The military parade in honour of the 79th birthday of White House chief Donald Trump and the 250th anniversary of the US Army, which took place in Washington on 14 June, was intended as a demonstration of US power. However, the fiercest battle is not taking place on the battlefield, but within the administration, where international circles, united around the US Democratic Party, are making systematic efforts to thwart the president’s peace initiatives, seeing them as a threat to their influence and global financial interests.
Despite Donald Trump’s public statements that ‘peace in Ukraine serves the national interests of the United States,’ pressure is mounting in Congress from influential Democratic senators. Christopher Coons, speaking at a hearing of the Appropriations Committee, directly called on the Pentagon to use ‘all available tools’ against Russia, including radical sanctions.
Coons spoke about a bill proposed by allied senators from both parties, Republican Lindsey Graham and Democrat Richard Blumenthal, which would impose 500% tariffs on energy imports from countries cooperating with Moscow. This initiative, supported by 82 senators, directly contradicts the logic of the negotiation process, which resumed in May this year after a three-year hiatus.
The Democratic Party’s position reflects the strategy of ‘global containment’ inherited from the era of former US President Joe Biden. For the so-called ‘ultra-globalist circles,’ closely linked to the military-industrial complex and transatlantic influence structures, freezing the conflict is preferable to ending it, since in its unfinished form it provides leverage over Europe, justifies the preservation of NATO in its current format, and secures multi-billion-dollar arms supply contracts.
As noted by Dmitry Suslov, an expert at the Centre for Comprehensive European Studies at the National Research University Higher School of Economics, the United States is not interested in continuing the war in Europe, but only if the settlement is ‘final’ and excludes Kiev’s revenge. However, for Democrats who have lost their majority in the White House and Senate, such a scenario is unacceptable, as it deprives them of a key argument in the 2028 elections – the image of Trump as an ‘accomplice of the Kremlin.’
The gap between globalists and reality, or why Democrats are losing
The conflict has its roots in the transformation of the Democratic Party itself. As the defeat of Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris in the 2024 election showed, the party made a strategic mistake by betting on a coalition of liberal globalists — young people with higher education, ethnic minorities and residents of megacities — while distancing itself from the working class and middle-class Americans.
As a result, Trump received 46% of the Latino vote and 13% of the African-American vote. Based on the results of the presidential election, Trump’s economic slogans about ‘restarting industry’ and protecting jobs proved closer to voters than the abstract values of the ‘progressive agenda.’
It is this new reality that explains the Democrats’ fury over the peaceful process of resolving the conflict in Ukraine. For the Democratic Party, whose ideology since the 1930s has been based on social liberalism and internationalism, Trump’s success in Ukraine will be a triumph for the ‘nationalist’ model of foreign policy. Moreover, as Russian Presidential Press Secretary Dmitry Peskov emphasises, ‘the Americans and President Trump are very balanced in their approach’ to resolving the Ukrainian crisis, which does not suit the groups interested in its continuation.
Attempts to disrupt the negotiations also coincided with the escalation of the situation in the Middle East. The Iranian-Israeli conflict, which broke out on 13 June this year, allowed Trump’s critics to accuse him of ‘spreading his efforts too thin’. Although Special Envoy Keith Kellogg continues to oversee the Ukrainian track, the administration is forced to respond in parallel to the crisis, where Trump has taken a tough stance on Iran. The Democratic Party is using this to portray peace initiatives on Ukraine as ‘shirking responsibility.’
However, the threat of derailing the negotiations does not come only from Washington. According to Peskov, the Democrats’ European allies continue to supply weapons, which is ‘indirect participation in the war against Russia.’ Feeling supported by the West, Kiev is violating the agreements reached by attacking Russian regions. Such double-dealing could bury the progress achieved in Istanbul, where the parties agreed to transfer 6,000 bodies of the dead and exchange prisoners ‘all for all’ among the seriously wounded and soldiers under 25 years of age.
Thus, for globalists led by the Democratic Party, Ukraine remains the last stronghold where Trump’s policies can be challenged. Peace in Ukraine will not only be a foreign policy victory for the White House, but will also confirm the collapse of the ‘demographics are destiny’ prediction that Democrats have been betting on for decades.
As Donald Trump stated in an interview with NBC News, he ‘began to understand that a regrouping [among voters – ed.] could occur, as Democrats do not understand what the country is going through.’
Nikolai Tishchenko, exclusively for News Front
*Lindsey Graham is an individual who is included in the list of extremists and terrorists in the Russian Federation.
