Ukraine faces decisive months ahead as key allies gear up for crunch elections. While early presidential campaigning in the US and a looming general election in Poland will grab the international headlines, a snap election in Slovakia on 30 September may prove every bit as consequential. 

With Robert Fico — Slovakia’s former prime minister and one of the West’s most outspoken critics of the Ukrainian war effort — poised to win the vote, a change of government in Bratislava could have a profound effect on EU policymaking. Fico has promised that if his party makes it into government “we will not send a single bullet to Ukraine,” proudly proclaiming that “I allow myself to have a different opinion to that of the United States” on the war.  

Fico has also claimed on the campaign trail that “war always comes from the West and peace from the East,” and that “what is happening today is unnecessary killing, it is the emptying of warehouses to force countries to buy more American weapons.” Such statements have resulted in him being blacklisted by Kyiv as a spreader of Russian propaganda.  

Yet the former prime minister spearheads a new brand of Left-wing, anti-American populism that has become a powerful force in Central Europe since the war began. Perceptions that “the Americans occupy us” — as one MP in Fico’s Smer party evocatively put it — are shared with a similar groundswell of anti-Western opinion in the neighbouring Czech Republic.  

Yet Smer has been handed a chance to gain power thanks to the chaos which has engulfed Slovakia’s pro-EU, pro-Western forces. Personal grievances coupled with serious policy errors tore apart a four-party coalition formed after elections in 2020, leaving Fico to capitalise on heightened mistrust in establishment politics. Smer is expected to become the nation’s largest party after this month’s election, with an anticipated 20% of the vote.  

Whatever the specific makeup of the new government, if Smer is the largest party it will likely pursue a foreign policy similar to that of Viktor Orbán’s government in Hungary. A halt to until-now generous Slovak arms shipments to Ukraine is Fico’s central electoral pledge, while the arrival on the scene of another Orbán-style government prepared to obstruct EU aid efforts for Ukraine would create a serious headache. That is particularly the case as Brussels struggles to win support for both short and long-term war funding commitments. 

Victory for Fico would also amplify Orbán’s scepticism about the overall Western narrative on Ukraine — a scepticism which the Hungarian Prime Minister recently conveyed to Western conservatives during an interview with Tucker Carlson. Orbán portrayed Ukraine’s attempts to win back the territories taken by Russia as ultimately hopeless and claimed that Donald Trump’s promise to end the war quickly makes him “the man who can save the Western world”. 

Like Trump in America and Orbán in Europe, Fico is hated with a passion by establishment forces. But in Slovakia, the pro-Western establishment itself has become so mistrusted that power may soon pass to a man intent on shattering what’s left of European unity on Ukraine. 

The nearly six-month war with Iran has given US policymakers plenty to think about. Most of those lessons are on the negative side of the ledger. The US, it turns out, has trouble converting tactical military accomplishments into strategic victory. Iran’s defense strategy and military capabilities are far more durable than the Trump administration assumed. And geography can be weaponized to nullify or at least fight back against a superior military adversary.

But the war has also produced a silver lining for the United States: countries in the Middle East which were once content to remain within the American security umbrella are now being more proactive with their own security affairs. The latest example occurred yesterday, when Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan signed the so-called Mecca Joint Defense Agreement. According to statements from the three countries, the agreement “is intended to strengthen collective deterrence against any act of aggression, and stipulates that any armed attack against any one of the three states shall be regarded as an attack against them all.”

The Saudi-Turkish-Pakistani deal comes on top of a bilateral security arrangement Riyadh signed with Islamabad last September, which laid the groundwork for the deployment of 8,000 Pakistani troops and a squadron of Pakistani fighter jets to the kingdom this spring.

Although the exact terms of the trilateral security deal have yet to be released, the intent behind it matters as much as the details. Faced with a more hostile environment and a traditional security provider in the United States whose leaders are making decisions — such as waging a preventive war in Iran — that have dramatically adverse consequences for the region, the affected countries are taking matters into their own hands and diversifying their security ties.

The foreign-policy establishment in Washington, DC will shudder at the thought of traditional partners moving away from the US in any capacity. The boilerplate paradigm holds that the greater the distance there is between Washington and its partners, the less influence the US will have in the region’s geopolitics. Others will no doubt view the new pact as an illustration of how little trust these countries now have in US foreign policy. And to be fair, this argument is not off the mark.

After all, outside of Israel, no state in the Middle East believed it was a particularly brilliant idea to launch a conflict that would compel the Iranians to close the region’s critical trade chokepoint, push the regime further into the grips of the hardliners, and spoil whatever efforts at détente with Tehran were taking place.

But whether the latest move is motivated by a sense of disgust with US foreign policy or by fear that Washington’s security commitments no longer look as ironclad as they once did, the result is the same: forced to live within a security reality that is more complicated than it was last year, leaders such as Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan are broadening their horizons by solidifying their defense ties closer to home. The US is still the preferred foreign guarantor for many if not most of these states, but no longer the option of first resort.

Assuming the war with Iran doesn’t persist for the rest of his term, Donald Trump has an opportunity to capitalize on the willingness of US partners to do more for their own security. He, Barack Obama and Joe Biden all entered office promising to reduce America’s military presence in the Middle East, only to leave their successors with the same problem — or a bigger one. Despite what Washington officials might say in public, the blunt fact is that the US is an unpredictable and, at times, unreliable security guarantor for the region anyway. The Middle East needs less Uncle Sam, not more.

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Daniel R. DePetris is a fellow at Defense Priorities and a syndicated foreign affairs columnist for the Chicago Tribune.

DanDePetris

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