Uncertainty looms large over the 2024 US presidential election. As the list of international crises grows, partisan battles in Congress over foreign policy priorities are heating up, suggesting that fears about America’s future commitments are warranted.

The war between Israel and Hamas is being used by Trump-supporting Republicans to limit United States’ support for Ukraine. Republicans have blasted President Joe Biden for his decision to meet Xi Jinping, the Chinese president, during his trip to the APEC summit of Asian and Pacific states in California in November. Donald Trump’s threat to withdraw the US from Nato, if re-elected, risks further instability across Europe.

US foreign policy choices will shape the prospect for peace in Europe, Asia and the Middle East. America’s global role has been both anchored and amplified by the strength of its own democracy, so the US election poses a more existential problem.

The starting point for the 2024 elections is already a troubled one. The norms and institutions that are the building blocks of democracy are contested by a vocal minority.

The prospects for overcoming partisan differences and bringing radical Republican forces back into a shared conversation look bleak. One avenue for this, forging a consensus around even a minimalist basket of policies, is increasingly out of reach. On virtually all major social and economic issues, not least on abortion rights, education, healthcare, climate change and the economy, Republicans and Democrats in Congress are divided.

The midterm elections brought a Republican majority to the US House of Representatives and empowered a small but vocal number of MAGA − Make America Great Again −Republicans. The bipartisanship that made for Biden’s success in passing an infrastructure bill two years ago is rapidly becoming a historic relic.

Today, policy debate is too often marked by a rejection of the very legitimacy of the values held by members of the opposing party. This creates a political context in which the scope to forge cross-party coalitions and broker compromises, a bedrock of democratic practice, is shrinking.

Under these conditions, elections take on even greater significance, creating the prospect not only for major shifts across key policy domains that affect daily life in the US, but for significant parts of the population to feel left behind.