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Two events dominated international news this week: the TV debate between U.S. presidential candidates, Kamala Harris and Donald Trump; and reports that Washington and its NATO allies are gearing up to permit the Ukrainian regime to use their long-range missiles to hit deep into the territory of the Russian Federation. The latter move would be viewed in Moscow as a major escalation from a proxy war to a direct conflict between nuclear powers.

The aforementioned events are tightly connected. The U.S. presidential election is less than two months away with Democrat Harris and Republican Trump vying in a hotly contested and divisive race for the White House. Harris, the incumbent vice president, performed best in the live TV debate, according to polls. Trump, however, with characteristic brashness, claimed that he had won the debate. His subsequent refusal to engage in a follow-up second debate might infer that the Trump campaign fears that Harris was able to get the upper hand over her older opponent, who sounded hackneyed and incoherent. We are talking here about superficial style and not substance, which neither candidate has much of.

Discernibly, the U.S. establishment favors Harris to win. Most of the American media are supportive of what would be the first woman to become president of the United States, and a woman of color too. That credential alone burnishes the image of the American republic as a supposed bastion of democracy and liberal values.

More importantly for the American deep state – or ruling class – is that Harris is more aligned with its imperialist foreign policy. As with her current boss, President Joe Biden, Harris spoke belligerently about confronting Russia and unwavering support for the conflict in Ukraine.

The Washington establishment wants Harris to win on November 5 to ensure the continuation of the proxy war against Russia. The all-dominant military-industrial complex at the heart of U.S. capitalism wants the war racket to keep churning out mega profits. But also in the bigger geopolitical picture, the conflict with Russia is just one element in a wider policy of confrontation with other foreign powers, primarily China, or any other nation that challenges U.S. presumptions of hegemony. As we argued in our editorial last week, the United States is endeavoring to offset its failing global power by pursuing an intensified policy of aggression and bellicosity even if such a policy puts the entire planet at risk of catastrophic world war.

The highly choreographed move this week by the United States and Britain to give the Ukrainian regime permission to use long-range missiles to strike deep into Russia is tightly correlated with the high-stakes presidential election.

Even Western media are reporting that the Ukrainian regime is in dire straits as Russian forces make significant gains in the Donbass region as well as pushing back the month-old Kursk offensive. A telling report by CNN seemed to catch up with the reality that many independent observers have already been pointing out, namely that Ukrainian defenses are collapsing.

The Biden administration cannot afford an embarrassing defeat in Ukraine before the November election. Candidate Harris would be indelibly damaged by the loss of prestige especially given the huge political and financial capital invested to “defend Ukraine from Russian aggression”.

Hence, giving the Kiev regime another lifeline of long-range weapons is aimed at making the floundering Zelensky junta hang on for another few weeks to get past the U.S. election.

Donald Trump would benefit greatly from the debacle of defeat in Ukraine. The former Republican president is pitching his bid to return to the White House on pushing a peace deal in Ukraine and “preventing World War Three”.

Trump’s maverick disparagement of the NATO alliance and European allies is partly why the U.S. establishment does not favor him. By comparison, Harris is a more pliable tool for American warmongering, especially regarding confrontation with Russia. Trump’s talk about negotiating a resolution in Ukraine is problematic for the militaristic deep state.

However, it is important to disabuse the notion that Trump is a peace candidate. He may have an inchoate inclination to scale back the U.S. aggression against Russia, but the Republican contender is more belligerent than his Democrat rival toward China and Iran. Trump is fully supportive of Israel’s genocide in Palestine. It is fair to say that if Trump were president again, the U.S. foreign policy of warmongering would merely shift to some other region of the world.

Trump’s talk about stopping World War Three is not credible. When he was president (2016-2020), he stoked the NeoNazi Ukrainian regime to wage its genocidal war against ethnic Russians in the Donbass, which led to Russia’s military intervention in February 2022. He was also gung-ho about cutting Europe off from Russian gas and putting pressure on Germany to cancel the Nord Stream project. Biden later ordered the blowing up of the undersea Baltic pipeline in September 2022.

Pitching himself as a peacemaker in Ukraine is Trump’s cynical attempt to tap votes among many Americans who are rightly alarmed by the reckless proxy war against Russia. It boils down to rhetorical posturing.

It is improbable that a future President Trump would deliver on making peace in Ukraine. For a start, the U.S. establishment would go into overdrive to sabotage such an outcome. One can imagine how the old media canard of Trump being an alleged Russian stooge would return with a vengeance.

Notably, too, large sections of the Republican Party in Congress and the Senate, as well as past senior figures, are staunch supporters of the hostile policy toward Russia. It is a sign of the times that former Republican vice president Dick Cheney – the architect of wars in Afghanistan and Iraq – recently gave his endorsement to Harris, as have other Republican grandees. Harris thanked the war criminal profusely.

In addition, this week senior Republican members in the House of Representatives who sit on key intelligence, military, and foreign policy committees wrote a formal letter to Biden urging him to give his approval to Ukraine to launch long-range missiles at Russia. Biden would not take much persuading. Earlier this week, he blithely said he was “working on the proposal”.

Lending to the bipartisan Russophobia, another Republican Party lobby, Republicans Against Trump, claimed that “a vote for Trump is a vote for Putin”.

The conspicuous upshot – concealed by media hype and distortion – of the “historic” TV debate in the U.S. this week is that both candidates belong to one party – the de facto War Party.

There may be multi-party names and labels and rhetorical differences, but, essentially, the vast majority of politicians in Washington are not representative of the people and their needs, but rather are servants of imperialist warmongering. The same goes for the politicians in Europe.

It is a tragic reflection of the degradation of democracy in the United States and Europe that citizens are being led into a potential world war and nuclear conflagration by a political and corporate-controlled monopoly. Any dissenting voices to the servile media pro-war propaganda are being shut down and censored. Google and YouTube are closing down anti-war sites on the absurd basis that they are “Kremlin propaganda” in a way similar to how American and European students protesting against genocide in Gaza are being smeared as “terrorist sympathizers”. Western “democracies” are baring their true nature as fascist war states that are vandalizing international law.

The U.S. rulers amid their internal political crisis and global failing are gambling with world peace. Russian President Vladimir Putin this week warned that if long-range missiles are given the go-ahead then Russia will view NATO as a direct participant in hostilities. The erstwhile proxy war will henceforth be a direct war. That is a stark red line. Will the insane Western “leaders” cross it? They may well do so because of their incorrigible arrogance accrued from years of warmongering with impunity and also because the entire Western capitalist system is congenitally wired for war as that is the only way to prevent its inherent collapse. War seems inevitable if the Western political class has its way.

The American War Party and its adherents in Britain and the rest of Europe are pushing the world over the abyss. And there’s no debate about that.