Riaan Smit

YES, THE REPUBLICANS LOST control of the House and the Senate. But the real story of US politics this week is the defeat of the Democratic Party’s old guard and the first large-scale failure of AIPAC. Voters wanted a genuine anti-war stance, NOT the horrific Joe Biden/ Kamila Harris pro-Israel line. - Both those stale Democrats pledged undying loyalty to Israel, endless funds for Netanyahu, and a bottomless supply of "special price for you" bombs with which Tel Aviv could blow up surrounding communities ("defend Israel"). - The old Democrats were loudly pro-war – we can’t forget Kamila Harris’s insistence that the US would have “the most lethal force on Earth”, and her party’s insistence that not enough taxpayer cash was being diverted to the military. - The Democrats were also heavily into global dominance. Biden arranged “Democracy Summits” which excluded actual democratic countries, because the gatherings were really just thinly disguised sales meetings of pro-Washington agents from around the world. (Asia’s oldest democracy, Sri Lanka, was excluded for not hating China enough, and Taiwan, which isn’t even a country by the US’s own definition, was included.) - Biden’s foreign secretary Tony Blinken endlessly peddled the absurd lie that the US underpinned the “rules-based order”, when the country refused to sign or ratify more than 40 of the international conventions that kept the world safe. (In contrast, China DID sign most of them.) . GLOBAL INTERFERENCE The old Democrats, the public realized, were worse than the Republicans on the issue of US interference around the world. And Trump exploited that. Trump defeated the Democrats in 2024 by simply realizing that the US public was opposed to overseas wars. Their leader said he would stop wars “on his first day”. It won him power. Then he did the opposite, starting the most ill-considered war for decades, attacking Iran on Israel’s behalf, and he also threatened war on Panama, Canada, Greenland—anyone who opposed the old US habit of global military expansionism. . WHO ATTACKED INTERNATIONAL LAW? Most of the world is saying that Donald Trump’s administration repeatedly violates international law. This criticism is clearly valid. But we mustn’t forget that Joe Biden did the exact same thing earlier. “Biden showed that international law is little more than a cudgel to be used against our enemies while being treated as optional for our friends,” wrote foreign policy advisor Matt Duss in a January 2025 review of how Biden lost to Trump. . ISRAEL CONSENSUS IS OVER So let’s be clear about who was really defeated this week. It was the militarist status quo favored by the terrifying Israeli lobby. Pro-Palestinian candidates won many races, and Michigan’s Abdul El-Sayed became the first Muslim in the US Senate, despite (and this is the key) AIPAC spending more than US$40m to defeat him. “The old bipartisan consensus on Israel is over,” Beth Miller, political director of Jewish Voice for Peace Action, told the press. What does that mean? America could stop its terrible behaviour in West Asia, and decline to send more bombs to Netanyahu. It could actually take action against the expansionist “settlers” in the West Bank. (Let’s be realistic—we’ll believe it when we see it, but at least it is now a possibility.) Let’s recall that just a few weeks ago, AIPAC owned up to the fact that it was now harming candidates by showering them with millions of dollars and boasting that every candidate it backed got elected. It then said it was backing off—which was not actually true. The money will just be steered to their candidates in sneakier ways. . HOPE FOR LESS INTERFERENCE IN ASIA From the point of view of Asia—which, in human terms, is larger than all the other regions of the world put together—the results are mixed, but can be seen as hopeful. Asia wants peace and freedom from US interference. The old United States, both parties, endlessly used their proxy forces in the Philippines and Taiwan and Hong Kong to create friction. Both Biden and Trump worked hard to turn Asia (Australia, Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines, Papua New Guinea, others) into a network of proxy forces with which to threaten or attack China, which had committed the grave sin, in US eyes, of developing peacefully, without invading the rest of Asia. It would be naïve to assume that a major move towards peace is coming. But looking at the number of non-white, pro-peace faces among the mid-term winners yesterday, one can at least hope for a safer, fairer world. . .