A Foreign Policy ‘October Surprise’ Now Hangs Over US Election

The world isn’t getting tamer as the US presidential election nears. Lethal Israeli strikes against leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah — following a deadly missile attack by Hezbollah in the northern Israel — raise the specter of a wider Middle Eastern war. An apparently fraudulent election in Venezuela is fanning protests and brutal repression by the government. Both crises are testing President Joe Biden in his final months in office. Both are also examples of how a messy world could wreak havoc on a close-run presidential race.

Speculation about a so-called October surprise is nothing new. In the fall of 1956, a war over the Suez Canal and a doomed uprising against Soviet domination in Hungary jolted global affairs on the eve of President Dwight Eisenhower’s re-election. In 1968, Richard Nixon feared that a breakthrough in the Vietnam peace talks might doom his candidacy, just as Democrats feared that Nixon was undermining those talks for his own political gain. In 1980, Ronald Reagan’s supporters worried that President Jimmy Carter would seal a last-minute bargain to spring US hostages from Iran. (Other observers later alleged, probably without merit, that Reagan sabotaged that bargain so the hostages could be released on his watch.) The 2016 presidential election was roiled by Russian cyberattacks and disinformation meant to benefit Donald Trump.