From Ukraine to Taiwan to Gaza, how much should the United States commit — militarily, financially, and diplomatically — to conflicts and allies abroad?
Each issue breaks into the specific questions Congress actually fights over. Read each position, then head to the interactive version of this issue to mark which reflects your view and build a message to your representatives.
Continued military aid to Ukraine is necessary to avoid rewarding Russian aggression, but Congress should do more than authorize modest, capped funding increments — seizing frozen Russian sovereign assets for Ukrainian reconstruction and designating Russia a state sponsor of terrorism would impose real costs rather than symbolic ones.
A statutory security commitment to Ukraine modeled on the decades-old Taiwan Relations Act — affirming support without a mutual-defense treaty — offers a middle path between open-ended commitment and abandonment, and could give Kyiv the confidence to accept a negotiated settlement rather than fight indefinitely.
The FY26 NDAA's modest, capped two-year Ukraine assistance package reflects appropriate caution about open-ended commitments to a war with no clear endpoint; pursuing a negotiated peace, even one requiring difficult territorial compromises, is preferable to indefinite funding with no exit strategy.
Arms sales to Taiwan and investment-screening rules aimed at China are defensible deterrence tools, but should be paired with genuine diplomatic engagement and human-rights pressure on Beijing, not treated purely as a military competition that risks becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The Taiwan Relations Act's four-decade model — providing defensive arms and a statutory statement of concern without a mutual-defense treaty — has arguably deterred conflict precisely because it's deliberately ambiguous, and recent large arms sales extend that same calculated-ambiguity logic rather than escalating it.
The record $11.1 billion Taiwan arms package and mandatory investment-screening rules for Chinese-controlled entities are overdue responses to years of PRC military buildup and economic coercion, and Congress should continue strengthening deterrence rather than risk signaling weakness to Beijing.
Israel's expansion of military control in Gaza well beyond the ceasefire's original "yellow line" — to an estimated 70% of the territory by mid-2026, alongside strikes that have killed over a thousand Palestinians since the truce began — undercuts the credibility of the U.S.-brokered peace process, and continued expedited U.S. military financing shouldn't come without real pressure to comply with the ceasefire's own terms.
The administration's Gaza ceasefire and Board of Peace framework achieved a genuine, if fragile, reduction in large-scale fighting and secured a hostage release, but nine months on, core disputes — Hamas disarmament, the actual withdrawal line, and Gaza's post-war governance — remain unresolved, and the plan's success still depends on follow-through neither side has fully delivered.
The administration's Gaza peace framework and the parallel U.S.-Iran memorandum reducing regional tensions represent real diplomatic achievements after years of open warfare, and Israel's continued security operations against a Hamas that still refuses to disarm are a legitimate response to an unresolved threat, not a ceasefire violation.
Dismantling USAID and folding its functions into a downsized State Department cut U.S. humanitarian and development capacity just as global need is rising — an 18% State Department workforce reduction and an 80% staff cut to the human-rights and democracy bureau will take years to rebuild, even after Congress partially restored funding above the administration's request.
Congress's bipartisan FY2026 foreign-aid bill — appropriating $50 billion, nearly $19 billion above the administration's request, while still accepting USAID's dissolution into State — reflects a genuine compromise: accepting the administration's institutional restructuring while pushing back hard on the scale of the underlying cuts.
Consolidating USAID's functions into the State Department eliminates duplicative bureaucracy and lets foreign assistance be judged by clearer national-security and "America First" priorities rather than open-ended development spending with limited accountability for results.
Lifting sanctions on Syria's new government and pursuing negotiated de-escalation with Iran are reasonable diplomatic moves in principle, but should come with explicit human-rights conditions and transparent congressional oversight, not be left entirely to executive discretion.
Sanctions relief tied to concrete, verifiable steps — Syria's post-Assad transition, Iran's 60-day nuclear-negotiation window under the June 2026 memorandum — is a more durable approach than either permanent sanctions or unconditional relief, though both cases remain fragile and could reverse quickly if talks collapse.
Repealing sanctions on Syria and pursuing direct negotiation with Iran reflect a pragmatic recognition that maximum-pressure sanctions regimes alone hadn't achieved U.S. objectives, and engaging from a position of demonstrated strength is more likely to produce results than indefinite economic isolation.