REPRISE (with commentary): The Stakes in the 2024 Elections (October 20, 2024)
With a call to Patriotism: Lincoln's Gettysburg Address (November 19, 1863)
Originally published in Don’tBe Stupid. Pay Attention, Damn It! Advice for Undecided Voters and Voters Leaning Toward Trump (2024), Chapter 44, pp. 182-184.
The Stakes in the 2024 Elections
For Americans, the overarching question in the elections is whether they will be governed by a president of integrity, a president who is honest, a president dedicated to truth, and a president dedicated to upholding the Constitution and the rule of law.
The evidence is in on Donald Trump. We know the answers to these questions if he is elected on November 5, 2024,
For the rest of the world, the stakes are of enormous importance. The main questions are:
1. Will the United States continue military and economic aid to Ukraine, at current or higher levels, to ensure that Russian aggression against Ukraine is not successful?
2. Will the United States exercise the international leadership necessary to defeat Russian aggression and barbarism and uphold international law including international humanitarian law (the law of war), the United Nations Charter, and the U.N. Charter-based international legal order.?
3. Will the United States be a leading force within the United Nations to successfully overcome international challenges such as global warming and climate change, the proliferation of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction, the need for regulation and control of artificial intelligence, and prevention and defense against biological threats such as the coronavirus?
The answers to these questions will all depend on who is elected president on November 5, 2024.
A recent book by Régis Genté, Notre homme à Washington, Trump dans la main des Russes (Paris: Editions Grasset, October 15, 2024), makes an overwhelming case that Donald Trump is in the hands of the Russians and indeed their “Man in Washington”. Genté, an expert on Eastern Europe and the countries of the former Soviet Union and longtime correspondent of Le Figaro resident in Tbilisi, Georgia, has pulled together a massive amount of evidence that demonstrates beyond the slightest doubt that Moscow has been cultivating Trump for some four decades. The book helps the reader understand why Trump has never criticized Vladimir Putin and has over the years acted consistently to further Soviet and now Russian interests.
The elections on November 5 will amount to a national Rorschach test which will reveal who, in 2024, we Americans really are.
Are we fascists and willing to elect a fascist leader of a fascist Republican Party whose members do not believe in the rule of law and the maintenance of democracy?
At the moment, it would appear so.
Or are we still, if only by a narrow margin, patriots dedicated to “the great task remaining before us” as set forth by Abraham Lincoln in his Gettysburg Address?
Not yet, but American Patriots may yet reverse the pro-Russian coup d’état (seizure of power) by Donald Trump and the Republican Party.
Lincoln defined the great task before American Patriots, in the following words:
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But in a larger sense we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us, that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion, that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
– Gettysburg Address, November 19, 1863
Commentary
We wrote on October 20, 2024 the following:
For the rest of the world, the stakes are of enormous importance. The main questions are:
1. Will the United States continue military and economic aid to Ukraine, at current or higher levels, to ensure that Russian aggression against Ukraine is not successful?
2. Will the United States exercise the international leadership necessary to defeat Russian aggression and barbarism and uphold international law including international humanitarian law (the law of war), the United Nations Charter, and the U.N. Charter-based international legal order.?136
3. Will the United States be a leading force within the United Nations to successfully overcome international challenges such as global warming and climate change, the proliferation of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction, the need for regulation and control of artificial intelligence, and prevention and defense against biological threats such as the coronavirus?
The answers to these questions will all depend on who is elected president on November 5, 2024.
The answers did indeed depend on who was elected on November 5, 2024.
Donald Trump was elected. His answers to these questions, manifested in actions, have so far been as follows.
Question 1.
Answer: No.
Moreover, as “the Kremlin’s man in Washington”,1 Trump has actively undercut Ukraine’s position vis-à-vis Russia, seeking to negotiate directly withVladimir Putin over the heads of of the Ukrainians, just as Britain and France negotiated over the heads of the Czechs in ceding the Sudetenland to Hitler in the infamous Munich Pact of September 1938.
Question 2.
Answer: No.
Question 3.
Answer: No.
—Global Warming: The U.S. under Trump has withdrawn from the 2015 Paris Climate Convention and continuing processes
—proliferation of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction (to be determined)
—regulation and control of artificial intelligence (not likely, given role of Elon Musk)
—prevention of and defense against biological threats: The U.S. under Trump has withdrawn from the World Health Organization (WTO). It has also cut USAID funding, including funding for many projects dedicated to monitoring and safeguarding global health
—Also—strengthen and defend international trade law. The U.S. under Donald Trump has launched an all-out attack on the 1948 GATT and World Trade Organization (WTO) Rules with his arbitrary imposition of tariffs, stating no legal justifications. The U.S. continues to block the functioning of the highest WTO dispute-resolution body, by refusing to name members necessary for the body to function with a quorum.
See, e.g., James Rowles, “The Kremlin in the White House: "Russia’s man in Washington", Donald Trump, moves to undermine defense of Ukraine,” Trenchant Observations, December 12, 2024.
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James Rowles is a former Lecturer on Law at Harv Law School and professor of international law at other universities.
He studied the history of Nazi Germany at Stanford, and has studied and worked on human rights, judicial reform, and access to justice projects in many countries in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and in Afghanistan and Russia. At Harvard Law School, he taught a course on “Law, Human Rights, and the Struggle for Democracy in Latin America”.
At the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) of the OAS, he worked on human rights cases involving forced disappearances, executions, and torture in a number of authoritarian countries in Latin America and the Caribbean.
Recent Books by the Author
James P. Rowles, The Rape of American Democracy: Republican Actions and Democratic Failures, 2016-2021 (2024). Available on Amazon, and from IngramSpark by clicking on a link here.
James P. Rowles, Don’t Be Stupid. Pay Attention, Damn It! Advice for Undecided Voters and Voters Leaning Toward Trump (2024). Available on Amazon,and from IngramSpark by clicking on a link here.
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