was so close to the priests yet so far from the priesthood.