The Road That Should Not Be Taken

More than a century ago, Robert Frost penned The Road Not Taken, twenty lines that have become perhaps the best-known poem ever written by an American.  The subject, of course, is choice and how every choice made leaves behind one that was not.  And there is rarely any going back.  “Oh, I kept the first for another day!” Frost wrote, “Yet knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back.”

How often does each of us ponder our own road not taken and what might have happened had we followed the other path?  And what is true for people is also true for nations, especially democracies, where each election leaves a candidate not chosen.  How different the nation might have evolved if Adams had defeated Jefferson in 1800, or Breckenridge had bested Lincoln in 1860, or Dewey had actually beaten Truman in 1948.

The United States is fast approaching two other roads that will diverge, although hardly in Frost’s yellow wood.  How we choose which to take might well determine whether we survive as a nation that wishes to continue as a functioning democracy, operating under the rule of law.  But we have been at this same fork before and so, in this case, Americans have the rare opportunity of knowing where either road not taken will lead. 

As cases in point, in the myriad crises the nation currently faces, there are two that involve bitter conflicts in other parts of the world, Ukraine and the Middle East.  The nation’s course in navigating each of them is currently being set by Joe Biden, who was put in office by less than 50,000 votes in the latest in a string of increasingly bitter and divisive presidential elections.  (Although he won by more 7 million popular votes, a shift in that far tinier number would have made him the loser in the anachronistic Electoral College.)

It is not difficult to imagine how each would have played out had Donald Trump been making the decisions. 

Ukraine would almost surely now be part of Russia with Volodymyr Zelensky and virtually every other advocate of a free Ukraine dead, imprisoned, or, if they were lucky, in exile.  Almost impossible to conceive is that Donald Trump, instead of braying “America first,” would have supported the massive military aid and held together the largely European coalition that has allowed Ukraine to fight Russia to a standstill. 

The damage of allowing Vladimir Putin to swallow up Ukraine goes far beyond the betrayal of a nation fighting for its freedom against a ruthless dictator who will stop at almost nothing, including genocide, and who announced he would undertake a program of ethnic cleansing to destroy both the Ukrainian language and its culture.  An emboldened Russia would continue to put enormous stress on American interests, including the constant threat of driving up both energy and food prices. 

Not every lesson of history has universal application but one that does is the upshot when a megalomaniacal autocrat is allowed to prey on weaker neighbors and become engorged with victory.  That is what a second Trump presidency would have bequeathed to the United States, to say nothing of the fact that there is little doubt that Trump aspires to rule in the precise manner as does Putin.

In the Middle East, Biden has endured withering criticism in some quarters for what is perceived as “his seemingly preternatural support for Israel.”  In fact, “an NBC News poll published November 19 found that just 34 percent of registered voters approve of how Biden is handling the war. Many younger voters in particular are angry; and some Arab and Muslim Americans are telling pollsters they won’t vote for Biden in 2024 because of his stance.”

While it is true that Biden’s support for Israel has been unwavering, it is also true that both he and Secretary of State Antony Blinken have put unremitting pressure on Benjamin Netanyahu to not simply attack Gaza willy-nilly, civilian casualties and humanitarian crisis be damned.  It must be borne in mind that Netanyahu is fighting not just to eliminate Hamas, but also for his own survival.  He clearly believes that he has no hope of staying in power—and out of jail—without a clear-cut devastating victory over the same terrorist group he has coddled for more than a decade.

And what would Trump have done? Would he have exerted the same diplomatic pressure to prevent even more widespread devastation in Gaza, to say nothing of helping initiate the delicate process by which scores of Israeli and foreign hostages were freed?

Certainly not. 

Many observers, including this one, have been hoping President Biden, despite a highly successful first term, would forego re-election because the risk to the nation was too great that his age and unpopularity—based solely on perception, rather than achievement—would do him in.  But if he is determined to run, as he seems to be, and Donald Trump is his opponent, it will be vital, perhaps as vital as in 1860, for every American who values democratic ideals and a nation that actually aspires to the lofty language in both the Declaration of Independence and preamble to the Constitution to do absolutely everything they can to defeat a man for whom the sentiments behind those words mean absolutely nothing.

A second Trump term is a road that does not need to be taken to recognize that it leads directly to the edge of a cliff that the man himself would gladly push the nation over without giving it a second thought.