NOVEMBER 5 — Well, well, well.

The Democrats have done it. The House of Representatives and the United States Senate, both wrestled from the Republicans in a spectacular electoral upheaval.

Donald Trump has been handed a political kicking, Washington’s television commentators are practically weeping with relief, and somewhere in America, Republican campaign strategists are discovering that LinkedIn has rather limited vacancies for professional character assassins.

Democracy has been saved.

Again.

And across Asia, otherwise intelligent people are beginning to imagine that the world’s most powerful military state has suddenly discovered compassion.

How terribly sweet.

Before Asean joins the standing ovation, might I suggest something scandalously unfashionable?

Arithmetic.

Because if hypocrisy were an export commodity, Washington would never run a trade deficit.

And the Democrats have quite an impressive collection of receipts.

Let’s begin with Israel.

The Nobel Peace Prize comes with a weapons subscription

In September 2016, Barack Obama, Nobel Peace Prize recipient and one of America’s most eloquent presidents, proudly announced that his administration had provided Israel with US$23.6 billion in foreign military financing and another US$3.4 billion for missile defence since fiscal 2009.

Twenty-seven billion dollars.

And Obama wasn’t finished.

He negotiated another US$38 billion in military assistance over ten years, comprising US$33 billion in military financing and US$5 billion for missile defence.

The largest such commitment in American history at the time.

Not bad for a Nobel Peace Prize winner.

Apparently, the road to world peace requires an unusually generous weapons subscription.

Then came Joe Biden, a man who publicly described himself as a Zionist and whose enthusiasm for Israel extended considerably beyond affectionate speeches.

According to the Congressional Research Service, American assistance to Israel amounted to US$4.8 billion in fiscal 2022, US$3.8 billion in 2023 and US$12.5 billion in 2024.

Another US$21.1 billion.

Combine those figures with Obama’s earlier US$27 billion, and we have US$48.1 billion across those selected Democratic-era periods alone. The figures cover different periods, and I am deliberately not adding Obama’s subsequent US$38 billion commitment again, because much of it overlaps with later assistance.

Unlike certain politicians, I believe arithmetic should survive contact with reality.

But then came Gaza.

To those celebrating the Democratic victory as some miraculous breakthrough for Palestinian rights, I have one rather uncomfortable question.

Who occupied the White House when Gaza was being devastated?

Joe Biden.

According to Brown University’s Costs of War project, America provided or approved at least US$17.9 billion in security assistance to Israel during the first twelve months following October 7, 2023.

That wartime estimate overlaps the annual figures already mentioned. But the amount remains extraordinary.

And if the financial figures seem abstract, consider the cargo manifests.

The speeches expressed concern. The cargo planes delivered bombs.

In June 2024, Reuters reported, citing American officials, that the Biden administration had transferred to Israel at least 14,000 two-thousand-pound bombs, 6,500 five-hundred-pound bombs, 3,000 Hellfire missiles, 1,000 bunker-buster bombs and 2,600 small-diameter bombs since October 7.

These were reported deliveries, not merely proposed sales.

Fourteen thousand two-thousand-pound bombs.

Meanwhile, Biden was expressing growing concern about civilian casualties and the humanitarian catastrophe unfolding in Gaza.

His administration did temporarily withhold a shipment of heavy bombs and criticised aspects of Israel’s military campaign. Yet substantial military assistance continued.

In August 2024, Washington also notified Congress of more than US$20 billion in potential additional arms sales, including approximately US$18.8 billion in F-15 fighter aircraft and upgrades. These were proposed future sales, not completed deliveries.

South Africa had meanwhile brought its genocide allegations against Israel before the International Court of Justice. Israel rejects those allegations, on which the court has not delivered a final judgment.

Biden expressed concern.

Then more concern.

Occasionally, profound concern.

Washington has perfected a remarkable diplomatic art: expressing heartbreak at the consequences of a military campaign while continuing to supply much of the hardware.

It’s rather like helping someone burn down a house and then issuing a beautifully worded statement expressing profound sadness about the curtains.

There is nothing amusing about Palestinian suffering.

But there is plenty to scrutinise in the distance between Washington’s humanitarian language and its military decisions.

And Israel was hardly the only recipient of American largesse.

Ukraine: US$174 billion and a very American supply chain

Between fiscal 2022 and 2024, Congress appropriated US$174.2 billion in emergency supplemental funding responding to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

One hundred and seventy-four billion dollars.

Before anyone imagines pallets of American currency being flown directly to Kyiv, let’s examine the accounting.

Approximately US$110.7 billion, or 64%, was allocated to the US Department of Defense and other defence-related activities, including American operations, weapons procurement and replacing equipment transferred from military stockpiles.

By January 2025, the Biden administration reported approximately US$65.9 billion in military assistance commitments to Ukraine since Russia’s full-scale invasion.

Its inventory included more than 40 HIMARS rocket systems, three Patriot air-defence batteries, more than 3,000 Stinger missiles and over three million 155mm artillery rounds.

Separately, the US Government Accountability Office recorded approximately US$30.2 billion actually disbursed for direct Ukrainian government budget support between April 2022 and December 2024.

These figures represent different, sometimes overlapping measures of American support, not amounts that can simply be added together.

Russia invaded Ukraine in violation of its sovereignty. Ukraine’s right to defend itself is not the same legal or moral question as American military assistance during the Gaza war.

But the financial arrangements reveal something fascinating about Washington.

Overseas military commitments can also sustain an enormous domestic industrial ecosystem.

The taxpayer provides the funding. The Pentagon places orders. American factories manufacture equipment. Politicians explain the strategic necessity.

Everyone has a job.

Some jobs are considerably more profitable than others.

And here comes the truly bipartisan part.

In April 2024, the House approved a major Ukraine assistance bill.

Every one of the 210 Democrats who voted supported it. So did 101 Republicans.

Another major bill involving Israel’s security and humanitarian assistance for Gaza and elsewhere received 173 Democratic votes and 193 Republican votes.

When discussing healthcare, housing or taxation, American politicians can disagree about virtually everything.

When discussing foreign military expenditure, cooperation can become positively athletic.

One almost expects the defence contractors to send thank-you cards to both parties.

Perhaps they already do.

Libya: regime change, with a laugh track

For those convinced that military intervention is an exclusively Republican enthusiasm, allow me to introduce Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and a country called Libya.

In 2011, the Obama administration participated in Nato’s intervention against Muammar Gaddafi, initially authorised by the United Nations to protect civilians.

American and allied operations helped bring down his government, at an estimated American military cost of approximately US$1.1 billion by September 2011.

Gaddafi was hardly a model democrat. But after Nato aircraft struck his fleeing convoy, he was captured alive by Libyan fighters and subsequently died in circumstances that prompted serious allegations of unlawful killing.

And Hillary Clinton’s reaction to his death?

“We came, we saw, he died.”

She laughed.

A dictator was dead, a government had collapsed, and Libya was entering years of militia warfare, political fragmentation and instability.

America had helped remove the man.

The infinitely more complicated business of securing the country was another matter.

It’s remarkable how precisely Washington can calculate the cost of destroying military infrastructure, and how much harder it is to calculate the human consequences of what follows.

Then there is Afghanistan.

Contrary to the convenient political mythology, it was Trump who negotiated the February 2020 Doha agreement with the Taliban, establishing the framework for American withdrawal and reducing US troop levels to approximately 2,500 before leaving office.

Biden inherited that agreement, revised the deadline and completed the final withdrawal in August 2021.

Trump negotiated and initiated the final drawdown. Biden completed it.

Trump’s agreement excluded the Afghan government from the negotiations. Biden’s final evacuation unfolded amid chaos and the collapse of the Afghan state.

Neither administration deserves a spotless historical certificate.

But please spare us the fairy tale that Republicans start wars while Democrats graciously end them.

History has a rather irritating habit of refusing to cooperate with campaign slogans.

Both houses of Congress. Now what?

This is what makes the Democratic victory genuinely consequential.

They will control congressional committees, investigations, spending legislation and the Senate confirmation process when the new Congress convenes in January 2027.

Trump remains president and commander-in-chief, retaining substantial executive authority over diplomacy and military operations. He can veto legislation, and Congress would need supermajorities to override him.

Nevertheless, the Democrats will possess considerable legislative and oversight powers.

They can challenge appropriations, scrutinise arms sales and demand accountability.

The question is whether they will use those powers to reconsider policies their own party previously helped finance.

A political party that campaigns against a president’s foreign-policy decisions faces a rather different test when it acquires the authority to influence them.

And there are signs of genuine disagreements within the Democratic Party.

Consider Michigan.

Abdul El-Sayed’s election as America’s first Muslim senator is historic, particularly following a campaign containing religiously charged attacks.

Yet shortly before the election, Haley Stevens, the Democratic congresswoman defeated by El-Sayed in the primary, endorsed his Republican opponent, Mike Rogers.

A Democrat endorsing a Republican against her own party’s nominee.

The dispute involved Israel, campaign messaging and personal grievances, including Stevens’ claim that she had been excluded from El-Sayed’s campaign.

It exposed divisions that no congressional victory can magically erase.

Some newer Democratic politicians are questioning established foreign-policy positions. Others remain committed to them.

Which raises the most interesting question of all.

Who will actually lead the Democrats in 2028?

Can politicians challenging longstanding military commitments reshape the party’s programme?

Or will a future Democratic president, should one be elected, speak the language of reform while retaining much of the same security establishment?

Nobody knows.

One senator, however historic his election, cannot single-handedly rewrite decades of alliances, defence procurement and geopolitical commitments.

The Pentagon, after all, has rather more than one aircraft carrier.

Even Trump complicates the fairy tale

On November 3, Trump announced that America would end approximately US$4 billion in annual military assistance to Israel after 2026.

Donald Trump.

The arrangement he proposed ending had its roots in the ten-year agreement negotiated under Obama.

Before anyone commissions a statue of Trump holding a dove, however, this was an announcement, not an implemented cut. The agreement runs through 2028, Congress has authority over appropriations, and Trump indicated that arms sales could continue.

His administration’s war with Iran also demonstrates that reconsidering one military commitment does not make a president opposed to military intervention.

But the announcement challenged a longstanding arrangement supported by successive Democratic and Republican administrations.

Which is precisely why American foreign policy cannot be understood through the comforting fiction that one party is invariably militaristic while the other is invariably humanitarian.

Reality has a dreadful habit of being less convenient than political advertising.

Asean, the election is American. The consequences are ours

For Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam and the Philippines, American politics is not some distant television entertainment.

Its consequences arrive in freight charges, energy prices, tariffs, market access and the cost of doing business.

Trump escalated America’s tariff confrontation with China.

Biden retained many of those tariffs and increased duties on Chinese electric vehicles to 100%.

Apparently, protectionism becomes considerably more sophisticated when delivered in complete sentences.

Washington’s interests in the South China Sea, Taiwan Strait, semiconductors and maritime trade routes have persisted across administrations.

American policy does change, sometimes substantially. But central strategic interests frequently survive changes in political leadership.

Asean therefore needs relationships based on mutual interests, not sentimental interpretations of American election results.

Our countries have different security requirements and diplomatic priorities. What they share is a stake in regional stability, diversified trade, resilient energy supplies and independent foreign-policy judgment.

For those who hope the new Congress will bring a different American approach to Palestine, the test is equally straightforward.

Examine the appropriations.

Examine the weapons transfers.

Examine the votes.

And in 2028, examine the presidential candidate the Democrats actually choose.

Because the financial record matters more than the campaign slogans.

Obama negotiated the US$38 billion Israel assistance framework.

Biden presided over US$12.5 billion in Israeli military and missile-defence assistance in fiscal 2024 alone, while substantial weapons transfers continued during the Gaza war.

Congress enacted US$174.2 billion in emergency funding responding to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, with support from both parties.

These decisions arose in different circumstances and served different declared purposes. They do not prove that Democrats and Republicans are identical.

But they demonstrate that the institutions, interests and commitments shaping American foreign policy are considerably more durable than individual administrations.

That is the distinction Asean must understand

The Democrats have won an extraordinary electoral victory. Their new congressional power may produce important changes, and those changes deserve to be judged on their merits.

But victory speeches are not foreign policy.

And elections are not guarantees.

So congratulations to the Democrats. Commiserations to the Republicans.

And to those of us in Asia, perhaps we should leave the champagne unopened until we see what actually changes.

America has voted for change. Our responsibility is to distinguish the change it has voted for from the change the rest of the world merely hopes for.

* This is the personal opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of Malay Mail.