The wars that have consumed the world’s attention for the past two and a half years came up for about five minutes in the Kamala Harris-Donald Trump debate last night, even though what is happening now in Afghanistan and Gaza are what history will remember, not the potential ingestion of dogs or cats, or geese in Springfield, Ohio.

Harris, in particular, is not helped by a focus on her foreign policy opinions, and so—gee, I wonder why—there was only a glancing reference to them. Nonetheless, what little we did see was disheartening, and on both sides. The way Trump and Harris talked about the wars and our role in them speaks to a deeper disease both in the American body politic and in the American elite view of the wars in which this country is involved. It’s especially worthy of note today, as we commemorate the 23rd anniversary of the September 11 attacks, which remain the defining event for the United States thus far in the 21st century.

Simply put, Kamala Harris cannot say that America wants Israel to win its war in Gaza, and Donald Trump cannot say he wants Ukraine to win the war with Russia.

Both effectively said the same thing about these different conflicts.

On Gaza, Harris said we need a ceasefire now, today, right this second, immediately, forthwith, so that we can get right back on that path to a two-state solution, which is a little like saying we need to get on a path to a sequel to Howard the Duck. She claims to be a supporter of Israel’s defense and its right to protect itself. She says she wants an end to the killing in Gaza. Well, the killing in Gaza has fallen literally to a fraction of what it was ten months ago when she first started saying there was too much of it—and morally and in terms of the international law people like Harris claim to respect and want to uphold, then as now, every single death there is the responsibility of Hamas.

In any case, what an immediate ceasefire in Gaza today, this second, means is this: Israel will not finish the job. Israel will not complete its task of finishing off Hamas. It means it will have gotten 80-90 percent of the way there and then halted before unconditional surrender.

Harris cannot say she wants Israel to win because…she does not want Israel to win.

For his part, though he did not say it last night, Donald Trump has said, point blank, that he does want Israel to win—but says he wants it to win faster because the publicity is bad. He’s right that the publicity is bad, and he’s right that the political entanglements of Israel and the Biden administration have extended and distended a war that likely could have been won in April or May. But of course Israel gets bad publicity whatever it does, and while for Trump, press coverage is everything, for Israel, existential security is more important.

Meanwhile, on Ukraine, it’s Trump who who says we need to stop the war right now, immediately, instantly, because “millions have died” (no, they haven’t) and he will end it before he’s sworn in as president (if he wins) because he knows Putin and he knows Zelensky and it’s just too much.

Like Harris on Israel, Trump will not say he wants Ukraine to win because…he doesn’t want Ukraine to win. He wants a stalemate. He wants the war frozen where it is. He wants Russia to retain Ukrainian territory and Ukraine to assent to Russia’s imperial evil. Why he wants this is less clear; I think it’s because he thinks this whole conflict is some kind of effort to lionize and elevate NATO, and he loathes NATO. Now, why he loathes NATO so much is a matter best understood not from buying into the continuing liberal psychotic delusion that Trump is a Putin agent but rather from a psychiatrist’s couch. Like maybe some European diplomat insulted him once when he was out clubbing in New York in the 1970s. I’m not kidding.

As for Harris, she works for an administration that has effectively brought Ukraine to the very stalemate Trump wants to formalize. We have helped Ukraine enough not to lose, but continue to pursue policies seemingly designed to keep it from pursuing actual victory in the form of pushing Russia out of its territory—so much so that it took the incredibly risky but tactically necessary step of invading Russia to upset the apple cart, change the conditions on the ground, and see if they could reset the expectations, frazzle Putin, depress the Russian people, and give the Ukrainian people new hope.

Either way, America is engaged, not entirely directly, in two wars—and both people vying to lead us in the next four years either do not want our allies and the side we are engaged with to win or kind of want them to lose. It’s the perfect expression of America’s unprecedented anti-isolationist neo-isolationism:

We don’t win wars any longer, not really, so why should anyone else?