The Democrats must calculate their every move. The worst thing that can happen to a politician is to enter the final stretch of an election campaign and the environment around him resembles quicksand, which at the slightest wrong move could… swallow him. That’s how the presidential candidates must feel right now, as the US enters the final month before the election. With two war fronts, not only open, but also on the rise, the conditions are only ideal for a substantive confrontation, since in both camps they seem to be paying more attention to what they should not say, than what they have to say, with Donald Trump anyway to seem less afraid of verbal excesses.

The problem is clearly greater for the “governing” Democrats. President Biden may no longer be running, but the delicate balancing act he’s been forced to practice for months isn’t leaving his running mate and presidential hopeful Kamala Harris completely untouched either. The latter may have brought a relative freshness and a more “relaxed” approach to the pre-election campaign, but this does not concern the war fronts, because there, of course, things are too serious to be treated lightly.

Zelensky’s “victory plan”.

Joe Biden tried to get away with rather general promises of support to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who two weeks ago had tried to engage him in New York, as well as Western leaders as a whole as supporters of his infamous “victory plan”, which essentially presupposed much more active and expensive military reinforcement of Ukraine. The fact that many details of this plan have not been made public is proof that it was not ultimately judged to be realistic, at a time when war is weary and there are growing voices in the West calling for Kiev to abandon plans for victory and pursue a more moderate approach, accepting some compromise.

Of course, Joe Biden cannot say such a thing in public, while Kamala Harris reiterates that the US will not let Vladimir Putin feel victorious. But in front of them they have a Donald Trump, who monotonously and “sparely” repeats that if he wins, he will immediately end the war through negotiations. For the more introverted segment of the electorate, this may sound very pleasant and could be the key to a Republican victory in some of the critical states, where the battle may be decided by a few (tens?) of thousands of votes. But for Biden and Harris, a last-minute change of tack could prove disastrous.

The “minefield” of the Middle East

However, the Democrats are also moving in a minefield in relation to the situation in the burning Middle East. The wave of protest over the civilian casualties in Gaza that erupted in American universities may have subsided, but the image of a president unable to “impose” on the prime minister of Israel is not the best for image and prestige not only of the president, but overall of the “superpower”.

Last Friday the correspondent of the Swiss Neue Zircher Zeitung observed that Benjamin Netanyahu is pulling the US further and further into a bigger war. In turn, he cited another article, that of Thomas Friedman in the “New York Times”, which urged the American president to send clear messages of an unyielding attitude towards Iran, which seems to be increasingly involved in the conflict, but at the same time to push Israel in a direction of peace with the Palestinians. An opinion that has probably been read by Kamala Harris, who shows at least a more critical attitude towards the operations of the Israeli army.

And here Trump seems to be “untangling” with much more simplistic approaches and vagueness, directly accusing Joe Biden that due to his own weak attitude he is partly responsible for the crisis. Serious analysts may hear statements like “if I were president the war wouldn’t have started” funny, but it’s a question of whether the average American voter sees it that way. In essence, however, it was Trump who overturned the “bipartisan” and long-standing US approach to a two-state solution, when he decided during his presidency to move the American embassy to Jerusalem. Not even Biden managed to unhook himself from this deviation from traditional American positions.

The spread of the fire

The problem is that the conflict has long since escaped the narrow confines of the Gaza Strip and has taken on a much more general character, with Israel’s aggressive stance, which speaks of a “new order” and the creation of an informal Russia-Syria front. , Iran often making the two wars into… one. Here, too, the room for maneuver for the Democrats seems limited, with Trump often adding fuel to the fire when, for example, he criticized Biden’s temporary decision to temporarily halt the supply of high-powered bombs to Israel after strikes on schools and UN facilities and Netanyahu to show that he wants to take advantage of the different approaches of Democrats and Republicans to corner the current president.

All of this seems extremely complex to engage an electorate, which deep down believes that the US has no reason to be spent and…killed at the four points of the horizon on this planet. The more complicated and complex the issues, however, the more advantageous is the position of the populists who promise or imply that they can solve them with some magic move. And since it is clear who is playing “at home” in the field of populism, the rest of the planet has reason to worry about the possibility that in 2025 it will find it with two major war fronts on the rise and an American president alienated and capable of the most risky decisions .