{"id":26908,"date":"2026-10-31T00:19:48","date_gmt":"2026-10-31T00:19:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/2026\/10\/31\/trumps-foreign-policy-from-ukraine-to-iran-raised-fears-of-world-war-three-americans-are-about-to-have-their-say-the-guardian\/"},"modified":"2026-10-31T00:19:48","modified_gmt":"2026-10-31T00:19:48","slug":"trumps-foreign-policy-from-ukraine-to-iran-raised-fears-of-world-war-three-americans-are-about-to-have-their-say-the-guardian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/2026\/10\/31\/trumps-foreign-policy-from-ukraine-to-iran-raised-fears-of-world-war-three-americans-are-about-to-have-their-say-the-guardian\/","title":{"rendered":"Trump\u2019s foreign policy, from Ukraine to Iran, raised fears of world war three. Americans are about to have their say – The Guardian"},"content":{"rendered":"

Voters who backed the US president in the last election are saying they can\u2019t vote for him today: \u2018This is an abomination\u2019
Outside the Ukrainian educational and cultural center in a quiet Pennsylvania suburb of Jenkintown, on the outskirts of Philadelphia, a banner expressed unqualified gratitude: \u201cThank you USA for supporting Ukraine<\/a>.\u201d
Inside, however, the sentiment was altogether different. Irene Skulsky, a retired teacher in her late 70s, voiced indignation at Donald Trump<\/a>\u2019s sudden turn against her ancestral homeland, which she believed had come close to killing her son, Darko, and a desire to punish his fellow Republicans at next week\u2019s midterm elections.
\u201cWhen we vote, we have to vote with Ukraine in our hearts,\u201d she told her fellow retirees, gathered to hear a presentation by the Daughters of Knyahynya, a women\u2019s group delivering military equipment to Ukrainian special forces on the frontline. \u201cI know many people here are Republicans<\/a>, but we can\u2019t go according to party lines now. Ukraine needs us. They need our support. We need to shift the balance of power in Congress and in the Senate.\u201d
Days earlier, Skulsky told fellow members at a meeting of the Ukrainian American Senior Citizens Association, Darko had been sitting in traffic en route to work in Kyiv when Russian drone missiles slammed into five cars immediately ahead of him.
There had been no prior alert, allegedly as a result of a decision by Washington to suspend its intelligence-sharing arrangement<\/a> with Ukraine that has acted as an early warning system against missiles attacks since Russia invaded in February 2022.
In recent weeks, Trump \u2013 who pledged during his victorious 2024 presidential election campaign to end the Russia-Ukraine conflict within 24 hours of returning to office \u2013 appears to have abandoned Ukraine.
He struck a deal with the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, to buy<\/a> nearly 5m tonnes of diesel, overriding US sanctions on Moscow. He called on Ukrainians to replace the country\u2019s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy<\/a>. His administration was accused of throttling<\/a> the Ukrainian military\u2019s access to the Starlink satellite internet service.
And while the Trump administration denied that it had stopped sharing intelligence this month, as relations with Ukraine nose-dived, Zelenskyy has said his country received no advance warning<\/a> from US intelligence networks of two Russian missile attack waves.
Darko escaped injury, but several people in the vehicles in front were killed in the strikes, according to Skulsky. Her frustration spilled over to include Trump\u2019s fellow Republicans, whom she said were \u201cselling our souls\u201d rather than standing up to the president.
\u201cRepublicans are afraid of Trump,\u201d she said. \u201cThey\u2019re afraid to lose their position. I think their heart is with Ukraine, but they\u2019s sitting on their hands.\u201d
Many American Ukrainians will express their outrage at the polls on 3 November, according to Eugene Luciw, a retired lawyer and local representative of the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America, an advocacy group.
\u201cFor [American] Ukrainians, I believe foreign policy is unquestionably the No 1 issue,\u201d he said. \u201cBut I think even the average American without the added affinity of a homeland in Europe is going to see foreign policy as a very important issue.
\u201cIt\u2019s beginning to reach people\u2019s minds and hearts that something very important is brewing in Europe. If Ukraine loses this war, we have the beginnings of world war three.\u201d
The most recent Ukraine development is the latest in a trio of Trump foreign policy decisions with the potential to hurt Republicans when Americans head to the polls next week.
More relevant to voters\u2019 living costs \u2013 a key issue in this election, according to polls \u2013 has been Trump\u2019s protracted war with Iran<\/a>, and his determination to impose tariffs on imports from much of the world.
The Iran war, launched with Israel in February, shows no signs of ending despite Trump\u2019s early claims that it would be a short-term \u201cexcursion\u201d certain to end in the \u201cunconditional surrender\u201d of Tehran\u2019s Islamic regime.
Instead, Trump has reportedly drawn up plans<\/a> to launch renewed strikes against Iran after the midterms as he seeks to break Iran\u2019s grip on the strait of Hormuz, an energy choke point that was the conduit for one-fifth of the world\u2019s energy supplies before the Tehran regime closed it in response to being attacked.
The strait\u2019s closure has resulted in soaring global oil prices, which have been passed on to US consumers in the form of higher prices for petrol and diesel, which is vital for supply chains and US farmers.
Polls have consistently shown voters\u2019 disapproval of Trump\u2019s handling of the war, and his management of the economy and inflation. Roughly 70% are now critical of both, according to a recent AP-Norc survey<\/a>.
The war\u2019s economic impact has compounded the inflationary effects of Trump\u2019s tariffs, which has affected the prices of consumer goods and increased costs for manufacturers by increasing the costs of imported raw materials such as steel, copper and aluminum.
The tariff regime has also strained Washington\u2019s relations with once-close allies \u2013 perhaps most visibly with Canada, the US\u2019s second-biggest trading partner. Ties between the two neighbors plunged to a new low<\/a> in August following the collapse of bilateral trade talks.
Following the collapse, the Trump administration imposed tariffs on $20bn of Canadian imports \u2013 including cars, forestry and dairy produce \u2013 triggering a retaliatory tit-for-tat response from Canada\u2019s government, led by the prime minister, Mark Carney. In Michigan, which shares a border with Canada, even Republican Senate candidate Mike Rogers released an ad calling on Trump to end the trade war and declared: \u201cCanada is not our enemy.\u201d
Trump has articulated his vision with characteristic bullishness. After January\u2019s US attack on Venezuela, during which it ousted the country\u2019s president, Nicol\u00e1s Maduro<\/a>, he dubbed his strategy the \u201cDonroe doctrine\u201d \u2013 a play on the Monroe doctrine, named after a 19th-century US president, which states that the western hemisphere should be Washington\u2019s exclusive domain.
He bragged about extracting Venezuela\u2019s oil resources and fantasized about making the country \u201cthe 51st state\u201d in a speech this week in Corpus Christi, Texas, during which he showed off a tanker he claimed was carrying 1m barrels of oil<\/a> and repeated a phrase \u2013 \u201cto the victors belong the spoils\u201d \u2013 that startled foreign leaders when he first uttered it at last month\u2019s gathering of the United Nations general assembly.
There are fears that his neo-imperialist instincts could be applied after the midterms to Cuba, where he has repeatedly pledged to topple the communist regime that has ruled for the past 67 years.
Meanwhile, Trump\u2019s fixation with autocratic leaders has been extended to China\u2019s president, Xi Jinping. Having already met Xi at a summit in Beijing this year before hosting him at the White House, Trump will go to China again next month to meet the Chinese leader.
On a range of issues, he has shown disdain for diplomatic niceties \u2013 dispensing with seasoned diplomats to instead rely on Steve Witkoff, a real estate investor and attorney with no background in foreign policy, and Jared Kushner, his businessman son-in-law, as negotiators over matters as intricate as Iran, Gaza and Ukraine.
Yet Trump\u2019s latest Ukraine turn carries special resonance, not least because it risks a dramatic rupture with Washington\u2019s European Nato allies, who are heavily invested in Kyiv\u2019s protection as a first line of defence.
It has highlighted once again Trump\u2019s complex relationship with Putin, an autocratic leader for whom he has repeatedly voiced admiration. It is also a reminder of Trump\u2019s failure to live up to his frequently expressed vow to swiftly end the Ukraine war during the 2024 presidential election campaign.
Trump has blown hot and cold towards Zelenskyy. At an explosive White House meeting<\/a> in February 2025, he told the Ukrainian leader \u201cyou don\u2019t have the cards\u201d \u2013 but with a peace deal on terms acceptable to Russia seeming ever more distant, relations seemed to thaw, with Trump even publicly mooting giving Ukraine a license <\/a>to build its own Patriot missiles.
In recent weeks, however, Trump appears to have definitively ditched the US\u2019s putative ally and sided with Putin.
Economists argue that the volume of diesel covered by his deal with Moscow is too insignificant to reduce diesel prices, which have been inflated mainly by the effects of the Iran war, rather than by the actions of Ukraine.
Witkoff, Trump\u2019s envoy, caused further consternation by praising Putin as a \u201chumanitarian\u201d<\/a> after the Russian president agreed to release a 74-year-old US citizen, Stephen Hubbard, whom Russia had imprisoned for several years after falsely accusing him of fighting for Ukraine.
The Russia-friendly moves have stunned Ukrainian Americans, many of whom have pro-Republican sympathies dating back to the cold war, when staunchly anti-communist presidents like Ronald Reagan were seen as champions of self-determination<\/a> for the constituent, so-called \u201ccaptive nations\u201d that comprised the Soviet Union, which included Ukraine.
\u201cWe are befuddled and upset by what\u2019s going on,\u201d said Andrij Chornodolsky, chair of the senior citizens association, who urged his fellow members to call the White House and leave comments criticizing the recent policy moves. \u201cHow can you be doing this to us?\u201d
The US is \u201chelping a country that wants to subjugate Ukraine back into a new empire, the Russian empire\u201d, added Chornodolsky, who was equally angry with Republicans who have failed to criticize Trump over his abandonment of Ukraine.
\u201cWhat are the comments coming out of Congress?\u201d he said. \u201cSilence speaks very loudly. If you do nothing, you agree with the person making the pronouncements.\u201d
There are about 60,000 people of Ukrainian descent in Philadelphia\u2019s metropolitan area, the second-largest such ethnic population in the US after New York. From 105,000 to 122,000 people are estimated to claim Ukrainian ancestry throughout Pennsylvania.
Peter and Orysia Hewuka, long-term Republicans who had both previously voted for Trump, said they were likely to vote for a local Democrat because of Ukraine, even though it represented a psychological hurdle.
\u201cI am very hesitant to vote Democrat. I\u2019m a lifelong Republican,\u201d said Peter, 88, a retired nuclear physicist. \u201cBut I can\u2019t vote for people who support what Trump is doing. The Republican party has left us, we haven\u2019t left the Republican party.
\u201cIt\u2019s very difficult for me and for a lot of Ukrainian Americans to vote for the Republican party based on what they\u2019ve been doing in the past months.\u201d
Luciw, of the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America, said even Trump\u2019s diehard supporters in the Ukrainian community had been alienated by the diesel deal with Putin.
\u201cFrom my interactions on social media and elsewhere, I would say more than 75% of those who supported him have now abandoned him because it\u2019s now clear where this is headed,\u201d said Luciw, 68, who described himself as a Reagan Republican, but now also intends to vote Democrat.
\u201cUntil the last few weeks, there was a hope that Trump\u2019s swinging back-and-forth on Ukraine was a kind of negotiation \u2026 that maybe he would come to terms with things because it looked liked Ukraine was going to win and he would support a winner,\u201d he said. \u201cBut the diesel deal reversed all that.\u201d
Mykola Hryckowian, director of the Center for US-Ukrainian Relations, said he voted for Trump three times and been active in an ad hoc group called Ukrainian Americans for Trump \u2013 but has since severed his last vestiges of support.
\u201cI went to the polling booth in the last election not knowing who to vote for, thinking I might write in Zelenskyy, but in the end voted for Trump, because I couldn\u2019t vote for Kamala Harris,\u201d he recalled. \u201cToday, I could not vote for Trump.
\u201cBut a lot of my colleagues [on the committee] were very staunch, holding onto Trump until the very end. But in these last two weeks, they have turned around and said: \u2018This is an abomination\u2019.\u201d
Not all Ukrainians are surprised by Trump\u2019s actions. Mark Andryczyk<\/a>, a Ukrainian studies scholar at Columbia University and board member of the Ukrainian League of Philadelphia \u2013 a cultural group that hosts performances by writers and musicians from the country \u2013 said the president\u2019s actions were predictable.
\u201cI never thought Trump would be a good idea for Ukraine,\u201d he said. \u201cYou just have to look at how happy Russia was each time he was elected.\u201d
\u201cAll his information on the war is basically Russian talking points,\u201d added Andryczyk<\/a>. \u201cI can\u2019t imagine why anybody would think he was pulling for Ukraine. Perhaps people somehow thought that he wouldn\u2019t be doing this. I would think that their eyes are open now.\u201d
A clear-eyed view of Trump\u2019s foreign policy could reap an electoral whirlwind for Trump\u2019s Republican allies on 3 November, with the pocket-book effects of his tariffs and the war on Iran looming large as voters head to the polls.
Yet such an outcome could be a double-edged sword. Should Trump become hemmed in at home by a Democrat-controlled Congress in the final two years of his presidency, where better to assert his power than the rest of the world?
<\/span> This article was amended on 30 October 2026. An earlier version said the Monroe doctrine was named after the 19th president of the United States. James Monroe was in fact the fifth US president, but served in the 19th century.<\/p>\n

source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Voters who backed the US president in the last election are saying they can\u2019t vote for him today: \u2018This is an abomination\u2019Outside the Ukrainian educational and cultural center in a quiet Pennsylvania suburb of Jenkintown, on the outskirts of Philadelphia, a banner expressed unqualified gratitude: \u201cThank you USA for supporting Ukraine.\u201dInside, however, the sentiment was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":26909,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-26908","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26908","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26908"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26908\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/26909"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26908"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26908"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26908"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}