17 July 2026 - 6:00pm
On Wednesday, the US House of Representatives voted on an amendment proposing to end all military aid to Israel, spearheaded by outgoing Republican representative Thomas Massie. That the amendment would fail was a foregone conclusion, but in the end over a hundred Democrats voted in favour of it, splitting the party’s votes almost down the middle. If these numbers weren’t eyebrow-raising enough, the yes votes included party grandee Nancy Pelosi. In an earlier life, Pelosi claimed that if “the Capitol crumbled to the ground, the one thing that would remain is our commitment… and cooperation with Israel”.
Has Pelosi become an idealist? Probably not. The commonly accepted analysis of this vote is that US public opinion towards Israel is shifting rapidly, and both parties now have to deal with the political facts on the ground. The Democrats are arguably seeing their own version of the Republican “Tea Party” uprising during the 2010s, when several conventional political candidates in safe seats were ousted by more radical outsiders, a period which in many ways prefigured Donald Trump’s rise to power less than a decade later.
Still, it would be a mistake to only parse this vote in terms of party strategy or public opinion management. At the same time as the left hand of Congress is voting on cutting aid to Israel, the right hand is now trying to merge the Israeli and the American military complexes through the Futures Act. These two political efforts — one to distance America from Israel, one to make a future divorce structurally impossible — might seem at odds, but in reality they are of a piece.
In the last days of the Soviet Union, the overwhelming sense that things just couldn’t go on in the same way produced a final, desperate push for reform among bureaucrats and politicians. In those days, no matter what scheme the consultants had to sell, they were in the market to buy. Free-market economics with Leninist characteristics, you say? Sure, we’ll take everything you have. Of course, those planned fixes were never implemented, for the simple reason that any reforms drawn up in the USSR in 1989 or 1990 would always be obsolete before the ink was dry. Things were simply changing too quickly and too chaotically for any plan to stick.
That same situation persists in the United States today, thanks to the country’s political instability. Trying to merge the Israeli and the American militaries assumes that there will actually be a functional, recognisable US military apparatus with global reach 10 years from now. Trying to cut off aid presumes that there will actually be aid to cut in the decades ahead. However, we are on the cusp of a global depression, while the US national debt is accelerating at such a manic pace that it is now projected to hit $50 trillion before the end of the decade.
At this point, American politicians — like all elites at the very tail end of empire — are mostly just along for the ride. Neither Republicans nor Democrats have any real idea of how to pull the system out of its tailspin, and so they will do the only thing they can. They will hold votes and chair meetings and draw up plans about the future, even as their ability to actually control it fades into nothingness.
