THE NEW YORK TIMES: If only Americans would fight as hard to save their democracy as Ukrainians are

Sometimes you have to get outside America, and go to a place like Ukraine, to see the full impact of Donald Trump’s policies on both our country and the world. What I saw so clearly from Kyiv several days ago was a stark contrast: How Trump is loving Israel’s democracy to death, while shunning Ukrainian democracy to life, to coin a phrase.

Over the past few years, Ukrainians have developed their own drone industry, with a system for adapting to new battlefield conditions that is now so fast that Ukrainian army engineers are recoding their drones from one attack to the next to respond to Russian countermeasures.

At the Yalta European Strategy conference that I attended, the hosts showcased a typical drone assembly line: One person was building the frames, one adding propellers and another the control boards. Over the two days of the conference, I’d guess they built around 100 of them right there in the lobby.

Ukrainians aren’t waiting for Trump to save their democracy. In recent months, the US president has been all over the place and then some on the Ukraine-Russia war: One day blaming Ukraine for starting it, one day voting to sanction Putin’s oil exports, one day posting on Truth Social that “This is not TRUMP’S WAR ... It is Biden’s and Zelenskyy’s war,” without even mentioning Putin, and then declaring Tuesday — after meeting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy at the U.N. General Assembly — that Ukraine “is in a position to fight and WIN all of Ukraine back in its original form,’’ without offering any new US help.

But can we rely on our democratic institutions to save us? When you look at today’s America from Kyiv or Jerusalem, you notice the degree to which democracy-loving Ukrainians and Israelis have been willing to take to the streets — in the middle of hot wars — to push back on their would-be autocrats trying to gut their democratic institutions.

Meanwhile, in the face of declarations like Trump’s that it should be “illegal” to criticise him, the most cowardly Americans — particularly the tech titans of Silicon Valley and virtually the whole Republican Party — go along for the ride, while those who are the most activist boast that they tweeted against it or pressed the like button on a post from their favourite liberal influencer.

That is the protest equivalent of firing a mortar into the Milky Way and believing that you’ve had an impact. Thank God social media was not around for the women’s rights or civil rights movements.

For a contrast, consider one of the first things I learned in meeting with democracy activists in Kyiv — something that I had missed while worrying about my own democracy.

Earlier in the summer, Zelenskyy’s ruling party in Ukraine, Servant of the People, had pushed through a law stripping the authority of two independent anticorruption bodies (the National Anticorruption Bureau of Ukraine and the Specialized Anticorruption Prosecutor’s Office) to decide who could be prosecuted in high-level corruption cases.

The new law transferred their prosecutorial authority to the general prosecutor, a presidential appointee. This would have allowed the presidency to unilaterally close or reassign corruption investigations involving top officials.

The troubling bad news is that Zelenskyy — and the powerful head of his office, Andriy Yermak — pushed this law. The amazingly good news is that average Ukrainians, led mostly by young people, pushed against it. And they didn’t just post emojis against it on their Facebook pages.

Instead, they defied the almost daily and deadly drone attacks by Putin and took to the streets in mass protests to demand that Zelenskyy and Yermak take their hands off these vital anticorruption institutions. They forced Zelenskyy to call a new vote and overturn the law a few days after he signed it.

As the BBC reported July 31: “It was only 10 days earlier that MPs had backed Zelenskyy’s controversial law, and yet they voted on Thursday by 331 to 0 to overturn it. On both occasions they appeared to be following Zelenskyy’s direction.” Zelenskyy posted on social media, “Ukraine is a democracy — there are definitely no doubts.”

Those young Ukrainians who made that happen knew they would never get into the European Union — the giant center of free markets, rule of law and democratic freedoms that they desperately want to join — if that law stood.

Here is how my Times colleagues in Kyiv described the day the law was overturned. “A crowd that had gathered outside Parliament only hours after explosions” from Putin’s drones “cheered when the vote was announced ... Zinaida Averina, a 23-year-old consultant in green energy, has emerged as a key organizer of the protests.

A newcomer to activism, she said she was spurred to action because she felt as though a ‘red line’ had been crossed toward autocracy. She started a small group chat on Telegram to coordinate with friends. It quickly swelled to about 3,000 members, becoming a hub for organizing protest actions.”

Marc Santora, one of the Times’ longest-serving reporters in Ukraine, described to me “a remarkable day” that started with “swarms of drones and missiles” in a Russian attack and ended with thousands celebrating their successful push to get Zelenskyy to change course. Marc and his colleagues posted a video dispatch that conveyed the euphoria.

My fellow Americans: These are the democracy-loving people whom Donald Trump has been stiffing — in our name — in favor of his pal Vladimir Putin. This is what I mean when I say Trump is “shunning” Ukrainian democracy to life.

By favouring Putin and retreating from aiding Ukraine’s cause, he is forcing Ukrainians to double down on both creating and strengthening their own democratic advances.

One of Ukraine’s most influential journalists, Vitaliy Sych, remarked to me in Kyiv that what Ukrainians did in restoring their anticorruption laws, “feels good for Ukraine.” But it left him “baffled and amazed by Americans,” who he said, “gave up so easily and quickly and paved the way for an incompetent, exotic and destructive president.”

I hear the same from Israelis: Tens of thousands of them dedicated their time every Saturday for nine months to oppose Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s attempt to strip the Israeli Supreme Court of its authority to check the excesses of Israeli politicians — and they have succeeded, for now.

Today, much the same coalition of Israelis is in the streets almost every Saturday demanding an end to the war in the Gaza Strip and prioritizing the return of Israeli hostages.

But they are up against two authoritarians working together: Netanyahu and Trump.

Trump has effectively given Bibi a blank check to militarily occupy all of Gaza — grinding it to dust with massive civilian casualties — even though the commander of Israel’s armed forces criticized the plan as reckless because it comes with no exit strategy.

Trump also embraced Netanyahu’s efforts to delegitimize the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank by banning the P.A.’s leader, Mahmoud Abbas, from attending the U.N. meetings in New York this week, risking the collapse of the organization.

Trump also essentially gave Israel a green light to expand settlements into the E1 area, long opposed by other presidents because it would effectively cut off the occupied West Bank from East Jerusalem and foreclose any contiguous Palestinian state.

Trump’s ambassador to Israel, the Christian Zionist Mike Huckabee, regularly throws the full weight of the U.S. behind the settler movement in Israel and treats with utter indifference the more secular, liberal Israelis who still hope for some kind of secure separation from Gaza and the West Bank.

Huckabee shamefully acts as if he were the ambassador to America for the Israeli settlers in the West Bank, instead of the ambassador for all of America to all of Israel.

This is what I call loving Israel to death, because it can end only with a permanent Israeli military occupation of Gaza, to go along with its permanent military occupation of the West Bank.

That means, at best, we are going to see roughly 7 million Israeli Jews trying to control roughly 7 million Palestinian Arabs between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea in perpetuity.

At worst, it will lead to Israel eventually evicting millions of Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza, thereby destabilizing two of America’s most reliable Arab allies — Egypt and Jordan.

Both are a prescription for a forever war that will be broadcast live on TikTok, turning a whole young, global generation against Israel and helping to ensure that the Jewish state becomes one of the great pariah states in the world.

Already we saw this weekend the decision by Britain, Canada, Portugal and Australia to ignore Israel’s concerns and recognize a Palestinian state, almost seemingly as a punishment for Israel’s land grabs in the West Bank and military occupation of Gaza. No matter, Huckabee’s messianic evangelical vision for Israel will be fulfilled. Thanks a lot.

Netanyahu seemed to implicitly acknowledge that this is where he is leading the country and, absurdly, tried to make a virtue out of it by boasting that Israel’s strength will make it the new “Sparta” of the Middle East.

Last week Bibi told a conference in Jerusalem that “Israel is in a sort of isolation.” The country, he explained, “will increasingly need to adapt to an economy with autarkic characteristics,” meaning self-sufficient and increasingly closed off from global trade.

Faced with a choice of being either Athens or Sparta, “Israel would be ‘Athens and super-Sparta,’” Netanyahu boasted. “There’s no choice; in the coming years, at least, we will have to deal with these attempts to isolate us.”

That is why I say that when you look at America from the outside — from either Kyiv or Jerusalem — you understand that Trump is not animated by saving their democracies or ours.

But please don’t post this column on Facebook or hit the share button on X. Don’t make a point. Make a difference. Register someone to vote in the 2026 U.S. midterm election, for any candidate who promises to protect our democracy — and those in Kyiv and Jerusalem as well — and to put our Constitution ahead of Trump’s creeping authoritarianism or Silicon Valley’s profits.

Otherwise, we too will be Sparta — and if you know your history, it did not end well for Sparta.

As Haaretz economics editor and columnist David Rosenberg observed last week: “Sparta was too small to act as a hegemon for long and, even worse, had to expend resources constantly putting down unrest by a growing population of Helots (non-Spartan serfs under its rule).

Sparta eventually lost its independence to the Macedonians and the Romans. The city itself survived but disappeared from history ... Is that where we want to go?”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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