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FO° Talks: From MAGA to Gaza — How Trump Changed US–Israel Relations Forever

Josef Olmert — Thu, 10 Jul 2025 13:43:14 +0000

[This is the final part of a four-part series. To read more, see Parts 1, 2 and 3 here.]

Josef Olmert: Hello. Hi to my watchers, to my readers, to my followers. This is the fourth and last in my short series on US–Israel relations. And the idea is really to lead us to the current situation with US President Donald J. Trump, his second administration, with a brief review of his first and the in-between period of the US presidency of Joseph Biden — Joe Biden Jr. — as president. And then we’ll come to the current situation, with the exception that I have to make already now: that we are in a situation that is unfolding. And there might be people who say, “Oh, it’s too early even to talk about US–Israel relations under Donald Trump.” So what I’m going to do is, therefore, to talk about what I consider to be situations that already are fully now results, and maybe inevitable results, of what we already discussed, and how they are happening right now — not talked about, but happening.

Therefore, if we make any predictions for the future, they will be based on what I would consider to be a more solid ground. That’s about the methodics of all that. And I need to say, because I do get reactions, comments, responses from people who watch, read, and they are asking questions that lead me to say what I’m saying to you now.

The American Jewish community and Israel’s image problem

Josef Olmert: So today, very briefly, just to remind you: In our previous episode, we discussed more in-depth processes, mostly in the American Jewish community, that led to changes in attitudes towards Israel. And we touched upon, therefore, what was happening in Israel at the same time that might have led to these changes in American attitude towards Israel, but also the rise of new movements in the US that were either more or less supportive of Israel. Of course, the evangelical Christians on the one end being more supportive; the left-wing, the progressive movement on the other side, in the Democratic Party mainly, that has been much more negative, still is, and becoming more and more negative.

And that brings us, really, to the situation that we are going to delve into in great detail today in our episode.

Trump’s first term: populism, promises and policy shifts

Josef Olmert: And I would say to you that when President Trump was running for president in 2015, 2016, he was not taken seriously, not just by Jews, but also by ordinary America, of course, the commentators. And I cautioned people at the time — it’s not like an “I told you so, period” — but I cautioned people, because I talked to people about the significance of the politics of identities and populist politics altogether, in the unfolding political climate in the US, as well as in other Western democracies.

And by the way, I gave the comparison with Israel. I analyzed the fact that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Bibi Netanyahu, at that time was already in his sixth year as prime minister in his second term, after the one that he was in from 1996 to 1999 — this one was from 2009; we talk about 2015, 2016 — that Netanyahu also succeeded in Israel with the politics of populism and identities. And this is a successful political card.

And Trump made promises about Israel, and everybody said, “No, I mean, don’t take them seriously.” And he fulfilled, to a large extent, a great deal of his promises. For example, the moving of the embassy to Jerusalem, which was, by the way, the policy of every American president before him, with the exception that they didn’t fulfill their decision because of whatever reason that they gave. That was basically based on the idea, “Yes, we say to the Israelis and to the Jews and to the pro-Israel community, we want to move the embassy — but we can’t do it now.”

Trump did it. Trump also withdrew out of the Iran nuclear deal, as was expected by the Netanyahu government in Israel.

Let me say something here: Netanyahu was not wrong in his opposition to the nuclear deal as was devised by President Obama’s administration. Where were the problems that he had, and they have to do with what’s happening now, so therefore I’m saying them now:

He didn’t know the limits of, or the ways in which to express, his opposition to the Obama administration policy, and therefore he made a terrible mistake of showing in Congress and giving his speech — that was in March of 2015. In January of 2015, that is to say, two months before, the speech was announced by then-Speaker John Boehner. (By the way, I have a picture with John Boehner in my study, because I met him before — I met many other people.) And I then cautioned from getting biting gifts — I cautioned Netanyahu not to do the speech. That was a big mistake.

It comes back to what we discussed before in the previous episode about bipartisanship, or lack thereof, under Netanyahu. It was a big mistake.

The other mistake, which might have even been bigger, was that while he said no to the deal as was devised by Obama — with the support of other powers, as part of Obama’s internationalist policy — he did not offer any alternative. He basically created the impression from day one that all he wanted was to see an American military operation against Iran — or else to justify an Israeli one. But even then, he was not preparing one.

In 2011, the Israeli military establishment was waiting for a word from Netanyahu that he was giving the green light for an attack on Iran. He asked for three days to make a decision. He then said no. And there still are reports to that effect that even today, he basically did not approve all kinds of plans that were supposed to finance projects that were designed to improve technological abilities that were to be connected with an attack on Iran and so on and so forth.

So Netanyahu basically said to Trump, “Cancel the agreement, period,” without offering an alternative.

Why is this important? Because it’s the same mistake he has done since the beginning of the war in Gaza, on the 7th of October 2023, to this very moment. While he said, “no, no, no, no, no,” to everything offered by other people, to other countries, including the best friends of Israel, he does not provide any alternative.

Then Trump, for example, said something which is again interesting: that when the US, with Israeli support, decided to eliminate the arch-terrorist Qasem Soleimani, the head of the Quds Force of the Revolutionary Guards in Iran, Netanyahu said yes. And then he said no, he would not be part of it. Which, by the way, caused ongoing damage in the relationship between him and Trump, because Trump — and that we know already — doesn’t like what seems to be weak people, leaders, losers. For Trump, the fact that Netanyahu did not show up in the end, as opposed to what Trump did, was an indication of lack of stamina, resolve, real determination.

But there were also examples of how Israel was so helpful to the American administration. For example, in the war against ISIS, I don’t know how many of my watchers and listeners and readers remember that Trump, in public, said something that compromised the invaluable, great support that Israel gave to American intelligence to locate ISIS targets in Syria. Israelis were furious. But Trump said, “He’s a great friend.”

MAGA and the limits of right-wing support

Josef Olmert: Trump gave a lot of support also in the UN, the national organizations. But Trump also was the leader of MAGA, and that’s the point that I want to emphasize here. And we saw it after the incident in Charlottesville — if I even call it an incident, I believe what happened there in 2017, referring to “good people on both sides.” I immediately wrote an in which I said, “There are no ‘both sides’ where there are swastikas.”

When Trump referred to “good people on both sides,” he also referred to those that were marching with people that waved the swastikas. That led me into discussion with myself about MAGA.

First of all, it was “America First,” which was a bad memory to me. For those who remember history — I mean, I don’t remember it from that time, but I know it — there was Charles Lindbergh with his America First Committee. That was basically a pro-Nazi domestic American organization that didn’t want America to join the Second World War. You can argue, “Okay, he just used the words; he didn’t mean very much.”

The MAGA movement is a nativist movement. The MAGA movement is isolationist. When you look at the roots of the MAGA movement, when you look at the terminology used, the symbols used, the organizations that were at the forefront of the movement, you have to come to the conclusion that this movement cannot be the pro-Israel movement that existed in the past under the great US President Ronald Reagan — when the world was divided according to the Cold War, and Israel was on that side, the good side. Or under US President George W. Bush, let alone previous presidents from before. Because their opinion about how the world is divided is totally different.

And nativist movements in America or in Europe, by definition, have more than a nucleus of antisemitism, because any movement which is also based on xenophobic feelings is bound to be antisemitic. And no antisemitic movement can be good to Jews, can be good to Israel. It’s as simple as that.

And it was very convenient to many Israelis to accept the better sides of Trump’s policies, but to ignore the roots of it that were based on assumptions and ideologies and terminologies which, as I said, by definition are not good to Jews and Israel.

And how many more times can I say it? How, with more decibels, stronger volume, to say it in order to make the point? Because it is a point that is still debated, even among Jews: What makes you really anti-Israel?

The MAGA movement was on the right side. The alternative to the MAGA movement as a mass mobilization political movement is the “woke” movement, which is, again, anti-Israel. The two most important political movements — and I say movements, not parties — in terms of mobilizing public opinion in the US from right and left, as developed in the last ten to 15 years, are not pro-Israel. And it’s just a question of time when these movements affect the political parties that they try to influence from the outside or by infiltrating from the inside. They already did it in the Democratic Party, and they are doing it now — and have done it — in the Republican Party.

And it will bring me to the current situation momentarily.

Biden’s presidency and the fracturing of democratic support

Josef Olmert: Joseph Biden Jr. — interesting fellow. I, by the way, met him personally: I had dinner with him in Tel Aviv in December of 2002, ahead of the invasion of Iraq. He came to visit the Middle East with a colleague from the Republican Party, Senator Chuck Hagel, a Republican from Nebraska who later became the moderate Republican defense secretary under US President Barack Obama; a much more moderate Republican than the Republican Party already at that time.

And Biden gave a brilliant prediction and analysis of what would happen in Iraq after the war. Because everybody knew there was going to be a war, the Bush administration would do it at that time. Much later on, I wrote an article in The Huffington Post, where I blogged for seven, eight years, praising Biden for the fact that he read and understood the situation in Iraq very properly. I also talked about the ethnic and sectarian divisions in all this.

The problem really is — and this is not something that we need to develop in this particular episode, because it’s much beyond the topic that we are discussing — Biden, who came to be president, was not the Biden of earlier years. And we understand it, Now we know more truth about it.

The Biden administration, from the beginning of its term, in all kinds of subtle ways that became much more obvious during the early stages of the war in Gaza — and much later on, as the war dragged on — developed the sense that we have problems with Israel. Exactly on the main core point of what the Israeli lobby and pro-Israeli lobbies all the time emphasized: that Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East, a beacon of freedom, of human rights, of civility and all that comes with it.

The attack on Israel with regard to that was already at the time of Jimmy Carter. But who remembers Jimmy Carter? He was way back.

Now, Biden, whether wittingly or not — I would say intentionally — slowly, gradually, systematically, consistently built up the case in all kinds of ways, undermining this Israeli argument or claim to fame, if you will.

The forefront of it was what’s called “The Squad” in the Democratic Party. And it was much beyond it. It infiltrated and crept into the trade union movement, the labor movement that in the past was one of the beacons of support for Israel; minority communities — African Americans, but also Asian Americans, which is very interesting; Latinos — tolerating the infiltration of Qatar and other states into universities in America, Saudi Arabia and others — relying on people that were clearly not in the pro-Israel camp anymore, but were at various levels of being anti-Israel.

And the fact is that while still a majority of the Democratic caucus in the House voted with Israel, there was a growing number of the progressives that were already taking their distance. So you could see the cracks in the bipartisan coalition for Israel.

The Netanyahu speech was, in that case, a gift he gave to these people. A stupid gift. Terrible mistake, as I said.

Trump’s second term: strategic ambiguity

Josef Olmert: The Trump administration these days — let’s move on now. First of all, in the last campaign that brought Trump again to the presidency — he didn’t even talk about Israel. He talked about Israel or the Middle East, made very, very superficial, almost insignificant comments or references. The promises were not there, you know.

Everybody took for granted that Trump is pro-Israel and will continue to be. The person that completely misread all this was Benjamin Netanyahu, again, in Jerusalem, believing that somehow Trump is going to be the same Trump of the first administration. He ignored the fact that in second administrations, presidents do tend to change.

I would remind people here that even Ronald Reagan — a great friend and supporter of Israel — he is the president that gave the first kosher certificate to the PLO before he left his second term. He was the one who authorized the beginning of official contact between the US and the PLO in 1989, as an example. But I can give you other examples.

Then came the inauguration, and I noticed something very interesting: While the inauguration was taking place, immediately afterward, US Special Envoy Steve Witkoff — I don’t get into too many details about him and his connections with Qatar, all this I leave to investigative journalism — but I don’t need to get into investigative journalism to analyze what he said on Inauguration Day, about what would be the four main pillars of American policy in the Middle East, the name “Israel” was not mentioned. The name “Iran” was not mentioned. The name “Hamas” was not mentioned.

Remember, it is in January of 2025, and the war was already raging from October of 2023. That was the first red light.

But forget about this. Maybe it was a ceremonial occasion. You don’t get into details, you just give main, big points and so on and so forth.

Gulf-centric policy and Israel’s marginalization

Then, of course, let’s see what has happened since then.

Some of his appointments have definitely been very pro-Israel. For example, Elise Stefanik, a congresswoman from New York, to be ambassador in the UN — and she made the point already, before: She’s going to fight hard about anti-Israelism in the UN as the first, if not the most important, but one of the main missions. This appointment, by the way, was canceled for all the obscure reasons. Why did he cancel her appointment, arguing that, “we need her in Congress,” when he did not cancel other appointments of people that had to resign from Congress and lead to early elections? I mean elections like in Florida. Well, I’m just leaving you with the question.

Ambassador Mike Huckabee — great, great supporter of Israel, there’s no question about it. But was he appointed as a policymaker? Or as the person that is supposed to say the good stuff to the Israelis, as opposed to the leaks coming consistently from the White House that are the bad stuff? Good cop, bad cop? Yeah — I leave my audience with this question.

All kinds of other appointments — I was skeptical about Pete Hegseth as defense secretary, for all kinds of reasons. I was skeptical about National Security Advisor Mike Waltz for all kinds of reasons. I did welcome the appointment, of course, of Marco Rubio as Secretary of State, for all kinds of reasons.

But — you know — instead of getting into every little detail, like this appointment, that appointment, let’s try to talk about three or four particular issues that are typical of what has happened, and still is happening, and would lead me, therefore, to a conclusion at the end of this discussion.

Take, for example, the question of fighting terrorism. Proud American President Donald Trump surrendered. Yes, he surrendered to the Houthis in Yemen. He gave up to terrorists because he allows them, maybe even encourages them indirectly, to keep attacking Israel, but not attacking America. Sure, it’s a pro-American move: “We don’t attack America.” But is it a pillar of your foreign policy to abandon a friend and ally like that?

Cautionizing, legitimizing attacks on Israel by saying, “You can do that. What can I do?”

Donald Trump started the negotiations with Iran with changing views about what the demands from Iran are. And we still don’t know the final outcome of all that. But if the final outcome would be that Iran is still allowed to maintain a nuclear program — even for civilian purposes — it means that he doesn’t do anything different than what the Obama administration did.

Donald Trump put pressure on Israel to stop the war in Lebanon, exactly at the time when Hezbollah was ready to get the final blow from Israel. Yes, in the Lebanese situation, after 11 months of relative inaction by Israel, finally, Netanyahu, under pressure, decided to take the initiative. And it paid off so well to Israel, because this was the area in which you can talk specifically about the total defeat, almost, of the terrorists. Why “almost?” Because something else was needed to finalize the job. And then the American administration put a stop to it.

Donald Trump promised hell to Hamas in Gaza if they don’t release all the hostages within a short period of time. Nothing of this happened, of course. Edan Alexander was released — it is great news, fantastic news — but he is one hostage and an American citizen, which is also raising questions about the division between Americans and Israelis. You fight terrorism, you fight terrorism — it is one problem.

And I can go on with some more examples like this.

Where does it come from? Where was the Israeli reaction? And therefore, how do we put it all in perspective? Where it comes from is Trump’s version of isolationism. And many people will say it’s great, it’s a good American interest. So if that’s an American interest, not to get into war almost at all cost, I will be the last one to criticize it. But I need to mention it in the context of the Middle East. Because what does it mean? It means that we tolerate the terrorists, that we coexist with them. And for the sake of clarity, I will refer not just to people like the Houthis or Hezbollah or Hamas, but Iran.

Donald Trump doesn’t really care, apparently, about the fact that these systems will continue to exist. If he believes that by coming to some accommodation with them, he will be able to tame them, that’s a terrible, terrible mistake. Taming the shrew — ah! Impossible.

But if it falls into the basic tenets of how he views American isolationism and his supporters, then I can understand that there are implications.

Donald Trump wants political solutions that will be short-sighted — short of one situation that he raised and then did nothing about, which I immediately criticized, arguing it’s not going to happen because it’s just not even a half-baked cake. This is the talk about removing all the people of Gaza. It’s — let me use a non-diplomatic word — nonsensical.

But what helps him in that is that, yes, he has done already now some things that are very pro-Israel. He unfroze the embargo on arms to Israel that was basically imposed by Biden. He ordered his people in the UN organizations to continue to support Israel, even though it hasn’t yet come to any big test, like, say, a resolution in the Security Council about possible sanctions against Israel. That remains to be seen.

And at the same time, he makes it very clear that the focal countries of his new policy in the Middle East are the Gulf states: Saudi Arabia and Qatar, mainly, and the UAE, because they have something that Israel doesn’t have. They have the resources, the money.

And to give a kosher certificate, for example, to Qatar is the total opposite of anything which is like fighting terrorism. It is the greatest possible encouragement of terrorism because of what Qatar is and who the Qataris are. It’s as simple as this.

Israel’s paralysis and the waning American umbrella

Josef Olmert: What helps him with all that is — and that brings me back to what we already discussed — the total paralysis of the government of Israel under Benjamin Netanyahu. Netanyahu has no alternatives to anything, has no proposals to anything, has no initiatives — because he cannot do anything if he wants to maintain his current coalition, which is based on some lunatic — I would say lunatic — extreme right-wing parties, led by Israeli Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir and Israeli Minister of Finance Bezalel Smotrich. And for Netanyahu, this is the number one interest.

So even if Netanyahu were to change a little bit on all kinds of issues, or even to a large extent, it may not have changed completely the overall perspective that Trump has about how he should do his own policies and conduct them. But when Netanyahu does nothing and offers nothing, it makes it so much easier.

And that is the same mistake that Netanyahu has done throughout his political career — and definitely when it came also to the Obama administration: to say no with great, polished English is all very nice and easy. But to say yes requires courage, resolve, determination, leadership, which he lacks.

And what happens now is that because of the distance that is being created between Trump and Israel — he’s in the Middle East, but not in Israel. He’s praising Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, he’s meeting the terrorists like Mohammad al-Julani in Syria, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, the model countries for relations with the US. More and more countries are encouraged now to take more and more anti-Israel positions because they believe that the balance is changing. The umbrella of defense provided to Israel by the US is weakening, if not in the process of disappearing — which is, again, something very bad to Israel.

A troubling future for US–Israel relations

Josef Olmert: I can go on and on. I think I’ve said enough to lead me to interim conclusions.

Beware, Israel. The second administration of Donald J. Trump is going to be the greatest challenge to Israeli foreign policy in our memory, definitely in my memory. And I’m not a young person.

Israel will have to understand that America is changing. And with it are changes in American foreign policy, also in the Middle East.

And I will sharpen the point here by saying: The changes about Israel between this administration of Trump and the first one — in terms of the action but also the image, the perceptions — are just so important. These changes will not be the ones that will lead to a rebellion against Trump in the Republican Party, even by the greatest supporters of Israel, short of maybe a few. If there will be a rebellion against him, but it will be over other issues: the effect of the tariffs, the economic situation, the index of living, inflation, success or failure on the southern border and so on and so forth.

And that’s where we are standing, from the perspective of being in Israel now with less and less bipartisan support. If the Republican administration is the one that is changing the way I described, Israel cannot expect the Democrats to pull the chestnuts out of the fire for Israel. That could not happen.

So I have to leave my audience with this perspective: that for those who care about Israel and for Israel — and I’m one of them, of course — this is a very troubling, pessimistic, but I believe realistic assessment of the situation.

Thank you all.

[ and edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article/video are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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The Foreign Policy Game: Cruz Talks, Carlson Scores

Peter Isackson — Thu, 26 Jun 2025 13:37:00 +0000

Tucker Carlson is a media star and an iconic voice of Republican conservatism in the United States. He often provokes strong reactions because of the unconventional positions he sometimes takes. Carlson stands as that rare personality who, however logical or illogical his discourse, always appears to be honest and sincere. Ever since making his declaration of independence in April 2023, when he was asked to Fox News, Carlson toes no one’s line.

As an independent broadcaster, Carlson also dares to break many of the rules, not just of the media culture he has long been a part of. He has also acquired the habit of challenging the nation’s dominant political culture. He made headline news when, shortly after leaving Fox, he dared to carry off a long in the Kremlin with the man whose voice is never allowed to be heard in US media: Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Carlson certainly understood that refusing to talk freely with Putin is part of a strategy designed to leave Western commentators in charge of interpreting Putin’s secret thoughts. They alone know what he is truly thinking, so why bother listening to the man himself? It’s an effective strategy. For example, how many times have we heard from the politicians and the media that once Putin has fully integrated Ukraine into Mother Russia, he will set about conquering Poland, the Baltic States and probably Finland before sending his tanks down France’s Champs-Elysée. Emmanuel Macron, for one, appears to that. As does NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, who not so long ago, according to Defense News, “that Russian President Vladimir Putin wants to ‘wipe Ukraine off the map’ and could come after other parts of Europe next.”

Carlson has since become specialized in long, informal interviews with important people in politics. In the context of the Middle East crisis, last week, Carlson fellow conservative Republican and one-time presidential hopeful, Texan Senator Ted Cruz.

In the course of the interview, Carlson dared to accuse Cruz of being a neocon, ready to intervene and attack foreign countries on the flimsiest of supposedly moral principles. “You’re saying we’re making a moral case,” Carlson claimed at one point, while pointing out that the reasons for attacking Iran, similar to the case of Iraq two decades ago, is being made based on lies. Insisting he isn’t a neocon, at one point Cruz objects: “I’m not in the morality game. I’m in the US interest game.”

�մǻ岹��’s Weekly Devil’s Dictionary definition:

In the game:

An expression popular in the United States to designate the area in which people conduct their professional activities, deemed a sport or competition rather than a vocation because in US culture everyone’s role in society is to maneuver in ways that lead to winning at the expense of everyone else, the “losers.”

Contextual note

Cruz is guilty of nothing more serious than using an easy-to-grasp metaphor to make his point. The expression, “in the game of,” has featured in American English for at least a century. It usually appears in the negative formulation, as a form of denial: “I’m not in the game of X,” an assertion similar to “I’m not in the business of X.”

Cruz’s denial of being in the “morality game” tells us a lot about two things: US political culture in general and Cruz’s own lack of seriousness. Games produce results (wins or losses) and scores. But those results, unlike the results of international conflict, have no permanent effect on society. The senator’s formulation conveys the idea that the matter under discussion is just a game, with no serious stakes. But the matter he evokes is foreign policy — more specifically war and peace — a domain in which the stakes are always serious. We should note, however, that in the US, labeling something as “foreign” means it can only be of marginal interest.

Another distinction will help to understand how US political culture distinguishes between the serious and the trivial. Cruz would never be tempted to talk about what “game” he’s in when discussing immigration policy. Immigration is a “serious” issue that we should never think of in terms of playing a game. Americans treat foreign policy as a distraction, like a team sport. When a war starts, a new season begins. When it ends (as it tends not to do these days), the season is over.

In the same conversation, Cruz has no qualms about contradicting his denial of playing the morality game. At one point, to justify US aggression, he out: “That’s who Iran wants to kill, is all the Jews and all the Americans.”

In other words, he frames the emerging US regime change strategy for Iran in terms of a moral duty to punish an immoral government. His does so on the grounds that people thousands of miles away have a desire to kill Jews and Americans. Carlson laughs at his ignorance of any of the basic facts about Iran, including the size of its population. And clearly Cruz has not tried to explore the meaning of the verbal threats Iranians have been prone to make in the past. Whether it’s “the morality game” or the “control of Middle East oil” game, for him it’s only about who will win or lose. No more of an issue than who will win next year’s Super Bowl.

Historical note

Every culture on earth, throughout history has created, adapted or adopted popular games in which people compete mentally, physically to prove what they are capable of, either individually, collectively or both. The Egyptians and Sumerians invented and played as far back as five thousand years ago. Games provide non-threatening opportunities to simulate, experiment, understand and eventually master complex human activities. Over the course of history, these have been related directly or indirectly to religion, sexuality and marriage, business and, of course, war, most directly alluded to in the game of chess. Though they have no applicable purpose, the skills thus cultivated often play a role in implementing strategies of survival and social organization.

Games are built around formal rules and strictly defined contexts that are designed to avoid confusion with social, political and economic reality. But the relationship between games and living history evolves over time. In modern cultures, particularly in the West, the frontier between those two realms of competitive activity appears to be breaking down. Cruz provides an example of how that may happen. By entertaining the idea that political reality is a game, a contest, in which there are winners and losers, rather than as a kind of social ballet serving to knit a complex fabric of society, our understanding of how the world works is diminished. Within every society, complementary forces interact in a variety of ways to facilitate exchange (of information, goods, language, wealth and the arts). If the distinction between social interaction and games is lost, society’s concept of politics inevitably becomes confused with the violence of war, the ultimate and fatal form of competition.

Our age has elevated the idea of national security as everyone’s top core value. This usually translates as an expanding effort aimed at multiplying the physical and technological means of protecting the status quo of existing governments. The surveillance state becomes a universal ideal. US President Donald Trump clearly shares that mindset. But so did former President Joe Biden.

Trump biographer Michael Wolff is now featured in the media quoting examples of Trump’s captured from phone calls made over the past week leading up to his decision to bomb Iran’s nuclear sites. The litany begins with: “Are they going to win? Is this a winner? Is this game over? They are so good. This is really a showstopper.” The day before authorizing the bombing, Trump said, “If we do this, it needs to be perfect. It needs to be a win. It has to look perfect.” Capping it all, the president summed it up with, “In, boom, out.” In US sport, that is called planning a “buzzer-beater.”

Once upon a time, nations would routinely attempt some form of diplomacy before beginning a war. If it failed, war ensued. In the course of the war, they would then prepare for the diplomatic campaign that would resolve the war. That isn’t what happens in games. And the fact that we no longer see diplomacy at work before a war and that wars are conducted with no “end game” in sight, tells us that civilization has adopted a new set of rules: no rules, other than the logic of force. “Peace through force” in the eyes of Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu translates as “might makes right.”

Although his style was different, Biden also reduced foreign policy to a game. Upon taking office in January 2021, he repeatedly claimed that the world was a contest between two teams: democracies and autocracies. That explains why he didn’t bother , at Putin’s request, to hammer out a framework for European security. The game would be a proxy war.

Trump took the aversion to serious diplomacy one step further when he used officially programmed negotiations as a simple feint in his game strategy that allowed Israel to Iran on the pretext of settling by force the very issue the US claimed it was “negotiating.” That attack included an attempted of Iran’s chief negotiator.

One thing seems to be clear in the wake of the last two US presidencies: concerning the fate of what the Biden team tirelessly vaunted as “the rules-based international order.” For that order, it is truly “game over.”

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The 51�Թ� Devil’s Dictionary.]

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post The Foreign Policy Game: Cruz Talks, Carlson Scores appeared first on 51�Թ�.

Europe’s Reckoning: Genocide in Plain Sight, Diplomacy in Disguise

Peter Isackson — Wed, 21 May 2025 11:29:30 +0000

For the past 19 months, European leaders have attempted to obscure their characterization of what appears to be a clear and consistent pattern of behavior by the Israeli government in its response to the revolt organized by Hamas on October 7, 2023. Most non-political observers with no vested interest in either the Israeli government or Palestinian organizations tend to agree with the assessment of the International Court of Justice from January 2024 that there is a “” case for describing Israel’s actions reported in the period preceding that declaration.

Even at the time, genocide wasn’t a difficult case to make. Whatever it was then has become demonstrably more flagrant today. At the very least, systematic attacks on , explicit acts of and deliberate, organized all fall squarely into the category of war crimes under the Geneva Convention.

Many of the world’s governments, particularly in the West, have preferred to practice what they may think of as a style of “diplomatic discretion” that prevents them from explicitly condemning Israel’s actions. Few have taken any bold steps to use whatever political clout they could muster to prevent Israel from turning a plausible genocide into a fait accompli we Europeans just have to learn to live with. Several European nations have even continued to provide military assistance to Israel throughout the period.

, and are the only members of the European Union to have literally accused Israel of war crimes and followed it up with an . In contrast, Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States have continued to back Israel militarily, even while occasionally hinting to Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu’s government that they would feel more comfortable if he were to tone down the destruction a bit. Italy initially arms exports but later resumed them quietly. “Piano, piano!” Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni seemed to be saying. Bibi, the Israeli virtuoso, naturally interprets her words as an invitation to play, with unusual brio, his latest resounding apocalyptic concert on her keyboard.

Emmanuel Macron’s France, to its credit, has consistently supported UN ceasefire resolutions, knowing the US would veto them, but adamantly refuses to call Israel’s actions genocide, collective punishment or ethnic cleansing. At the same time, it has refused a full arms embargo but, to demonstrate its empathetic rhetoric with a suffering population, has restricted the supply of certain weapons.

In other words, despite a few courageous initiatives from a small minority of governments, the Atlantic alliance — the US, European nations and the EU itself — has remained relatively unified in solidarity with Israel. From the beginning the US has led the fanfare, first under Biden and then, despite a visible change of style, under Israel’s favorite US president of all time, Donald Trump.

Nevertheless, the pressure is mounting and some of the seams appear to be cracking. Just last week, Macron characterized the humanitarian situation in Gaza as “,” adding that it has become “” (��é�徱��). By “unprecedented” he meant that Israel’s conduct today appears to be even worse (��é��) than it was at any earlier point in the campaign. In other words, his complaint is less about the nature of the act than the degree, as if war crimes can simply evolve quantitatively before crossing the distant threshold of genocide. This kind of reasoning enables Macron to maintain a position that falls short not only of having to utter the g-word, but of acting in any concrete way upon his perception of ongoing horror.

Nevertheless, the temperature is clearly rising. France’s state-owned radio news network Radio France Internationale (RFI) that Macron’s government has at least begun thinking about the theoretical tipping point beyond which it becomes necessary to evoke gross violations of international law. “French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot,” RFI informs us, “has voiced his support for reviewing the EU-Israel Association Agreement, amid growing concern over the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.”

Our Devil’s Dictionary has recently highlighted the moral ambiguity associated with prominent political figures who voice “concern.” But Barrot provides another clue about the strength of France’s moral fiber when he proclaims: “This is a legitimate request, and I invite the European Commission to examine it.”

�մǻ岹��’s Weekly Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Legitimate request:

A timidly formulated hope that others will recognize a moral stance unwilling to take the form of a commitment. It contrasts with what the same parties see as an “illegitimate request,” such as firmly demanding the cessation of a genocide.

Contextual note

The French have always cultivated the idea that they are a generous and welcoming people, clearly reflected in Barrot’s promise to “” the European Commission to review its solidarity with a nation credibly engaged in genocide. Note that the invitation aims not at changing the relationship or taking any concrete action, but at examining it.

That attitude of bold moral resoluteness turned out to be too much for the currently disenfranchised leader of the opposition to Macron’s regime, Marine Le Pen, who no need for a review. “Israel is doing what it can in a situation that is extremely difficult,” she charitably explained. Her reasoning may follow a well known pattern: Any nation that would go so far as to invite the opprobrium attached to practicing live-streamed genocide and ethnic cleansing would only do so in response to an extremely difficult situation. Take the case of Nazi Germany, whose regime Marine’s father (and founder of her party) openly . After losing World War I, the German nation found itself humiliated by the victors, saddled with exorbitant reparations to pay that in turn provoked raging inflation that undermined the economy and destabilized the government. The world treated Deutschland as the sole culprit in a war Europe’s leaders had collectively sleepwalked into. In such extremely difficult circumstances, it is natural that only a holocaust could follow.

Le Pen herself has undergone the humiliation and disgrace of being barred by the courts from running in an election, even though the put her in the lead for the 2027 presidential election. That may help explain her current position on Israel, which she expressed in her critique of Macron’s impatience with Israel: “He is constantly increasing his criticism of Israel, perhaps because it is incapable of providing a solution to facilitate the fight against Islamist fundamentalism.” The German example may have convinced Le Pen that when attempting to “provide a solution” the only surefire way of achieving one’s goal is by aiming at a “final solution.”

Historical note

Historical inertia, the patient acceptance of immoral behavior as a fait accompli or feature of the landscape, has become a standard response for leaders like Macron. Le Pen is right to point out that he has no solutions, but that won’t prevent him from defending to the death his right to hold onto power and prevent anyone who might have solutions from applying them. The current class of European leaders has become adept at using the perception of intolerable situations as faits accomplis that can never be seriously questioned as the most convenient way to define and maintain their dangerously confused policies. This is especially true with regard to the two major conflicts they appear committed to: a Ukraine war started and then apparently abandoned by the US, and Israel’s noble “self-defense” against a captive, occupied and confined population whose cowardly soldiers hide behind human shields composed essentially of women and children.

If it didn’t involve the sacrifice of probably more than a million Ukrainians and Russians, the case of Europe’s inertia with regard to Ukraine may appear comic, at least since the return of US President Donald Trump to the White House. The Donald has embarrassingly made it clear he’s ready to pull out of a war his predecessors encouraged Europe to join. The belief initially inculcated by US propaganda that Ukraine has the capacity to win a war designed to humiliate and eventually dismantle Russia is already delusional. But formulating the project of replacing the clout of the US — which under Trump is withdrawing from the fight — and believing that Europe’s commitment could turn the tide is positively surreal.

Europe’s backing of Israel follows the same pattern. Former US President Joe Biden set the tone and Europe followed suit. In this case, NATO solidarity could not provide the pretext, but the logic was identical. The US leads NATO and NATO leads Europe; with or without NATO, the US has led Europe… by the nose. That’s what Europeans have accepted as a “security system” (some would call it a security blanket). It is not limited to Europe and its periphery. It applies even to nations in West Asia. It should be noted that Macron, thanks to his obsession with the idea of “strategic autonomy,” is the rare European leader in recent times to have expressed his desire to refuse the status of vassal to the US. Note that he “desires” to “refuse” which means quite simply that he will not dare to refuse.

The policy of passive conformity with the policies of other nations — Israel and the US — who have fewer qualms about engaging in evil, may now be coming back to bite Europe and France. A group of French “Jurists for the Respect of International Law” (JURDI) have taken legal action, sending a formal (mise en demeure) addressed to the European Commission and the European Council calling for “the immediate suspension of all agreements of cooperation with Israel,” individual sanctions imposed on responsible parties and exclusion of Israel from the SWIFT payment system. These are all measures that the Europeans rapidly applied to Russia following its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

As Le Monde, this is an accusation of “institutional complicity.” Readers will note the radical difference between a mise en demeure (a formal legal act) and a “legitimate request.”��

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of 51�Թ� Devil’s Dictionary.]

[ edited this piece.]

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Does the US Really Want to Annex the Vatican?

Peter Isackson — Wed, 07 May 2025 11:44:14 +0000

The world now awaits the iconic puff of white smoke indicating the election of an individual who may be regarded as holding the unique remaining position of power with a claim to exercising a form of universal moral authority. Whether one accepts that authority or not, we cannot avoid sensing that the authority of every other institutional leader on Earth appears to focus exclusively on something very different from moral logic, if not clearly at odds with it.

The problem today is that moral authority doesn’t carry much weight in a world motivated by financial success and celebrity at the individual level and national security at the collective level. Moral authority, at least in the Western world, persists only amorphously in each individual’s heart — which means nowhere in the shared landscape — and officially in each nation’s laws. Moral standards exist in the form of reigning fashions. Tradition quotes Winston Churchill as the for Stalin’s dismissive question: “How many divisions has the pope?”

So why are so many people willing to put up hard-earned cash to bet on the eventual winner in the race among papabiles? It isn’t just practicing Catholics who feel concerned by the conclave’s decision. An by Rose Morelli on the website LBC informs us that “betting houses are cashing in on the opportunity” as “gamblers’ interest in the future papal rivals even Formula 1 and the Europa League on betting sites.”

And just to reassure us that this isn’t a modern vice associated with late-stage capitalism and its culture of financialized speculation, the article claims that the tradition of betting on the conclave’s decision dates back to 1503. As two popes were elected that year — the unfortunate Pius III died 26 days after his election, some say by poisoning — Morelli doesn’t provide sources to determine which of the two elections got Renaissance bookmakers excited enough to post their odds.

Posterity retains two major associations with Julius II, who lost the first but won the second election in 1503. It was Julius whose idea of commissioning the work to Michelangelo made it possible for today’s visitors to the Vatican to marvel at the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling. Perhaps more significantly, Julius, whom his contemporaries called “the Warrior Pope,” made a major contribution to Italy’s and Europe’s political instability over the subsequent century. His style of papacy transformed the Vatican into a European military empire Stalin might have respected. It helped create the conditions that would eventually lead, four years after the pope’s death in 1513, to Martin Luther’s open revolt against the Vatican’s militarized empire. The pope’s political adventurism set the stage for the humiliating disaster known as the Sack of Rome in 1527.

Pope Francis, whose successor will soon be elected, provided a stark contrast with the popes of half a millennium ago, such as Julius or his predecessor, Alexander VI, the Borgia pope. Could a new “warrior pope” — for example, hailing from a nation committed to war — succeed a Holy Father who famously that all wars are unjust?

USA Today features an by John Bacon with the title, “Will we see the first-ever American pope? How USA’s image could come into play.” It expresses a secret hope regularly evoked in recent decades following the death of a reigning pontiff.

�մǻ岹��’s Weekly Devil’s Dictionary definition:

American pope:

A fantasized historical figure, who speaks Latin and maybe Italian as well as English, but probably not Spanish.

Contextual note

The same article contains this true assertion: “Francis made history as the first pope from Latin America.” A totally logical visitor from Mars — even after colonization by Elon Musk — who happened upon this article would probably struggle with the idea that a “pope from South America” might be succeeded by a “first-ever American pope.” Does “first-ever” mean “second” in English? If so, that might make some sense.

Just asking the question in the title of the article appears to indicate the logical answer to the question. The reason there has never been a pope from the US lies in the hubris contained within Bacon’s use of the word, “American.” Of course, there’s nothing original about applying the term exclusively to things proper to the nation officially known as “The United States of America.” After all, among the five words that compose the nation’s somewhat cumbersome title, one happens to be “America.”

People from the US long ago somewhat presumptuously developed a habit they subsequently shared with the world. It is based on the assumption that, because of the history of US economic, military and cultural dominance, the adjective “American” refers exclusively to one of the three North American nations (Canada, US and Mexico) and not to the entire continent. We have all been conditioned to use language in precisely that way. Particular thanks go to Hollywood, the soft power machine that has used the adjective “American” in so many of its titles: “American Beauty,” “American Psycho,” “American Gangster,” “American Sniper,” “American Hustle,” “American Graffiti,” “American Pie,” to name only a few. And it has celebrated the Marvel superhero, “Captain America.” All that belongs to the broader idea of “the American dream.”

But honestly, wouldn’t it be a generous gesture on the part of a US journalist to acknowledge the Argentine Jorge Mario Bergoglio as the first American pope? It’s true that Papa Francesco was of Italian stock and probably had no true “native American” ancestry. Argentina is, nevertheless, an American state, far more substantially than Idaho or Rhode Island.

Some cultural icons have taken the trouble to make the distinction. Bruce Springsteen described his true origins in the lyrics of “Born in the USA.” Of course, he could do it because he’s a “cool rocking Daddy in the USA.”

Historical note

Springsteen’s song recounts some of the effects of a particularly painful episode in the history of US hubris: the war in Vietnam. That was the period that featured patriotic bumper stickers inciting war protesters to “love America or leave it.” Some chose to stay in America… but in Canada or even Mexico. “Oh, but that’s not what we meant by America,” the dyed-in-the-wool (and authentically sheeplike) owners of the bumper stickers might have objected.

Speaking of Mexico, when visiting Mexico City’s wonderful anthropological museum many decades ago, I’ll never forget the moment when I found myself in a room also occupied by a group of US youngsters. Upon examining the displays and discovering the Mexican symbol of an eagle seizing a snake, one of them shouted out: “They stole our national bird.” This is the same mentality that recently incited US President Donald Trump to claim naming rights over what he wants everyone now to refer to as the “Gulf of America.” We cannot deny that this gulf is located alongside the American continent… but that name could place it anywhere from the North Pole to Tierra del Fuego.

The legendary US architect, Frank Lloyd Wright, conscious of the rich variety of national and regional architectural and cultural traditions that existed across the globe understood the need to offer equal respect to all nations and people. To avoid confusion when speaking about anything pertaining to the US, he coined the word, “Usonian.” Wright spent a significant period of his career designing and building some of the most exquisitely original homes in and around Hollywood. Had he instead worked on movies, adopting the great studios’ mindset during that period, he might have had more success convincing the general public to adopt the epithet Unosian.��

In the USA Today article, Bacon quotes Reverend James Bretzke, a theology professor at John Carroll University in Ohio, who offers an interesting explanation of the real issue the article addresses: Why, even after the reign of an authentic American pope (from a different part of America), the Catholic church has never dared to elect a pope born in the US.

“Bretzke says a pope is a diplomat who must be accepted globally, and the papacy must appear to represent a cross-section of the world. In the past, Italians were viewed within the church as diplomats, so they were more acceptable across ethnic groups − although this appears to be less important now.”

Now that’s a convincing explanation. It has never been more evident — in the current age of former US President Joe Biden and Trump — that despite the superficial differences those two presidents have embodied, they have both maintained a principle that has become sacred in US geopolitics: the rejection of the practice of diplomacy. �մǻ岹��’s US leaders see diplomacy as wastes of time and money, the kind of thing that should be rooted out in the name of “government efficiency” and unipolar rectitude. That has become baked into the contemporary US psyche. It’s something the Vatican cannot afford.

Trump was probably sincere when he, “I’d like to be pope.” That attitude may indicate why so many people find The Donald refreshing. Unlike other presidents, who carefully disguise their intentions by ranting about democracy and human rights, Trump wears his hubris on his sleeve. Hubris only works if you know how to hide it.

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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Gray Ladies, Yellow Journalism and the Hidden Truth of Ukraine

Peter Isackson — Wed, 09 Apr 2025 14:52:17 +0000

In former times, the color gray possessed a nobility it has largely lost in today’s technicolor world. Gray hair was a sign of maturity and wisdom. Reasoning that respected shades of gray signaled deep thought and respect for the complexity of reality. It abhorred sensationalism.

Even after a change of style, the image of the gray lady persists to this day. After more than a century of resistance, on October 16, 1997, The New York Times for the first time used color on its front page. It was a revolution, but its compact text and overly lengthy and poorly articulated articles submerging the reader with mostly (but not always) factual statements convey even to today’s reader an impression of grayness.

In the 20th century, gray had one major thing going for it: It could not be called “yellow.” The late 19th century witnessed the emergence of “yellow journalism,” designed to stir readers’ most extreme emotions, including their appetite for war. Yellow journalism earned its military stripes in February 1898 when William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal featured the: “DESTRUCTION OF THE WAR SHIP MAINE WAS THE WORK OF AN ENEMY.”

With no evidence to support its claim, the Journal blamed Spain, the colonial overlord of Cuba. Within two months of that headline, the United States had declared war on Spain. The settlement of that war four months later instantly turned the US into a global colonial power. The Philippines, Cuba, Puerto Rico and Guam had become its possessions.

Hearst could be proud. His yellow journalism had provoked a successful war of conquest. In contrast, throughout that period the Gray Lady had maintained its measured and fact-based approach in its reporting. Over the ensuing century, the Gray Lady defended its image as the “newspaper of record.”

Modern critics of the NYT may justifiably claim that by the beginning of the 51st century the paper’s color had veered at least to ochre. Judith Miller’s breathless about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction equalled in intensity and ultimate effect Hearst’s exploitation of the sinking of the Maine. Just as effectively as Hearst’s provocation of war against Spain, the NYT literally did its damnedest to justify George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq in March 2023. If Hearst’s war had the effect of vastly expanding US dominion, the assault on Iraq constituted a major step towards producing the increasingly complex quagmire visible today in the Middle East.

The NYT has never been alone in its encouragement of US wars. But it continues to eschew sensationalism. The Gray Lady’s sober prose has nevertheless proved itself fully compatible with the goals and achievements of the most successful yellow journalism. Readers can savor the latest example of it in a meticulously documentedMarch 29 by Adam Entous bearing the title: “The Partnership: The Secret History of the War in Ukraine?” Instead of pushing for a new war, the article seeks to convince readers that the wonderful war the US has been secretly engaged in for three years in Ukraine was well worth waging. Its final sentence, quoting former US President Joe Biden’s Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin, expresses a hope against hope that it might even continue. “Ladies and gentlemen, carry on.”

But let’s take a closer look at this sample of Entous’s Gray Lady prose. Even when he attempts to be even-handed, he can produce absurdly self-serving sentences such as this one: “The Ukrainians sometimes saw the Americans as overbearing and controlling — the prototypical patronizing Americans. The Americans sometimes ��ǳܱ��’t understand why the Ukrainians didn’t simply accept good advice.”

�մǻ岹��’s Weekly Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Good advice:

Anything US politicians and military experts have to say because, by definition, they are known to be “a force for good” in the world.

Contextual note

The message of the article can be summarized in three ideas. The magnanimous US political and military complex generously offered a partnership with victimized Ukraine. It did so in secret to better ensure its efficacy. Though the enterprise ultimately failed, producing massive loss of lives and a nation in ruins, the US can stand tall for having done its utmost. It would have succeeded if only the Ukrainians had lived up to the terms of the partnership.

Entous makes his contempt for the Ukrainians clear when he adds “simply” to the remark about not accepting good advice. This is just one example of the author’s and newspaper’s studied capacity to craft its Gray Lady style in such a way that contorted moral reasoning and militaristic self-aggrandizement seem like natural features of the geopolitical landscape described.

Consider Entous’s eloquent characterization of the collaborative arrangement engineered by the US. He calls it a “partnership of intelligence, strategy, planning and technology” that “would become the secret weapon in what the Biden administration framed as its effort to both rescue Ukraine and protect the threatened post-World War II order.” Two complementary noble ends which no citizen of the democratic West could possibly call into question.

But it doesn’t stop there. Entous warns us that the global order is on the brink, because “that order — along with Ukraine’s defense of its land — teeters on a knife edge, as President Trump seeks rapprochement with Mr. Putin.” This makes it clear that the Ukrainians aren’t the only ones refusing to follow good advice. Biden’s successor in the White House is also to blame.

Since at least 2015, the NYT’s ochre journalism finds itself in its comfort zone whenever criticism of Donald Trump is required. Our Devil’s Dictionary has in the past exposed the paper’s shameless and deeply hypocritical commitment to Russiagate during Trump’s first term, for example here and here.

In the author’s eyes, there’s plenty of blame to go around: Russia of course, for what the NYT has always called its “unprovoked” aggression, but also Trump and the Ukrainians. Only the personnel of the US military industrial complex and the Biden administration can stand tall. When you think of it, this isn’t very different from Trump’s tendency to categorize everyone, including allies, as enemies trying to take advantage of the US. All but Israel, that is.

Historical note

As a member of the Gray Lady’s team, Entous deserves applause for daring to produce this “untold story” that boldly contradicts the narrative his paper has been developing over the past three years. It has consistently denied the US was doing anything other than empathetically responding to Ukraine’s repeated appeals for assistance. Entous brings us out of the fog by clarifying the true history of the kinetic war in Ukraine, even as he simultaneously displays a studied indifference to the far more complex history of betrayed agreements (Minsk) and declined negotiations that over the span of eight years made the conflict ineluctable.

At one point, Entous gloats over what he refers to as the “New York Times investigation” he himself conducted. It “reveals that America was woven into the war far more intimately and broadly than previously understood.” Understood by whom? By readers of the NYT? He appears blissfully unaware of the fact that multiple experts such as former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter, Colonel Douglas Macgregor or former CIA Russia analyst Ray McGovern were describing that reality in alternative media as early as the spring of 2022.

Here are some notable examples of the reality that was hidden from the public before Entous’s article:

“A vast American intelligence-collection effort both guided big-picture battle strategy and funneled precise targeting information down to Ukrainian soldiers in the field.

One European intelligence chief recalled being taken aback to learn how deeply enmeshed his N.A.T.O. counterparts had become in Ukrainian operations. “They are part of the kill chain now,” he said.

“In some ways, Ukraine was, on a wider canvas, a rematch in a long history of U.S.-Russia proxy wars — Vietnam in the 1960s, Afghanistan in the 1980s, Syria three decades later.

It was also a grand experiment in war fighting, one that would not only help the Ukrainians but reward the Americans with lessons for any future war.”

Readers should note how Entous evokes other fields of endeavor to establish the legitimacy of US policy. The “wider canvas” evokes the world of art; “a rematch,” sport and the “grand experiment,” science. In short, the US’s actions in Ukraine were the work of an advanced civilization, conscious of its commitment to the arts, to high level athletic competition and science. These are truly cultivated kill chains.

It’s a pity the chaotic Ukrainians weren’t able to follow such good civilized advice.

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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Outside the Box: AI Is Not of Our World

Peter Isackson — Mon, 07 Apr 2025 12:47:59 +0000

Politicians and military strategists constitute a tiny segment of the population but have an inordinate influence over our lives. They also exist in a space-time continuum a little different, at least in scale, from the rest of humanity. They spend much of their time and most of their mental energy trying to balance two operations: predicting the future and acting to influence it. Journalists sometimes think of themselves as belonging to that category of humankind. Although theoretically focused on recounting past events and describing the present, they participate in the game of predicting the future. Their influence on the future is indirect at best.

Artificial intelligence also observes history as it unfolds. But it does so with a multitude of eyes and an undefined diversity of viewpoints. Because it assembles all viewpoints, it lacks its own viewpoint. That means that for AI history unfolds not, as it does for us, in the form of perceived and remembered sequences of events whose meaning changes with each new perception in time, but in the form of written discourse produced by others in the past.

A central feature of the operational gap between human and artificial intelligence is the space created between an event and the account of an event. Humans perceive that gap subjectively as composed of causality — by definition, uncertain and incomplete — and duration, the sense we have of the time for an event to unfold and the lapse of time between successive events. Subjectivity is dynamic and even when dealing with the past and future exists in the present. AI can only simulate subjectivity. When it claims to have a point of view, it is quite simply hallucinating.

AI’s time rootlessness

I frequently interrogate AI chatbots about the meaning of current historical trends or unfolding dramas. But this can be frustrating because, as my experiment revealed, AI will always be lagging. It simply does not share our human time frame. Although it can muster a plethora of pertinent facts, this non-existent time frame puts it at a significant remove from what we perceive as historical reality.

I ran an experiment with ChatGPT and DeepSeek that threw some valuable light on the phenomenon. It demonstrated to me that AI may indeed possess intelligence, but it will always be yesterday’s intelligence. I devised a prompt intended to remove the ambiguous impression given by the kind of contradictory statements we often hear from those we refer to as “world leaders.”

Europeans find themselves in a historical quandary whose outcome will determine a future that will play out somewhere between the extremes of war and peace, of prosperity and devastation. The debate focuses on the ongoing discussions aiming at recalibrating NATO’s strategy in the months and years to come. This is precisely the kind of problem that should incite us to solicit AI’s insight to help clarify the choices we as citizens face in democratic societies.

I sincerely hoped that AI could help me understand what lies beneath the surface of a surprising assertion made this past week by Mark Rutte, NATO’s general secretary. Reacting to the wish that US President Donald Trump’s administration apparently has to disengage from Europe and focus on China, Rutte that, within the existing NATO framework, “we have to be aware of what is happening in the Indo-Pacific. That’s the reason why we have that close cooperation.”

This didn’t seem to me totally logical. Wishing for clarification I formulated the following prompt, which I addressed to ChatGPT and DeepSeek.

“NATO chief Mark Rutte explained ‘that it is understandable, also for the US, that over time, they want to focus more and more also on that part of the world, and it is only logical for the Europeans to step up even more.’ This seems to indicate a vision of the evolution of NATO that turns it into an alliance challenging the entire globe or at least northern hemisphere, with two complementary forces governed by a common goal, one facing west and the other east. The US would take responsibility for the Pacific and East Asia while Europe would challenge Russia. And this would all take place within one alliance: NATO.

How realistic is this vision? It seems compromised by the very person whose positions and actions provoke this hypothesis: Donald Trump and his refusal to commit to supporting the Ukraine war. Is it reasonable to imagine Trump would agree to still being attached to the terms of the NATO alliance, which would oblige the US to back up an autonomous European command that attempted on its own to manage a war with Russia?

If it is not realistic, what does this say about the likelihood of NATO surviving or the risk of its demise? If it is imaginable, what would Europe have to do to convince Trump to align with this vision? Does Europe have the capacity to create those conditions?”

ChatGPT offered some solid analysis that began with this paragraph:

“This is a rich and timely question—one that gets at the fault lines in NATO today and the deeper strategic evolution that may be underway, or at least imagined by figures like Mark Rutte.

How realistic is this vision of NATO bifurcating its strategic focus (US to Pacific, Europe to Russia)?

On paper, it’s a coherent and even elegant vision—an alliance that adapts to global multipolarity by dividing its weight according to geography and strategic interest. In practice, however, this vision collides with several structural and political realities:”

ChatGPT developed three points in detail before concluding that Rutte’s “vision is aspirational, but not yet realistic.” It then offered detailed reflection on two more topics — “Trump: Obstacle or Catalyst?” and “If it’s not realistic, what does that say about NATO’s future?” — before concluding with this surprising observation:

“If Trump wins in 2024 and continues to signal disengagement, NATO’s coherence may not survive another four years. The alliance’s survival depends on either continued US commitment or the rapid and credible emergence of European strategic autonomy—a capacity that remains largely aspirational.”

“Wait a minute,” I reacted. “Don’t you know that Trump not only won in 2024 but has been sowing havoc in the global order for more than two months?” ChatGPT apparently cannot comprehend that it and we are living in two different epochs!

My next instinct was to ask myself: What would a different chatbot tell me? Would its discourse belong to today’s world or yesterday’s? To the same prompt, DeepSeek announced from the start that it was still living in a world order dominated by former US President Joe Biden’s politics:

“Your analysis raises important questions about NATO’s future, particularly in light of shifting U.S. priorities toward Asia and the potential return of Donald Trump to the White House. Let’s break this down.”

As I had already discovered in my exchanges with ChatGPT about contemporary matters, even when the chatbot claims to be up-to-date it will admit, when challenged, that it lacks “real-time awareness.” Here was the apology it offered when I accused it of being ignorant of Trump’s victory:

“Good catch! My default time frame is the present moment (March 2025), but since I don’t have real-time awareness of political events unless I look them up, I was working under the assumption that Biden was still in office. If Trump or another candidate has taken over, that would obviously change the dynamics dramatically.”

We all admire AI’s ability to imitate human behavior. But do humans rely on “default time frames?” And, logically speaking, what does it mean when the chatbot claims to have the capacity to “look up” the reality of the present moment? You “look up” what has already been “put down” on paper. Humans “look up” information about the past, but literally “look out” — within their current spacetime — to discover the present through their senses.

Furthermore, when AI admits it is constructed not out of real knowledge but assumptions, such as Biden still being in office in March or April of 2025, we can understand not only that statements about contemporary events are likely to be inaccurate, but, more significantly and profoundly, that AI’s intelligence is fundamentally different from our own.

That important point we need to bear in mind in all our interactions with AI is helpfully complemented by another: its honesty about its ambiguous relationship with time, although we should note that it is only forthcoming when challenged.

The simple conclusion is that AI can be very helpful in unearthing registered facts and identifying relationships between them. It can signal interesting things to think about based on its ability to correlate different facts and elements of reasoning. But we must always remember it lives in a different world, a world from which time has been excluded.

The 17th century poet, Andrew Marvell began his most famous , “To His Coy Mistress” with this line:

“Had we but world enough and time.”

AI has world enough… but it clearly lacks a sense of what Marvell called “time’s winged chariot” that was “hurrying near.”

Back in the late 1960s, long before anyone even thought about AI, my mentor at the University of California, Los Angeles, the late Thomas Clayton, claimed that the real Turing test concerning a computer’s potential for creativity could be summed up in the question: Can a computer produce “To His Coy Mistress?” It wasn’t a fair question because only one human being in history proved capable of doing that. But Tom had indirectly put his finger on the real question: Can AI deal with time?

The answer is, today it cannot. My conclusion is that until a computer can feel time’s winged chariot hurrying near, it never will.

My conclusions

Both chatbots offered valuable “speculative” insights. But instead of helping me understand what I perceived as the embarrassed and somewhat embarrassing “logic” promulgated by Rutte, both chatbots taught me a different lesson that can be summed up in two main points. The first is confirmation of the seriousness of the historical moment we are now living in. The world before and after Trump 2.0 has undergone a radical change, which should make us realize that what’s to come will be even more radically different than what we are already seeing.

The second is what this episode tells us about AI’s relationship with time, or rather its lack of a relationship with the present. It points to a major and probable unsurmountable difference between human and artificial intelligence. AI has a distinct advantage when talking about the past. It remembers more than we do. But it remembers the past as a discourse about the past, not as a dynamic process. We are equal in our relationship to the future, since the future is not built quantitatively but is famously subject to the “.” As for the present, that is our world. That is who we are. We don’t depend on an algorithmically programmed�� “default time frame.”

Your thoughts

Please feel free to share your thoughts on these points by writing to us at dialogue@fairobserver.com. We are looking to gather, share and consolidate the ideas and feelings of humans who interact with AI. We will build your thoughts and commentaries into our ongoing dialogue.

*[Artificial Intelligence is rapidly becoming a feature of everyone’s daily life. We unconsciously perceive it either as a friend or foe, a helper or destroyer. At 51�Թ�, we see it as a tool of creativity, capable of revealing the complex relationship between humans and machines.]

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial��policy.

The post Outside the Box: AI Is Not of Our World appeared first on 51�Թ�.

Trump Turns in His Chessboard for a Deck of Cards

Peter Isackson — Wed, 19 Mar 2025 13:24:13 +0000

It all began on February 28 at the most climactic geopolitical moment of 2025, when Volodymyr Zelenskyy confronted an increasingly aggressive tagteam composed of US President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance in the Oval Office. Losing patience with the Ukrainian president who was clearly begging for reassurance that the US would not veer away from the policies of former President Joe Biden’s administration over the past three years, Trump out: “You right now are not in a very good position. You’ve allowed yourself to be in a very bad position. You don’t have the cards right now. With us, you start having the cards.”

Perhaps failing to process the deeper meaning of the metaphor, Zelenskyy replied, “I’m not playing cards. I’m very serious, Mr. President. I’m very serious.” This was followed by Trump’s retort: “You’re gambling with lives of millions of people, you’re gambling with World War III, and what you’re doing is very disrespectful to this country.”

We may be witnessing the birth of a linguistic trend. The United Kingdom’s Foreign Secretary, David Lammy, picked up Trump’s metaphor and it to the unfolding drama concerning an eventual ceasefire in Ukraine.

“If Putin does not deliver, and I must tell the house that I currently see no sign yet that he is, the G7 meeting helped us ready the tools to get Russia to negotiate seriously. We’re not waiting for the Kremlin. If they reject a ceasefire, we have more cards that we can play.”

�մǻ岹��’s Weekly Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Cards to play:

According to the context, it can refer to physical or financial resources, personal or national prestige, or one of many other expressions in English, such as “the gall to,” the “gumption” or “guts” or even the more vulgar “have the balls to.”

Contextual note

The dollar has dominated global trade for 80 years. US soft power has had a similar success as it managed to spread US brands, movies and fast food across every national boundary. Once articulated thanks to the subtleties of the French language, diplomacy has now been redesigned in the US of A and exported around the globe. Less than 30 years ago, a political actor and thinker such as Zbigniew Brzezinski could evoke the metaphor of the noble game of chess to evoke the logic of international relations. Trump and Lammy have redefined it as a game of poker.

Even amateur chess players know that the tactic at the core of poker’s logic — the art of bluff — has no role to play in chess. On the chessboard everything is visible and subject to very precise laws of movement and interaction. Chess players spend years refining their understanding of the complexity of the interactions that define the game. It requires an absolute respect for rules and the ability to anticipate and react to an opponent’s strategies and moves.

Poker’s logic turns around one simple concept and one tactical variant: winning cards and dissembling. Cards acquire meaning through random groupings. Otherwise they are meaningless.

Poker is to chess what astrology is to astronomy. Our perception of the constellations from the vantage point of Earth is a matter of pure chance. Those groupings have no correlative meaning in reality. The appearance of the meaning announced by astrologers is the result of pure chance. Astronomy seeks to determine real relationships and account for plays of force.

Lammy’s explanation of how he sees diplomacy reveals how the mindset of modern diplomats more closely resembles that of a poker player than a chess player.

“We can all see the impact the G7’s unprecedented sanctions have had on Russia’s faltering economy; social spending down, inflation and interest rates sky high. There can be no let up in our efforts.

In Canada we discussed where we can go further to target their energy and defence sectors, further squeeze their oil revenues and use frozen Russian assets. At the same time we will keep up our support to Ukraine – Europeans clearly need to shoulder our share of this responsibility.”

Because there is no dialogue, no real interplay, the tactic devised takes no serious account of the adversary’s strategy. It’s simply a question of measuring the potential power of the hand one holds. In the current context, we should note that most objective observers see Europe and the various European countries as being in a position of singular weakness. Having for decades accepted subordination to the whims of the US, Europe holds no cards in its own hand capable of winning the kind of game they imagine they are playing against Russia. Instead, their stated belief in their means to achieve victory appears to be nothing more than bombast and bravado.

This strategy can be summed up in a single word: bluff.

Historical note

The game of chess apparently emerged in India somewhere around the 6th century, inspired by the metaphor of warfare. Initially called “,” it simulated a battle between four divisions of the Indian military: infantry, cavalry, elephants and chariots. Chess players use their understanding of combinatorial possibilities to devise and apply a strategic plan leveraging the force required to penetrate the opponent’s defense while protecting their king, who represents the integrity of the society and army engaged in battle. The winner’s reward is essentially the satisfaction of having successfully weathered the attack of the opponent and proved one’s strategic capacity and tactical skills. Along the way, pawns and other pieces are sacrificed before one of the kings can be faced with imminent extinction through a declaration of checkmate.

In other words, chess contains high drama based on the metaphorical stakes of life and death. As it is usually paid, the aim is not to kill or obtain material gain, but rather to demonstrate skill. The reward is the respect one earns for the demonstration of one’s skills.

In contrast, success at poker relies on understanding how pure chance may or may not play out in the course of a game whose winning configurations are hidden from view. The player has limited choices that can only be executed through the act of betting. Essentially, the player can do two things: bet in a meaningful or intentionally deceptive way and, to some extent, vary one’s demeanor in a way that might lead the opponent to guess wrongly about the cards one holds in one’s hand. Unlike chess, where winning serves to confirm the player’s skill, poker plays focus on taking the winnings rather than proving their skills.

The American geopolitical strategist Zbigniew Brzezinski was Polish. In Eastern Europe, the game of chess has, for centuries, been honored and cherished, breeding a culture that privileges the notion of strategy, which it unambiguously deems nobler than the naked greed of the poker player. Generations of aristocrats, but also their bourgeois successors in the 19th century, viewed chess not just as a game but as a tool developing their sense of cultural competition and exchange. It stands as a symbol of the intellectual and strategic prowess that can be deployed in adversarial situations of international tension.

A major cultural shift took place in the 20th century. Two World Wars reframed the very idea of war that had now come to be seen essentially as a contest for economic domination that could be carried out with modern means of massive destruction. With an ever-increasing emphasis on economic and monetary gain, the idea of proving one’s strategic skills to achieve geopolitical status gave way to the obsession with securing resources and wealth. Quite naturally, poker replaced chess as the apposite metaphor for the conduct of international relations in a world in which diplomacy has taken a back seat.

Busy with doing deals, Trump probably never had time for chess. Why should he, since it holds no obvious key to wealth? But a review of Biden’s diplomacy reveals a similar disinterest for the subtlety of strategic interaction. Biden may not have thought of himself as a poker player, but he definitely was no chess player. Nor was his choice to lead whatever he believed might fall into the category of diplomacy: former Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

In the 21st century, nations are playing with two-dimensional cards. They long ago abandoned the artistically sculpted figures of traditional chess pieces.

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post Trump Turns in His Chessboard for a Deck of Cards appeared first on 51�Թ�.

Outside the Box: AI’s Honest Take on Europe’s Ambiguity, Part 2

Peter Isackson — Tue, 18 Mar 2025 13:17:34 +0000

In Part 1, we discussed the current surprisingly extreme rhetoric used by some European leaders in reaction to their sense of having been betrayed by the United States’s new Trump administration concerning the war in Ukraine. ChatGPT judged that “the current geopolitical landscape has prompted leaders to adopt more assertive stances, which, while aiming to address security challenges, may also influence domestic political dynamics and public engagement.” It cited French President Emmanuel Macron’s emphasis on the necessity for Europe to strengthen its military capabilities and reduce reliance on external powers,” as well as UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s “plans to revitalize Britain’s economy and public sector efficiency, linking national security with domestic renewal.”

At the same time, the chatbot worries “that leaders resorting to bellicose rhetoric to enhance their authority may bypass traditional democratic processes, leading to a disconnect between government actions and public sentiment.” Because of the risks, it maintains that “it is crucial to balance these actions with robust democratic engagement to ensure that measures taken do not inadvertently weaken the democratic institutions they seek to protect.”

Up to this point, the discussion remained theoretical. As often, ChatGPT recommended a balanced approach, avoiding risks and preserving stability. But, given what we know about Europe today, is that realistic? I continued the conversation with the following prompt:

“All these suggestions may sound reasonable to the leaders who are looking to promote a vision of unified Europe standing tall on the global stage. But aren’t its vulnerabilities obvious? Does it make sense to talk in these terms, at least on the UK side, after Brexit? Isn’t there already a debt crisis that will only be aggravated by these projected plans? Isn’t it also obvious that achieving unanimity within Europe’s 27 nations is unthinkable, but that the notion of a ‘coalition of the willing’ is far more absurd today, when there is no powerful designated leader to organize it, as was the case for George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq? Even in those circumstances, the effort proved to be a long-term fiasco. Am I wrong to think that Europeans themselves, the voters, will remain skeptical of the bombast and excessive optimism? There are personalities such as Dominique de Villepin who are attempting to put forward a somewhat different vision. But is there room for a different vision of Europe today, given the attitude shared by the current elected and non-elected leaders, such as Ursula von der Leyen?”

ChatGPT reacted with a dose of political and economic reality that appears to pour cold water on its previously-affirmed cautious optimism.

“Your skepticism is well-founded, and it aligns with many of the critical fault lines that could hinder Europe’s ambitious defense and geopolitical aspirations. Let’s break down the key vulnerabilities and contradictions:

The Fragility of the Unified Europe Narrative

European leaders, particularly Macron and von der Leyen, present a vision of Europe as a sovereign geopolitical power, capable of defending itself and asserting influence on the global stage.
However, the realities of economic distress, political fragmentation, and military dependence on the US suggest that this vision may be more rhetorical than practical.
Even within EU defense discussions, Germany, France, and Eastern European states differ in their approaches—with Poland and the Baltics favoring a US-centric NATO approach, while Macron pushes for ‘strategic autonomy’, which lacks real military backing.

Brexit and the UK’s Role in European Defense

The UK is no longer bound by EU decision-making, making its participation in these defense plans far less certain.
British defense strategy is still tightly linked to the US and NATO, meaning any idea of a European-led military force that includes the UK is largely wishful thinking.
Moreover, Brexit itself was driven partly by skepticism toward grand European integration projects—so UK voters may not see these proposals as viable or desirable.

The Debt Crisis and Economic Constraints

The EU’s economic reality is already strained:
- High debt burdens in France, Italy, and Spain.
- Rising interest rates, making new borrowing for defense spending more costly.
- Lack of fiscal unity, with northern European countries (Germany, Netherlands) resisting major joint spending plans.
��If European defense spending follows the model of past crises (such as the Eurozone bailout), it could exacerbate economic inequalities and public discontent.

The Problem of Consensus and the Illusion of a “Coalition of the Willing”

During the Iraq War, the US was the clear leader, and even then, the coalition was shaky and ultimately failed to achieve its long-term goals.
Today, Europe lacks a single dominant military or political power capable of leading such a coalition.
Macron might aspire to this role, but Germany’s reluctance to engage militarily and the diverging interests of Eastern and Southern Europe make true unity implausible.
Eastern European countries—particularly Poland and the Baltic states—prioritize NATO over EU-led initiatives, making a purely European military effort unlikely.

Public Skepticism Toward Militarization and Bombastic Rhetoric

European voters have traditionally been cautious about military interventions, especially in France, Germany, and Italy.
The failure of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars lingers in public memory, reinforcing skepticism toward open-ended military commitments.
Polls suggest that support for Ukraine is conditional—many Europeans favor continued aid, but not at the cost of long-term economic hardship or direct military intervention.
Far-right and far-left parties across Europe (e.g., AfD in Germany, Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise, Salvini’s Lega) are capitalizing on this skepticism by opposing expanded military commitments.

Is There Space for an Alternative Vision?

Figures like Dominique de Villepin, who famously opposed the Iraq War, are advocating for a more diplomatic, cautious European foreign policy.
The problem is that current European leadership (von der Leyen, Macron, Scholz, and others) is deeply aligned with US priorities.
Mainstream European political parties (center-right and center-left) are largely in lockstep when it comes to positioning Europe as a strategic actor in global security.
The European Parliament lacks real influence over foreign policy, and the European Council (where heads of state make decisions) is dominated by those favoring a militarized approach.

Final Thoughts: Can Europe Chart a Different Course?

Europe’s leaders are promoting a vision of military strength and unity that lacks both financial and political foundations. The public remains skeptical, debt levels are high, and deep fractures exist among member states. The real risk is that leaders, driven by bombastic rhetoric, may commit to policies without true democratic legitimacy, further alienating voters and weakening democratic institutions.

A different vision, based on diplomacy, de-escalation, and economic stability, exists but currently lacks strong political champions at the highest levels. Whether figures like de Villepin or emerging opposition movements can shift the debate remains an open question—but for now, the dominant leadership is pushing Europe toward a more militarized, high-risk posture that may prove economically and politically unsustainable.

Most of ChatGPT’s response seemed to me very pertinent. There was one assertion, however, that seemed to me to be totally erroneous. I chose to challenge the chatbot on this particular point.

“In one of your responses above you stated that ‘The problem is that current European leadership (von der Leyen, Macron, Scholz, and others) is deeply aligned with US priorities.’ This seems to me mistaken, unless you’re referring to US priorities under Joe Biden. The anguish in Europe today seems to turn around the shift in US priorities under Trump. Can you clarify this?”

“You’re absolutely right to raise this point. My statement was imprecise. When I said that ‘current European leadership… is deeply aligned with US priorities,’ I was referring specifically to the Biden administration’s stance—supporting Ukraine, reinforcing NATO, and advocating a militarized deterrence strategy against Russia.

However, as you note, the real tension in Europe stems from uncertainty about the future of US priorities, particularly with the possibility of a second Trump presidency. Trump’s approach—his skepticism toward NATO, transactional view of alliances, and suggestion that European nations should bear more of their own security costs—has created deep anxiety among European leaders.

This explains why figures like Macron, von der Leyen, and even Scholz (despite his cautious approach) have begun discussing the need for European strategic autonomy. The problem is that Europe is structurally dependent on the US for defense, making real autonomy difficult to achieve, especially in the short term. So while they align with Biden’s policies today, they are also trying to hedge against a potential future in which the US disengages or shifts to a more isolationist stance.

Would you agree that this uncertainty—rather than a simple alignment or divergence with US policy—is at the heart of Europe’s current dilemma?”

Some lessons about ChatGPT raised by this dialogue

Just as many people have noticed that when asked to produce an image, AI often demonstrates its deep concerning left and right, this example reveals that ChatGPT has a serious problem with time. In this example, it reflected on statements made in the past month by European leaders, but it is assuming that Joe Biden is still the US president and that US policies are Biden’s policies.

In its initial response, the chatbot clearly assumed that Biden was calling the shots. In its reaction to my correction, it revealed that it believes Donald Trump has not yet become president. Its time frame is clearly prior to Trump’s election last November, since it evokes “the possibility of a second Trump presidency.”

In the first year or so after ChatGPT’s launch, it frankly admitted, with a formal disclaimer, that it had no information about events after September 2021. In 2025, it no longer informs us of the limits of its chronological perspective.

Does that invalidate its answer? Not really, because the Europeans, in contrast with the US, have not deviated from their former policy. So long as we are speaking of Europeans, its observations remain valid. But this gaffe does tell us something worth noting: that when we are dialoguing with AI we do not exist in the same time frame. Moreover, it raises the question of how time has been built into AI’s algorithms.

This highlights a fundamental difference between AI and human intelligence. We cannot remove ourselves from the consciousness of time as a structural factor in our environment. Those who claim AI will someday achieve and even surpass human consciousness should take note of this radical difference. It isn’t a simple gap of awareness of history. If we evoke the question of sentience as the essential component of consciousness, the perception of time for humans remains fundamental. It isn’t a question of tracking and measuring the intervals between events, it’s our permanent awareness of the present.

With these thoughts in mind, I asked ChatGPT another question:

“Actually, I’m intrigued by the question of why you seemed to believe Biden is still president? What is your time frame?”

Would you like me to check the latest updates on the U.S. presidency and its impact on Europe’s strategic calculations?”

This answer complicates the ambiguity of the time factor, a topic I will come back to in a future column.

Your thoughts

[Artificial Intelligence is rapidly becoming a feature of everyone’s daily life. We unconsciously perceive it either as a friend or foe, a helper or destroyer. At 51�Թ�, we see it as a tool of creativity, capable of revealing the complex relationship between humans and machines.]

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial��policy.

The post Outside the Box: AI’s Honest Take on Europe’s Ambiguity, Part 2 appeared first on 51�Թ�.

Is This the Beginning or the End of a New Cold War?

Medea Benjamin — Sun, 16 Mar 2025 13:22:28 +0000

When EU leaders met in Brussels on February 6 to discuss the war in Ukraine, French President Emmanuel Macron this time “a turning point in history.” Western leaders agree that this is a historic moment when decisive action is needed, but what kind of action depends on their interpretation of the nature of this moment.

Is this the beginning of a new Cold War between the United States, NATO and Russia or the end of one? Will Russia and the West remain implacable enemies for the foreseeable future, with a new iron curtain between them through what was once the heart of Ukraine? Or can the US and Russia resolve the disputes and hostility that led to this war in the first place, so as to leave Ukraine with a stable and lasting peace?

The Cold War repeats itself

Some European leaders see this moment as the beginning of a long struggle with Russia, akin to the beginning of the Cold War in 1946, when Winston Churchill that “an iron curtain has descended” across Europe.

On March 2, echoing Churchill, European Council President Ursula von der Leyen that Europe must turn Ukraine into a “steel porcupine.” President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said he wants up to 200,000 European troops on the eventual ceasefire line between Russia and Ukraine to “guarantee” any peace agreement. He insists that the US provide a “backstop,” meaning a commitment to send US forces to fight in Ukraine if war breaks out again.

Russia has repeatedly said it to NATO forces being based in Ukraine under any guise. “We explained today that the appearance of armed forces from the same NATO countries, but under a false flag, under the flag of the European Union or under national flags, does not change anything in this regard,” Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on February 18. “Of course this is unacceptable to us.”

But the UK is persisting in a campaign to recruit a “coalition of the willing,” the same term the US and UK coined for the list of countries they persuaded to support the invasion of Iraq in 2003. In that case, only Australia, Denmark and Poland took in the invasion. Costa Rica publicly insisted on being from the list, and the term was widely lampooned as the “coalition of the billing” because the US recruited so many countries to join it by promising them lucrative foreign aid deals.

Far from the start of a new Cold War, US President Donald Trump and other leaders see this moment as more akin to the end of the original Cold War, when US President Ronald Reagan and Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev met in Reykjavik, Iceland, in 1986 and to bridge the divisions caused by 40 years of Cold War hostility.

Like Trump and Putin today, Reagan and Gorbachev were unlikely peacemakers. Gorbachev had risen through the ranks of the Soviet Communist Party to become its General Secretary and Soviet Premier in March 1985, in the midst of the Soviet war in Afghanistan. He didn’t begin to Soviet forces from Afghanistan until 1988. Reagan oversaw an unprecedented Cold War arms build-up, a in Guatemala and covert and proxy wars throughout Central America. And yet Gorbachev and Reagan are now widely remembered as peacemakers.

While Democrats deride Trump as a Putin stooge, in his first term in office, Trump was actually responsible for escalating the Cold War with Russia. After the Pentagon had milked its absurd, self-fulfilling “War on Terror” for trillions of dollars, it was Trump and his defense secretary, General “Mad Dog” Mattis, who declared the shift back to strategic competition with Russia and China as the Pentagon’s new gravy train in their 2018 National Defense Strategy. It was also Trump who lifted President Barack Obama’s restrictions on sending to Ukraine.

The dissolution of European peacemaking

Trump’s head-spinning about-face in US policy has left its European allies with whiplash and reversed the roles they each have played for generations. France and Germany have traditionally been the and peacemakers in the Western alliance. Meanwhile, the US and UK have been infected with a chronic case of war fever that has proven resistant to a long string of military defeats and catastrophic impacts on every country that has fallen prey to their warmongering.

In 2003, France’s Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin led the to the invasion of Iraq in the UN Security Council. France, Germany and Russia issued a joint to say that they would “not let a proposed resolution pass that would authorize the use of force. Russia and France, as permanent members of the Security Council, will assume all their responsibilities on this point.”

At a press conference in Paris with then-German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, French President Jacques Chirac , “Everything must be done to avoid war… As far as we’re concerned, war always means failure.”

As recently as 2022, after Russia invaded Ukraine, it was once again the US and UK that and blocked peace negotiations in favor of a long war, while , and continued to call for new negotiations, even as they gradually fell in line with the US policy.

Former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder took part in the peace negotiations in Turkey in March and April 2022 and then flew to Moscow at Ukraine’s request to meet with Putin. In a 2023 with German newspaper Berliner Zeitung, Schröder confirmed that the peace talks only failed “because everything was decided in �²��󾱲Բ��ٴǲ�.”

With Biden blocking new negotiations in 2023, one interviewer asked Schröder, “Do you think you can resume your peace plan?”

He replied, “Yes, and the only ones who can initiate this are France and Germany… Macron and Scholz are the only ones who can talk to Putin. Chirac and I did the same in the Iraq war. Why can’t support for Ukraine be combined with an offer of talks to Russia? The arms deliveries are not a solution for eternity. But no one wants to talk. Everyone sits in trenches. How many more people have to die?”

Since 2022, President Macron and a Thatcherite team of iron ladies — European Council President von der Leyen; former German Foreign Minister Analena Baerbock and former Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas, now the EU’s foreign policy chief — have promoted a new militarization of Europe, egged on from behind the scenes by and arms manufacturers.

Has the passage of time, the passing of the World War II generation and the distortion of history washed away the historical memory of two World Wars from a continent that was destroyed by conflict only 80 years ago? Where is the next generation of French and German diplomats in the tradition of de Villepin and Schröder today? How can sending German tanks to fight in Ukraine, and now in Russia itself, fail to remind Russians of previous German invasions and solidify support for the war? And won’t the for Europe to confront Russia by moving from a “welfare state to a warfare state” only feed the rise of the European hard right?

So are the new European militarists reading the historical moment correctly? Or are they jumping on the bandwagon of a disastrous Cold War that could, as and Trump have , lead to World War III?

A US–Russian plan to restore relations

When Trump’s foreign policy team with their Russian counterparts in Saudi Arabia on February 18, ending the war in Ukraine was the second part of the three-part plan they agreed on. The first was to restore full diplomatic relations between the US and Russia, and the third was to work on a series of other problems in American–Russian relations.

The order of these three stages is interesting because, as Secretary of State Marco Rubio noted, it means that the negotiations over Ukraine will be the first test of restored relations between the US and Russia.

If the negotiations for peace in Ukraine are successful, they can lead to further negotiations over restoring arms control treaties and nuclear disarmament. Perhaps they could even spur cooperation on other global problems that have been impossible to resolve in a world stuck in a zombie-like Cold War that powerful interests will not allow to die.

It was a welcome change to hear Rubio that the post-Cold War unipolar world was an anomaly and that now we have to adjust to the reality of a multipolar world. But if Trump and his advisers are just trying to restore US relations with Russia as part of a “reverse Kissinger” scheme to isolate China, as some analysts have , that would perpetuate America’s debilitating geopolitical crisis instead of solving it.

A chance for change

The US and our friends in Europe have a new chance to make a clean break from the three-way geopolitical power struggle between the US, Russia and China that has hamstrung the world since the 1970s. They can find new roles and priorities for our countries in the emerging multipolar world of the 21st century.

We hope that Trump and European leaders can recognize the crossroads at which they are standing, and the chance history is giving them to choose the path of peace. France and Germany in particular should remember the wisdom of de Villepin, Chirac and Schröder in the face of American and British plans for aggression against Iraq in 2003.

This could be the beginning of the end of the permanent state of war and Cold War that has held the world in its grip for over a century. Ending it would allow us to finally prioritize the progress and cooperation we so desperately need to solve the other critical problems the whole world faces today. As US General Mark Milley back in November 2022 when he called for renewed negotiations between Ukraine and Russia, we must “seize the moment.”

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial��policy.

The post Is This the Beginning or the End of a New Cold War? appeared first on 51�Թ�.

Lucifer, The New York Times and a Debrief on 2024

Peter Isackson — Wed, 01 Jan 2025 09:43:11 +0000

It took nearly 15 months to nail it, but The New York Times has finally happened upon a truth that it never really wanted to publish. It’s always encouraging to realize that acts that have been visible to most direct observers for more than a year are now being belatedly acknowledged.

In an titled, “Israel Loosened Its Rules to Bomb Hamas Fighters, Killing Many More Civilians,” the newspaper of record provides what some may deem honest “reporting” — albeit more than a year late — illuminating the logic of a long-running genocidal campaign.

“An investigation by The New York Times found that Israel severely weakened its system of safeguards meant to protect civilians; adopted flawed methods to find targets and assess the risk of civilian casualties; routinely failed to conduct post-strike reviews of civilian harm or punish officers for wrongdoing; and ignored warnings from within its own ranks and from senior U.S. military officials about these failings.

The Times reviewed dozens of military records and interviewed more than 100 soldiers and officials, including more than 25 people who helped vet, approve or strike targets. Collectively, their accounts provide an unparalleled understanding of how Israel mounted one of the deadliest air wars of this century. Most of the soldiers and officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were barred from speaking publicly on a subject of such sensitivity. The Times verified the military orders with officers familiar with their content.”

�մǻ岹��’s Weekly Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Investigation:

A procedure relied on by some governments to obscure and delay the discovery and description of obvious facts.

Contextual note

To make sure the reader’s attention is engaged, the author boasts of the “unparalleled understanding” the journal is providing. What some people understand in the space of a few weeks, the Gray Lady needs 15 months to assess. But even when revealing what can honestly be described as “unparalleled” war crimes, she hedges her bets on the big question in the background: Does her reporting support the case of genocide? True to the paper’s patented style, the article restricts its analysis to the rules applied in an air campaign and avoids making any connection with the overall strategy of Israel.

We learn that Israel “routinely failed to conduct post-strike reviews of civilian harm or punish officers for wrongdoing.” The crew of reporters present at the State Department’s daily will be intrigued by the NYT’s contribution. After months of questioning spokesperson Matthew Miller about how potential war crimes were being investigated, they can discover what Miller so carefully concealed when, week after week, he promised that the United States would await the findings of Israel and then launch its own investigation. After all, Israel was a trusted ally, a rules-based democracy committed to human rights that would infallibly get to the bottom of the truth and punish all potentially guilty parties. Why the hurry to find out the truth?

The publication of this article offers an important lesson for the reporters present at the briefings. In cases where genocide is a plausible description of an endlessly repeated series of atrocities, they can definitively conclude that neither the Israelis nor the Americans can be counted on to express the truth. All that’s required is patience and trust in The New York Times, even if it takes 15 months or so for the revelation.

Might we wonder why the famous newspaper’s journalists and editors failed for so long to see the light? Independent commentators and even the 15 judges of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) all managed to cotton on. But, for a quality newspaper like NYT, some real news sometimes takes more than a year to digest and report. Acting too soon to report war crimes may remove the certainty of their existence that is gained by watching them continue month after month.

The NYT did, of course, cover the the ICJ’s finding of “plausible genocide” in January 2024. But its reporting emphasized the potential for ambiguity in the court’s assessment. The article gave the final word in its concluding paragraph to none other than Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu:

“On the other hand, Israel’s reaction to the court’s decision pointed to an alternative perspective. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the court order had upheld Israel’s right to protect itself. ‘Like any state, Israel has the basic right of self-defense. The court justly rejected the disgraceful demand to nullify that right,’ he said.”

The belated publication of an “unparalleled” investigation also hedges its bets. At one point, the article recounts that the air force “was running low on the guidance kits that transform unguided weapons, or ‘dumb bombs,’ into precision-guided munitions.” It then explains: “This forced pilots to rely on unguided and less accurate bombs, the officers said.” Did it really “force” them to violate the laws of wars they were claiming to respect? Or did it conveniently provide an excuse for carrying out what the article later describes as “the prevalent mood inside the military: ‘harbu darbu?’ This is an expression derived from Arabic and widely used in Hebrew to mean attacking an enemy without restraint.”

If the NYT is so enamored with investigations, why, in its December 25 about a Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS NET), does it appear to legitimize the Joe Biden administration’s refusal to accept that organization’s findings? For the paper, what matters is that the official critique “raises questions,” casting doubt on the veracity of the report. But the NYT hides a key fact by Al Jazeera that “FEWS NET is funded by the US Agency for International Development (USAID).” USAID, as many have noticed, is closely to the CIA.

In other words, the most credible explanation of what the NYT calls the “U.S. rebuke” is that the political side of the administration rejects and calls into doubt the work of intelligence professionals. This is a well-established pattern, demonstrated most dramatically by the George W. Bush administration’s adamant insistence that the non-existence of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction should not be taken seriously to the point of cancelling a planned invasion.

Historical note

On one side, it’s always good to plant lies. On the other, to affirm doubt about objective expression of truth. Lies, such as “forty beheaded babies” may be circulated and will definitely be remembered, but if a truth is too obvious, it must be either “rebuked” or the investigation into it delayed.

In a on Christmas Eve, noted international relations expert John Mearsheimer offers a slightly more direct assessment of the “truth” revealed by the NYT in its latest investigation.

“Given the West’s presumed commitment to human rights and especially to preventing genocide, one would have expected countries like the United States, Britain, and Germany, to have stopped the Israeli genocide in its tracks.

Instead, the governments in those three countries, especially the United States, have supported Israel’s unimaginable behavior in Gaza at every turn. Indeed, those three countries are complicit in this genocide.”

Without mentioning the Gray Lady specifically, he notes: “The mainstream media has made hardly any effort to expose and challenge what Israel is doing to the Palestinians. Indeed some key outlets have staunchly supported Israel’s actions.”

The NYT is obviously not alone. Not noticing genocide and claiming that there is insufficient evidence to confirm its existence has become standard operating procedure for Western media. Mearsheimer’s reference to Britain and Germany could have included the European Union, whose hypocrisy is even more evident. Back in January, in its account of the ICJ’s ruling that deemed plausible the accusation of genocide, the NYT : “On Friday the European Union it expected the ‘full, immediate and effective implementation’ of the I.C.J.’s orders, noting that such orders ‘are binding on the Parties and they must comply with them.’”

Since then, the EU has continued to do everything in its bureaucratic power to avoid any action that might be interpreted as implementing the court’s ruling. Some will say the devil’s in the details, but the devil to whom this dictionary is dedicated has from the beginning acknowledged his handiwork.

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Everyone (Sort of) Loves a Disrupter

John Feffer — Mon, 16 Dec 2024 11:59:36 +0000

Liberals hate President-elect Donald Trump, no question about it. He’s the definition of illiberal: authoritarian, racist, sexist and downright nasty. Not only that, he’s a living repudiation of the liberal delusion that the United States runs on meritocracy.

But you want to know a dirty, little secret? In back alleys, encrypted group chats and off-the-record conversations, liberals will still support Trump on a case-by-case basis. Of course, they’d never vote for the guy, but they’ll give two cheers for some of his policies.

I discovered this ugly truth during Trump’s last term while writing an article on the shift in US policy toward China from lukewarm engagement to hostile decoupling. The general consensus among the foreign policy elite was that, at least in terms of relations with Beijing, Trump was a useful idiot for slowing China’s roll with harsh rhetoric and tariffs.

“Trump is a madman, but I want to give him and his administration their due,” one prominent liberal intellectual me. “We can’t keep playing on an unlevel playing field and take promises that are never delivered on. It’s really China’s turn to respond, and it’s long overdue.”

It wasn’t just China. For years, liberals and conservatives alike were, for instance, the concept of burden-sharing: getting US allies to cover more of the bill for their security needs. But it was only Trump who really made it happen by blackmailing NATO members and other US partners into doing so.

Sure, few warmed to the idea of the US actually pulling out of NATO, but even many of our European allies, though they publicly grumbled, were secretly happy about The Donald’s gaiatsu. That’s the Japanese word for outside pressure that enables a leader to force through unpopular changes by blaming it all on foreigners. The self-described liberal leader of NATO, Dutch politician Mark Rutte, even came out in the open after Trump’s re-election to the US president for making European countries more militarily self-sufficient.

It wasn’t just liberals who were thrilled about Trump’s unorthodox foreign policy during his first term, either. Some of those further to the left also embraced Trump the engager (with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un), Trump the isolationist (and his threats to close US military bases globally) and Trump the putative peacemaker (for concluding a deal with the Taliban to end the US military presence in Afghanistan).

Trump, in other words, was not just an unanticipated crisis; he was also an opportunity. Deep in their hearts, anyone unhappy with the status quo will support a disrupter. Quite a few Democrats disgusted with this country’s border policies, inflation and its coastal elites even to vote for Trump in November because they wanted change, regardless of the consequences.

Trump 2.0 is going to be the same but worse, like a strong cheese voted out of the refrigerator only to grow ever more pungent as it molded in a dark corner of Florida. The latest version of Trump has promised more violence and destruction the second time around, from mass deportations to mass tariffs. And he’s planning to avoid appointing anyone to his administration who might have a contrary thought, a backbone to resist him or the least qualification to enact sensible policy.

In the face of such a vengeful and truculent force returning to the White House, surely, you might think, it will be impossible to find any liberals embracing such anarchy the second time around.

Think again. This is how US politics works, if only for liberals. The modern Republican Party routinely boycotts Democratic administrations: blocking Merrick Garland’s Supreme Court nomination, working overtime to shut down the federal government, voting en masse against legislation it would have supported if introduced by a Republican administration. The MAGA crowd has, in fact, turned noncooperation into something of an art form.

Liberals, on the other hand, pride themselves on bipartisanship, on getting things done no matter who’s in power. So, inevitably, there will be cooperation with the Trump team as it sets about the “deconstruction of the administrative state” (as Trump cheerleader Steve Bannon once it). Worse, there will even be some silver-lining liberals (and a few leftists) who pull up a seat to applaud the wrecking ball — not perhaps for its wholesale destruction of neighborhoods, but at least for its demolition of a select number of buildings that they deem irreparable.

Each time such destruction takes place, the self-exculpatory comment from such silver-liners will be: “Well, somebody had to come along and do something!” If Trump is the only tool in the governing toolbox, some liberals will indeed try to use him to pound in a few nails they think need hammering.

Burning bridges with China

In his 2024 State of the Union address, President Joe Biden argued that he did a better job than Trump of standing up to China. He certainly devoted more to containing China. And not only did he not roll back Trump’s tariffs on Chinese products, but he added some of his own, including a 100% tax on Chinese electric vehicles. Biden also made concrete moves to decouple the US economy from China’s, especially when it came to the supply chains for critical raw materials that Beijing has sought to control. “I’ve made sure that the most advanced American technologies can’t be used in China,” he insisted, , “Frankly for all his tough talk on China, it never occurred to my predecessor to do any of that.”

Biden’s moves on China, from export controls and subsidies for chip manufacturers to closer with Pacific partners like Australia and India, received the enthusiastic support of his party. No surprise there: It’s hard to find anyone in Washington these days who has a good word to say about engaging more with China.

So when Trump takes office in January, he won’t actually be reversing course. He’ll simply be taking the baton-like stick from Biden while leaving all the carrots in the ground.

That said, Trump’s proposed further spike in tariffs against China (and Canada and Mexico and potentially the rest of the world) does give many liberals pause. It threatens to unleash an economically devastating global trade war while boosting prices radically at home. But trade unions backed by such liberals support such measures as a way to protect jobs, while the European Union only recently imposed of their own on Chinese electrical vehicles.

So, yes, neoliberals who embrace free trade are going to push back against Trump’s economic policies, but more traditional liberals who backed protectionist measures in the past will secretly (or not so secretly) applaud Trump’s moves.

Back to the wall

On taking office, Biden rolled back his predecessor’s harsh immigration policies. The rate of border-crossings then spiked for a variety of reasons — not just the repeal of those Trump-era laws — from an average of half a million to about annually. However, in 2024, those numbers despite Trump’s campaign claims — but no matter. By then, many Democrats had already been reborn as border hawks.

That new, tougher attitude was on display in Biden took in 2024 as well as the border security that Democrats tried to push through Congress earlier this year. Forget about finding a path to citizenship for the millions of undocumented immigrants who keep the US economy humming, Biden’s immigration policy focused on limiting asylum petitions, increasing detention facilities and even more money to build Trump’s infamous wall.

As Elora Mukherjee, director of the Immigrants’ Rights Clinic at Columbia Law School, on the eve of the November election, “What we are seeing is that the center of the Democratic Party is now adopting the same policies, the same postures, that MAGA Republicans were fighting for about six years ago.”

And yet such punitive policies still weren’t harsh enough for MAGA Republicans and their America First followers. The bottom line was that immigration-averse voters didn’t want to support Democrats pretending to be MAGA Republicans. When it came to the White House, they wanted the real thing.

As politics change hands in Washington next January, it’s going to be difficult to find any Democrats who will support the mass detentions and deportations Trump is promising. Yet many liberals, like the of Latinos who pulled the lever for Trump in 2024, do want major changes at the border with Mexico. In Arizona, Democrat Ruben Gallego won a squeaker of a Senate election by emphasizing and even backing a border wall in certain areas. Such liberal border hawks will be happy when the Republican president does the dirty work so that Democrats don’t suffer the political fallout that is sure to follow.

Remapping the Middle East

On the face of it, the Abrahamic Accords were a liberal nightmare. The brainchild of Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, they to repair relations between Israel and the major authoritarian regimes in the region: Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States, Morocco and Sudan. The deal was a reward for illiberal leaders, particularly Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu. The primary losers would, of course, be the Palestinians, who would have to their hopes for a separate state in exchange for some Saudi handouts and the Sahrawi people who lost their claim to the Western Sahara when the US and Israel Moroccan sovereignty over the entire region.

Instead of shelving the Accords, however, the Biden administration pushed ahead with them. After roundly criticizing Saudi autocrat Mohammed bin Salman for, among other things, ordering the of a US-based Saudi journalist, Biden mended ties, fist-bumping that rogue leader and continuing to discuss how and when the Kingdom would normalize relations with Israel. Nor did his administration restrict Washington’s staggering weapons deliveries to Israel after its invasion and utter devastation of Gaza. Yes, Biden and crew made some statements about Palestinian suffering and tried to push more humanitarian aid into the conflict zone, but they did next to nothing to pressure Israel to stop its killing machine, nor would they the Trump administration’s decision on the Western Sahara.

The liberals who support Israel (come what may) like Pennsylvania Senator , New York Congressman and the in the House of Representatives are, of course, going to be enthusiastic about Trump’s ever tighter embrace of Netanyahu next year. But there are also likely to be quiet cheers from other corners of the liberal-left about the Trump is likely to take against Tehran. (Remember Kamala Harris’s during her presidential run that Iran was the main adversary of the US?)

The Arab Spring is long gone and a strong man in the White House needs to both schmooze with and go toe to toe with the strong men of the Middle East — or so many liberals will believe, even as they rationalize away their relief over Trump’s handling of a thoroughly illiberal region.

Looking ahead (or do I mean behind?)

Anyone to the left of Tucker Carlson will certainly think twice about showing public enthusiasm for whatever Trump does. Indeed, most liberals will be appalled by the new administration’s likely suspension of aid to Ukraine and withdrawal from the Paris climate accord, not to mention other possible hare-brained maneuvers like sending US troops to narcotraffickers in Mexico.

Trump will attract liberal support, however quietly or even secretively, not because of his bridge-building genius — in reality, he even get a bridge-building infrastructure bill through Congress in his first term — but because all too many liberals have already moved inexorably rightward on issues ranging from China and the Middle East to immigration. The MAGA minority has seized the machinery of power by weaponizing mendacity and ruthlessly breaking rules, in the process transforming politics much the way the Bolshevik minority did in Russia more than a century ago. In the pot that those Republicans put on the stove, the water has been boiling for more than a decade and yet the left-of-center frogs barely seem to recognize just how altered our circumstances have become.

In normal times, finding overlapping interests with your political adversaries makes sense. Such bedrock bipartisanship stabilizes fractious countries that swing politically from center left to center right every few years.

These are, however, anything but normal times and the second-term Trump team is anything but center-rightists. They are extremists bent on dismantling the federal government, unstitching the fabric of international law and turning up the heat drastically on an already dangerously overcooking planet.

In 2020, I raised the possibility of a boycott, divestment and sanction (BDS) movement against the US if Trump won the elections that year. “People of the world, you’d better build your BDS box, paint ‘Break Glass in Case of Emergency’ on the front, and stand next to it on November 3,” I then. “If Trump wins on Election Day, it will be mourning in America. But let’s hope that the world doesn’t mourn: it organizes.”

Four years later, Trump has won again. Do I hear the sound of breaking glass?

Here in the US, a stance of strict non-engagement with Trump 2.0, even where interests overlap, would not only be a good moral policy but even make political sense. When things go disastrously south, laws are broken and the government begins to truly come apart at the seams, it’s vitally important that no left-of-center fingerprints be found at the crime scene.

Let’s be clear: The Trump administration will not be playing by the rules of normal politics. So forget about bipartisanship. Forget about preserving access to power by visiting Mar-a-Lago, hat in hand, like Facebook’s or the of MSNBC’s Morning Joe show. “Fascism can be defeated,” historian Timothy Snyder immediately after the November elections, “but not when we are on its side.”

So, my dear liberal-left, which side are you on?

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Israel’s Wars Repeat the 1980s on Steroids

James M. Dorsey — Wed, 11 Dec 2024 14:07:45 +0000

Appalled by Israel’s carpet bombing of Beirut during the 1982 Lebanon war, United States President Ronald Reagan didn’t mince words with then-Israeli Prime Minister Menahem Begin.

“I was angry. I him it had to stop, or our entire future relationship was endangered. I used the word holocaust deliberately & said the symbol of his war was becoming a picture of a 7-month-old baby with its arms blown off,” Reagan noted in his diary.

The August 1982 phone call between Reagan and Begin provides a template for the US’s ability to twist Israel’s arm and the limits of the Western giant’s influence.

Begin wasted no time in halting his saturation bombing of the Lebanese capital in response to Reagan’s threat. Yet, he rejected the president’s demand that he allow an international force to enter Beirut to protect the hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees in the Israeli-besieged city. His refusal had dire consequences.

A month later, at least 800 Palestinians, many of them women and children, were massacred in their homes in Sabra and Shatila in West Beirut by Lebanese Christian gunmen under the watchful eyes of the Israeli military. Public outrage in Israel forced Begin to resign, ending his career.

Biden failed where Reagan succeeded

More than four decades later, US President Joe Biden understood the stakes when Israel went to war in response to �Ჹ��’s October 7, 2023 attack on Israel. He also the levers of power at his disposal after test-driving Reagan’s approach in 2021.

At the time, Biden, like his predecessor, picked up the phone to read Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu the riot act. As a new on Biden, The Last Politician, describes, it was his fourth phone call to the Israeli leader in ten days in which behind-the-scenes diplomacy and cajoling failed to end fighting between Israel and Hamas. The president advised him that he “expected a significant de-escalation today on the path to a ceasefire.” When Netanyahu sought to buy time, Biden replied: “Hey man, we’re out of runway here. It’s over.”

Netanyahu and Hamas agreed to a ceasefire a day later. Even so, he knew then and now that he had less to worry about than Begin did with the Reagan presidency.

In contrast to Reagan’s administration, which allowed the United Nations Security Council to pass 21 resolutions , if not condemning, Israel’s policies, Biden gave Israel blanket diplomatic cover and provided it with arms. With these, it could prosecute wars that make 1982 pale in comparison.

Biden’s test-driving of Reagan’s template, familiarity with the Israeli interventions in Lebanon and annexationist policies in the 1980s and beyond, coupled with his predecessor’s willingness to confront Begin in the 1982 war leave the president with little excuse for refusing to rein Israel in over the past year.

Biden’s failure has tangibly devastating consequences for the Palestinians and yet to materialize fallouts for Israelis and the rest of the Middle East. These will haunt the region for a generation, if not more.

Like Begin, Biden will likely see his legacy sullied by Israeli conduct on the Middle East’s battlefields.

Historic destruction may only increase

A heated with Begin during the 1982 war, which involved finger jabbing and fists pounding on a table, spotlights Biden’s lack of an excuse. Echoing Reagan, Biden warned Begin that Israeli settlement policy could cost it US support. In response, Begin snapped, “I am not a Jew with trembling knees.”

Forty-two years later, Biden studiously ignores the fact that Israel’s latest Gaza and Lebanon wars are a repeat of the early 1980s on steroids.

Begin created the for Israel’s systematic targeting of militants irrespective of the risk to civilians with the 1981 bombing of Fakhani. This densely populated Beirut neighborhood was home to the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and its affiliates. The bombing destroyed a seven-story building and damaged four nearby structures, killing some 90 people and wounding hundreds of others.

In a letter to Reagan, written during Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, Begin the carpet bombing of Beirut to the Allied destruction of Berlin during World War II.

“I feel as a prime minister empowered to instruct a valiant army facing ‘Berlin’ where, amongst innocent civilians, Hitler and his henchmen hide in a bunker deep beneath the surface,” Begin said.

Begin’s equation of PLO chairman Yasser Arafat and his organization with Adolf Hitler and his associates, like Netanyahu equating Hamas with the Nazis, served to justify civilian casualties in operations that were as much about targeting fighters as they were designed to incite the local population against the militants.

“In certain cases, the Israeli shelling and bombing were carefully targeted, sometimes on the basis of good intelligence. All too often, however, that was not the case. Scores of eight-to twelve-story apartment buildings were destroyed… Many of the buildings that were levelled…had no plausible ,” recalled historian Rashid Khalidi, who lived in Beirut at the time of the 1982 bombings.

The strategy produced mixed results but, on balance, hardened rather than weakened popular resistance to Israeli policies.

There is little reason to believe that the impact of Israel’s current wars will be any different. Israel has already prepared the ground by turning Gaza into what onetime Australian human rights commissioner and United Nations rapporteur Chris Sidoti calls a “terrorism creation .”

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For the US in Syria, Is It About Principle or Interest?

Peter Isackson — Wed, 11 Dec 2024 11:29:04 +0000

In an era marked by authorities waging battle against the windmills of disinformation (conveniently defined as somebody else’s speech), the average citizen is clamoring for access to facts. But where do facts come from, or rather, how do we citizens receive and consume them?

The obvious answer is the media. But few people in the United States the media these days. Surely, in a democracy “of the people, by the people and for the people,” there will be a few scoundrels who make their way into government, but we can assume that the majority merits our confidence. Well, according to a Pew titled, “Public Trust in Government: 1958-2024,” the current of trust has fallen to 22%.

December 2024 offers us a vision of exacerbated tensions in various parts of the globe. At such moments, we expect our leaders to speak with some degree of honesty. Especially when the stakes are high and decisions become a matter of life or death. We accept that some things must remain secret. But the democratic principle implies an effort on the part of our governments to offer a minimum of clarity concerning the facts and their intentions.

Alas, the duty of obscurity seems to have replaced the ideal of clarity as the norm. Clever government officials have good reasons to justify their brazen stonewalling. First, national security requires concealing one’s true intentions. After all, if revealed, the enemy will profit. Then there is the fact that in any situation of conflict, we should accept the reality of the “fog of war,” a concept erroneously but persistently to Prussian general and military theorist Carl von Clausewitz by commentators, some of whose brains may be subjected to a permanent fog.

What are US presidents for if not guiding the nation towards an understanding of the truth? In August 2023, US President Joe Biden informed us that “Putin has already lost the war” in Ukraine. An obvious fact. The truth teller now the recent history of US policy towards Syria. “Over the past four years, my administration pursued a clear and principled policy toward Syria. First, we made clear from the start sanctions on Assad would remain in place unless he engaged seriously in a political process to end the civil war.”

�մǻ岹��’s 51�Թ� Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Principled policy:

A course of action relentlessly pursued thanks to the capacity of some people in a position of authority to persistently ignore surrounding reality.

Contextual note

Biden uses two epithets, “clear” and “principled,” to describe his policy. The word “clear” is certainly the most overused word by any spokesperson for the White House or State Department. At briefing sessions with personalities such as the White House’s Karine Jean-Pierre and the State Department’s Matthew Miller, whenever a journalist poses embarrassing questions that highlight potential ambiguity or equivocation with regard to the “noble” principles that guide US actions, they respond with the formula, “We have been very clear about…” In one random example, the press briefing session of March 27, 2024, Max Miller crafted this litany of:

So we have been very clear about this matter.
So we have made that quite clear to them.
So I will say that we have a fundamental disagreement with the Israeli Government over this issue, and we have made that quite clear.
… we will continue to be clear about what we think about these actions.
…we have made clear that we believe that allegations of genocide are unfounded.
…we have made clear that the United States is not going to send any troops to Ukraine.
And I think it’s clear that these claims are categorically false. (this was a response to the claim that the US created ISIS.)
…and we’ll make the same thing clear privately.
…we have made clear since the outset of this administration that the promotion of democracy is one of the top priorities for the President.
So we continue to make clear in our conversations with the Government of Bangladesh… that we wanted to see free and fair elections and we will continue to support free, full, open democracy in Bangladesh.
So we have been very clear about this matter. We’ve been unequivocal. (This concerned the fact that “Ben-Gvir’s coalition would be annexing additional land in the Jordan Valley.”)
So we have made that quite clear to them. We’ve been very direct and candid about it in our conversations with them. (On the same topic of land seizures.)

This obsessively repeated verbal tic brings home the point that “being clear” means quite simply: “Whatever we say must be accepted as truth.” As for the “principled policy” Biden cited, his logic consists of announcing a simple principle — that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad must be removed from office — and never deviating from it. Even if circumstances change, and even if hundreds of thousands of people may die or be displaced as a result of clinging to that principle.

Biden has already vowed to support the new Syrian government. Some may find this a bit strange. At this point, nobody has even a vague idea about what the new government will look like. On principle, can the US support it? What if it turns out to be a Wahhabi terrorist government, fulfilling its leader’s initial allegiance? Moreover, Syrian Head of State Abu Mohammed al-Joulani still has a $10 million bounty on his head because the US branded him a terrorist. Does Joulani’s success in overthrowing a dictator, Assad, automatically mean that democracy is on its way? Biden might profitably consult the the poem, “The Great Day” by the Irish poet, William Butler Yeats::

“Hurrah for revolution and more cannon-shot!
A beggar upon horseback lashes a beggar on foot.
Hurrah for revolution and cannon come again!
The beggars have changed places, but the lash goes on.”

Substitute “regime change” for “revolution” and Yeats has defined the principle that defines at least 50% of US foreign policy. In the meantime, Biden and his good friend, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are providing “more cannon-shot.” Within a day of the announced liberation of Syria, the US and Israel conducted multiple bombing raids on the military infrastructure and other threatening elements within a country that is rife with threatening elements. Can anyone seriously doubt that the lash will go on?

Anyone struggling with the question of which “clear principles” to apply to a dramatic situation in which multiple interests both converge and diverge would do well to follow Caitlin Johnstone’s. “I personally don’t blame people for misunderstanding what’s been happening in Syria all these years. Some of my favorite analysts got Syria wrong in the early years of the war. It’s a complicated issue. It’s hard to sort out the true from the false, and it’s hard to sort through the moral complexities and contradictions of it all as a human being. What matters is that you stay curious and open and sincerely dedicated to learning what’s true instead of bedding down and making an identity out of your current understanding.”

Johnstone’s wisdom tallies with the advice our fictional journalist and his AI assistant are intent on following in the video above.

Historical note

As US President Barack Obama’s vice president and then as president, Joe Biden has been associated with the framing and enforcing of the principles he claims to be at the core of US policy with regard to Syria.

But what are those principles? In 2015, The Guardian that the most obvious one has been to ignore any initiative aiming at peace and mutual security, especially if the initiative comes from Russia.

The Guardian was clear. “Russia proposed more than three years ago that Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, could step down as part of a peace deal, according to a senior negotiator involved in back-channel discussions at the time. Former Finnish president and Nobel peace prize laureate Martti Ahtisaari said western powers failed to seize on the proposal. Since it was made, in 2012, tens of thousands of people have been killed and millions uprooted, causing the world’s gravest refugee crisis since the second world war.”

Biden’s principles are clear. He once again demonstrated that clarity in December 2021 when he to consider security arrangements Russian President Vladimir Putin proposed that could have avoided an invasion and a prolonged war in Ukraine, in which an estimated one million people have died. UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson applied the same principle when he instructed the Ukrainians not to sign a peace treaty in April 2022.

During a 2015 television interview, Former French Foreign Minister Roland Dumas how his British friends told him they were planning to overthrow Assad because the “Syrian regime said things that were anti-Israeli.” Another case of applying a principle, this time by British allies of the US.

These cases illustrate what has become clear as far as principles are concerned. Negotiation and diplomacy can never replace kinetic action, whatever the eventual cost. The principle of regime change for Syria has already been in place for 12 years. It has finally succeeded. Just as it had in Iraq and Libya and even in Afghanistan in 2001.

One may legitimately ask, is it more about principle or about interest?

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Requiem for an Empire: How America’s Strongman Will Hasten the Decline of US Global Power

Alfred W. McCoy — Sat, 23 Nov 2024 11:33:46 +0000

Some 15 years ago, on December 5, 2010, a historian writing for TomDispatch made a prediction that may yet prove prescient. Rejecting the consensus of that moment that United States global hegemony would persist to 2040 or 2050, he that “the demise of the United States as the global superpower could come… in 2025, just 15 years from now.”

To make that forecast, the historian conducted what he called “a more realistic assessment of domestic and global trends.” Starting with the global context, he argued that, “faced with a fading superpower,” China, India, Iran, and Russia would all start to “provocatively challenge U.S. dominion over the oceans, space, and cyberspace.” At home in the US, domestic divisions would “widen into violent clashes and divisive debates… Riding a political tide of disillusionment and despair, a far-right patriot captures the presidency with thundering rhetoric, demanding respect for American authority and threatening military retaliation or economic reprisal.” That historian concluded, “the world pays next to no attention as the American Century ends in silence.”

Now that a “far-right patriot,” one President-elect Donald Trump, has indeed captured (or rather recaptured) the presidency “with thundering rhetoric,” let’s explore the likelihood that a second Trump term in office, starting in the fateful year 2025, might actually bring a hasty end, silent or otherwise, to an “American Century” of global dominion.

Making the original prediction

Let’s begin by examining the reasoning underlying my original prediction. (Yes, I was the historian.) Back in 2010, when I picked a specific date for a rising tide of US decline, this country looked unassailably strong both at home and abroad. President Barack Obama’s administration was producing a “post-racial” society. After recovering from the 2008 financial crisis, the US was on track for a decade of dynamic growth — the auto industry saved, oil and gas production booming, the tech sector thriving, the stock market soaring and employment solid. Internationally, Washington was the world’s preeminent leader, with an unchallenged military, formidable diplomatic clout, unchecked economic globalization and its democratic governance still the global norm.

Looking forward, leading historians of the empire agreed that the US would remain the world’s sole superpower for the foreseeable future. Writing in the Financial Times in 2002, Yale professor Paul Kennedy, author of a widely-read book on imperial decline, that “America’s array of force is staggering,” with a mix of economic, diplomatic and technological dominance that made it the globe’s “single superpower” without peer in the entire history of the world. Russia’s defense budget had “collapsed” and its economy was “less than that of the Netherlands.” Should China’s high growth rates continue for another 30 years, it “might be a serious challenger to U.S. predominance” — but that wouldn’t be true until 2032, if then. While the US’s “unipolar moment” would surely not “continue for centuries,” its end, he predicted, “seems a long way off for now.”

Writing in a similar vein in The New York Times in February 2010, Piers Brendon, a historian of Britain’s imperial decline, the “doom mongers” who “conjure with Roman and British analogies in order to trace the decay of American hegemony.” While Rome was riven by “internecine strife” and Britain ran its empire on a shoestring budget, the US was “constitutionally stable” with “an enormous industrial base.” Taking a few “relatively simple steps,” he concluded, Washington should be able to overcome current budgetary problems and perpetuate its global power indefinitely.

When I made my very different prediction nine months later, I was coordinating a of 140 historians from universities on three continents who were studying the decline of earlier empires — particularly those of Britain, France and Spain. Beneath the surface of this country’s seeming strength, we could already see the telltale signs of decline that had led to the collapse of those earlier empires.

By 2010, economic globalization was cutting good-paying factory jobs here, income inequality was widening and corporate bailouts were booming — all essential ingredients for rising working-class resentment and deepening domestic divisions. Foolhardy military misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan, pushed by Washington elites trying to deny any sense of decline, stoked simmering anger among ordinary US citizens, slowly discrediting the very idea of international commitments. And the erosion of the US’s relative economic strength from half the world’s output in 1950 to a quarter in 2010 meant the wherewithal for its unipolar power was fading fast.

Only a “near-peer” competitor was needed to turn that attenuating US global hegemony into accelerating imperial decline. With rapid economic growth, a vast population and the world’s longest imperial tradition, China seemed primed to become just such a country. But back then, Washington’s foreign policy elites thought not and even admitted China to the World Trade Organization (WTO), that “U.S. power and hegemony could readily mold China to the United States’ liking.”

Our group of historians, mindful of the frequent imperial wars fought when near-peer competitors finally confronted the reigning hegemon of their moment — think Germany vs Great Britain in World War I — expected China’s challenge would not be long in coming. Indeed, in 2012, just two years after my prediction, the US National Intelligence Council that “China alone will probably have the largest economy, surpassing that of the United States a few years before 2030” and this country would no longer be “a hegemonic power.”

Just a year later, Chinese President Xi Jinping, drawing on a massive in foreign-exchange reserves accumulated in the decade after joining the WTO, announced his bid for global power. This would come in the form of what he called “the ,” history’s largest development program. It was designed to make Beijing the center of the global economy.

In the following decade, the US–China rivalry would become so intense that, last September, Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall : “I’ve been closely watching the evolution of [China’s] military for 15 years. China is not a future threat; China is a threat today.”

The global rise of the strongman

Another major setback for Washington’s world order, long legitimated by its promotion of democracy (whatever its own dominating tendencies), came from the rise of populist strongmen worldwide. Consider them part of a nationalist reaction to the West’s aggressive economic globalization.

At the close of the Cold War in 1991, Washington became the planet’s sole superpower, using its hegemony to forcefully promote a wide-open global economy — forming the in 1995, pressing open-market “” on developing economies and knocking down tariff barriers worldwide. It also built a global communications grid by 700,000 miles of fiber-optic submarine cables and then 1,300 satellites (now 4,700).

By exploiting that very globalized economy, however, China’s soared to $3.2 trillion by 2016, surpassing both the US and Japan, while simultaneously 2.4 million US jobs between 1999 and 2011, ensuring the closure of factories in countless towns across the South and Midwest. By fraying social safety nets while eroding protection for labor unions and local businesses in both the US and Europe, globalization reduced the quality of life for many, while creating inequality on a staggering scale and stoking a working-class reaction that would crest in a global wave of angry populism.

Riding that wave, right-wing populists have been winning a steady succession of elections — in Russia in 2000, Israel in 2009, Hungary in 2010, China in 2012, Turkey in 2014, the Philippines and the US in 2016, Brazil in 2018, Italy in 2022, the Netherlands in 2023, Indonesia and the US again in 2024.

Set aside their incendiary us-vs-them rhetoric, however, and look at their actual achievements and those right-wing demagogues turn out to have a record that can only be described as dismal. In Brazil, President Jair Bolsonaro the vast Amazon rainforest and left office amid an . In Russia, President Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, his country’s economy to capture some more land (which it hardly lacked). In Turkey, President Recep Erdoğan caused a crippling , while 50,000 suspected opponents. In the Philippines, President Rodrigo Duterte 30,000 suspected drug users and China by giving up his country’s claims in the resource-rich South China Sea. In Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has wreaked havoc on Gaza and neighboring lands, in part to in office and stay out of prison.

Prospects for Donald Trump’s second term

After the steady erosion of its global power for several decades, the US is no longer the — or perhaps even an — “exceptional” nation floating above the deep global currents that shape the politics of most countries. And as it has become more of an ordinary country, it has also felt the full force of the worldwide move toward strongman rule. Not only does that global trend help explain Trump’s election and his recent re-election, but it provides some clues as to what he’s likely to do with that office the second time around.

In the globalized world the US made, there is now an intimate interaction between domestic and international policy. That will soon be apparent in a second Trump administration whose policies are likely to simultaneously damage the country’s economy and further degrade Washington’s world leadership.

Let’s start with the clearest of his commitments: environmental policy. During the recent election campaign, Trump climate change “a scam” and his transition team has already drawn up to exit from the Paris climate accords. By quitting that agreement, the US will abdicate any leadership role when it comes to the most consequential issue facing the international community while reducing pressure on China to curb its greenhouse gas emissions. Since these two countries now account for (45%) of global carbon emissions, such a move will ensure that the world blows past the target of keeping this planet’s temperature rise to C until the end of the century. Instead, on a planet that’s already had 12 recent of just such a temperature rise, that mark is expected to be permanently reached by perhaps 2029. That is the year Trump finishes his second term.

On the domestic side of climate policy, Trump last September that he would “terminate the Green New Deal, which I call the Green New Scam, and rescind all unspent funds under the misnamed Inflation Reduction Act.” On the day after his election, he committed himself to increasing the country’s oil and gas production, a celebratory crowd, “We have more liquid gold than any country in the world.” He will undoubtedly also wind farm leases on Federal lands and the $7,500 tax credit for purchasing an electrical vehicle.

As the world shifts to renewable energy and all-electric vehicles, Trump’s policies will undoubtedly do lasting damage to the US economy. In 2023, the International Renewable Energy Agency that, amid continuing price decreases, wind and solar power now generate electricity for less than half the cost of fossil fuels. Any attempt to slow the conversion of this country’s utilities to the most cost-effective form of energy runs a serious risk of ensuring that US-made products will be ever less competitive.

To put it bluntly, he seems to be proposing that electricity users here should pay twice as much for their power as those in other advanced nations. Similarly, as relentless engineering innovation makes electric vehicles cheaper and more reliable than petroleum-powered ones, attempting to slow such an energy transition is likely to make the US automotive industry uncompetitive at home and abroad.

Calling tariffs “the greatest thing ever invented,” Trump has slapping a 20% duty on all foreign goods and 60% on those from China. In another instance of domestic–foreign synergy, such duties will undoubtedly end up crippling US farm exports, thanks to retaliatory overseas tariffs. Simultaneously, it will dramatically raise the cost of consumer goods for US citizens, stoking inflation and slowing consumer spending.

Reflecting his to alliances and military commitments, Trump’s first foreign policy initiative will likely be an attempt to negotiate an end to the war in Ukraine. During a CNN town hall meeting in May 2023, he he could stop the fighting “in 24 hours.” Last July, he : “I would tell [Ukrainian President] Zelenskyy, no more. You got to make a deal.”

Just two days after the November 5 election, Trump reportedly Putin over a phone call “not to escalate the war in Ukraine and reminded him of Washington’s sizable military presence in Europe.” Drawing on sources inside the Trump transition team, the Wall Street Journal that the new administration is considering “cementing Russia’s seizure of 20% of Ukraine” and forcing Kyiv to forego its bid to join NATO, perhaps for as long as 20 years.

With Russia drained of manpower and its economy pummeled by three years of bloody warfare, a competent negotiator — should Trump actually appoint one — might indeed be able to bring a tenuous peace to a ravaged Ukraine. Since it has been Europe’s frontline of defense against a revanchist Russia, the continent’s major powers would be expected to play a . But Germany’s coalition government has just collapsed; French President Emmanuel Macron is crippled by recent electoral reverses and the NATO alliance, after three years of a shared commitment to Ukraine, faces real uncertainty with the advent of a Trump presidency.

US allies

Those impending negotiations over Ukraine highlight the paramount importance of alliances for US global power. For 80 years, from World War II through the Cold War and beyond, Washington relied on bilateral and multilateral alliances as a critical force multiplier. With China and Russia both rearmed and increasingly closely aligned, reliable allies have become even more important to maintaining Washington’s global presence. With 32 member nations representing a billion people and a commitment to mutual defense that has lasted 75 years, NATO is arguably the most powerful military alliance in modern history.

Yet Trump has long been sharply critical of it. As a candidate in 2016, he the alliance “obsolete.” As president, he mocked the treaty’s mutual-defense clause, even “tiny” Montenegro could drag the US into war. While campaigning last February, he that he would tell Russia “to do whatever the hell they want” to a NATO ally that didn’t pay what he considered its fair share.

Right after Trump’s election, caught between what one analyst “an aggressively advancing Russia and an aggressively withdrawing America,” Macron insisted that the continent needed to be a “more united, stronger, more sovereign Europe in this new context.” Even if the new administration doesn’t formally withdraw from NATO, Trump’s repeated hostility, particularly toward its crucial mutual-defense clause, may yet serve to eviscerate the alliance.

In the Asia-Pacific region, the US presence rests on three sets of overlapping alliances: the entente with Australia and Britain; the with Australia, India and Japan and a chain of bilateral defense pacts stretching along the Pacific littoral from Japan through Taiwan to the Philippines. Via careful diplomacy, the administration US President Joe Biden those alliances, bringing two wayward allies, Australia and the Philippines that had drifted Beijing-wards, back into the Western fold. Trump’s penchant for abusing allies and, as in his first term, from multilateral pacts is likely to weaken such ties and so US power in the region.

Although his first administration famously waged a trade war with Beijing, Trump’s attitude toward the island of Taiwan is bluntly transactional. “I think, Taiwan should pay us for defense,” he in June, adding: “You know, we’re no different than an insurance company. Taiwan doesn’t give us anything.” In October, he the Wall Street Journal that he would not have to use military force to defend Taiwan because Xi “respects me and he knows I’m f—— crazy.” Bluster aside, Trump, unlike Biden, has never committed himself to defend Taiwan from a Chinese attack.

Should Beijing indeed attack Taiwan outright or, as appears more likely, impose a crippling on the island, Trump seems unlikely to risk a war with China. The loss of Taiwan would break the US position along the Pacific littoral, which for 80 years has been the fulcrum of its global imperial posture. This would push its naval forces back to a “second island chain” running from Japan to Guam. Such a retreat would represent a major blow to the US’s imperial role in the Pacific, potentially making it no longer a significant player in the security of its Asia-Pacific allies.

A silent US recessional

Adding up the likely impact of Trump’s policies in this country, Asia, Europe and the international community generally, his second term will almost certainly be one of imperial decline, increasing internal chaos and a further loss of global leadership. As “respect for American authority” fades, Trump may yet resort to “threatening military retaliation or economic reprisal.” But as I predicted back in 2010, it seems quite likely that “the world pays next to no attention as the American Century ends in silence.”

[ first published this piece.]

[ edited this piece.]

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Eight Reasons Marco Rubio Would Be a Disastrous Secretary of State

Medea Benjamin — Wed, 20 Nov 2024 13:17:15 +0000

Of all of President-elect Donald Trump’s choices for his foreign policy team, Marco Rubio is the least controversial to the foreign policy establishment in Washington, DC. He is the most certain to provide continuity with all that is wrong with United States foreign policy, from Cuba to the Middle East to China.

The only area where there might be some hope for ending a war is Ukraine. Rubio has come close to Trump’s position on that matter, praising Ukraine for standing up to Russia, but that the US is funding a deadly “stalemate war” that needs to be “brought to a conclusion.”

But in all the other hotspots around the world, Rubio is likely to make conflicts even hotter, or start new ones. Here are eight reasons why he would make a dangerous secretary of state:

Rubio’s obsession with Cuban regime change will sink any chance of better relations there

Like other Cuban-American politicians, Rubio has built his career on vilifying the Cuban Revolution and trying to economically strangle and starve the people of his parents’ homeland into submission.

It is ironic, therefore, that his parents left Cuba before the Revolution, during the US-backed dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista. Batista’s executioners, secret police and death squads killed an 20,000 people, leading to a wildly popular revolution in 1959.

When President Barack Obama began to restore relations with Cuba in 2014, Rubio swore to do “everything possible” to obstruct and reverse that policy. In May 2024, Rubio his zero-tolerance for any kind of social or economic contacts between the US and Cuba, claiming that any easing of the US blockade will only “strengthen the oppressive regime and undermine the opposition… Until there is freedom in Cuba, the United States must maintain a firm stance.”��Two months earlier, Rubio legislation to ensure that Cuba would remain on the US “State Sponsor of Terrorism List,” imposing sanctions that cut Cuba off from the US-dominated Western banking system.

These measures to destroy the Cuban economy have led to a massive wave of migration in the past two years. But when the US Coast Guard tried to coordinate with their Cuban counterparts, Rubio introduced legislation to prohibit such interaction. While Trump has vowed to stem immigration, his secretary of state wants to crush Cuba’s economy, forcing people to abandon the island and set sail for the US.

Applying Rubio’s anti-Cuba template to the rest of Latin America will make enemies of more of our neighbors

Rubio’s disdain for his ancestral home has served him so well as a US politician that he has extended it to the rest of Latin America. He has sided with extreme right-wing politicians like Argentinian President Javier Milei and former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro. He rails against progressive ones, from Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva to the popular Mexican former President López Obrador, whom he “an apologist for tyranny” for supporting other leftist governments.

In Venezuela, Rubio has promoted brutal sanctions and plots to topple the government of Nicolas Maduro. In 2019, he was one of the of Trump’s failed policy of recognizing opposition figure Juan Guaidó as president. He has also advocated for sanctions and regime change in Nicaragua.

In March 2023, Rubio urged President Joe Biden to impose on Bolivia for prosecuting�� leaders of a 2019 US-backed coup that led to that killed at least 21 people.��He also the government of Honduras for withdrawing from an extradition treaty with the US this past August. This was a response to decades of US interference that had turned Honduras into a narco-state riven by poverty, gang violence and mass , until the election of democratic socialist President Xiomara Castro in January 2022.

Rubio’s major concern in this part of the world now seems to be the of China, which has become the second-largest of most Latin American countries. Unlike the US, China focuses on economic benefits and not internal politics. Meanwhile, US politicians like Rubio still see Latin America as the US’s “backyard.”

While Rubio’s virulent anti-leftist stands have served him well in climbing to senior positions in the US government, and now into Trump’s inner circle, his disdain for Latin American sovereignty bodes ill for US relations in the region.

Rubio insists that the US and Israel can do no wrong, and that God has given Palestine to Israel

Despite the massive death toll in Gaza and global condemnation of Israel’s genocide, Rubio still the myth that “Israel takes extraordinary steps to avoid civilian losses” and that innocent people die in Gaza because Hamas has deliberately placed them in the way and used them as human shields. The problem, he says, is “an enemy that doesn’t value human life.”

In November 2024, when CODEPINK if Rubio would support a ceasefire, he replied, “On the contrary. I want them to destroy every element of Hamas they can get their hands on. These people are vicious animals.”

There are few times in this past year that the Biden administration has tried to restrain Israel, but when Biden begged Israel not to send troops into the southern city of Rafah, Rubio that was like telling the Allied forces in World War II not to attack Berlin to get Adolf Hitler.

In a to Secretary of State Antony Blinken in August 2024, Rubio criticized the Biden administration’s decision to sanction Israeli settlers linked to anti-Palestinian violence in the occupied West Bank.

“Israel has consistently sought peace with the Palestinians. It is unfortunate that the Palestinians, whether it be the Palestinian Authority or FTOs [Foreign Terrorist Organisations] such as Hamas, have rejected such overtures,” Rubio wrote. “Israelis rightfully living in their historic homeland are not the impediment to peace; the Palestinians are,” he added.

No country besides Israel subscribes to the idea that its borders should be based on 2,000-year-old religious scriptures, and that it has a God-given right to displace or exterminate people who have lived there since then to reconquer its ancient homeland. The US will find itself extraordinarily isolated from the rest of the world if Rubio tries to assert that as a matter of US policy.

Rubio’s enmity toward Iran will fuel Israel’s war on its neighbors, and may lead the US to war

Rubio is obsessed with Iran. He that the central cause of violence and suffering in the Middle East is not Israeli policy but “Iran’s ambition to be a regional hegemonic power.” He that Iran’s goal in the Middle East is to “seek to drive America out of the region and then destroy Israel.”

He has been a proponent of maximum pressure on Iran, including for more and more sanctions. He believes the US should not re-enter the Iran nuclear deal, saying: “We must not trade away U.S. and Israeli security for vague commitments from a terrorist-sponsoring regime that has killed Americans and threatens to annihilate Israel.”

Rubio calls Lebanon’s Hezbollah a “full blown agent of Iran right on Israel’s border” and claims that wiping out Hezbollah’s leadership, along with entire neighborhoods full of civilians, is a “service to humanity.” He alleges that Iran has control over Iraq, Syria and the Houthis in Yemen, and is a threat to Jordan. He claims that “Iran has put a noose around Israel,” and says the goal of US policy should be regime change in Iran. This would set the stage for war.

While there will hopefully be leaders in the Pentagon who will caution Trump about the of a war with Iran, Rubio will not be a voice of reason.

Rubio is beholden to big money, from the weapons industry to the Israel lobby

Rubio has reportedly received over in campaign contributions from pro-Israel groups during his career. The Pro-Israel America PAC was his single campaign contributor over the last five years. When he last ran for re-election in 2022, he was the recipient of funding by pro-Israel groups in the Senate, taking in $367,000 from them for that campaign.

Rubio was also the recipient of funding from the “defense” industry in the Senate for the 2022 cycle, receiving $196,000. Altogether, the weapons industry has invested $663,000 in his Congressional career.

Rubio is clearly beholden to the US arms industry. He’s even more beholden to the Israel lobby, which has been one of his largest sources of campaign funding. This has placed him in the vanguard of Congress’s blind, unconditional support for Israel and subservience to Israeli narratives and propaganda. Therefore, it is unlikely that he will ever challenge the ongoing extermination of the Palestinian people or their expulsion from their homeland.

Rubio is so antagonistic towards China that China has sanctioned him — twice

at the Heritage Foundation in 2022, Rubio said: “The gravest threat facing America today — it is the challenge that will define not just this century, but my generation and every generation represented here in this room today — that challenge is not climate change, it’s not the pandemic, it’s not the left’s version of social justice. The threat that will define this century is China.”

It will be hard for our nation’s “top diplomat” to ease tensions with a country he has so maligned. He antagonized China by co-sponsoring the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, which allows the US to bar Chinese imports over alleged Uyghur rights abuses — abuses that China denies and independent question. In fact, Rubio has gone so far as to accuse China of a “grotesque campaign of genocide” against the Uyghurs.

On Taiwan, he has not only introduced legislation to increase military aid to the island, but actually supports Taiwanese — a dangerous deviation from the US government’s long-standing One China approach.

The Chinese responded to Rubio by sanctioning him, not once but twice: once regarding the Uyghurs and once for his support of Hong Kong protests. Unless China lifts the sanctions, he would be the first US secretary of state to be banned from even visiting China.

Analysts expect China to try to sidestep Rubio and engage directly with Trump and other senior officials. Steve Tsang, the director of the China Institute at the United Kingdom’s School of Oriental and African Studies, told , “If that doesn’t work, then I think we’re going to get into a much more regular escalation of a bad relationship.”

Rubio knows sanctions are a trap, but doesn’t know how to escape them

Rubio is a leading advocate of unilateral economic sanctions, which are under international law, and which the UN and other countries refer to as “unilateral economic coercive measures.”

The US has used these measures so widely and wildly that they now a third of the world’s population. Officials from Treasury Secretary to Rubio himself have warned that using the US financial system and the dollar’s reserve currency status as weapons against other countries is driving the rest of the world to conduct trade in other currencies and develop alternative financial systems.

In March 2023, Rubio on Fox News, “We won’t have to talk sanctions in five years, because there will be so many countries in currencies other than the dollar that we won’t have the ability to sanction them.”

And yet Rubio has continued to be a leading sponsor of sanctions bills in the Senate. These include new on Iran in January 2024 and a in July to sanction foreign banks that participate in alternative financial systems.

While other countries develop new financial and trading systems to escape abusive, illegal US sanctions, the nominee for secretary of state remains caught in the same sanctions trap that he complained about on Fox.

Rubio wants to oppress US free speech

Rubio wants to curtail the right to enshrined in the First Amendment of the US Constitution. In May, he campus protests against Israel as a “complete breakdown of law and order.”

Rubio claimed to be speaking up for other students at US universities. “[They] paid a lot of money to go to these schools, [but are being disrupted by] a few thousand antisemitic zombies who have been brainwashed by two decades of indoctrination in the belief that the world is divided between victimizers and victims, and that the victimizers in this particular case, the ones that are oppressing people, are Jews in Israel,” Rubio said.

The Florida senator has said he supports Trump’s to deport foreign students who engage in pro-Palestinian campus . In April, he for punishing supporters of the Israel boycott movement as part of efforts to counter antisemitism, falsely equating any attempt to respond to Israel’s international crimes with antisemitism.

And what about those crimes, which the students are protesting? After visiting Israel in May, Rubio wrote an article for in which he never mentioned the thousands of civilians Israel has killed. He instead blamed Iran, Biden and “morally corrupt international institutions” for the crisis.

Rubio expects US citizens to believe that it is not genocide itself, but protests against genocide, that are a complete breakdown of law and order. He ��ǳܱ��’t be more wrong if he tried.

Students are not Rubio’s only target. In August 2023, he that certain “far-left and antisemitic entities” may have violated the Foreign Assistance Registration Act by their ties to China. He called for a Justice Department investigation into 18 groups, starting with CODEPINK. These unfounded claims of Chinese connections are only meant to intimidate legitimate groups that are exercising their free speech rights.

Conclusion: Rubio is a dangerous choice for secretary of state.

On each of these issues, Rubio has shown no sign of understanding the difference between domestic politics and diplomacy. Whether he’s talking about Cuba, Palestine, Iran or China, or even about CODEPINK, all his supposedly tough positions are based on cynically mischaracterizing the actions and motivations of his enemies and then attacking the straw man he has falsely set up.

Unscrupulous politicians often get away with that, and Rubio is no exception. He has made it his signature tactic because it works so well for him in US politics. But that will not work if and when he sits down to negotiate with other world leaders as secretary of state.

His underlying attitude to foreign relations is, like Trump’s, that the US must get its way or else. Additionally, other countries who won’t submit must be coerced, threatened, couped, bombed or invaded. This makes Rubio just as ill-equipped as Blinken to conduct diplomacy, improve US relations with other countries or resolve disputes and conflicts peacefully, as the United Nations Charter requires.

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post Eight Reasons Marco Rubio Would Be a Disastrous Secretary of State appeared first on 51�Թ�.

The Pentagon’s Flawed Account of Its Failure to Keep Accounts

Peter Isackson — Wed, 20 Nov 2024 11:02:51 +0000

Precisely three years ago, in November 2021, Reuters this headline: “U.S. Pentagon fails fourth audit but sees steady progress.” Both the Department of Defense (DoD) and Reuters hoped at the time to put the best spin on this chronic failure. Handling billions and even trillions is no easy job. Mistakes will be made. Oversight will be occasionally real. But, as the Beatles once insisted, “it’s getting better all the time.”

Reuters, like the Pentagon itself, sought to reassure the public that, however poor the performance, the DoD’s intentions were good. (Cue the Nina Simone, “I’m just a soul whose intentions are good; Oh Lord, please don’t let me be misunderstood…”)

For United States citizens, late 2021 was an odd moment in history. It was the first year of Joe Biden’s presidency. Following the withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021 after 20 years of war, the increasingly bloated US defense establishment was, for a few months, no longer visibly involved militarily, diplomatically or logistically in an overseas conflict. Yes, there was some action in Syria and even Iraq. But the public felt this as a moment of peacetime. The perfect opportunity to set one’s house in order.

Reuters cannot be blamed for failing to notice that the State Department was busy at the time setting the scene for a war with Russia as NATO — but not the US on its own — was putting increasing pressure on the Donbas region in Ukraine. No journalist could predict the Russian invasion that would take place three months later. It was indeed a privileged moment for reassessing the entire defense establishment’s capacity to manage and even audit its own accounts.

In the meantime, that war not only began but is still going on, with hundreds of billions of US defense expenses transferred to Ukraine. Even less predictable than Putin’s “unprovoked” invasion of Ukraine, was the equally “unprovoked” Gaza revolt of October 2023 that put the DoD money machine into overdrive as the ironclad commitment to Israel had to be respected, no matter what.

So, with all that unexpected activity and the complex politics that accompanies it, we should not be astonished today to discover that not too much has changed on the audit front.

This time it’s Brad Dress writing for The Hill who offers us what has now become a somewhat predictable and repetitive: “Pentagon fails 7th audit in a row but says progress made.”

But the Beatles certainly got it right, since, according to no less an authority than Under Secretary of Defense Comptroller and Chief Financial Officer Michael McCord, the Defense Department “has turned a corner in its understanding of the depth and breadth of its challenges.” He even gave a reading of the dynamics when he added: “Momentum is on our side, and throughout the Department there is strong commitment — and belief in our ability — to achieve an unmodified audit opinion.”

�մǻ岹��’s Weekly Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Strong commitment:

In the language of military officials, vague intention, which is a generous reading for something that more likely means “a weak non-commitment.”

Contextual note

It may sound abusive to claim that a phrase such as “strong commitment” can mean literally its opposite, as we propose in our definition. But meaning comes from context. In baseball, a 7-0 shutout is a weak performance, and this one resembles a “no-hitter.”

But there is another linguistic test we can apply to determine the meaning here. If a Silicon Valley entrepreneur makes a statement such as, “We have a strong commitment to rival the market leader,” no one will doubt that the company’s focus will be squarely on achieving that goal. In contrast, we learn from McCord that “throughout the Department there is strong commitment.” First, we should notice that “there is” signifies a passive assertion, compared to the type of formulation that identifies a determined will. The “we” in “we have a strong commitment” includes the speaker. McCord’s assertion is so vague it would be true even if he himself didn’t for a moment share the commitment.

McCord uses the idea of “throughout the Department” to rhetorically magnify the effect, but instead it dilutes it. “Throughout” suggests a dispersion in space, a diffuse feeling rather than the kind of moral engagement one would expect him to affirm. But it’s his following parenthesis that gives the game away. He speaks of a “belief in our ability.” The idea of “belief” is considerably weaker than, say, “confidence in our ability.” Belief expresses a form of hope that relies on no concrete evidence.

McCord allows the fog of his reasoning to thicken. “I do not say we failed, as I said, we have about half clean opinions. We have half that are not clean opinions. So if someone had a report card that is half good and half not good, I don’t know that you call the student or the report card a failure. We have a lot of work to do, but I think we’re making progress.”

At least the Beatles affirmed that it’s getting better all the time, not that they “think” they’re making progress.

Historical note

In a January 2022 Devil’s Dictionary piece, we cited the of an observer of Beltway politics who provided a clue as to why things need not get better all the time. “None of the ‘centrist’ Democrats or Republicans who complained about the cost of the Build Back Better Act have said a peep about the ever-growing Pentagon budget — and the fact that it is somehow still growing even despite the Afghanistan pullout. It has grown about 25% in size over the past five years, even though the Pentagon just failed its fourth audit last month.”

We cited an earlier from 2019 that began with this astonishing sentence: “A Michigan State University economics professor discovered $21 trillion unaccounted for in the federal budget starting in 1998 until the end of fiscal year 2015.”

In other words, there is no reason to be surprised today that a “strong commitment” to conduct accurate audits is necessary and will continue to make headlines… probably for decades to come. And the only change will be similar to what we’ve already seen when, three years later, four failed audits turn into seven.

But let’s look more deeply at the historical context. The latest article cites what appears to be a serious deadline, only four years away. “The Pentagon said it is firmly committed to achieving a clean audit by 2028, as mandated by the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act.”

This leaves us wondering. Could this be related to another commitment we’ve been hearing about? Some will call it not so much a commitment, but a belief widely shared in national security circles and that concerns the medium term: that a war with China has been at least “mentally” programmed for 2027. Noah Robertson writing for Defense News this May published a two-part with the title: “How DC became obsessed with a potential 2027 Chinese invasion of Taiwan.”

This leaves us speculating about why 2028 was chosen as the objective. How convenient a hot war with China would turn out to be for anyone seeking to avoid having to face up to the first “clean audit” the following year. Who would dare to demand accountability in the midst, or even the aftermath of a hot war with China?

So, how much “confidence” should we have in the breakout of a war with China in 2027? Remember, this forecast of a war at a precise date was formulated at a time when no one expected Donald Trump to be elected for a second time. It isn’t Trump’s volatility that explains it, nor his promise to focus his attention on China rather than Russia.

Robertson explained the logic by citing a Joe Biden administration official who paraphrased the remarks of Chinese President Xi Jinping: “Look, I hear all these reports in the United States [of] how we’re planning for military action in 2027 or 2035.” Xi affirms: “There are no such plans.” Which many interpret as the proof that such plans do exist.

“That first year, 2027,” Robertson says, “is a fixation in Washington. It has impacted the debate over China policy — a shift from the long term to the short term. It’s also helped steer billions of dollars toward U.S. forces in the Pacific. And in the last several years, it’s been a question mark hanging over the Biden administration’s approach to the region.”

There’s the answer to the mystery of the failed audits. We know that the military-industrial complex is all about helping to “steer billions of dollars” in any chosen direction. At the same time, one steers one’s regard away from the auditor’s books.

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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Running Scared: Democrats Routed by a Torrent of Hate

Larry Beck — Mon, 18 Nov 2024 11:38:17 +0000

The 2024 United States presidential election should have provided the easiest path to electoral choice in decades. Even though it should have been easy to identify who won, a majority of the nation’s voters dove into the cesspool of self-absorbed and hate-filled racists, misogynists, grifters, corporate lowlife and the like to ensure an outcome reflecting their perspective. Every time I think America cannot disappoint more, the citizenry seems to reaffirm just how low our nation can sink.

Former President Barack Obama has a that he and others, particularly Democrats, use routinely: “This is not who we are.” Obama trots it out at every perceived tragedy, generally in order to avoid the uncomfortable and, dare I say it, more confrontational opposite message. For example, when gun carnage abounds, Obama and others so inclined prefer to absolve the masses from any responsibility because “this is not who we are.” If only that sentiment were true.

The current presidential election gave Obama a new platform from which he reminded us all of the coming horrors should the unwashed vote for Donald Trump. Then he immediately absolved the unwashed of any responsibility for the impending doom because “this is not who we are.” Unfortunately, it is precisely who we are.

Candidate Kamala Harris was quick to jump on the “this is not who we are” bandwagon. In her with the White House as a backdrop, she treated us all to a “this is not who we are” chorus, fanning the flames of absolution in the vain hope that she could reach those who would be offended by a more direct message. In fact, in the waning days of the election, President Joe Biden pretty much nailed it — calling Trump’s racist supporters “” seemed about right to me.

I could go on with this, but it would not bring us any closer to understanding Trump’s grip on more than half the people who actually voted in the election. On one level, it seems that many voters have become so jaded by their personal “plight” that everything from the increased cost of a tomato to a martini to a Bentley offends their personal sensibilities, unfettered by concern for others and their plight. By this line of reasoning, any Trump lie about the economy received a friendly reception unencumbered by facts to the contrary.

Democrats must fight back

On another level, it looks like Trump tapped into a deep vein of fear that changing demographics are eroding the privilege that drives white Americans to a sense of comfortable superiority. This sense of superiority seems to run across economic divides in the white community, providing white voters with the impetus they needed to ignore the actual likely economic impact of specific candidate or political party proposals. Some of the same reasoning may have led “privileged” blacks and Latinos to similar conclusions.

So now that this interminable election cycle has produced a hard fall, it might be time for progressive Democrats to finally get indignant enough to confront, confuse and undermine every initiative of Trump they can find. This is long overdue. Talk of “unity” is the prescription for continued political demise.

Using Latinos as an example, apparently many chose not to hear or understand the racist, anti-immigrant message aimed at them because they for Trump anyway. It is time now to stand up to those Latino voters with that message in hand as Trump deports them and spits in their faces on the way out. Then, while the roundup continues, Democrats must not do anything to support any plan to “fix” America’s immigration system. Oppose any such plan every step of the way.

Democrats need to remember how nicely that political dance worked for Trump and his acolytes in this election. That same dance will work for Democrats in the next election cycle, but only if they have the political cojones required to pull it off while consistently advocating for the required components of humane and comprehensive immigration reform.

Likewise, this is a time to forcefully confront the undemocratic aspects of our political system and the inequities that they spawn. This would be a significantly more concrete message about the fight for democracy than all the blather about the cataclysmic clash between “democracy” and “autocracy,” as if winning the labeling war ends the discussion. Actually fighting for meaningful institutional reform in the US is the real fight for democracy that can reap electoral rewards and promote messaging clarity.

The list is long: Champion the simple democratic reform of eliminating the electoral college to provide that a popular vote majority elects the next president; aggressively confront voter suppression measures and seek to enact national voter access standards; force as many open congressional votes as possible on legislative proposals to enact a national living wage and provide for the childcare equity that opens pathways to a higher collective standard of living and demand that government protect the freedom to life and liberty that is threatened directly by ever-present gun violence. Then, work on easy-to-understand legislation that makes access to meaningful healthcare and quality public education a right of every man, woman and child living in America.

Further, as a painful reminder that weaponized hypocrisy has been a powerful tool of Senate Republicans, watch how smoothly they eliminate the filibuster in the upcoming legislative year to use their congressional majority to ensure that their right-wing agenda items reach Trump’s desk. Senate Democrats must use every trick they can find to stop this onslaught. The Republicans will inevitably attempt to manipulate the confirmation process to ensure the Senate confirmation of the parade of troglodytes proposed for high government, military office and the judiciary. Democrats must, for once, outmaneuver them, even as it reveals their own hypocrisy.

Finally, as Democrats reflect on what is to come, we will be treated to another pathetic round of mainstream media self-flagellation, at the conclusion of which celebratory kudos will be passed around for a job well done in difficult times. For this ever to change, we must expose the role of corporate money and its corrupting influence on the nation’s media. We must challenge the news “personalities” aspiring to be part of the story and little more, content “balance” free of context or verification and the ubiquitous presence of unregulated social media devoid of any standards.

Remember what America, sadly, stands for

As with the open and ugly face of racism that Trump’s first adventure in “governing” exposed to the easily deluded populace, this time around we will be treated to the death knell of so many more of the delusions that underpin the most venal aspects of what America has always been and sadly continues to be. So the next time you pledge allegiance to the flag and to the republic for which it stands, think of immigrants rounded up like cattle, of hungry children in our midst, of the homeless, of book bans and the like, along with a flag-friendly nod to the cruelty directed at some of the most vulnerable among us.

Meanwhile, I will be sitting on my perch watching and waiting, hoping that the younger generations finally find something to move them enough to think beyond themselves and put something at risk. It is a shame that an old man has to be the one to continue saying this.

[ first published this piece.]

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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How Optional Can De-Dollarization Become?

Peter Isackson — Wed, 13 Nov 2024 12:00:14 +0000

51�Թ� will shortly renew our regular publication of an ongoing dialogue we call “Money Matters.” In it we publish the reflections, insights and matters for debate shared by a group of experts and contributors willing to participate in an open dialogue aimed at making sense of the crucial decisions and initiatives now being made concerning international payment systems and the effect these decisions are likely to have on an evolving geopolitical order. The decisions currently debated and increasingly put into practice will shape the future global economy impacting the lives of the eight billion inhabitants of our planet.

Among the prominent experts, former central banker at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Kathleen Tyson, recently concerning the global trend of central banks to diversify away from strict dependence on the US dollar: “Currency optionality is now a matter of economic and national security. US threats of more tariffs and sanctions against states moving to Local Currency Trade demonstrate the dangers of dollar dependence and the urgency of optionality and resiliency.”

Everyone understands the meaning of resiliency. But what about optionality?

�մǻ岹��’s Weekly Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Optionality:

A euphemistic synonym of the common noun “choice.” It is employed to avoid provoking the simulacrum of “moral judgment” exercised by dominant powers who believe that their set of rules intended to normalize economic behavior endow them with the right to coerce others and the duty to limit others’ ability to choose.

Contextual note

Tyson is of course referring to the growing trend seen in a diversity of nations to devise methods, techniques and technology that will allow central banks and other foreign exchange operators to conduct transactions flexibly and, when possible, directly between the widest range of individual currencies. This means adopting an attitude that aims at avoiding dependence on what used to be the most convenient solution for everyone: holding US dollars reserves.

So why pedantically insist on a technocratic neologism? Why not be more simple and natural and call this “currency choice?”

There are several comprehensible reasons for this innovation in vocabulary. Unlike the idea behind the word choice, optionality refers not to the act of choosing but to a persistent state in which flexible strategic choice appears as the default setting. In contrast, the idea of choice to modern ears evokes a specific act governed as much by taste as rational calculation. It even includes the idea of not choosing. Optionality implies the necessity to choose.

The emergence of the notion of “consumer choice” in the 20th century has polluted our vocabulary. It defines a mentality in which consumers, confronted with a diversity of brands, exercise their free will by choosing the one they find most attractive. This has even affected the model of democracy in the US. Americans now understand that they have a choice between exactly two viable brands. Elections are about convincing the electorate that one brand is better than the other.

The advent of the consumer society enabled marketers to develop a complementary concept, the notion of impulse purchasing decisions fueled by advertising. Given the seriousness of foreign exchange, optionality can thus be seen as the necessary alternative to the ultimately trivial notion of consumer choice.

Unlike consumer decisions, optionality is emotionally neutral. It supposes cold rationality in its decision making. Some find it ironic that at the same time dominant macro theories of modern capitalism posit and indeed require a belief in the existence of homo economicus — a purely rational being capable at all times of calculating what best correlated with their interest — the notion of impulse buying emerged as a staple of the “science” of marketing.

To understand the transition from the increasingly unipolar, normative and conformist 20th century and the disruptive increasingly multipolar 21st century, pondering these distinctions of vocabulary can prove helpful. It’s too easy to dismiss a word like optionality as a futile example of a self-enamored professional elite’s taste for jargon, designed to meet their need to feel both different from and superior to the common culture.

What we’re seeing today is an emerging world wounded and sent into disarray by Washington’s obsessive recourse to sanctions. Rather than seeking to undermine the dollar, the wise bankers and politicians are focusing on defining a field of options in which normal economic relationships may play out, free of the fear of coercion and intimidation. Rather than taking the form of a slave revolt, they are inventing not only new practices and technologies, but even a vocabulary that helps define a new economic culture.

Historical note

Since the beginning of the 21st century, two major events have transformed the way nations understand the world order. When President George W. Bush responded to the drama of the September 11 attacks by launching a war with a nation state, Afghanistan, instead of framing the issue as a criminal affair, his futile “forever wars” focused on regime change ultimately undermined the image of the US as the unipolar enforcer of a self-defined rules-based order. The prestige of its global military presence, ready to police the world in the name of democracy, took a serious hit. President Joe Biden’s ignominious retreat from Afghanistan in 2021, after 20 years of feckless war, confirmed the world’s worst suspicions.

The supposedly indomitable US military machine had confirmed what should have been clear with the fall of Saigon nearly 50 years earlier: Even with no rival global power on Earth, the US military was incapable of imposing its will on other regions of the world. Thanks to Bush, one pillar of US supremacy was seriously cracked for all the world to see.

The financial crisis of 2007–2008 offered an initial glimpse of the weakness of the other pillar: the US economy, its tentacular stock market and the almighty dollar. The shock was real but not fatal. Thanks to President Barack Obama’s commitment to quantitative easing (QE), the dollar maintained its pivotal role, but at its core it was already seriously fragilized.

After the withdrawal from Afghanistan, Biden made a new strategic error that had the effect of confirming the world’s perception that currency optionality had become an existential necessity. For decades, Washington has been addicted to sanctions designed to weaken and ultimately topple the governments of every nation that fails to show due respect to what Noam Chomsky has “the Godfather.” The extreme measures taken in reaction to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 brought to the fore what should have been obvious: every nation should fear the dollar. When Biden cut Russia off from the SWIFT payment system and threatened to punish any country that did business with Russia, nations across the face of the globe realized that holding too many dollars, though convenient for trade, entailed a possibly existential risk.

The “de-dollarization” movement has been growing slowly over time. In 2016, Obama’s Treasury Secretary Jack Lew expressed his awareness of the risk for the US. He that the “escalation of financial sanctions will only accelerate this trend, precipitating further de-dollarization as more countries capitalize on digitalization to expand their use of LCS for bilateral transactions and to develop more hedging instruments.” He added this: “The more we condition the use of the dollar and our financial system on adherence to US foreign policy, the more the risk of migration to other currencies and other financial systems in the medium term grows.”

As Lew predicted, the medium term is living up to his forecast. Currency optionality will inexorably be part of a new world order.

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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If She Loses, Part 2: Kamala’s Campaign Didn’t Resonate

Christopher Roper Schell — Tue, 05 Nov 2024 11:12:29 +0000

[You can read “If She Loses, Part 1: Kamala Wrong on the Issues” here.]

Democratic US presidential candidate Kamala Harris has never won a single primary vote in the 2020 or 2024 elections, so at least she would be consistent, but if she loses the 2024 election, it will boil down to five main issues and one sleeper issue that will have collectively proven insurmountable.

“Word salad city” and lack of clarity

Harris is for not doing her homework and then berating staff. The word “insecure” often pops up in descriptions of her. On occasion, so, too, does the word “.”

Whatever the reason, her word salads in speeches, debates and interviews have become infamous. . Her predilection for tautologies and phrases that verge on mysticism comes across as far more corny and sophomoric than profound or philosophical. Phrases like, “You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you,” run in circles and say nothing to voters.

Harris’s October 23 was not a winner either. Her word salads extended even to predictable questions like, “What weaknesses do you bring to the table, and how do you plan to overcome them while you’re in office?” or “Is there something you can point to … that you think is a mistake that you have learned from?”

This is not a new phenomenon. Even as Vice President, she often, in the Bard’s words, “speaks an infinite deal of nothing.” In a question about war crimes, she had to say: “But we all watched the television coverage of just yesterday.��That’s on top of everything else that we know and don’t know yet, based on what we’ve just been able to see.��And because we’ve seen it or not doesn’t mean it hasn’t happened.” What in heaven’s name is she saying?

She has also spoken of her belief that will “inspire us by helping us to be inspired to solve the problems.” This is sheer nonsense, and it makes you wonder what kind of gerbil wheel is running in her head. Or what about the word “,” which she deployed in succession to ultimately say nothing about the question she was asked about housing. Harris’s Mobius strips of bullshit led to a brilliant on The Daily Show in which a fictional “holistic thought advisor” helps Harris develop Harris-shaped “idea voyages.”

Harris knows this is a weakness, which is why she avoided interviews as much as possible and only speaks to the press pool . She even skipped the National Association of Black Journalists — a decidedly friendly crowd. This is President Joe Biden 2.0.

Harris’s unwillingness to go an inch off script has led people to doubt her authenticity, and many voters say they want to know more about her policies because her scripted moments talk endlessly about aspirations and dignity rather than policy. Much of what Harris plans to do remains a blank slate.

David Faris, in an October 24 Newsweek , put it bluntly: “Harris has unwittingly leaned into everything that independent voters hate about D.C. politics — the inauthenticity, the refusal to answer direct questions, the casual jettisoning of past policies and stances in a mad dash to chase public opinion around as if she has no power whatsoever to shape it.” He went on to say her approach was to “basically renounce the person that she had been throughout her entire time in the U.S.��Senate��and to walk back the positions she staked out when she sought the presidency in 2019 one by one.”

Flip-flops over past policies

Harris’s word salads are well-known, but she is also “ by what has been” with respect to her past policy positions. Coconut trees and are not enough. Calling Trump a fascist is not a plan, nor can platitudes replace policy. Comparing Trump to Nazi dictator is a losing argument because it demeans those considering him. Besides that, Jews, understandably, do not appreciate the comparison.

Unfortunately, Harris’s platform looks like Swiss cheese. She has on virtually every position she held when she last ran for president. Her Etch A Sketch proposals are made all the more curious in the absence of any explanation of why she has made the drastic revisions, but it doesn’t take a genius to answer that question: It’s political opportunism.

Harris papered countless 180s on policy over with the whimsically empty explanation that her “values haven’t changed.” This damaged her credibility. While some evolution is to be expected, the about-faces make her look too much like a product of polling with no real convictions. Beyond winning and a likely reversion to her earlier, California progressive positions, there’s not much to make us believe the new Harris is anything but a temporary retread. Trump may be a lot of things, but people know he’s the real McCoy.

For those who enjoyed the calm days of Black Lives Matter protests, Harris was there supporting them and tweeting about a bail fund for those arrested in riots. We all fondly the days when she was with the “Defund the Police” set and said, “It is outdated, wrong and backward to think more police creates more safety.” If you peruse her in the Senate, she was in line with all the right-thinking people. Adam Nagourney at The New York Times notes that truncating the race has Harris to “coast past some of the scrutiny and detailed policy debates that candidates usually experience on the path to the nomination.”

Harris is no longer in favor of a lot of things she swore by. Getting rid of Immigration and Customs Enforcement? Not a part of her plan. Gone, too, is her commitment to press for Medicare for All (the abolition of private insurance) and the College for All Act. A fracking ban is supposedly out. Rather than confiscating guns, she now rushes to tell us about the one she owns. Packing the Supreme Court is ducked and dodged. She doesn’t want to talk about it. Decriminalizing illegal border crossings? That’s no longer her position, and one assumes she doesn’t want to mess with the food pyramid to get Americans to eat less red meat, as she some years ago.

Harris hasn’t said much about an EV mandate, though in 2019 she a bill that would have required automobile manufacturers to produce only electric and hydrogen-powered vehicles, completely phasing out the gas-powered ones Americans like by 2040. Race as a in college admissions isn’t spoken of by Democrats during this election cycle, though they are strongly in favor of it. Race reparations also don’t merit mention, though Harris that idea in 2019 as well.

Harris’s past positions now appear in the media as a “404: Page not Found.” In one case there is quite literally no page retrievable. Going into her first presidential campaign, GovTrack her the most liberal senator in 2019. Mysteriously, or perhaps not, that page was shortly after Harris became the 2024 candidate. I guess we know how this self-described “non-partisan” “transparency” is voting. So much for “mak[ing] our government more open and accessible.”

However, they still have a up that lists Harris as the most left-leaning and least bipartisan Democrat Senator for the entire Congress of 2019–2020. Senator Bernie Sanders occupies a different category as a self-declared independent, and he edged her out in a for the most lefty senator overall. However, Harris’ lefty positions can still be spotted. During an online campaign event, her running mate , “Don’t ever shy away from our progressive values. One person’s socialism is another person’s neighborliness.”

If staff is policy, look at Harris’s . Gene Sperling, once Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama’s economic advisor, is now with Harris. Harris’s climate engagement director a ruckus by saying the candidate doesn’t really mean what she’s saying about fracking. These are not “change” advisos.

Why would they be? The about-face is a �ٰ��ǳ��-��’�վ��. As economist Oren Cass in an op-ed for The New York Times, when Harris was asked on October 16 about her former advocacy for giving driver’s licenses, college tuition and free healthcare to undocumented immigrants, she��, “Listen, that was five years ago.” You can change your mind, but you can’t do a wholesale makeover of who you are in a few years.

So what (theoretically) are her (current) policies? Harris mostly offers vibes, teleprompter remarks about gauzy ideals and attacks on Trump. The problem, of course, is that 25% of Americans believe the country is heading in the right direction, and only 39% of likely voters think Harris was the best candidate the Democratic Party could have picked. That makes it hard to run on her record.

The other problem is that Bidenomics is Kamalanomics, but in a twist, Kamalanomics pairs the massive spending and regulatory overreach of Bidenomics with the price controls of Nixonomics. To address inflation, Harris is going to institute to tame grocery bills. Even as the media claims these are not actual price controls, I don’t know what else to call it when the Federal Trade Commission and each state’s Attorney General gets to “punish” whoever transgresses the profit rules made up in Washington. As though a government bureaucracy would know the price of kale.

Or how about giving $25,000 to home buyers, which would only raise house prices and stoke demand, a point she acknowledges when she pledges to build three million more homes. How will she build these houses? Details to follow. Economics 101 question: What will giving $25,000 for every homebuyer do to house prices? If you said raise them, then you and the average high schooler know more about economics than Kamala Devi Harris.

The Washington Post regarding Harris’s economic plan, “The times demand serious economic ideas. Harris supplies gimmicks.” They go on to note that “‘price gouging’ is not causing inflation. So why is the vice president promising to stamp it out?” No one seems to know why, and no one can even say what excessive profits are. The Post again questions how this would even be established. “Ms. Harris says she’ll target companies that make ‘excessive’ profits, whatever that means.”

When considering her proposed programs, there is a decided funding hole. Where is the money coming from? In the understatement of the year, Harris’ campaign, “otherwise light on policy specifics,” a $5 trillion tax hike.

Harris is a blank slate on Biden’s proposal to tax unrealized capital gains, but in the wants you to that her ordinary capital gains plan is a big break from Biden’s proposed higher rate.��

“Kamala the moderate” is the word of the day. The New York Times us this is “one of several moves meant to win over business owners” and that she is “friendlier than Biden” on taxes. Hooray. Harris added in a platitude-laden , “Let us understand, then, that when we say ‘fight,’ it is a fight for something, not against something. It is for something.��That’s what we’re talking about when we talk about a new way forward.��This is for something.” She declined to go much into what that something is.

I will say it is a fight for something. Once you include Harris’s proposed surcharge on investment income, the fight is for returning to the highest capital gains rates since 1978, a decade few would recall as a time of low inflation and flourishing small businesses. It’s also worth noting the 1978 tax cut was signed into law by President Jimmy Carter, a Democrat, not Ronald Reagan. Harris’ policies are full-on stagflation material more reminiscent of the “secular stagnation” Obama years until his successor showed there were plenty of animal spirits left when you cut regulation and let people spend their money as they see fit.

I hear a lot about the rich paying their “fair share,” but how much should the 1% pay? I want an actual number. Currently, the 1% pay 40% of all income taxes. Should 1% of the population pay more than 40%? Is it 60%? 100%? Alas, you never get a number, and Republicans never ask the question.

Blind loyalty and Harris’s current record

For those in fraternity houses, a good drinking game during the Democratic convention was to take a drink whenever you heard Trump’s name. Those in Alcoholics Anonymous could safely commit to taking a drink any time they heard Biden’s name. On the first night, Biden himself landed that plum spot everyone jockeys for as a speaker at the convention: 11:30 PM. The party is running from the man, but Harris is sticking with his policies.

Harris tries to say she would govern differently from Biden, but she gives no specifics. Were she to distance herself on at least an issue or two from the present administration, or even point out that the vice president doesn’t have much pull, that might resonate; as things are, she refuses to mark any territory where she would diverge from the current path.

In the softest of softball interviews, Harris sat on a panel with the left-wing ladies of The View. When asked what she would change about the last four years, she gave a stunning answer. “There is not a thing that comes to mind,” she began. Really? Not on blowout, multi-trillion dollar bills that stoked inflation, immigration, or, I dunno, the Afghanistan withdrawal?

After saying she ��ǳܱ��’t think of a single change she would make, she continued, “And I have been a part of most of the decisions that have had impact.” She effectively said, “I’ve seen the polls and know you’re unhappy about things, but I’m not going to change current policies because I was behind them.” Trump seized the moment and ran with the .

Harris’s pollsters have to know Americans are not happy with the direction of the country, but she ��ǳܱ��’t articulate one thing she would do differently while also claiming stewardship over the last four years — thereby negating the “I’m only VP and have no decision-making authority” argument most Democrats have been making for her.

Harris has not departed on a single issue. When another time about voters’ desire for change and what she would do differently from Biden, she said, “I’m obviously not Joe Biden.” Well, no shit, Sherlock. Then, of all things, she went on to distinguish herself from Trump with the same vacuity before rounding it out with more talk of an “opportunity economy.” Unfortunately, it will take more than the media elite telling everyone about the current “” economy to make voters forget they aren’t happy. Meanwhile, Trump reminds people at his rallies of the Reagan question: “Are you better off than you were four years ago?”��

It’s not just that people feel overburdened; it’s that they feel they don’t get much for their tax dollars. When the government spends $7.5 billion dollars on charging stations to, more than two years later, exactly 8 stations, you have a problem. Whether the money is still in the planning stages or is waiting around is beyond the point. Why is it taking 2 years to just get going? Why isn’t the government working? This is why much of Trump’s rhetoric about government inefficiency and his promise to tap Elon Musk to address that problem resonate.

Everyone else seems to be running away from the mistakes Harris can’t summon to mind. Democrat incumbents trying to keep their Senate seats have some misgivings, and watching Senator Bob Casey’s ads you’d think he’s as MAGA as they come. There’s only one problem: he’s voted 98.5% of the time. That’s true too of Wisconsin’s��Tammy Baldwin (95.5% ). Michigan’s��Elissa Slotkin,��who is a three-term Representative bucking for a promotion to the Senate, votes 100% of the time. They’re now all running away from that record.

In Harris’ case, she promises to have a Republican in her cabinet, and she makes unsubstantiated promises to be a president for all Americans if elected, but many suspect she remains a California liberal at heart and will not reach across the aisle and build coalitions as promised. An NBC interview question on October 22about abortion is instructive.

Q: “What concessions would be on the table? Religious exemptions, for example, is that something that you would consider with a Republican-controlled Congress?”

Ms. Harris: “I don’t think that we should be making concessions when we’re talking about a fundamental freedom to make decisions about your own body.”

That same spirit of working with people extends to Harris’s dealings with her own staff. Even as vice president, she has had a 92% staff in her first three years. This goes back to her Senate . Actually, it goes back to her San Francisco district attorney days.

House Democrats are even running ads accusing a Republican of “turn[ing] his back on President Trump” during one of his impeachments. This is playing with fire if you think Trump is Hitler — so why would they do this? The same reason they supported pro-Trump Republicans in the last two election cycles: politics. That, and as I’ve said forever, Democrats don’t really think Trump is truly dangerous. They just need their voters to think he is.

Most notably, Harris continues to stand behind Biden’s diminished mental acuity. This is ridiculous. The coverup is now obvious in hindsight, yet she stands by her belief that Biden is as sharp as a tack.

Even before the January 6 Capitol Hill riots, there was a large cohort of “Never Trumpers,” yet the party was labeled spineless for not standing up to him. Few outside of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and George Clooney had the courage to tell Biden to his face that he ��ǳܱ��’t hack it. Certainly, Harris went along for the long con. Where is the cohort that casts as being of little character the person who spent the most time with the president but resoundingly declared him fit? And who flipped every policy to win the presidency out of naked ambition? If character is an important quality, then the voters might have had reason to believe Harris didn’t possess it.

Failure to pick Josh Shapiro

Polling by Emerson College at the time of Harris’ VP pick the following:

Regarding Vice President Harris’ selection of a running mate, a plurality of Arizona voters prefer Senator Mark Kelly (36%), 27% of Michigan voters prefer Gretchen Whitmer, 40% of Pennsylvania voters support Josh Shapiro, while 14% of Wisconsin voters support Bernie Sanders and 12% Pete Buttigieg.

Among just Democratic voters, in Arizona 42% prefer their Senator Mark Kelly, in Pennsylvania, 57% prefer their Governor Josh Shapiro and in Michigan 36% prefer their Governor Gretchen Whitmer. Georgia and Wisconsin saw Democrats split among candidates with no one having more than around 20%.

Given Pennsylvania is considered a, if not the, must-win state of the election, and given the state’s own voters had much stronger feelings for having “their guy” as Harris’ running mate, her choice of Minnesota Governor Tim Walz over Pennsylvania Governor Shapiro amounts to political malpractice. While a centrist as a congressman, Walz as governor played to the left. Further, Minnesota is a blue state, so Walz does not bring a swing state into the fold. Harris will also not be able to rely on Biden’s Pennsylvania roots this time around. Her San Francisco chops have zero credibility in the Mid-Atlantic.

Shapiro’s Jewish heritage was thought to be a liability with growing protests over Gaza, particularly in the swing state of Michigan. The widely rumored concern he would outshine Harris spoke only to insecurity and a willingness to go along with the base no matter what. Shapiro claimed, “We are the party of real freedom,” at the Democratic National Convention after being over for running mate for being a little too Jewish.

Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight fame thinks picking Tim Walz rather than the popular Shapiro, who has sky-high approval and is governor of a must-win state, might the election. Silver also points out that 47% of poll respondents think Harris is too liberal/progressive, while only 32% think Trump is too conservative. Over half of those polled (52%) aged 45 and up think she’s too liberal/progressive, which is a problem since older voters tend to be the ones who show up to vote. Now it seems Silver’s gut Trump will win. The New York Times’ 61 focus groups to Patrick Healy that Trump has the edge on the usual issues of inflation, the economy and immigration.

Not only does Harris have a problem with Pennsylvania’s 400,000 Jews who likely wanted Shapiro as VP, but she has a Catholic problem as well. The last presidential candidate not to attend the annual Al Smith dinner, held in New York City to raise money for Catholic charities, was Walter Mondale. As the Archbishop of New York, Cardinal Timothy Dolan, , “This hasn’t happened in 40 years, since Walter Mondale turned down the invitation. And remember, he lost 49 out of 50 states.” Instead, Harris sent in a video, Catholics noted her absence, and none of this was well-received.

Exit polls from 2020 show 30% of Pennsylvania’s voters are Catholic. That’s above the national average of 22%. In 2020, Biden (a Catholic himself) narrowly edged Trump in the Catholic vote, 50% to 49%, yet a Pew survey has found Harris trailing Trump among Catholics by five points, 47% to 52%.��In other worrying news for the Harris camp, Democrats have seen their voter registration edge in the state cut in since the last presidential election to the tune of several hundred thousand voters. To put that in perspective, Joe Biden won the state in 2020 by��80,555 votes, or 1.17%

Social issues and indecisive foreign policy

Ruy Teixeira, a progressive think tanker, has said for that social issues are an Achilles’s heel for Democrats. Liberal condescension has worn thin, and even the sainted Obama faced recent backlash when he gave black supporters a tongue-lashing. He “brothers” that maybe they’re “not feeling the idea of having a woman as president.” Maybe another thing they’re “not feeling” is being told they’re misogynists if they don’t vote for Harris.

Others aren’t feeling a lot of the trendy social issues the Left has extolled for years. Perhaps this is no clearer than on the US government policy of paying for sex changes for prisoners and illegal immigrants. Harris is running from the issue, but her record is clear. The lefty factcheck.org says that “Harris went on record in an American Civil Liberties Union candidate��as supporting medically necessary gender-affirming care for federal prisoners and immigrant detainees, including surgical care. She also��support for gender-affirming surgery for California state inmates on other occasions��her 2019 presidential run, taking some credit for working ‘behind the scenes’ to get access to these surgeries for prisoners.” This has become a sleeper issue, and it’s playing out in swing elections.

Trendy social issues are out, and Harris’ 2019 introduction during a CNN town hall leading with “my pronouns are she, her and hers” is starting to sound like a relic. Not that such issues ever polled .

Across the country, green policies, dear to Harris’s heart by all accounts, are now scarcely spoken of. Liberal condescension and gender politics are left to proxies, and no one wants to defund the police with rising crime rates. Diversity statements for professors are on the wane, and diversity, equity and inclusion are less prominent in corporate hiring and shareholder reports. “The woke is real.”

Interestingly, Democrats have traded in their “blame America” duds for a freedom theme. This seems to be largely a reaction against a sense that more and more people feel less free, but who thinks Democrats are the party of greater freedom?

Democrats are also less patriotic. 39% of US adults are “extremely proud” to be American, which is essentially unchanged from��last year’s . The numbers of those who think less well of America are overwhelmingly Democrats. The combined 67% of Americans who are now extremely or “very proud” (28%) skew heavily toward Republicans.

Foreign policy is also a sticking point with some voters. The world simply feels less safe with Israel, Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, Ukraine and Russia fighting. China continues to press for regional, and even global, hegemony, and even North Korea’s troops are on the march in Ukraine. Foreign policy rarely registers as a top voter concern, though it does figure in when people consider how secure they feel overall.

On most foreign policy issues, Harris would rather not say. But we do know she skipped Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s address before a joint session of Congress. No word was given on what Harris thought about the protestors in Chicago, including in a Swastika-bearing “FUCK ISRAEL” T-shirt, but I wasn’t holding my breath for any clarity. She continues her contradictory stand on the absolute right of Israel to defend itself and the absolute necessity of a ceasefire. It’s anyone’s guess where she really is on that issue.

Breaking the filibuster

Breaking the Senate filibuster is perhaps where Harris’ goals are most dangerous. Currently, a senator can use his or her privilege to speak in order to delay or kill a bill. To end such a filibuster, three-fifths of the Senate (60 out of 100 senators) must agree. Lately, Democrats have toyed with ending this rule, effectively allowing legislation to be passed in the Senate by a simple majority.

By breaking the filibuster, Democrats could pack the Supreme Court with friendly judges, pass a national law on abortion and usher in nationalized healthcare. There’s also the real prize: statehood for the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. Statehood has nothing to do with “taxation without representation,” as DC license plates say. The real goal is creating four new Senate seats that would enshrine their majorities.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has mused about this move . During the August Democratic convention, he , “We got it up to 48, but, of course, [US Senators Kyrsten] Sinema and [Joe] Manchin voted no; that’s why we ��ǳܱ��’t change the rules. Well, they’re both gone.”

Harris is fully with the norm-shattering maneuver.

The death of the filibuster would send every progressive constituency scrambling for their own carve-out. Henceforth, every time the House, Senate and White House aligned, there would be tectonic shifts in policies from taxation to abortion. Nothing would be sacred, and it would be a free-for-all.

There are as many, if not more, unknowns in this final day of voting, and no one with any sense is stating with certainty what the outcome will be. However, as the coddled elite to counsel students who have mental health breakdowns over the election, it will be worthwhile to recognize the problems the campaign and candidate had — if she loses.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post If She Loses, Part 2: Kamala’s Campaign Didn’t Resonate appeared first on 51�Թ�.

Powder Keg in the Pacific

Alfred W. McCoy — Tue, 29 Oct 2024 11:55:38 +0000

While the world looks on with trepidation at regional wars in Israel and Ukraine, a far more dangerous global crisis is quietly building at the other end of Eurasia, along an island chain that has served as the front line for the United States’s national defense for endless decades. Just as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has revitalized the NATO alliance, so China’s increasingly aggressive behavior and a sustained US military buildup in the region have strengthened Washington’s position on the Pacific littoral, bringing several wavering allies back into the Western fold. Yet such seeming strength contains both a heightened risk of great power conflict and possible political pressures that could fracture the US’s Asia–Pacific alliance relatively soon.

Recent events illustrate the rising tensions of the new Cold War in the Pacific. From June to September of this year, the Chinese and Russian militaries conducted joint maneuvers that ranged from live-fire in the South China Sea to air patrols circling Japan and even US airspace in . To respond to what Moscow “rising geopolitical tension around the world,” such actions culminated last month in a joint Chinese–Russian that mobilized 400 ships, 120 aircraft and 90,000 troops in a vast arc from the Baltic Sea across the Arctic to the northern Pacific Ocean. While kicking off such monumental maneuvers with China, Russian President Vladimir Putin accused the US of “trying to maintain its global military and political dominance at any cost” by “increasing [its] military presence… in the Asia-Pacific region.”

“China is not a future threat,” US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall in September. “China is a threat today.” Over the past 15 years, Beijing’s ability to project power in the Western Pacific, he claimed, had risen to alarming levels. He said the likelihood of war was “increasing” and, he predicted, it will only “continue to do so.” An anonymous senior Pentagon official that China “continues to be the only U.S. competitor with the intent and… the capability to overturn the rules-based infrastructure that has kept peace in the Indo-Pacific since the end of the Second World War.”

Indeed, regional tensions in the Pacific have profound global implications. For the past 80 years, an island chain of military bastions running from Japan to Australia has served as a crucial fulcrum for US global power. To ensure that it will be able to continue to anchor its “defense” on that strategic shoal, Washington has recently added new overlapping alliances while encouraging a massive militarization of the Indo–Pacific region. Though bristling with armaments and seemingly strong, this ad hoc Western coalition may yet prove, like NATO in Europe, vulnerable to sudden setbacks from rising partisan pressures, both in the US and among its allies.

Building a Pacific bastion

For well over a century, the US has struggled to secure its vulnerable western frontier from Pacific threats. During the early decades of the 20th century, Washington maneuvered against a rising Japanese presence in the region. These actions produced geopolitical tensions that led to Tokyo’s attack on the US naval bastion at Pearl Harbor that began World War II in the Pacific. After fighting for four years and suffering nearly 300,000 casualties, the US defeated Japan and won unchallenged control of the entire region.

Aware that the advent of the long-range bomber and the future possibility of atomic warfare had rendered the historic concept of coastal defense irrelevant, in the post-war years Washington extended its North American “defenses” deep into the Western Pacific. Starting with the expropriation of 100 Japanese military bases, the US built its initial postwar Pacific naval bastions at Okinawa and, thanks to a 1947 agreement, at Subic Bay in the Philippines. As the Cold War engulfed Asia in 1950 with the beginning of the Korean conflict, the US extended those bases for 5,000 miles along the entire Pacific littoral through mutual-defense agreements with five Asia–Pacific allies: Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines and Australia.

For the next 40 years to the very end of the Cold War, the Pacific littoral remained the geopolitical fulcrum of US global power, allowing it to defend North America and dominate Eurasia. In many ways, the US geopolitical position astride the axial ends of Eurasia would prove the key to its ultimate victory in the Cold War.

After the Cold War

Once the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 and the Cold War ended, Washington cashed in its peace dividend, weakening that once-strong island chain. Between 1998 and 2014, the US Navy from 333 ships to 271. That 20% reduction, combined with a shift to long-term deployments in the Middle East, degraded the Navy’s position in the Pacific. Even so, for the 20 years following the Cold War, the US would enjoy what the Pentagon “uncontested or dominant superiority in every operating domain. We could generally deploy our forces when we wanted, assemble them where we wanted, operate how we wanted.”

After the September 11 terrorist attacks on the US, Washington turned from heavy-metal strategic forces to mobile infantry readily deployed for counterterror operations against lightly armed guerrillas. After a decade of fighting misbegotten wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Washington was stunned when a rising China began to turn its economic gains into a serious bid for global power. As its opening gambit, Beijing started in the South China Sea, where oil and natural gas deposits are . It also began expanding its navy, an unexpected challenge that the once-all-powerful US Pacific command was remarkably ill-prepared to meet.

In response, in 2011, President Barack Obama a strategic “pivot to Asia” before the Australian parliament and began rebuilding the US military position on the Pacific littoral. After withdrawing some forces from Iraq in 2012 and refusing to commit significant numbers of troops for regime change in Syria, the Obama White House a battalion of Marines to Darwin in northern Australia in 2014. In quick succession, Washington gained access to five near the South China Sea and a new South Korean naval base at on the Yellow Sea. According to Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel, to operate those installations, the Pentagon to “forward base 60 percent of our naval assets in the Pacific by 2020.” Nonetheless, the unending insurgency in Iraq continued to slow the pace of that strategic pivot to the Pacific.

Despite such setbacks, senior diplomatic and military officials, working under three different administrations, launched a long-term effort to slowly rebuild the US military posture in the Asia–Pacific region. After “a return to great power competition” in 2016, Chief of Naval Operations Admiral John Richardson that China’s “growing and modernized fleet” was “shrinking” the traditional US advantage in the region. “The competition is on,” the admiral warned, adding, “We must shake off any vestiges of comfort or complacency.”

Responding to such pressure, the administration of President Donald Trump added the construction of 46 new ships to the Pentagon , which was to raise the total fleet to 326 vessels by 2023. Support ships aside, when it came to an actual “fighting force,” by 2024 China had the world’s with 234 “warships.” The US deployed only 219, with Chinese combat capacity, according to US Naval Intelligence, “increasingly of comparable quality to U.S. ships.”

Paralleling the military build-up, the State Department reinforced the US position on the Pacific littoral by negotiating three relatively new diplomatic agreements with Asia–Pacific allies Australia, Britain, India and the Philippines. Though those ententes added some depth and resilience to the US posture, the truth is that this Pacific network may ultimately prove more susceptible to political rupture than a formal multilateral alliance like NATO.

Military cooperation with the Philippines

After nearly a century as close allies through decades of colonial rule, two world wars and the Cold War, US relations with the Philippines suffered a severe setback in 1991. That country’s senate refused to renew a long-term military bases agreement, forcing the US 7th Fleet out of its massive naval base at Subic Bay.

After just three years, however, China occupied some shoals also claimed by the Philippines in the South China Sea during a raging typhoon. Within a decade, the Chinese had started transforming them into a network of military bases, while pressing their claims to most of the rest of the South China Sea. Manila’s only response was to a rusting World War II naval vessel on Ayungin shoal in the Spratly Islands, where Filipino soldiers had to fish for their supper. With its external defense in tatters, in April 2014 the Philippines an Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement with Washington. This allowed the US military quasi-permanent facilities at five Filipino bases, including two on the shores of the South China Sea.

Although Manila won a from the Permanent Court of Arbitration at the Hague that Beijing’s claims to the South China Sea were “,” China dismissed that decision and continued to build its bases there. And when Rodrigo Duterte became president of the Philippines in 2016, he revealed a new policy that included a “separation” from the US and a toward China. That country rewarded the policy with promises of massive developmental aid. By 2018, however, China’s army was anti-aircraft missiles, mobile missile launchers and military radar on five artificial “islands” in the Spratly archipelago that it had built from sand its dredgers sucked from the seabed.

Once Duterte left office, as China’s Coast Guard harassed Filipino fishermen and blasted Philippine naval vessels with water cannons in their own territory, Manila once again started calling on Washington for help. Soon, US Navy vessels were conducting “freedom of navigation” patrols in Philippine waters and the two nations had staged their biggest ever. In the April 2024 edition of that exercise, the US deployed its mobile Typhon Mid-Range capable of hitting China’s coast, sparking a bitter from Beijing that such weaponry “intensifies geopolitical confrontation.”

Manila has matched its new commitment to the US alliance with an unprecedented rearmament program of its own. Just last spring, it signed a $400 million deal with Tokyo to five new Coast Guard cutters, started receiving Brahmos from India under a $375 million contract and continued a billion-dollar deal with South Korea’s Hyundai Heavy Industries that will produce ten new naval vessels. After the government a $35 billion military modernization plan, Manila has been negotiating with Korean to procure modern jet fighters. This is a far cry from a decade earlier when it had no operational .

Showing the scope of the country’s reintegration into the Western alliance, just last month Manila hosted joint freedom of navigation in the South China Sea with ships from five allied nations: Australia, Japan, New Zealand, the Philippines and the US.

Quadrilateral Security Dialogue and the AUKUS alliance

While the Philippine Defense Agreement renewed US relations with an old Pacific ally, the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue involving Australia, India, Japan and the US, first launched in 2007, has now extended US military power into the Indian Ocean. At the 2017 Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Summit in Manila, four conservative national leaders led by Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Trump decided to the “Quad” entente (after a decade-long hiatus while Australia’s Labour Party governments cozied up to China).

Just last month, President Joe Biden hosted a “” where the four leaders agreed to expand joint air operations. In a hot-mike moment, Biden bluntly : “China continues to behave aggressively, testing us all across the region. It is true in the South China Sea, the East China Sea, South Asia, and the Taiwan Straits.” China’s Foreign Ministry : “The U.S. is lying through its teeth” and needs to “get rid of its obsession with perpetuating its supremacy and containing China.”

Since 2020, however, the Quad has made the annual Malabar in India into an elaborate four-power drill in which aircraft carrier battle groups maneuver in waters ranging from the Arabian Sea to the East China Sea. To contest “China’s growing assertiveness in the Indo-Pacific region,” India that the latest exercise this October would feature live-fire maneuvers in the Bay of Bengal, led by its flagship aircraft carrier and a complement of MiG-29K all-weather jet fighters. Clearly, as Modi it, the Quad is “here to stay.”

While the Trump administration revived the Quad, the Biden White House has promoted a complementary and controversial AUKUS defense compact between Australia, the United Kingdom and the US (part of what Michael Klare has called the “” of US foreign and military policy). After months of secret negotiations, their leaders that agreement in September 2021 as a way to fulfill “a shared ambition to support Australia in acquiring nuclear-powered submarines for the Royal Australian Navy.”

Such a goal sparked howls of diplomatic protests. Angry over the sudden loss of a $90 billion contract to supply 12 French submarines to Australia, France the decision “a stab in the back” and immediately its ambassadors from both Canberra and Washington. With equal speed, China’s Foreign Ministry the new alliance for “severely damaging regional peace… and intensifying the arms race.” In a pointed remark, Beijing’s official Global Times newspaper said Australia had now “turned itself into an adversary of China.”

To achieve extraordinary prosperity, thanks in significant part to its iron ore and other exports to China, Australia had exited the Quad entente for nearly a decade. Through this single defense decision, Australia has allied itself firmly with the US. It will to British submarine designs and top-secret US nuclear propulsion, joining the elite ranks of just six powers with such complex technology.

Australia will spend a monumental to build eight nuclear submarines at its Adelaide shipyards over a decade. Additionally, it will host four US Virginia-class nuclear subs at a naval base in Western Australia and buy as many as five of those stealthy submarines from the US in the early 2030s. Under the tripartite alliance with the US and Britain, Canberra will also face additional costs for the joint development of undersea drones, hypersonic missiles and quantum sensing. Through that stealthy arms deal, Washington has seemingly won a major geopolitical and military ally in any future conflict with China.

Stand-off along the Pacific littoral

Just as Russia’s aggression in Ukraine strengthened the NATO alliance, so China’s challenge in the fossil-fuel-rich South China Sea and elsewhere has helped the US rebuild its island bastions along the Pacific littoral. Through a sedulous courtship under three successive administrations, Washington has won back two wayward allies: Australia and the Philippines. They are once again anchors for an island chain that remains the geopolitical fulcrum for US global power in the Pacific.

Still, with more than 200 times the ship-building capacity of the US, China’s in warships will almost certainly continue to grow. In compensating for such a future deficit, the US’s four active allies along the Pacific littoral will likely play a critical role. (Japan’s navy has more than 50 warships and South Korea’s 30 more.)

Despite such renewed strength in what is distinctly becoming a new cold war, the US’s Asia–Pacific alliances face both immediate challenges and a fraught future. Beijing is already putting relentless pressure on Taiwan’s sovereignty, breaching that island’s airspace and crossing the median line in the Taiwan Straits monthly. If Beijing turns those breaches into a crippling embargo of Taiwan, the US Navy will face a hard choice between losing a carrier or two in a confrontation with China or backing off. Either way, the loss of Taiwan would sever the US’s island chain in the Pacific littoral, pushing it back to a “second island chain” in the mid-Pacific.

As for that fraught future, the maintenance of such alliances requires a kind of national political will that is by no means assured in an age of populist nationalism. In the Philippines, the anti-US nationalism that Duterte personified retains its appeal and may well be adopted by some future leader. More immediately in Australia, the current has already faced strong dissent from members blasting the AUKUS entente as a dangerous transgression of their country’s sovereignty. And in the US, Republican populism, whether Trump’s or that of a future leader like J.D. Vance could curtail cooperation with such Asia–Pacific allies, simply walk away from a costly conflict over Taiwan or deal directly with China in a way that would undercut that web of hard-won alliances.

And that, of course, might be the good news given the possibility that growing Chinese aggressiveness in the region and a US urge to strengthen a military alliance ominously encircling that country could threaten to turn the latest Cold War ever hotter. This would transform the Pacific into a genuine powder keg and could lead to a war that would, in our present world, be almost unimaginably destructive.

[ first published this piece.]

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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Gaza: Is There a Day Before the Day After?

Peter Isackson — Thu, 24 Oct 2024 11:39:04 +0000

The war in Ukraine could have been avoided in December 2021, when Russia proposed sitting down to deal with a much more general issue: European security. Had those negotiations — which never began — taken place and achieved any kind of compromise, Ukraine’s sovereignty would have remained intact. An estimated million or more dead Ukrainians and Russians would now be alive.

In today’s international climate, expecting Western diplomats to calculate that it might be healthier to avoid war than prove a point about who has the right to make decisions for others would be totally illusory. From Washington’s point of view, there are principles that must be applied in the defense of a “rules-based order,” even at the expense of another allied country’s population.

Perhaps the seasoned strategists of DC’s State Department felt that the larger issue of European security was too big a morsel to chew on. In their eyes, the only manageable issue to consider was the right of a particular nation, Ukraine, to adhere to a sprawling and fundamentally incoherent military alliance. They had good reason to insist on this. In their mind, this was the key to maintaining control of what Zbigniew Brzezinski “the grand chessboard.” The risk associated with spending unproductive months seeking to thrash out the mutual security requirements of neighboring, culturally connected nations was clearly not worth taking. By refusing to waste time in pointless discussion, they could seize the opportunity to continue on a well-trodden path by launching yet another one of Washington’s forever wars, another one of those epic conflicts that can carry on for “as long as it takes.”

War may be bad for some, but the war economy is good for anyone in power. That is the lesson America learned during World War II and it has never been forgotten.

In August 2021, the administration of American President Joe Biden finally wound up one of the most recent forever wars in Afghanistan. After 20 years, it had clearly run out of gas. The new Biden administration knew that Ukraine could be the new opportunity to focus on. Nearly three years on, it has become clear to everyone that — just like Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria — the war could not be won by the “good guys.” But winning apparently isn’t the major objective. Keeping a wartime economy going is clearly the top priority.

If, as early remarks by none other than Hillary Clinton, the Ukraine fiasco was strategically planned to create an “Afghanistan situation” for Russia, the war that broke out in Gaza and Israel on October 7, 2023 was on no one’s agenda. Washington didn’t need another headache. It was too busy stoking the fires in Ukraine in its quest to postpone the resolution as long as possible. This time, the value of waging a new forever hot war accrued to a local leader, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu. A prolonged war would have the twofold merit of pleasing a lot of key people in his own government and postponing the inevitable inglorious end of Bibi’s political career.

For authoritative voices inside the Beltway, the successive killing of the two top leaders of Hamas — Ismail Haniya and Yahya Sinwar — tells them the end of the conflict may be in sight. The White House followed up Sinwar’s elimination with this: “There is now the opportunity for a ‘day after’ in Gaza without Hamas in power, and for a political settlement that provides a better future for Israelis and Palestinians alike.”

�մǻ岹��’s Weekly Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Day after:

An imaginary moment of the future that governments and every other defender of the status quo in times of war has an absolute need to invoke rhetorically as a demonstration of their commitment to peace while doing everything in their power to prevent it from occurring.

Contextual note

Washington’s track record on assessing the dynamics of ongoing wars — how long they might last and when they might end — has never been brilliant. No sooner had Biden expressed his optimism about the sunny day after than his staunch ally, Netanyahu, contradicted him. “Israeli leaders,” Al Jazeera, “had a drastically different message. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the war is ‘not over’ and pledged that Israeli forces would operate in Gaza for ‘years to come.’”

H.A. Hellyer, a geopolitical analyst, dismissed American talks of a day after in Gaza as “laughable,” noting “that the Israelis have made it very clear that they’re not leaving Gaza, that the military presence will remain, so the idea of any sort of political horizon here is just very, very unrealistic.”

So why such disparity of perception between the two allies, Bibi and Biden? One answer might be the American penchant for “hyperreality” that infects the country’s political and social culture, transforming even the average citizen’s perception of the world. Americans simply don’t see the meaning of events in the same way as others, including their ironclad allies, the Israelis. In fact, no two countries share the same vision of history, a fact State Department diplomats would do well to ponder.

For Americans, days are always significant, especially for tracking the ends of wars. The American Civil War ended on April 9, 1865, with the unconditional surrender of General Robert E. Lee at Appomattox. General Ulysses S. Grant and Lee concretized the moment with a dramatic handshake. Adolf Hitler’s suicide on April 30, 1945 put an end to World War II in Europe. A pair of atomic bombs in early August of that year ended the Pacific version of the conflict.

Hollywood war films and most westerns build up to the single dramatic moment — often a showdown — when the villain dies or is humiliated and a brighter future emerges. This pattern of expectations appears to be wired into every American’s mindset as the key to understanding existential dramas. The successive deaths of Hamas leaders Haniya and Sinwar, with the added subplot of Israel’s elimination of Hassan Nasrallah’s in Lebanon, inevitably signaled to Americans that the year-long violent movie was coming to an end.

What Americans fail to recognize is that the Israeli screenwriters were working on a different script, one that derives not from Hollywood screenplays but from the mythology of the Old Testament. Messiahs don’t take over after the death of a villain. They don’t sign peace agreements. As instruments of a divine will, they install a new order. Their mission transcends the kind of everyday human goals associated with the banalities of governance and democracy.

Historical note

“Forever wars” inevitably produce a curious linguistic paradox. “Forever” evokes timelessness, if not eternity. But for the sake of reasonable, peace-loving political discourse, the same promoters of forever war need to invoke a precise moment of theoretical resolution: the day after. Sadly, neither term — “forever war” or day after — makes any real-world sense.

Take the case of Afghanistan. In 2001, America mobilized NATO, transporting Western troops well beyond the confines of its “home base,” the North Atlantic. Its goal was to rid a remote Asian nation of the dreaded Taliban. On that occasion, America rejected a reasonable proposal to negotiate a solution whereby Afghanistan itself would arrest and try the criminals. The administration of President George W. Bush preferred launching a war that would last 20 years. And what did the day after of that war turn out to be in 2021? The restoration of an even more radicalized Taliban.

In 1967, in the midst of the war in Vietnam that provided the initial template for future forever wars, General Westmoreland and the administration of President Lyndon B. Johnson began repeatedly “the light at the end of the tunnel.” That was an earlier version of the day after. That war lasted 20 years and ended in chaotic humiliation for America.

The Hollywood treatment of war may appear inspired by Shakespearean tragedy, which always ends with a dramatic death. But William Shakespeare’s tragic characters, even villains like Richard III or Macbeth, have something heroic about them that we cannot help but admire. And the perception of the day after always remains ambiguous. When Hamlet dies, the crown is given not to a Dane, but a Norwegian rival, Fortinbras, whose name, derived from French, means “strong in arm.” In other words, despite Hamlet’s own encouragement (“he has my dying voice”), the day after will more likely be a continuation of a forever war.

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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Biden Calls Sinwar a Terrorist, but He Was a Leader and a Martyr

Nicolas J.S. Davies — Wed, 23 Oct 2024 10:23:58 +0000

On October 17, US President Joe Biden the combat death of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar the previous day in Rafah in the Gaza Strip to the US killing of Osama Bin Laden.

“To my Israeli friends,” said Biden, “this is no doubt a day of relief and reminiscence, similar to the scenes witnessed throughout the United States after President [Barack] Obama ordered the raid to kill Osama Bin Laden in 2011.”

This appears to be the first time a senior U.S. official has publicly admitted that Obama did in fact “order the raid to kill” Bin Laden. Official accounts previously the fiction of a kill-or-capture mission, in which US troops were to capture Bin Laden alive if possible, but were forced to kill him.

Biden also implied that people all over the United States had publicly celebrated the death of bin Laden, but that was not true. A few thousand people gathered at the site of the World Trade Center in New York and in front of the White House, but, unless they were watching those gatherings on cable news, most Americans did not witness the mythical nationwide “scenes” Biden described.

At the time, US media reflected the public’s mixed feelings about bin Laden’s assassination more truthfully than Biden did. An titled, “Is it Wrong to Celebrate Bin Laden’s Death?” quoted a beer-drinking “reveler” at the World Trade Center site who questioned what they were all doing there. “It’s weird to celebrate someone’s death,” she said. “It’s not exactly what we’re here to celebrate, but it’s wonderful that people are happy.”

An article in The Atlantic the gathering at the White House as “surreal,” saying it was “jubilant and fiercely American, but, other than that, it did not know what it was.” The author, Alexis Madrigal, wrote that the only focal points for the gathering were a few roving TV cameras. Many in the crowd were Georgetown students, who led chants of “USA, USA”, and “Na na, na na na na, hey hey hey, goodbye,” interspersed with renditions of the Georgetown fight song. When the students flagged, Washington Capitals hockey fans stepped up, chanting “Caps, Caps, Caps.”

Now It’s Clear, Osama bin Laden Won the War on Terror

“There were no transcendent moments,” Madrigal observed, “Perhaps people did their own private accounting, but as a public, we were loud and boorish and silly. We treated the killing of a man who promoted the killing of thousands of Americans like a game with no consideration of the past or future costs.”

Biden’s linking of Yahya Sinwar’s killing to Bin Laden’s relied on the mythical, potted version of American history peddled by cable news and corporate politicians like himself, his Vice President Kamala Harris and his predecessor Donald Trump.

Whatever they say becomes the news, and what really happened in the real world is swept down the memory hole as in George Orwell’s 1984. Their version of reality is a dumbed-down, politicized view of the world tailored for political TV ads and teleprompters, leaving Americans hopelessly misinformed about the world we live in, and dangerously so in times of real crisis.

It is no wonder that young people who want to understand the crisis in Gaza turn directly to firsthand accounts and images of the genocide to find out what our “leaders” and the “news” refuse to tell or show us.

So how should we see Yahya Sinwar?

The context in which Americans hear “Hamas” from politicians and the media defines it as a “terrorist” group, setting the stage for Biden to that killing its leader “proves once again that no terrorists anywhere in the world can escape justice, no matter how long it takes.”

The whole premise of America’s war on “terror” was that terrorism is the product of religious indoctrination and an irrational view of the world that leads people to “hate our freedom.” The warmongers used this framing to deprive the public of the natural ability to put ourselves in somebody else’s shoes and apply the “golden rule”: to treat others the way we would want them to treat us.

After 76 years of gradual genocide in Palestine, there are Palestinian exiles all over the world, including in the United States. Many Americans know Palestinians and know that they are remarkably patient and tolerant people. They have lived under successive occupations, by the Ottoman Turks, the British and now the Israelis. They have never been quick to resort to armed resistance, and many still reject it and continue to work peacefully toward their liberation.

But to deny that they have a legitimate right to resist the militarized theft of their homeland by Israel, after 76 years of seeing it invaded, seized, occupied and annexed, piece by piece, is not “justice.” It is a historic injustice.

My Experience Working Alongside a Former Member of Hamas

To say that Israel “has a right to defend itself” cannot possibly justify the genocidal mass slaughter of civilians in Gaza, every day for the past year, now yet again in northern Gaza. Israel does have a right to defend itself — that is a truism — but only within the limits of and , and not in Gaza, which it has illegally occupied since 1967. As the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled in July, international law Israel to withdraw its forces from all the territories it occupied in 1967, including Gaza.

So, if the Palestinians have a right to resist their illegal military occupation by Israel, who is to lead that resistance? Hamas emerged as the leading resistance group after the previous Fatah government let Israel use the 1990s Oslo Accords as cover to Israeli settlements all over the land it was supposed to withdraw from and return to the Palestinians.

The of the Oslo Accords persuaded most Palestinians that they needed new leadership, and so they elected Hamas to a majority in the Palestinian parliament in 2006, with Ismail Haniyeh, also now killed by Israel, as .

The Hamas government rejected the previous government’s recognition of Israel, its renunciation of armed resistance and its commitments under the Oslo Accords. This was met with international led by Israel and the United States, who imposed economic sanctions while continuing to support and fund President Mahmoud Abbas and an unelected Fatah government in the West Bank.

Fighting between Fatah and Hamas killed 600 people and left the elected Hamas government in power in Gaza, with Abbas and Fatah in control of the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

The fog of war on October 7, 2023

Israel tightened its economic of Gaza and conducted regular bombing campaigns and invasions of Gaza that killed 1,965 people in 2008 and 2009, and 2,327 in 2014. By the time it launched its full-scale genocide in October 2023, Israel had already 7,087 Palestinians since 2008.

�Ჹ��’s from Gaza on October 7, 2023, was initially a well-planned military operation that surprised Israel’s defense forces and the whole world. But it went badly wrong when the Israeli military crumbled and militiamen from different Palestinian groups found themselves confronting civilians in kibbutzes and thousands of young people at the Nova music festival.

It is still impossible to be sure how many civilians the Palestinians really killed that day, and how many more were killed by Israeli forces responding to the break-out with overwhelming force. Israeli journalists Ronen Bergman and Yoav Zitun have how Israel activated its “Hannibal Directive,” under which Israeli forces were ordered to kill their own people rather than allow them to be taken to Gaza as prisoners. Israeli forces also destroyed homes in kibbutzes with both Palestinian militants and Israeli civilians still inside them.

Of the 780 unarmed Israeli on October 7, Palestinians are presumed to have killed hundreds, while Israeli military forces killed hundreds more. The Israeli military deployed far more powerful weapons than the Palestinians, including 8 Apache attack helicopters, 2 F-16 and 2 F-35 warplanes, 2 Hermes drones and 23 Merkava tanks.

If an accurate count were to be made, it is entirely possible that the Israeli forces killed more civilians than the Palestinians did, as well as some of the 374 Israeli troops, police and security forces who were also killed that day.

After a year of brutal, indiscriminate, criminal Israeli assaults, the fact that Hamas is still an effective military force defending Gaza reveals a high level of military organization and discipline, which stands in sharp contrast to the Israeli-propagated image of a bloodthirsty rabble on an undisciplined killing spree on October 7.

It is also still unclear how many of the Palestinians who surged into Israel that day were fully trained Hamas special operations forces, how many were members of other armed groups, and how many were just stunned Palestinian civilians excitedly joining an unexpected jailbreak. So we also don’t know how many civilians were killed by each of these different groups of Palestinians.

Conclusion

What Yahya Sinwar and the Palestinians of Gaza have shown the world for the past year is that they will never surrender their rights to self-determination and the universal protections of international law. And, when all else fails, as it has for 67 years, some of them will continue to turn to armed resistance, a right that most Americans would passionately uphold if the United States was militarily invaded and occupied like Palestine.

On the US and Israeli side, our governments and armed forces have shown the world that they are prepared to commit genocide, arguably the most serious international crime of all, before they will give up their insatiable ambitions to impose their will on the world by military force.

The last thing Yahya Sinwar did before he was killed by an Israeli tank shell was to pick up a stick and at an Israeli drone. To the last, he understood the power and symbolism of resistance.His example will endure as an inspiration to oppressed people everywhere, but especially throughout the Global South.

In July, a of human rights experts hailed the ICJ ruling that the Israeli occupation must end. “The Court has finally reaffirmed a principle that seemed unclear, even to the United Nations: Freedom from foreign military occupation, racial segregation and apartheid is absolutely non-negotiable,” the experts said.

Like Nelson Mandela, who led the movement against apartheid in South Africa, Yahya Sinwar, Ismail Haniyeh and other martyred Hamas leaders, though branded terrorists by Western leaders, will live on in the hearts of many.Biden and Netanyahu, on the other hand — like , South Africa’s “father of apartheid” — are more likely to be remembered as brutal colonialists who tried to hold back the tide of history. Verwoerd’s government sentenced Nelson Mandela to in 1964 for planning a revolution that Mandela and his people eventually won. Yahya Sinwar’s people will continue their struggle, until they too win their freedom, from the river to the sea.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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Outside the Box: The Art of Disinformation About Disinformation

Peter Isackson — Mon, 21 Oct 2024 12:28:32 +0000

Earlier this month, 51�Թ� featured a piece from the Wharton team with the title, “What Public Discourse Gets Wrong About Social Media Misinformation.” It cites an article in Nature revealing that after reviewing “years of behavioral science research on exposure to false and radical content online,” the researchers found “that exposure to harmful and false information on social media is minimal to all but the most extreme people, despite a media narrative that claims the opposite.”

There is clearly a crime afoot, the crime of systemic misinformation in the pursuit of disinformation. I therefore engaged the conversation with ChatGPT with the following prompt: “This highlights the obvious paradox that those who complain about and even take measures to rein in misinformation are themselves not only spreading misinformation but hiding the fact by appearing to be champions of truth. What do we know about the political, social and economic motivation of such people, which of course includes many people in politics and public administrations?”

Here is ChatGPT’s rich response:

“The paradox you mention is indeed intriguing, and it’s a subject of considerable debate among scholars and analysts. The motivations of individuals and groups who seek to combat misinformation but may, in turn, contribute to spreading it or misrepresenting its prevalence can be understood through several political, social, and economic lenses:

1. **Political Motivation: Power and Control**

– **Narrative Control**: In the political realm, controlling the flow of information and setting the narrative are key components of power. By labeling certain information as misinformation and positioning themselves as defenders of truth, politicians or political actors can control what is perceived as legitimate discourse. This can be used to suppress opposing views, delegitimize dissent, and fortify their own base.

– **Polarization**: Politicians often exploit misinformation as a tool to drive division. Polarized environments enable politicians to rally their base by creating an ‘us vs. them’ mentality. Often, accusations of spreading misinformation are politically motivated to weaken the credibility of the opposition or alternative narratives.

– **Deflecting Criticism**: Some political actors may amplify concerns about misinformation to distract from their own actions or to create a convenient scapegoat. If public discourse is dominated by concerns about misinformation, it can distract from policy failures or controversies.

2. **Social Motivation: Tribalism and Identity Politics**

– **Cultural War and Identity Politics**: For many individuals in public life, taking a stand against misinformation aligns them with particular social or ideological tribes. The act of policing misinformation becomes a signal of moral virtue or loyalty to a cause. These tribal affiliations often eclipse objective assessments of information, leading to the amplification of certain biases.

– **Moral Authority and Social Capital**: Social media allows individuals to gain prestige or moral authority by publicly positioning themselves as defenders of truth. This is particularly relevant for influencers, activists, and certain media figures, who may gain social capital through this stance. As their influence grows, the lines between advocacy, misinformation, and exaggeration can blur.

3. **Economic Motivation: Media and Market Incentives**

– **Clickbait and Sensationalism**: News outlets and social media platforms often benefit from sensational narratives about misinformation, as these narratives drive engagement. Alarmist headlines or stories about the prevalence of harmful information can generate more clicks, views, or shares than more measured takes. Hence, media companies may profit from amplifying the threat of misinformation even when it’s not as pervasive as claimed.

– **Platform Economics**: Social media platforms, while often blamed for misinformation, also have financial incentives to appear proactive. If platforms are seen as failing to address false content, they face regulatory scrutiny or public backlash. Thus, they may overstate the impact of misinformation in public relations efforts to appear responsible to both users and regulators.

– **Funding for NGOs and Research**: Many organizations focused on combating misinformation, such as fact-checking agencies or advocacy groups, rely on external funding (from governments or private institutions). These organizations may have incentives to overstate the problem of misinformation in order to secure more funding or resources, even though their original goal may be noble.

4. **Psychological and Cognitive Biases**

– **Confirmation Bias**: Many people, including those in power, are influenced by cognitive biases that lead them to selectively believe or amplify information that confirms their preexisting views. This can happen even when these individuals believe they are combating false information. In this case, misinformation can spread even within groups that seek to suppress it.

– **Cognitive Dissonance**: Individuals who publicly commit to fighting misinformation may experience cognitive dissonance when confronted with evidence that challenges their stance or reveals their own biases. To reconcile this, they might double down on their original claims rather than admit to spreading or contributing to misinformation themselves.

5. **Institutional Dynamics and Incentives**

– **Governmental and Bureaucratic Interests**: Governments and bureaucratic institutions often seek to maintain order and control over information. Highlighting the threat of misinformation can be a pretext for introducing laws and regulations that extend state control over media, social platforms, and public discourse. In some cases, those pushing for restrictions may be motivated by a desire to suppress political opposition or dissent under the guise of ‘fighting misinformation.’

– **Public Administration and Trust**: Public institutions, such as health authorities or electoral commissions, often face crises of public trust. Highlighting their efforts to combat misinformation can be a strategy to restore legitimacy. In some cases, however, they may exaggerate the threat of misinformation to justify measures that are seen as overly paternalistic or authoritarian.

6. **Manipulation and Opportunism**

– **Manipulative Opportunism**: Some actors within politics and media can opportunistically exploit the issue of misinformation for personal or institutional gain. By positioning themselves as gatekeepers of truth, they not only consolidate influence but can also discredit critics or adversaries without engaging with the content of their critiques. The framing of an opponent’s views as ‘misinformation’ can be a convenient tool to delegitimize their stance without providing a substantive counterargument.

In summary, those who campaign against misinformation may be motivated by a mix of legitimate concerns and less altruistic drives—whether it be maintaining political power, securing social status, or capitalizing on economic opportunities. This dynamic illustrates the complexity of modern information ecosystems, where fighting misinformation can itself become a politically charged and often self-serving activity.”

These observations define an important dimension of what can only be described as a fundamental crisis point in our civilization today, especially in the democratic West. Let’s call it the “public truth” problem. Ever since the early 20th century philosopher Bertrand Russell questioned the truth value of the, “The King of France is bald,” we should feel concerned about whether any language produced accurately translates reality or even specific features of reality. The difficulty of expressing truth should not discourage us from trying. It should simply make us humble about all our attempts to do so.

If someone says, “the sun rises in the west,” we can easily shout, “Are you crazy?!” The statement is empirically false, since no one on Earth not under the influence of LSD has ever seen the sun rise in the west. But the statement is false for another reason. Like the bald king of France, there simply is no sun that rises. The Earth turns, creating the illusion for Earthlings that the sun is rising.

So, is the statement, “the sun is rising,” misinformation? No, because it correctly describes our common perception of the event. Compare this with United States President Joe Biden’s claim last year that “Putin has already lost the war,” at a time when every knowledgeable expert inside Biden’s Beltway knew that Ukraine was not only losing the war on the battlefield, but could not possibly win it on its own, no matter how much support it might get from the West.

Did any fact-checker upbraid Biden for his claim? Not in the legacy media. With a bit of indulgence, one might reason that Biden “perceived” Russia’s failure to obtain an outright victory as a loss. But the informed experts who remained quiet or were simply never questioned by the media did not share that perception with the public. Biden used his position of authority to claim the sun was rising in the west.

Next week, we will take a deeper dive into ChatGPT’s analysis and try to understand whether AI itself might be able to clarify the problem of “public truth.”

Your thoughts

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The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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Reasons Supporting Netanyahu Is the US’s Big Middle Eastern Mistake

Juan Cole — Thu, 26 Sep 2024 12:47:58 +0000

At least one thing is now obvious in the Middle East: The Biden administration has failed abjectly in its objectives there, leaving the region in dangerous disarray. Its primary foreign policy goal has been to rally its regional partners to cooperate with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s extremist government. Simultaneously, it would uphold a “rules-based” international order and block Iran and its allies in their policies. Clearly, such goals have had all the coherence of a chimera and have failed for one obvious reason.

US President Joe Biden’s Achilles’ heel has been his “” of Netanyahu, who allied himself with the Israeli equivalent of neo-Nazis and launched a ruinous total war on the people of Gaza. He did this in the wake of the horrific October 7 Hamas terrorist attack Israel suffered in 2023.

Biden also signed on to the Abraham Accords, a project initiated in 2020 by Jared Kushner, the son-in-law and special Middle East envoy of then-President Donald Trump. Through them the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Morocco all agreed to recognize Israel’s statehood. In return, Israel granted them investment and trade opportunities, as well as access to American weaponry and a US security umbrella.

Washington, however, failed to incorporate Saudi Arabia into that framework. It has also faced increasing difficulty keeping the accords themselves in place, given the region’s increasing anger and revulsion over the ongoing civilian death toll in Gaza. Typically, just the docking of an Israeli ship at the Moroccan port of Tangier this summer set off popular that spread to dozens of cities in that country. And that was just a taste of what could be coming.

Breathtaking hypocrisy

Washington’s efforts in the Middle East have been profoundly undermined by its breathtaking hypocrisy. After all, the Biden team has gone blue in the face decrying the Russian occupation of parts of Ukraine and its violations of international humanitarian law in killing so many innocent civilians there. In contrast, the administration let Netanyahu’s government completely disregard international law when it comes to its treatment of the Palestinians.

This summer, the International Court of Justice that the entire Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories is illegal in international law. In response, the US and Israel both thumbed their noses at the finding. In part as a response to Washington’s Israeli policy, no country in the Middle East and very few nations in the global South have joined its attempt to ostracize President Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

Worse yet for the Biden administration, the most significant divide in the Arab world between secular nationalist governments and those that favor political Islam has begun to heal in the face of the perceived Israeli threat. Turkey and Egypt have long had their daggers over their differing views of the , the fundamentalist movement that briefly came to power in Cairo in 2012–2013. Now they have begun repairing their relationship, specifically citing the menace posed by Israeli expansionism.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has been persistently pressing Saudi Arabia, a key US security partner, to recognize Israel’s statehood at a moment when the Arab public is boiling over what they see as a genocide campaign in Gaza. This is the closest thing since the Trump administration to pure idiocracy. Washington’s pressure on Riyadh elicited the pitiful plea from Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman that he fears being were he to normalize relations with Tel Aviv now. And consider that ironic given his own past role in the assassination of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

In short, the ongoing inside-the-Beltway ambition to secure further Arab recognition of Israel amid the annihilation of Gaza has the US’s security partners wondering if Washington is trying to get them killed. This is anything but a promising basis for a long-term alliance.

Global delegitimization

The science-fiction-style nature of US policy in the Middle East is starkly revealed when you consider the position of Jordan, which has a peace treaty with Israel. In early September, its foreign minister, Ayman Safadi, issued a warning: Any attempt by the Israeli military or its squatter-settlers to expel indigenous West Bank Palestinians to Jordan would be an “act of war.” Such anxieties might once have seemed overblown, but the recent stunning (and stunningly destructive) Israeli military campaign on the Palestinian West Bank, bombings of populated areas by fighter jets, has tactically begun to resemble the campaign in Gaza. And keep in mind that, as August ended, Foreign Minister Israel Katz even the Israeli army to compel Palestinians to engage in a “voluntary evacuation” of the northern West Bank.

Not only is the expulsion of Palestinians now the stated policy of cabinet members like Jewish Power extremist Itamar Ben-Gvir; it’s the of 65% of Israelis polled. When Israel and Jordan begin talking about war, you know something serious is going on — the last time those two countries actively fought was in the 1973 October War, during the administration of US President Richard Nixon.

In short, Netanyahu and his extremist companions are in the process of undoing all the diplomatic progress their country achieved in the past half-century. Ronen Bar, head of Israel’s domestic Shin Bet intelligence agency, in August that the brutal policies the extremists in the government were pursuing are “a stain on Judaism” and will lead to “global delegitimization, even among our greatest allies.”

Turkey, a NATO ally with which the US has mutual defense obligations, has become vociferous in its discontent with Biden’s Middle Eastern policy. Although Turkey recognized Israel in 1949, under Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of the pro-Islam Justice and Development Party, interactions had grown rocky even before the Gaza nightmare. Until then, their trade and military ties had survived occasional shouting matches between their politicians. The Gaza genocide, however, has changed all that. Erdogan even Netanyahu to Adolf Hitler and then went further still, that, in the Rafah offensive in southern Gaza in May, “Netanyahu has reached a level with his genocidal methods that would make Hitler jealous.”

Worse yet, the Turkish president, referred to by friend and foe as the “” because of his vast power, has now gone beyond angry words. Since last October, he’s used Turkey’s position in NATO to that organization from cooperating in any way with Israel. This is on the grounds that it’s violating the NATO principle that harm to civilians in war must be carefully minimized. The Justice and Development Party leader also imposed an economic on Israel. It has interrupted bilateral trade that previously reached $7 billion a year and sent the price of produce in Israel soaring, while leading to a shortage of automobiles on the Israeli market.

Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party represents the country’s small towns, rural areas, Muslim businesses and entrepreneurs, constituencies that care deeply about the fate of Muslim Palestinians in Gaza. And while Erdogan’s high dudgeon has undoubtedly been sincere, he’s also pleasing his party’s stalwarts in the face of an increasing domestic challenge from the secular Republican People’s Party. Additionally, he’s long played to a larger Arab public, which is apoplectic over the unending carnage in Gaza.

The alliance of Muslim countries

Although it was undoubtedly mere bluster, Erdogan even threatened a direct on behalf of the beleaguered Palestinians. In early August, he said, “Just as we intervened in Karabakh [disputed territory between Azerbaijan and Armenia], just as we intervened in Libya, we will do the same to them.” In early September, the Turkish president for an Islamic alliance in the region to counter what he characterized as Israeli expansionism:

“Yesterday, one of our own children, [Turkish-American human rights ] Ayşenur Ezgi Eygi, was vilely slaughtered [on the West Bank]. Israel will not stop in Gaza. After occupying Ramallah [the de facto capital of that territory], they will look around elsewhere. They’ll fix their eyes on our homeland. They openly proclaim it with a map. We say Hamas is resisting for the Muslims. Standing against Israel’s state terror is an issue of importance to the nation and the country. Islamic countries must wake up as soon as possible and increase their cooperation. The only step that can be taken against Israel’s genocide is the alliance of Muslim countries.”

In fact, the present nightmare in Gaza and the West Bank may indeed be changing political relationships in the region. After all, the Turkish president pointed to his rapprochement with Egypt as a building block in a new security edifice he envisions. Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi made his first to Ankara on September 4, following an Erdogan trip to Cairo in February. And those visits represented the end of a more than decade-long cold war in the Sunni Muslim world over al-Sisi’s 2013 coup against elected Muslim Brotherhood Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi, whom Erdogan had backed.

Despite its apparent embrace of democratic norms in 2012–2013, some Middle Eastern rulers charged the Brotherhood with having covert autocratic ambitions throughout the region and sought to crush it. For the moment, the Muslim Brotherhood and other forms of Sunni political Islam have been roundly defeated in Egypt, Syria, Tunisia and the Persian Gulf region. Erdogan, a pragmatist despite his support for the Brotherhood and its offshoot Hamas, had been in the process of getting his country the best possible deal, given such a regional defeat, even before the Israelis struck Gaza.

Netanyahu’s forever war in Gaza

For his part, Egypt’s al-Sisi is eager for greater leverage against Netanyahu’s apparent plan for a forever war in Gaza. The Gaza campaign has already inflicted substantial on Egypt’s economy, since Yemen’s Houthis have supported the Gazans with on container ships and oil tankers in the Red Sea. In turn, that has diverted traffic away from it and from the Suez Canal, whose tolls normally earn significant foreign exchange for Egypt. In the first half of 2024, however, it took in only half the canal receipts of the previous year. Although tourism has held up reasonably well, any widening of the war could devastate that industry, too.

Egyptians are also reportedly over Netanyahu’s occupation of the south of the city of Rafah in Gaza. They also despise his blithe disregard of Cairo’s prerogatives to patrol that corridor, granted under the Camp David agreement. The al-Sisi government, along with Qatar’s rulers and the Biden administration, has been heavily involved in hosting (so far fruitless) peace negotiations between Hamas and Israel. The Egyptian government seems to be at the end of its tether, increasingly angered at the way the Israeli prime minister has constantly new conditions onto any agreements being discussed, which have caused the talks to fail.

For months, Cairo has also been seething over Netanyahu’s charge that Egypt allowed tunnels to be built under that corridor to supply Hamas with weaponry. Cairo that the Egyptian army had diligently destroyed 1,500 such tunnels over the past decade. Egypt’s position was recently supported by Nadav Argaman, a former head of the Israeli Shin Bet intelligence agency, who , “There is no connection between the weaponry found in Gaza and the Philadelphi Corridor.” Of Netanyahu, he added, “He knows very well that no smuggling takes place over the Philadelphi Corridor. So, we are now relegated to living with this imaginary figment.”

In the Turkish capital of Ankara, al-Sisi that he wanted to work with Erdogan to address “the humanitarian tragedy that our Palestinian brothers in Gaza are facing in an unprecedented disaster that has been going on for nearly a year.” He underscored that there was no daylight between Egypt and Turkey “regarding the demand for an immediate ceasefire, the rejection of the current Israeli escalation in the West Bank, and the call to start down a path that achieves the aspirations of the Palestinian people to establish their independent state on the borders of June 4, 1967, with East Jerusalem as its capital.” He also pointed out that such positions are in accord with United Nations Security Council resolutions. Al-Sisi pledged to work with Turkey to ensure that humanitarian aid was delivered to Gaza despite “the ongoing obstacles imposed by Israel.”

To sum up, the ligaments of US influence in the Middle East are now dissolving before our very eyes. Washington’s closest allies, like the Jordanian and Saudi royal families, are terrified that Biden’s bear hug of Netanyahu’s war crimes, coupled with the fury of their own people, could destabilize their rule. Countries that not so long ago had correct, if not warm, relations with Israel like Egypt and Turkey are increasingly denouncing that country and its policies.

The alliance of US partners in the region with Israel against Iran that Washington has long worked for seems to be coming apart at the seams. Countries like Egypt and Turkey are instead exploring the possibility of forming a regional Sunni Muslim alliance against Netanyahu’s geopolitics of Jewish power that might, in the end, actually reduce tensions with Tehran.

That things have come to such a pass in the Middle East is distinctly the fault of the Biden administration and its position — or lack thereof — on Israel’s nightmare in Gaza (and now the West Bank). Today, sadly, that administration is wearing the same kind of blinkers regarding the war in Gaza that US President Lyndon B. Johnson and his top officials once sported when it came to the Vietnam War.

[ first published this piece.]

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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Central Bank Independence Is Unbelievably Valuable for the World Economy

Masaaki Yoshimori — Thu, 26 Sep 2024 12:16:10 +0000

Central bank independence (CBI) is crucial for maintaining economic stability, particularly in a globalized world where political influence can lead to adverse outcomes like inflation and economic instability in the labor market. The relationship between CBI and globalization is evolving. In this piece, I explore the importance of independent monetary policy in managing global economic shocks, attracting foreign investment and maintaining long-term economic growth.

Furthermore, I believe opposition to CBI risks politicizing monetary policy. I recommend strengthening legal protections for CBI, enhancing the legal framework and prioritizing long-term stability over short-term political gains. Additionally, we should promote international agreements and cooperation among central banks to effectively manage global economic spillovers. These measures are essential for preserving the integrity and effectiveness of central banks in a rapidly changing global economy.

The role of central bank independence

Central bank independence is essential for maintaining a balanced approach to monetary policy, particularly in managing the trade-off between inflation and unemployment.

According to the (or the Fed), the Federal Reserve System is “independent within the government:” It works within the framework established by Congress. By operating independently of the government, central banks can focus on long-term economic objectives rather than succumbing to short-term political pressures. This independence governments from using monetary policy to achieve electoral gains, such as artificially lowering interest rates to stimulate the economy before an election.

Moreover, an independent central bank is better positioned to manage inflation, which is a critical component of economic stability. When inflation is allowed to rise unchecked, it can purchasing power, destabilize financial markets and harm economic growth. By maintaining a focus on price stability, central banks prevent these negative effects and actively an environment conducive to sustainable economic development. This offers a hopeful outlook for economic growth.

CBI has long been regarded as a cornerstone of sound economic governance, particularly in an increasingly globalized economy. As nations become more integrated through trade, finance and technology, the ability of central banks to operate independently from political influence has become crucial for maintaining economic stability.

One of the key drivers behind the global movement toward CBI is the need to attract and retain foreign investment. In a globalized economy, countries compete for capital and investors seek stability and predictability in monetary policy. Central banks perceived as free from political interference are more likely to inspire confidence among investors. As a result, many countries, particularly emerging markets, adopted or strengthened CBI as part of broader economic reforms aimed at integrating into the global economy.

The experience of countries like and in the 1990s illustrates this. Both nations, seeking to stabilize their economies and attract foreign investment, implemented significant reforms that enhanced the independence of their central banks. These reforms were instrumental in reducing inflation and fostering economic growth, demonstrating the positive impact of CBI in a globalized world.

During the Eurozone debt crisis that began in 2009, the European Central Bank (ECB)’s independence was critical in the collapse of the euro. As several Eurozone countries, including Greece, Ireland and Portugal, faced severe financial difficulties, the ECB resisted political pressure from member states to engage in direct bailout financing. Instead, it implemented unconventional monetary policies, such as the Outright Monetary Transactions (OMT) program. This provided a backstop for sovereign bonds without directly compromising its independence. This approach was pivotal in financial markets and restoring investor confidence, helping to prevent the crisis from spreading further across Europe.

Donald Trump’s opposition to CBI and the risks of weakening it

Former United States President Donald Trump has expressed his that, as president, he should have more influence over monetary policy. He has suggested that his business success gives him better instincts than those at the Fed. He criticized Fed Chairman Jerome Powell for poor timing in policy decisions, asserting that central banking is largely based on “gut feeling.”

During a press conference in August 2024, Trump , “I think that, in my case, I made a lot of money. I was very successful. And I think I have a better instinct than, in many cases, people that would be on the Federal Reserve or the chairman.” Trump’s business success, particularly in the real estate sector, where he has built a multi-billion-dollar empire, gives him a unique perspective on economic growth. Trump’s preference for easy money and low interest rates reflects his background in real estate, where tight money can harm developers.

Trump’s desire for more direct control over the Fed is reminiscent of historical instances where political influence over monetary policy led to disastrous outcomes. A notable example is US President Richard Nixon’s over Fed Chairman Arthur Burns in the 1970s, which resulted in policies that contributed to the stagflation of that era — characterized by high inflation and stagnant economic growth. Trump’s approach risks repeating these mistakes by prioritizing short-term economic gains over long-term stability.

Trump Jerome Powell as Fed Chairman but later him when the Fed did not lower rates. Trump also favors a weak dollar, believing it benefits exports; critics, however, argue that this approach harms Americans. Regardless, Trump would need a legal change to gain more control over the Fed. This is unlikely given the political risks and the Senate’s role in confirming any Fed Chair.

Trump criticized the Fed’s timing on monetary decisions. In particular, he noted that its models are outdated, still relying on a flawed tradeoff between inflation and unemployment. He pointed out that the Fed’s policies, such as quantitative easing (QE) and the expanded balance sheet, have given it excessive influence over the economy. Trump believes a debate over the Fed’s mandate and models would be beneficial. Economists, however, warn that focusing on easy money and a weak dollar could lead to more inflation and economic problems in a potential second term.

Trump’s criticism of the Fed, particularly his calls for lower interest rates and more accessible monetary policy, reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of the role of central banks. As a businessman with a background in real estate — a sector that thrives on low interest rates — Trump’s preference for easy money is understandable but misguided when applied to national monetary policy. His critique overlooks the risks associated with such an approach, like the potential for inflation to spiral out of control.

Trump’s advocacy for easy money is particularly concerning in the context of inflation. While low interest rates can stimulate economic growth in the short term, they also increase the risk of inflation if not carefully managed. The Fed’s primary mandate is to balance the goals of maximum employment and price stability. However, political interference that prioritizes growth at any cost could lead to the of this careful balance, resulting in higher inflation and economic instability.

Additionally, weakening CBI could undermine the Fed’s ability to respond effectively to economic crises. The 2008 financial crisis demonstrated the importance of a strong and independent central bank in stabilizing the economy. The Fed’s swift actions, including quantitative easing and emergency lending facilities, were crucial in preventing a deeper recession. Political influence that hampers the Fed’s ability to act decisively in future crises could have severe consequences for the US and global economies.

Weakening CBI can also exacerbate economic inequality, which is a growing concern in many advanced economies. When political figures influence monetary policy to achieve specific economic outcomes, like lower interest rates to spur growth before an election, the benefits often accrue disproportionately to certain sectors, like those reliant on cheap credit. Meanwhile, the costs — such as higher inflation — can disproportionately impact lower-income households. Inflation erodes the purchasing power of fixed incomes and savings, which can wealth disparities and strain the social fabric.

The Biden administration’s commitment to CBI

The global shift towards CBI is not just a change in monetary policy but a significant evolution that carries the weight of history. It is a response to the devastating inflationary episodes of the 1970s and 1980s, a movement that was a deliberate rethinking of the central banks’ role. This shift is rooted in the understanding that politically driven monetary decisions could lead to destabilizing and unsustainable economic conditions.

In the US, the passing of the Federal Reserve Reform (1977) marked a pivotal moment in this global shift. By enshrining the Fed’s dual mandate — promoting full employment and maintaining price stability — Congress also took crucial steps to protect the central bank from political interference. Incumbent President Joe Biden’s administration, building on Trump-era policies, has pursued significant investments in key industries through initiatives like the CHIPS and Science (2022) and the Inflation Reduction (2022). Some of these major industries include green energy and semiconductor manufacturing.

These initiatives demonstrate a strategic alignment of fiscal and industrial policy, aiming to strengthen domestic supply chains and promote technological leadership. While advocates argue that they enhance economic resilience and innovation, they also raise questions about the potential erosion of CBI. Central banks, traditionally insulated from political pressures, might face increasing demands to coordinate with government-led industrial policies. This would challenge the delicate balance between fiscal and monetary objectives.

Though a more collaborative approach between fiscal and monetary policy could generate short-term economic benefits, it also risks the central bank’s ability to act independently to stabilize inflation and manage long-term economic health. This legislative move was significant because it showcased the importance of allowing the Fed to operate independently. It recognized that short-term political pressures could undermine the economy’s long-term stability.

The US experience set a powerful example that soon influenced global economic policy. In 1997, both the Bank of England (BoE) and the Bank of Japan (BoJ) were granted formal . This signaled a major shift away from the historical norms of political control over monetary policy. Establishing the European Central Bank (ECB) in 1998 exemplified this trend. The ECB’s creation marked a new era in European monetary policy: It replaced national central banks that had been subject to varying degrees of political influence, thereby promoting a standardized and politically neutral approach to monetary governance across the Eurozone.

Empirical evidence robustly supports the benefits of this move towards CBI. It has become increasingly prevalent among advanced economies, connecting with a significant reduction in inflation rates and more firmly anchored long-term inflation expectations. These outcomes tie directly to the enhanced credibility and predictability that independent central banks bring to monetary policy. They allow them to focus on long-term economic health rather than short-term political considerations.

The global commitment to CBI has only strengthened over time. A comprehensive of 370 central bank reforms from 1923 to 2023 reveals a resurgence in support for CBI since 2016. This underscores its continued relevance as a fundamental pillar of economic stability. The renewed commitment is particularly noteworthy given the complex and evolving challenges facing global economies today, reaffirming CBI as a critical tool in maintaining macroeconomic stability.

Within the Biden administration, the historical context of CBI serves as a crucial guide. The administration’s steadfast support for CBI is not just a matter of policy preference, but a deep-rooted commitment to economic stability. In analyzing the Biden administration’s commitment to CBI, it is essential to recognize the delicate balance between fiscal policy and monetary authority. CBI is often celebrated for its role in safeguarding economies from politically motivated monetary policy that could destabilize inflation control. The separation between monetary and fiscal policy has been vital in maintaining long-term economic stability. The Fed’s autonomy is seen as critical to ensuring that monetary decisions remain focused on inflation and employment targets rather than short-term political gains.

The Biden administration wielded considerable influence over the economy using extensive fiscal policy measures. The American Rescue Plan (2021), the CHIPS and Science Act and the Inflation Reduction Act, as well as strategic executive actions such as the of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserves and student-loan debt , reflect a pragmatic approach. They leveraged fiscal tools to influence economic outcomes in ways that monetary policy alone could not have achieved in such a short time.

While CBI remains a pillar of long-term economic stability, the administration likely recognized that, given the nature of the COVID-19 pandemic, fiscal measures were indispensable. The unique conditions meant fighting inflation and stabilizing the economy required a broader, more immediate response — one where fiscal and executive action played a leading role, complementing rather than conflicting with the Fed’s independence. This dynamic, while preserving the long-term ideal of CBI, also underscores the reality that fiscal policy and executive power can shape economic outcomes in ways that transcend central bank interventions alone. Therefore, reversing the hard-earned progress towards CBI risks rekindling the inflationary pressures that once wreaked havoc on global economies.

Index of Central Bank Independence (CBI) in Advanced Economies, 1970-2022. Via .

Enhancing coordination and the role of globalization

While CBI is crucial, improving coordination between monetary and fiscal policy is merited, as Trump’s critique suggests. Fiscal policy, controlled by Congress and the executive branch, also significantly influences aggregate demand and inflation. Better communication and coordination between these two arms of economic policy could to more coherent and effective economic management.

One proposal to achieve this without compromising the Fed’s independence is to include the National Economic Council director and the Congressional Budget Office director as ex officio nonvoting members of the Federal Open Market Committee. This would allow for better between monetary and fiscal policies while the Fed’s autonomy in decision-making.

However, private conversations about economic stability are being held. The June 2024 between the BoJ, the Ministry of Finance and the Financial Services Agency highlights a critical moment in Japan’s economic policy. (Worth noting is the fact that the Minister of Finance, the Minister of State for Economic and Fiscal Policy and their designated delegates cannot . When attending Monetary Policy Meetings, they can express opinions, submit proposals and request the Policy Board to postpone a vote until the next meeting.) The yen’s depreciation against the US dollar has raised concerns about its potential impacts on inflation and overall economic stability in 2024. The discussion about the BoJ’s independence becomes particularly pertinent in this context. Though the BoJ traditionally operates with a degree of autonomy to implement monetary policy based on economic conditions, the yen’s current weakness and its repercussions are stirring discussions of whether more direct government intervention is needed.

The independence of the BoJ is rooted in its mandate to focus on price stability and economic growth without undue political influence. This separation is intended to ensure that monetary policy decisions implement policy with the aim of maintaining price stability with long-term objectives, not short-term political pressures. However, there is a growing sentiment within the government to take more assertive actions. This is evidenced by recent statements from key figures such as Minister of Digital Affairs Taro Kohno, who has hiking interest rates in response to the yen’s weakness. Such proposals indicate that some policymakers view the BoJ’s current policy stance as insufficient to address the immediate challenges posed by the depreciating currency.

The involvement of other members of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) further complicates the issue. Its discussions about potential interventions, including those that could impact the BoJ’s policy decisions, reflect a broader concern about the yen’s trajectory. While the BoJ has a clear mandate and operational framework, the mounting pressure from the government to align monetary policy with broader economic goals raises serious questions about the feasibility of maintaining its independence. If the government were to exert more influence, it could potentially undermine the BoJ’s ability to focus on long-term economic stability. This would pose significant risks to the economy.

CBI is closely linked to controlling inflation, which is a primary concern in advanced and emerging economies. Independent central banks are better equipped to resist the political pressure to pursue expansionary monetary policies that could increase inflation. This is particularly important in a globalized economy, where trade and financial linkages can transmit inflationary pressures across borders.

Empirical evidence supports the notion that CBI is associated with lower inflation. Countries with more independent central banks tended to experience lower and more stable inflation rates. For example, the relationship between CBI and inflation control became especially evident during the inflationary period of the 1970s and 1980s, when many central banks were subject to political interference, leading to high and persistent . This finding has been corroborated by subsequent research, which has shown that CBI contributes to the anchoring of inflation expectations, thereby enhancing the effectiveness of monetary policy.

The relationship between CBI and inflation control became particularly evident during the inflationary period of the 1970s and 1980s. Many central banks were subject to political interference during this time, leading to high and persistent inflation. Several countries, including the US and Germany, responded by granting greater to their central banks, resulting in a significant decrease in inflation.

Central banks navigate an increasingly complex global environment, balancing domestic objectives with the need to manage the global spillovers of their actions. The independence of central banks is critical to ensure economic stability and long-term growth.

In a globalized economy, the actions of a central bank have implications that reach far beyond national borders. The US dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency means that the Fed’s policies global financial markets, international trade and the economic stability of other nations. The importance of a non-politicized Fed in maintaining international confidence in the US dollar cannot be overstated. It helps capital flight, currency volatility and a potential shift away from the dollar as the dominant global currency.

Globalization has fundamentally altered monetary policy dynamics, particularly in the context of central bank independence. As economies intertwine, the actions of one central bank can have profound effects on others, amplifying the importance of independent decision-making. The growing complexity of global financial systems necessitates that central banks adapt rapidly to new challenges, such as capital flow volatility and cross-border financial risks.

One critical aspect of globalization is the transmission of economic shocks across borders. Central banks must be vigilant in mitigating these shocks while maintaining domestic economic stability. For instance, the 2008 financial crisis demonstrated how quickly financial turmoil can spread globally, underscoring the for independent central banks to act swiftly and decisively. The also showcased the of international cooperation among central banks; while this is necessary, it must be balanced with preserving domestic policy autonomy.

Looking forward, central banks must navigate the delicate balance between maintaining independence and participating in global monetary coordination. The potential for conflicts between domestic objectives and international pressures will likely increase, requiring central banks to adopt more sophisticated and transparent communication strategies. Ensuring that these institutions remain insulated from political pressures while engaging in necessary international cooperation will be crucial for economic stability in an increasingly interconnected world.

The Global Financial Crisis and central bank coordination

One historic economic event is especially imperative to study. The Global Financial Crisis (GFC) of 2008–2009 marked one of the most significant economic downturns in recent memory, with worldwide impact. The crisis began in the US but quickly spread to other economies, highlighting the interconnectedness of global markets.

The US is one of the largest economies in the world, and its trade relations influence other nations’ economies substantially. For instance, during the GFC, the collapse of US demand had a , causing major slowdowns in export-driven economies like those of China, Germany and Japan. This exemplifies how shocks in the US “export” financial stress across the world, while the reverse influence is often less pronounced. The rapid transmission of financial shocks underscored the need for coordinated action among central banks worldwide to stabilize the global economy.

During the GFC, central banks took the following actions:

The Fed played a pivotal role by implementing a series of unconventional monetary policies, including lowering to near-zero levels and introducing . These measures involved buying assets to restore liquidity to financial markets and support economic recovery.
Faced with a severe sovereign debt crisis in several Eurozone countries, the ECB lowered and provided long-term refinancing operations to banks. The ECB later introduced the , which was crucial in stabilizing bond markets and preventing the collapse of the euro.
The BoE reduced interest rates and launched its own to support the UK economy. Its actions were coordinated with those of other major central banks to ensure a unified response to the crisis.
The BoJ expanded its asset purchase and maintained a low-interest rate to support the Japanese economy, which was also affected by the global downturn.

Central banks recognized that unilateral actions would be insufficient to address the global nature of the crisis. Therefore, they engaged in unprecedented levels of cooperation, particularly through these mechanisms:

Currency Swap Agreements: Central banks, including the Fed, ECB, BoE and BoJ, established currency swap lines to ensure that banks in other countries had access to US dollars, which were in high demand. This move crucially prevented a liquidity crisis and stabilized global markets.
Coordinated Interest Rate Cuts: In October 2008, several major central banks, including the Fed, ECB, BoE and BoJ, conducted a coordinated interest rate cut to reduce borrowing costs globally and stimulate economic activity.
G20 Summits: The G20, which includes both advanced and emerging economies, played a critical role in facilitating international coordination. The 2009 G20 in London prompted commitments to provide fiscal stimulus, increase resources for the International Monetary Fund and enhance financial regulation to prevent future crises.
Bank for International Settlements (BIS): The BIS serves as a platform for central banks to exchange information, coordinate policy responses and discuss strategies for maintaining financial stability. Its role in fostering international cooperation was vital in ensuring a coherent global response to the crisis.

The coordinated efforts of central banks were instrumental in mitigating the worst effects of the GFC. The rapid implementation of monetary easing measures, coupled with international cooperation, helped stabilize financial markets, restore confidence and set the stage for a gradual economic recovery. The crisis demonstrated that in a globalized economy, the actions of one central bank can have significant spillover effects on others, making international cooperation essential.

The experience of the GFC showcases the importance of sustained international cooperation among central banks. As global markets become more interconnected, the potential for spillover effects increases, making coordinated policy responses critical for maintaining global economic stability.

Moving forward, central banks should continue to strengthen their cooperation through global forums like the G20 and BIS, ensuring that their policies are harmonized to prevent adverse cross-border impacts. Additionally, they should work together to develop frameworks for managing future crises. In an interconnected world, the stability of one economy often depends on the stability of others.

What is the solution?

The independence of central banks like the Fed is vital for ensuring sound monetary policy, economic stability and global financial confidence. While Trump’s critique of the Fed highlights legitimate concerns about the need for better coordination between monetary and fiscal policy, his desire for more direct control over monetary policy risks undermining the very foundation of economic stability. A politicized central bank, driven by short-term political goals, would likely lead to higher inflation, economic instability and global volatility.

In an increasingly globalized economy, the role of central bank independence extends beyond national borders. The interconnectedness of global markets means that the actions of central banks can have profound spillover effects on other economies. Central banks must navigate complex global dynamics, where their decisions influence global capital flows, currency stability and international trade.

The solution lies not in reducing central bank independence but in enhancing the mechanisms for policy coordination while preserving the autonomy of institutions critical to the economy’s long-term health. By maintaining a strong, independent Fed, the US can continue navigating the complexities of a globalized economy while safeguarding its economic future. Central bank independence can secure a stable and prosperous economic environment domestically and globally by focusing on policies like the Fed’s : maximum employment and price stability.

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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FO° Exclusive: New Twists and Turns in Astonishing US Presidential Election

Glenn Carle — Fri, 06 Sep 2024 12:40:25 +0000

If the near-assassination of former US President and Republican candidate Donald Trump did anything, it certainly made him a living martyr. The image of blood streaking his face as he stood, fist raised, against the American flag made his popularity skyrocket. It’s no surprise that Trump secured the candidacy nomination at the Republican National Convention soon after.

However, Trump took a hit in the polls when President Joe Biden withdrew from the race and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris as the new Democratic candidate. Harris’ replacement of Biden has fundamentally changed the dynamics of the election. A historical shift is happening before the country’s eyes.

Voter psychology is changing

The Marxist of base and superstructure can help define the shift. The base includes the modes of production that make up the structure of society. The superstructure refers to concepts not directly related to production — in other words, ideology and beliefs. Both the base and the superstructure continually bolster and maintain one another, and they are cyclically linked.��

Harris managed to raise $200 million within eight days of the announcement. She has campaigned on policies different from Biden’s platform. All of this is the base of the election season. The superstructure, on the other hand, manifests in the changing psychological aspects of the voter population based on demographics, geographics and candidate perception.

With only 53% of the US population identifying as white — compared to the 89% at the country’s inception — the symbolism of Harris’ identity motivates different voter groups. She represents several minorities, as she is a black, South Asian-American female. It could be said that her popularity is reflective of democratization — leaders more representative of the voter population have a certain appeal.

Yet despite Harris’ success, Trump still remains popular among large demographics. Why? White, male and Christian populations have become increasingly aware of the shifting caste structure and their own loss of social power. Individuals within these demographics believe the identity of US society and government is at stake. Trump and his Republicans have taken advantage of this. They use racist attacks against Harris and her platform to appeal to the disenfranchised White voters.

The Electoral College might be a hindrance for Harris

While Harris’ entrance into the campaign has already garnered immense support, that support comes from populations geographically centered in already-blue regions. Harris simply gained “Back the Blue” voters previously discouraged by Biden’s campaign. Swing states remain unclear in their support.

Even if Harris wins the popular vote, it doesn’t guarantee a win in the Electoral College. Presidential elections in the US aren’t decided by a national popular vote like they are in France. Rather, US elections are determined by a college of electors from each seat. Every state has as many votes as it has delegates (two senators plus however many representatives) in Congress. Because of this, some states have more votes than their population would suggest.

Wyoming is the most extreme case. It gets three electoral votes because it has two senators and one representative. Yet the state’s 581,000 residents — less than 0.2% of the US population — control all these votes. Thus, a vote in Wyoming is 36 times more influential than a vote in California, where 39 million people control just 54 electoral votes. This means a candidate can win a popular vote but lose the electoral vote, leading to the loss of the presidency.

In practice, most states are reliably red or blue. California will almost certainly elect Harris, and Texas will almost certainly elect Trump, canceling most of California’s influence out. Thus, only a few states where Democrats and Republicans are equally balanced are likely to influence the election. And these states may well have different priorities than the rest of the nation.

A number of these states — Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin — are in the “Rust Belt,” a former manufacturing zone hit hard by deindustrialization. Trump has been able to capitalize on the disaffection of these working-class voters in the past. It is thus little surprise that Harris has chosen Tim Walz, the Democratic governor of neighboring Minnesota who is popular among factory workers, to be her running mate.

Harris must reshape voter perception of the Democratic party

Narratives and assumptions attributed to a candidate can influence the electoral college as well as the popular vote. People’s perception of Harris has definitely improved the Democrats’ chances in swing states. This is especially true for policy-conscious voters who look at personal rights issues like women’s access to birth control and right to abortion. Harris has vocalized her support for policies that protect them, in line with the majority of Americans.

However, many voters fault Harris for the Biden administration’s poor handling of immigration. Biden had entrusted Harris with addressing the causes of illegal immigration. Illegal immigration, however, surged dramatically. In a televised interview, Harris spectacularly failed to explain herself to the audience, an embarrassment that caused her to retreat for some time from the public eye. As a presidential candidate, this reputation could hurt her chances in more conservative states, especially among laborers who are wary about being undercut by cheap labor from illegal immigrants willing to work below minimum wage.

Harris must change the narrative surrounding immigration, as well as the struggling US economy, if she wishes to secure the presidency. Simple demographics alone will not take any candidate into the White House. The future depends on both campaigns’ abilities to shape the public narrative.

[ wrote the first draft of this piece.]

The views expressed in this article/video are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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Kamala’s New Tone on Gaza Won’t Energize Her Base Yet

Emma Johnson — Sun, 01 Sep 2024 16:01:41 +0000

On July 21, Vice President Kamala Harris announced her candidacy for the 2024 US presidential elections. Three days later, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu traveled to Washington to the US Congress.

Recaps of Netanyahu’s and reports of the volatile climate in the Capitol briefly flooded online platforms, but the energy dissipated with the dawn of a new day. News of American flags being burnt drew more attention from the American public than Netanyahu’s the October 7 attack to 9/11. While the ongoing Israeli siege of Gaza has elicited significant international attention, Harris and President Joe Biden have shifted the dialogue to decenter the conflict as the November elections near.��

Biden’s approach��

Nearly 11 months have passed since the Hamas attack on Israel that sparked the war in Gaza. On the day of the attack, Biden released a declaring that the “Administration’s support for Israel’s security is rock solid and unwavering.” His administration followed through with this commitment in the months following, sending massive and significant financial assistance to Israel, including a passed in April that provided Israel with over $4.4 billion. A few months prior, the US had garnered anger across the globe for a UN resolution demanding a ceasefire in Gaza, further demonstrating the administration’s commitment to Israel.��

Despite his initially supportive approach, Biden’s position faltered in May in the face of a potential attack on Rafah, a city in southern Gaza where a great number of displaced Palestinians had fled. At the time, Rafah held over displaced Palestinians. As Israeli forces continued their assault on the strip, the president threatened to withhold arms shipments to Israel should they “.”

While the administration did pause at least in response to Israel’s then-impending attack on the city, both the language and bureaucratic processes surrounding policy decisions about Israel have been confusing and unclear. Biden’s statements have revolved around a staunch commitment to stand beside Israel, while establishing vague and immeasurable benchmarks and boundaries. Consider his attempt at taking a on the situation in Rafah. Biden stated: “I’m not supplying the weapons that have been used historically to deal with Rafah, to deal with the cities — that deal with that problem.”��

What does it mean for Israel to “go into Rafah”? At which point is the move, still ongoing, considered a violation? Additionally, what weapons specifically was Biden referring to? There is a long history of between the US and Israel, with a number of varied weapons supplied. Which weapons would Biden withhold, and for how long? Biden’s approach has been incredibly muddled and ridiculously ambiguous, leaving many Americans frustrated and confused.��

In light of Biden’s ineffective move to hold Israel more accountable, Netanyahu has tried to leverage his decades-long relationship with the current US president. In his July address, Netanyahu went as far as to for his “friendship to Israel” and for being a “proud Irish-American Zionist.”

Despite Netanyahu’s personal effort to sugarcoat US–Israel relations, over the course of the conflict, Biden has drifted from staunch support to a wishy-washy, passionately delivered yet logically confusing position. With the November elections rapidly approaching, that vaguely bipartisan-minded approach made sense as Biden faced a tough uphill battle. But Biden’s attempt to remain relevant quickly became a moot point when Harris replaced him as the Democratic candidate in late July. Depending on how Americans show up this November, it will now be she who controls the dialogue surrounding the situation in Gaza.

Harris’s approach

Since Harris became its candidate, the Democratic party has risen like Christ from the grave. Following the widespread tied to Biden’s performance in the first presidential debate, Harris’s arrival on the scene has suddenly revitalized the party and support is surging in. But her platform thus far has yielded next to nothing in terms of tangible plans and policies to be implemented in relation to the Israel–Gaza issue.��

On the one hand, Harris certainly had little time to prepare, entering the race with only 15 weeks until Election Day. She hit the ground running, with her focused primarily on the economy, healthcare and tax credits for the low to middle classes. But even on her extremely active social media platforms, there is little mention of the horrors unfolding in the Middle East — with over Gazans now dead — despite the significant role of the US in facilitating its ally’s war effort. In fact, until the recent Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Harris has conveniently avoided seriously engaging with the topic that the world has watched with bated breath since last October.

In her 37-minute speech on the final day of the convention, it took Harris over half an hour to get to the situation in Gaza, following her mention of the war in Ukraine. While stating that she will always support Israel’s right to defend itself, echoing Biden’s approach, Harris closed with a that she will work to ensure “the Palestinian people can realize their right to dignity, security, freedom and self-determination.” A statement more explicit and direct than anything the public has heard from Biden since October 7.��

Although she allocated just two minutes of her speech to discuss the conflict and reiterated Biden-era perspectives, Harris’s declaration of support for Palestinian self-determination signals that she may bring in a significant new approach to US-Israel relations. But context is crucial here: each and every vote matters in this election, and Harris’ of speaking in favor of both Israel and Palestine may be a strategic move to connect with a larger voter base.��

The future of Israel-Gaza in America’s political landscape

Americans have a lot on their minds going into the November elections. With an on Donald Trump, widespread panic after seeing Biden’s performance in the first presidential debate and overwhelming bouts of , Harris has a tough road ahead if she wants to emerge victorious. While her path forward is paved with the sparkling stones of America’s “future” of which she speaks so passionately, continuing to deprioritize the situation in Gaza could be crippling for Harris.

How our candidates and leaders speak of things matters, and voters are paying attention. Back in May, Biden had already lost who voted for him in the 2020 elections due to his recent support of Israel — and the fighting is nowhere near over. Harris should not forget that many Americans, especially young voters, care deeply about the suffering in Gaza. Additionally, these young voters — who with Palestine — are .��

Harris needs those votes. According to , Trump and Harris are currently neck-and-neck. The Democratic nominee has little room for error, and maintaining a vague, double-sided approach to the issue is a huge gamble that could cost Harris the election.��

While US engagement with Israel thus far has been largely driven by the Zionist-friendly perspectives of the Biden administration and the longstanding relationship between the two countries, America is still a democracy. The voice of the people cannot be ignored, and it is this voice that will determine what the future of US–Israel relations will look like as votes are cast this fall. Until then, it is up to the Presidential candidates to demonstratehow they plan to show up for America, and for the people of Gaza, should they be voted in as the most powerful individual in the world.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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Kaleidoscope Voting and Kamala: TikTok’s Influence on the 2024 Election

India Nye Wenner — Tue, 13 Aug 2024 13:36:43 +0000

If you’ve opened up TikTok in the last month, chances are you’ve wondered why your feed looks like a coconut tree-riddled Hawaiian Island. In the month before, you may have been bombarded by AI-generated images of an embracing Donald Trump and Joe Biden.

TikTok is a distinctive sea. Gen Z — the generation born from around 1995 to 2010, currently teenagers and young adults — 60% of TikTok’s 1.1 billion users. But just as the ocean tides can push around a ship that thinks it’s still sailing on its own, TikTok influences Gen-Z users more than they know.

In recent years, politicians have begun to catch on to TikTok’s potency. Democratic candidate Kamala Harris, who is much younger than her predecessor Joe Biden, or their Republican rival Donald Trump, seems to understand the power of the video app better than most. But, to understand this digital sorcery, the contenders of this November’s US presidential election must understand the platform’s unorthodox content.

Political dismay

In the 2020 presidential election, a of young people voted. Based on recent registration numbers, youth turnout this year seems to be near that of 2020. However, it was only two months ago that many young people were themselves from the ballot boxes. They disliked both presidential candidates; both were, to put it simply, old. They were “stuck in a political Groundhog Day,” as Erica Pandey at Axios , and saw national politics as a rusted establishment. Confidence in the nation’s institutions among younger Americans. , young people in voting in the presidential election. There was a sort of nihilistic apostasy among young people from both candidates and the political system at large. “Youth perception towards politics [was] a combination of disinterest and disgust,” , a professor of political science at Loyola Marymount University, told me.��

Young people decided to turn their noses up at their electoral power simply because neither the government nor its politicians had a “magic wand to end the suffering,” as The Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin .

In classic Gen-Z fashion, young people took to the Internet and flooded TikTok with satirical political content.

Coping with humor, celebrity culture and moral standards

“If you had to pick a Democrat or a Republican, Joe Biden or Donald Trump, gun to your head, who would you vote for?” “The gun would go off.” This back-and-forth (posted by Jason Selvig and Davram Stiefler, an American political comedy that has amassed 2.2 million followers on TikTok) was viewed over 27 million times. The clip took on another life as an additional 25,000 original videos were made reusing its audio track, spreading it across the internet.

Cut to video: “Late at night I toss and I turn” —��insert Biden and Trump photos — “and I dream of what I need. I need a hero” — insert photos of from the series Glee or of the media personality . For young people, Bonnie Tyler’s song “Holding Out for a Hero” perfectly mirrored their political predicament.��

Generated with Craiyon.

And then —��kickstarted by the worrying and almost comedic presidential debate at the end of June — there was the advent of “Triden,” the romantic pairing of Trump and Biden. Thousands of young people posted videos, often set to popstar ’s song “Casual,” portraying the two political rivals as lovers. These videos featured AI-generated images of the two men shaking hands, hugging and playing golf. One user, @diorgr6ande, partook in the trend by splicing together AI voice impersonations of Trump and Biden: “They want to take us away from each other, but I won’t let them. Joey, I love you,” declared AI-Trump. “I know you never meant to say anything mean about me, Donny. Maybe in another lifetime, we could be together,” replied AI-Biden. The video got over 10 million views. One user commented, “I love my generation.”

“It was like a form of coping,” Mebby, a 19-year-old part-time TikToker studying communications and film and media studies at Saint Louis University, told me.

To much of the youth, the political motif of Chappell Roan’s artistry represents all that they stand for. During her performance at the Governors Ball Music Festival in June, she , “This is a response to the White House, who asked me to perform for Pride. We want liberty, justice and freedom for all. When you do that, that’s when I’ll come.”��

When politicians fail to satisfy the youth’s hunger for justice, the youth forsake the government and seek refuge in their own generation and the reverie of idealism. While these high moral standards are admirable, young people risk losing sight of progress and pragmatism in the pursuit of political perfection. The heart of democratic politics is compromise, but many young people are unwilling to “betray” their principles by voting for an imperfect candidate.

The TikTok echo chamber

TikTok works by algorithm, tailoring a user’s feed based on videos the user has interacted with. After the algorithm has done its dirty work, a user will be fed a stream of agreeable, accommodating content, their “own personal self-affirmation chamber,” as Vox’s Christian Paz it.

“TikTok is … likely part of a new echo chamber as the algorithms being applied deliver ideologically compatible content to TikTok users,” Richard Fox and Kiani Karimi in a recent study that surveyed a large sample of 18- to 25-year-olds to explore TikTok’s political influence. If a user engages with satirical political content, their echo chamber will spit like content relentlessly back at them. The Biden-Trump memes were “discrediting the [political] process,” Fox told me. And how can one not be influenced by such an endless stream of cynicism?��

“People are consumed by what they see on social media and think it’s the world around them,” Mebby told me.

If a young person is trapped in a sphere of political fantasy and incredulity, they will lose sight of reality and inevitably lose any motivation to vote. If not outright, TikTok’s influence is subliminal, rooted in conditioning through repetition — we are what we eat, we are what we behold.

The 2024 Harvard Kennedy School Survey of young Americans’ attitudes towards politics and public service reports that 62% of 18- to 29-year-olds nationwide disapprove of the government’s performance and that 73% use social media platforms to stay informed. These same people dominate social media platforms. In consequence, young people are staying informed through the same apps on which their generation is perpetuating a negative view of the government.

“When these people that they consider to be “real,” that they consider to be truthful and honest, tell stories of certain government acts, people feel empathy for them and therefore see the government as the enemy,” Mebby told me.

But can TikTok be a force for good?

And suddenly, Biden out. Like a phoenix, Kamala Harris rose. TikTok was the wind beneath her wings. A new hysteria overtook the platform, but this time the digital commotion was not nihilistic — it was hopeful. As young people processed the news of Kamala’s candidacy, she became a heroine of high-octane Gen-Z culture.��

Kamala became “Brat,” the trend of the summer, an online delirium named for popstar ’s new album, Brat. Even Charli herself endorsed Kamala as a Brat-figurehead, on X, “kamala IS brat.” The Harris campaign’s official social media embraced the Gen-Z typhoon, rebranding in Brat’s signature lurid green color.

One year earlier, in May 2023, when giving remarks at a White House swearing-in ceremony, Kamala laughingly spoke some words that Gen Z will never forget: “You think you just fell out of a coconut tree? You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.” And luckily for Kamala, the internet never forgets. These seemingly cryptic, pseudo-philosophical words fit into the TikTok meme machine like lock and key. “Coconuts” and “context” the Gen-Z vocabulary.��

When Kamala became the presumptive Democratic nominee, her words came back not to haunt her, but to supercharge her. Young people mixed coconuts and context with Brat and got to work. They spliced Kamala’s iconic words into “Apple” by Charli XCX, “Blow” by Kesha and “Look What You Made Me Do,” by Taylor Swift — three singers representative of female power. Kamala HQ caught on quickly, subtitling its social media pages with the words “Providing context.”

Chappell Roan made her way back into the fray as young people used her song “Femininomenon” to celebrate Kamala’s candidacy. These same young people, who only days earlier had used Roan’s music to mock the government, were now invested in the election. One user, @cattakespics, posted a video set to a Charli XCX-coconut mashup prophesying: “All of Gen Z pulling up to the voting booths with nothing but this audio in their heads as they single-handedly elect the first female president of the United States.” It was bombs away. In the days just after Kamala’s emergence, registered to vote. More than four-fifths of them were between 18 and 34 years old.��

The making of memes and organicness

What was so effective about these memes?

For starters, they came about organically. “It was regular, random people finding the things that they cared about already and mashing it together. It was not top down, it was bottom up — and that is so important to meme culture,” @organizer, a pro-Harris influencer.

If political campaigns push content too hard, young people may feel coerced by what they scorn as efforts from the “out-of-touch” and “cringe” older generation. The memes must be coming from young people so they feel as if they are in control. Furthermore, they then become empowered as the mobilizers and not just the mobilized.

In a phenomenon called the “,” people are more likely to vote when they perceive that their social networks and friends expect them to vote. Due to the personal nature of TikTok’s content, users may psychologically classify complete strangers on the For You Page as friends. Another, soon-to-be released study finds that social media and friends, more than any other factors, have the most influence on political beliefs.

“I think the most interesting thing about social media is shared human experience,” Mebby told me. “Real people have a major impact.”

Kamala Harris got lucky. The seeds of her coconut meme-wave had already been planted in social media, so when she took over for Biden, young people on TikTok knew what to do with her. “Candidates have always attempted to stage this kind of virality … but the moments that truly take off lock into the absurdist, chaotic energy of the internet and are almost impossible to predict,” Vox’s Rebecca Jennings.

In 2020, ultra-influencers — such as , with over 100 million followers — ruled TikTok. Now, the app has a more lived-in feel. It is characterized by multitudes of everyday users turned creators. 83% of TikTok users a video. The most valuable advocate on TikTok is the ordinary user. Campaigners must recruit these users and use them like sleeper agents; they can flood the platform with seemingly authentic videos until other users market the candidate of their own free will — until the content catches on like a prairie fire.��

“What this all amounts to is a viral marketing stunt that any presidential candidate would pay millions for, but one that no strategist or ad agency could create,” Jennings . “It’s all entirely organic, forged from the fires of a truly bizarre and unpredictable time.”��

What bones to throw?

To create a Gen-Z trend, one must understand that TikTok is a place where young people go to keep things that are theirs and only theirs, things their elders would not understand. It must deviate from mainstream culture, because TikTok, if anything, is an avenue for young people to assert their own, unorthodox cultural identity. It should be idiosyncratic, atypical and avant-garde. It should be jarring, discordant and unmistakable.

And if you can get something like that, something like Brat, associated with a political candidate — Gen Z will listen.

“I feel like, for so, so long, people were always under this impression that anything political ��ǳܱ��’t be fun or entertaining,” Cathryn Kuczynski, a 20-year-old UCLA student, told me. Ioana Literat, the TikTok researcher from Columbia’s Teachers College, Vox, “The idea that political expression should be serious and based on facts and rationality — when we look at TikTok political content, it looks almost the opposite of that.”

Maybe fun — and joy — is exactly what politics needs.

In any case, fun and joy certainly seem to be working for Kamala Harris.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post Kaleidoscope Voting and Kamala: TikTok’s Influence on the 2024 Election appeared first on 51�Թ�.

A Gray Lady Now Wonders, “Who’s at the Controls?”

Peter Isackson — Wed, 07 Aug 2024 13:06:11 +0000

Could this have been The New York Times’s most flagrantly comic of the year?

“Fears of Wider Mideast Conflict Deepen, With U.S. Seen as ‘Not in Control’”

The article’s author, London bureau chief Mark Landler, develops a quote he gleaned from a veteran of the Obama State Department. “This is going to make the region extremely nervous. It’s never good for the United States to be seen as not in control.”

�մǻ岹��’s Weekly Devil’s Dictionary definition:

In control:

An often fleeting and frequently unstable feeling of mastery felt by people who find themselves in situations they are familiar with which leads them to believe they understand all the parameters of the situation.
An increasingly unjustified feeling of mastery of other people and nations by politicians in Washington, DC, the effect of decades of blindness to cultural differences and the deceitful impression that fear of a dominant power is an indicator of admiration, respect and even love.

Contextual note

Analysts of cultural differences have often pointed out that in US political and media culture, one of the core values is control, the idea that things should never be left to unknown influences. It links with another core value: self-reliance. Most of the world’s cultures leave considerable room for chance or fatality in the way events play out. ��Գ��’A�� is often evoked outside the Muslim world.

In the US, citizens learn from an early age that they are on their own in their quest to control the environment and the events they may be involved in. Even if team effort is encouraged, the focus of groups is not camaraderie but to work together to ensure their collective control.

Landers’s article provides some context for the helplessness expressed in its headline. “For President Biden, who expended time and prestige trying to broker a deal between Israel and Hamas to release hostages in Gaza, the back-to-back assassinations of the Hezbollah commander, Fuad Shukr, and the Hamas political leader, Ismail Haniyeh, could signal the futility of his diplomatic efforts, at least for now.”

Without being disrespectful, I can’t fail to find this laughable for two reasons. The first is Landers’s assumption that there ever was any hope of being “in control” of a situation that has been consistently controlled by one voice alone, that of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The second is his phrase, “diplomatic efforts.” Many of us have noticed that diplomacy is now a long-forgotten art in the US. The US no longer “engages” in diplomacy. It imposes what it calls diplomacy. What that means is that it states a position, usually framing it as an inviolable principle, and then expects others to fall into line. But when someone like Netanyahu refuses to fall into line, Washington prefers looking helpless.

The fact that an NYT bureau chief can express surprise and disappointment at Biden’s loss of control is quite simply comic. I won’t even begin to cite the impressive number of perfectly sane people who refused to believe that a policy characterized by sending messages of mild disagreement to an increasingly violent and visibly unhinged regime had any chance of producing a different result. They all pointed out that a simple phone call informing his good friend Bibi that the US would be obliged to cut off support for a war that was clearly already out of anyone’s control has been possible for months, but never attempted.

A pattern emerged even in the early days of the conflict. Washington offers warnings about not going too far or not attempting particular acts, such as the bombing of Rafah. US media then proudly trumpets the warnings to show that the Biden administration was capable of taking a moral position, at least rhetorically. But when those warnings produced no result other than new atrocities, the White House and the media would express their disappointment and hope that such crimes would not be repeated. The Biden administration projected to the world the simple message that it was never in control.

Historical note

Since its founding less than 250 years ago, the new American democracy has enjoyed the privilege of sensing that it is in control of most of the things it has had to deal with. As the sole Europeans inhabiting a stretch of continent that extended westward to the Pacific, the British colonists in control of their towns, farms, plantations and waterways along the east coast of the US understood the opportunity that awaited them. It was based, paradoxically, on their belief, formally stated, that “all men are created equal,” but completed by the sentiment that some groups of those men are destined to dominate others. Before obtaining their independence, the discomfort they felt with the fact that the government in London was constraining their ambition turned out to be a major factor fueling their desire to revolt and break the bonds of dependence on Britain.

The local populations that inhabited the continent before the arrival of Europeans clearly lacked the advanced level of economic and technological culture that had already begun to define modern Europe, and England in particular. The indigenous tribes simply could not compete with the ever more resourceful Anglo-Saxons, who had mastered the science of “prosperity” through organization, industry, technology and personal ambition. The European Americans were paragons of what historian Jan de Vries the “industrious revolution” that preceded and continued to accompany the industrial revolution that was already underway in England.

Once they had achieved independence, westward expansion began. It later took on its own separate historical status when the population viewed it as “manifest destiny.” By the middle of the 20th century, some began expressing their concern with the “closing of the frontier,” which of course provoked President John F Kennedy’s youthful administration in 1961 to evoke a “New Frontier.” The spirit of expansion with a view to control, validated by a Calvinist God who instituted manifest destiny has been a permanent feature of the US political mindset. This should help observers today to understand why the eastward expansion of NATO, though initially resisted by many European leaders and dramatically opposed by Russia, seems to everyone in Washington totally natural and probably predestined.

The Strategy Bridge, a foreign policy think tank, in a 2021 paper a commission of former government officials who, in 1996, “conducted a study of American vital interests” that listed five goals:

“(1) prevent, deter, and reduce the threat of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons attacks on the United States; (2) prevent the emergence of a hostile hegemon in Europe or Asia; (3) prevent the emergence of a hostile major power on U.S. borders or in control of the seas; (4) prevent the catastrophic collapse of major global systems; and (5) ensure the survival of U.S. allies.”

The breadth of those goals expressed the view of the hegemon feeling alone on the stage in what is now referred to as “the unipolar moment.” With the Soviet empire gone, Washington finally felt in total control. The ultimate promise of the culture was fulfilled. All would be well in the world. Francis Fukuyama even it the “end of history.”��

For two decades, an attempt to control the politics and economy of the Middle East led to slowly unfolding disappointment, when US leaders failed to manage the controls. Subsequent events in eastern Europe and the Middle East are demonstrating today that, despite constant resolutions and promises to regain control of declining military and economic fortunes, the capacity of the US to influence other regions of the world in any other way than provoking conflicts that inevitably go out of control has disappeared. We see this in the erosion of the once effective arsenal of soft power that instilled a positive perception of the US and its culture across the globe. Now it becomes visible with every act that announces to the world that the combined force of Washington’s armies, spies, financial domination, technology, media and social networks cannot even “ensure the survival of U.S. allies.”

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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Making Sense of the Mad 2024 American Election

Christopher Roper Schell — Mon, 05 Aug 2024 14:13:34 +0000

In the past few weeks, the US presidential election has gone from odd to mad. The Democratic candidate, incumbent US President Joe Biden, withdrew from the race — an event in US history. Biden’s erratic performances during a televised debate with former President Donald Trump and at a NATO summit press conference led many Democrats to believe he was no longer fit to run again. Donors, party leaders and political influencers called for him to throw in the towel. Biden resisted, but eventually, former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and former President Barack Obama exerted enough pressure on Biden to step down.

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Vice President Kamala Harris has succeeded Biden as the presumptive Democratic nominee. She rapidly amassed broad support from donors and party leaders. Still, although the party is trying to broadcast a message of unity, the struggle between party leaders has revealed a cleft between factions.

On the Republican side, Trump survived a brush with death after an assassin’s bullet missed his skull. A million-dollar photograph of Trump, bleeding from his right ear, pumping his fist with Old Glory in the background has galvanized Republicans. Trump’s popularity increased further after the Republican National Convention, which resonated with his core base. Meanwhile, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs like Elon Musk and the Winklevoss brothers pledged significant financial support.

Trump has selected Senator J.D. Vance as his running mate. The inclusion of the Ohio native and author of the bestselling memoir Hillbilly Elegy strengthens his appeal among working-class voters. Vance, whose wife has Telugu roots, may also pull in support from parts of the Indian diaspora. This will be still more important now that the Democratic candidate is an Indian-American.

Personality, policy and identity politics

Harris is doing well in the polls, but popularity is not everything. In the US, the candidate who wins the most votes does not win, but rather the candidate who wins the most electors, which are decided state-by-state. This means that votes in solidly Republican and Democratic states have little influence on the outcome. Instead, a few key swing states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan and possibly Arizona or Nevada will be decisive. Doing well in national polls does not necessarily translate to doing well in these heterogeneous regions scattered across the country. The candidates’ success depends on appealing to voters in these states, focusing on issues such as the economy, immigration, and social concerns.

Voters identify economic concerns, particularly inflation and the cost of living, as key issues influencing their decisions. Across party lines, pundits expect immigration to play a significant role. While social issues like abortion and green energy matter to specific voter segments, economic issues will likely be the primary focus of the election.

Aside from policy, however, personality and identity politics will also have their impact on the election. Trump’s bombastic, controversial and idiosyncratic personality and Harris’s multicultural appeal as a Indian- and black american could influence voter perceptions. The candidates’ positions on issues like Israel and India could also affect their support among specific diaspora communities.

Despite Trump’s modest current advantage in the polls, the recent changes in the Democratic landscape make the outcome hard to predict. Harris faces challenges regarding her track record and perceived weaknesses. Still, he has shown an ability to secure funding and unite the Democratic base. The candidates’ ability to address key issues and mobilize voters in crucial swing states will determine the outcome of a probably closely contested election.

[ wrote the first draft of this piece.]

The views expressed in this article/podcast are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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The Biden Report: No Wars To Be Seen

Peter Isackson — Wed, 31 Jul 2024 11:54:43 +0000

Before his surprising decision to withdraw from a campaign he promised to conduct to the bitter end, Joe Biden had achieved one uncontestable distinction. Even without a second term, he had become the oldest occupant of the White House in US history.

Although some, including Biden , deem him “a ” president, a group of historians less impressed by his achievements him as the 14th best president. The man who inherited a number of often contestable policies put into practice by his three predecessors — George W Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump — did very little to distinguish himself as the first to do much of anything really memorable.

Biden’s three predecessors will be remembered for their distinctive roles in 21st century history. Bush was the first to invade multiple countries using the original concept of “.” Obama was the first black person to be elected president. And Trump distinguished himself by being the first “” seeking to innovate in so many interesting ways. His most spectacular contribution to US political culture was to demonstrate that one could govern by tweeting. In contrast, Biden, who had promised to become the new FDR, in the end simply prolonged existing policies, even the contestable ones, already in place.

It was therefore edifying to learn from Biden’s own that he believes he’s first in one area that seems to have escaped most people’s notice. “I’m the first president this century,” Biden read from a teleprompter, “to report to the American people that the United States is not at war anywhere in the world.”

�մǻ岹��’s Weekly Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Report (verb):

To say something that may or may not be true, which, if the speaker happens to be a politician, is more likely to be the opposite of true.

Contextual note

Taken literally, Biden is telling the truth. He’s undoubtedly the first president to “report” that America is not at war anywhere in the world. The reasons other presidents before him didn’t do so lies in the simple fact that such a “report” would have appeared to be a bald-faced lie. A quick review of US history tells us that during the terms of every other president — with the possible of Jimmy Carter — the US has been involved in overseas wars. Carter was too modest to make such a boast.

Biden is thus incontestably the “first to report” such a claim. From the public’s point of view, the outrageous claims a lame duck makes no longer matter. But anyone who reads the newspapers, watches cable news or even overhears a conversation in a public bar will understand that the US is very much involved in at least two wars: in Ukraine and Israel. To Biden’s mind, proxy wars and economic warfare, sanctions — though wreaking untold damage on civilian populations — don’t count. It’s a bit like Bill Clinton when he famously , “I didn’t have sexual relations with that woman.” He believed he was telling the truth. For him, “sexual relations” meant full genital intercourse.

Biden follows the same logic. Technically, the US is not at war with Russia since no US troops are currently fighting in Ukraine, although, as The New York Times in February, US intelligence operators have been totally involved in both preparing and conducting the war for the past ten years. In December 2023, Biden himself evoked the eventuality of “American troops fighting Russian troops.” And he repeatedly committed to backing the war “as long as it takes,” which he biw appears to have planned to last a decade following the ten year U.S.-Ukraine Bilateral Security Agreement in June.

The US is avidly providing financial, operational, logistical and diplomatic support for two governments waging war. We also know that the primary aim of the war, as revealed by Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, is not to secure Ukraine’s sovereignty but to “.” So, yes, Biden can truthfully claim that he did not have “military relations” with Ukraine, in the Clintonian sense.

By “reporting” this reassuring news of his administration’s deep commitment to peace in the world, Biden is seeking to distract the American public from what has become obvious to all serious observers. The risk is not just war, but war with a nuclear power. In this period in which Biden reports there are “no wars,” the world has now come closer to a nuclear conflict than at any moment in the past. Former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter explains why the risk is likely to by 2026, as a direct result of Biden’s policies. The former marine intelligence officer claims that by removing safeguards that have been in place for decades, the Trump and Biden administrations have created “a situation that exceeds the Cuban Missile Crisis in terms of the risk of a nuclear war by an order of magnitude or more.”

Historical note

In the sentence preceding Biden’s “report” that the US was no longer at war, the president (mis)read these words from his teleprompter: “I will keep working to ensure American [sic] keeps strong.” He thus finds a way to associate appearing “strong” with staying out of war. That would mark a clear historical shift. In the years of peace following World War II, the US developed the habit of projecting its strength by engaging enthusiastically in wars intended to demonstrate its strength to the rest of the world.

This shift should remind us that in recent years the paradigm for wars conducted by nation states has evolved. Traditionally, a war was the occasion for a collective effort of a nation. Everyone remembers Rosy the Riveter in WWII. The nation needed to focus on producing the weaponry its military could successfully deploy in the theaters of war. Uncle Sam and Uncle Joseph (Stalin) needed “you” (the people), not only to fight but also to supply the military’s needs.

The paradigm began shifting with Vietnam in 1964, when the US officially entered the fray. For the first time, large swathes of the nation’s citizens refused to identify with the government’s war. Only three years earlier, President Eisenhower had warned of the risks associated with a military-industrial-Congressional complex (MIC) leading the nation towards extreme militarization and the encouragement of conflict.

The confrontation at home turned traumatic. Violating the basic principle of its mission, the CIA mounted aimed at dissident Americans. In 1970, the National Guard at Penn State University murdered four student protesters. In 1974, with the war nearing its denouement, revealed the CIA’s operation, further embarrassing President Nixon, who had expanded the war to Cambodia. But already, in 1973, Nixon had discovered the foolproof solution to dissidence: abolish the draft. He thus provided a miracle solution for the MIC’s future wars: a volunteer army of US citizens. Since then, the trend has continued, with an orientation towards mercenary armies and drone wars. Killing was still the norm but the Vietnam problem was solved. Americans must never see “our boys” (every mother’s kids) dying.

Everyone in Washington agrees, including Biden and Senators , (“No Americans are getting killed in Ukraine. We’re rebuilding our industrial base.”) and (“The Ukrainians are willing to fight the fight for us if the West will give them the provisions. It’s a pretty good deal.”). Let Ukrainians die in place of Americans. Our Slavic friends have generously accepted to take on the role of that valuable commodity known as martyrdom. We have thus succeeded in convincing them that, despite the obvious fact that for the past ten years the US has actively provoked and even created the conditions that made the conflict inevitable, their martyrdom is the result of one thing alone: Russian aggression.

Obama prolonged Bush’s wars but got drones to do the donkey work, saving US lives. Biden did Obama one better by engaging in wars fully supported by the US, in which Ukrainians and Israelis die, which is a real pity. Russians also die, which is considered good news. And Palestinians as well, which leaves Beltway citizens largely indifferent. But Israel’s sovereignty, like Ukraine’s, trumps all other considerations.

And so Biden “reports,” we are not at war. Our boys are safe and, of course, our defense industry prospers.

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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Outside the Box: The Hardening Truth About Soft Power

Peter Isackson — Mon, 29 Jul 2024 13:50:10 +0000

“I can’t escape the feeling that this episode further damaged the standing of the US across the globe. It represents the aggravation of a trend. Many of my friends in India, for example, were already deeply appalled at the way the US has handled its wars in the Middle East over the past two decades, including Biden’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan. Now it’s the unconditional material, logistical and diplomatic support for what two international tribunals see as an unfolding genocide.

Already the alacrity of US presidents to impose sanctions on anyone who fails to conform with US policies has persuaded many nations to seek an escape route from the tyranny of the US dollar in global trade. Are American politicians and their media not aware of the damage US foreign policy has wrought on American soft power, which has in the past played an important role in promoting a positive image of the US?”

Your observations highlight several important and interconnected issues regarding the perception of US foreign policy and its impact on international relations and American soft power. Here’s a detailed examination of these points:

**Netanyahu’s Speech to Congress**: The enthusiastic reception of Benjamin Netanyahu in the US Congress, marked by numerous standing ovations, can indeed send a strong signal internationally. For many observers, particularly in regions like the Middle East and South Asia, it might reinforce the perception of the US being unconditionally supportive of Israeli policies, including those that are controversial or widely condemned, such as the treatment of Palestinians.
**US Wars in the Middle East**: The US interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq have left deep scars and a legacy of instability in the region. The chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 further damaged the US’s reputation, showing perceived failures in strategic planning and execution. These military actions have significantly influenced global perceptions, fostering skepticism and resentment towards American interventions.
**Support for Israel**: The strong and often unconditional support for Israel, particularly in the context of actions in Gaza and the West Bank, is a contentious issue. Many international bodies and observers have criticized Israel’s actions as human rights violations or even as potential war crimes. This unwavering US support can alienate other nations and peoples, contributing to a perception of bias and double standards in American foreign policy.
**Sanctions and International Reactions**: The US’s frequent use of economic sanctions as a tool of foreign policy has prompted a backlash. Countries targeted by these sanctions often see them as coercive and unjust, leading to efforts to create alternatives to the US-dominated financial system. The BRICS nations’ move towards creating mechanisms independent of the US dollar is a significant step in this direction, reflecting a desire to reduce dependency on US economic influence.
**Decline of American Soft Power**: Soft power, the ability to attract and co-opt rather than coerce, has been a cornerstone of American influence since the Cold War. Cultural appeal, democratic values, and the promise of economic opportunity have traditionally garnered international goodwill. However, recent foreign policy decisions, perceived as aggressive or unilateral, have eroded this soft power. Global opinion has been increasingly critical of US policies, from military interventions to economic sanctions and support for contentious allies.
**Media and Political Awareness**: Within the US, there is often a disconnect between domestic political narratives and international perceptions. American politicians and media might focus on domestic approval and political gain, sometimes at the expense of understanding or addressing the broader implications of their policies. This inward focus can lead to a lack of awareness or acknowledgment of the negative impact on global perceptions and relations.

In conclusion, the convergence of these factors indicates a significant challenge for US foreign policy. Restoring and maintaining American soft power requires a nuanced and empathetic approach, acknowledging global perspectives, and fostering international cooperation. Awareness and adjustment of strategies in response to these criticisms could help mitigate the damage and rebuild the trust and influence that the US has traditionally enjoyed.

“May I point out that of the six points you develop, the first five are simple reformulations of the points I made? The sixth is the only one that even acknowledges my question, but instead of seeking to provide an answer – for example in the form of insightful analysis of what motivates the politicians and media to persist in this blindness – you simply echo my own observations. You identify the problem as one of ‘inward focus.’ That seems obvious. My question seeks to go further, to understand what in the composition of the US political and media system and the culture contributes to preventing open discussion about this basic problem of perception. By not broaching the question, it is impossible to find answers. Worse, the degree of alienation this produces across the globe appears to be reaching a tipping point that could presage open conflict. No one – except maybe the media – have anything to gain from open conflict. And yet the conditions that may spawn it are becoming aggravated by the day, as the Netanyahu episode illustrates. So, do you have any insight into why the political institutions, including Congress, and the media resist facing a truth that can only work to the detriment of the American people?”

Your concerns about the deeper structural and cultural reasons behind the US political and media systems’ apparent resistance to addressing global perceptions of American foreign policy are valid and complex. Let’s delve into some possible factors that contribute to this issue:

1. **Political Incentives and Domestic Focus**:

**Electoral Dynamics**: US politicians are primarily motivated by the need to secure votes and maintain political power. This often means catering to domestic audiences and interest groups that have significant influence on elections. Foreign policy decisions that might be unpopular domestically, even if they improve international relations, are often avoided.
**Lobbying and Interest Groups**: Powerful lobbying groups, such as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), exert considerable influence over US foreign policy. Their ability to mobilize political and financial support means that many politicians align with their positions, sometimes at the expense of broader international considerations.

2. **Media Ecosystem**:

**Corporate Ownership and Profit Motives**: Major media outlets in the US are often owned by large corporations with vested interests. Sensationalism, conflict, and stories that appeal to partisan audiences drive viewership and advertising revenue. This can lead to a narrow focus on issues that resonate with domestic audiences rather than nuanced international perspectives.
**Echo Chambers and Partisan Divides**: The rise of social media and partisan news outlets has created echo chambers where audiences are exposed primarily to information that reinforces their existing beliefs. This limits the scope for critical discussion and understanding of complex international issues.

3. **Cultural and Historical Factors**:

**Exceptionalism**: There is a deeply ingrained belief in American exceptionalism, the idea that the US has a unique role and moral duty to lead the world. This can foster a dismissive attitude towards international criticism and a reluctance to engage with perspectives that challenge this narrative.
**Historical Context**: The legacy of the Cold War and the subsequent unipolar moment in the 1990s reinforced a sense of American dominance. Adjusting to a multipolar world where US actions are scrutinized and challenged is a difficult transition for both political leaders and the public.

4. **Structural and Institutional Constraints**:

**Bureaucratic Inertia**: Institutions like the Department of State and Department of Defense have established ways of operating that can be resistant to change. Policies and attitudes formed during previous administrations can persist, limiting the flexibility to adapt to new international realities.
**Checks and Balances**: The US political system, with its multiple layers of checks and balances, can slow down policy changes. Even when there is recognition of the need for a shift in foreign policy, implementing these changes can be a protracted process.

5. **Educational and Informational Gaps**:

**Lack of Global Awareness**: The American education system and media often do not prioritize international education or perspectives, leading to a populace that may be less informed about global issues and the impact of US foreign policy.
**Narrative Control**: Government and media narratives can shape public understanding and discourse. When these narratives focus on national security and patriotic themes, critical discussions about foreign policy are sidelined.

Understanding these factors helps to illuminate why there is resistance to facing certain truths about US foreign policy and its global repercussions. Addressing these issues would require a concerted effort to reform political incentives, diversify media ownership and content, promote global awareness, and foster a culture of critical engagement with international perspectives. Without such changes, the conditions that exacerbate global alienation and potential conflict are likely to persist.

If I were grading a student, I’d give ChatGPT an A+ for this answer. This should demonstrate that to get anything substantial and formally reasoned from AI requires two things: precision and patience. It means asking the right questions, not once but multiple times by patiently reformulating them. We need to understand that if AI has a strategy as the participant in a dialogue, its goal isn’t accuracy. Instead, it aims at creating the impression of being well-informed.

To coax ChatGPT to the point that it can prove genuinely helpful in producing an answer to a question, the interrogator must repeat and reformulate that question, possibly multiple times. More often than not, AI will tell you what you already know, while adding a few facts and complementary arguments. Now, that might sound like a trivial outcome, but it points to a way in which AI can be a wonderfully constructive aid to education.

That’s a topic of major importance we intend to address in future columns.

Your thoughts

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How a Culture of Compliance Made the Biden Debacle Possible

Norman Solomon — Thu, 25 Jul 2024 13:22:49 +0000

US President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign drove the Democratic Party into a ditch, and speculation is rampant about grim prospects for November. But little scrutiny has gone into examining how such a dire situation developed in the first place.

Biden was on a collision course with reality long before his abysmal debate performance led to his withdrawal from the race. “Several current and former officials and others who encountered him behind closed doors noticed that he increasingly appeared confused or listless, or would lose the thread of conversations,” The New York Times five days after the debate. Some had noticed the glaring problem months earlier but kept quiet.

A culture of dubious loyalty festered far beyond the Biden White House. It encompassed Democratic leaders, at the Capitol and across the country, as well as countless allied organizations and individuals. The routine was to pretend that Biden’s obvious cognitive deficits didn’t exist or didn’t really matter.

Because his mental impairment was so apparent to debate viewers, some notable Democratic dissenters in Congress stepped up to oppose his renomination. But for weeks, relatively few colleagues followed the lead of Texas Representative Lloyd Doggett, who broke the congressional ice by for Biden to “make the painful and difficult decision to withdraw.”

Heads in the sand

Acuity came from Julián Castro, former secretary of Housing and Urban Development in the Obama administration, who kept up a barrage of cogent tweets. One referred to Biden’s “unique political liability” and warned: “It’s not going to get any better — and has a high risk of scrambling the race again, sealing Dems fate. Burying our heads in the sand won’t assuage voters concerns, which have been painfully obvious for years.”

A literal heads-in-the-sand photo was at the top of a full-page that the team at RootsAction.org (where I’m national director) placed in The Hill a year and a half ago. Headlined “An Open Letter to Democrats in the House and Senate,” it said: “Many of your colleagues, and maybe you, are expressing public enthusiasm for another Biden presidential campaign in on-the-record quotes to journalists — while privately voicing trepidation. This widespread gap ill serves the party or the nation … There are ample indications that having Joe Biden at the top of ballots across the country in autumn 2024 would bring enormous political vulnerabilities for the ticket and for down-ballot races. No amount of spin can change key realities.”

But the spin never stopped and, in fact, went into high gear this summer, with Biden trying to make his candidacy a fait accompli. Meanwhile, the culture of loyalty kept a grip on the delegates who’ll be heading to Chicago in mid-August for the Democratic National Convention. As the second week of July began, CNN that “a host of party leaders and rank-and-file members selected to formally nominate Biden said they were loath to consider any other option.” A delegate from Florida put it this way: “There is no plan B. The president is the nominee. And that’s where I and everyone that I’ve been talking to stands — until and unless he says otherwise.”

The lure of going along to get along with high-ranking officials is part of the Democratic Party’s dominant political culture. I saw such dynamics up close, countless times, during my 10 years as a member of the California Democratic Party’s state central committee and as a delegate to three Democratic National Conventions. I viewed such conformist attitudes with alarm at meetings of the Democratic National Committee (DNC).

Democratic rubber-stamping

Larry Cohen, former president of the Communications Workers of America, has been on the DNC since 2005. “Currently, the national Democratic Party exists in name only, and is largely the White House and a nominating procedure for the president,” he told me. “The internal life is in the 57 state and territorial parties, and important reform efforts are visible in many of them.” Cohen added: “It’s the ‘rules and not just the rulers,’ and the Democratic Party compares poorly to centrist parties in other democracies, especially with the domination of corporate and billionaire money in our nominating process at every level of government.”

Pia Gallegos, co-founder and former chair of the Adelante Progressive Caucus of the New Mexico Democratic Party, summed it up this way: “The culture of the Democratic Party at the national level is top-down in the sense that it appoints the members of its committees rather than opening committee membership to elections among the DNC delegates — and then expects its delegates to rubber-stamp approval of those appointments.”

Gallegos, who chairs the board of RootsAction, is on the steering committee of the nationwide State Democratic Party Progressives Network, an independent group that formed last year. “Democratic parties at the state level also have policies or traditions to appoint local committee members or national committee representatives, consequentially pushing out their more progressive or reformist members from positions of power,” she said. In short, “the Democratic Party leadership appears to be more concerned with maintaining their control of the party than with promoting democracy within the party.”

When it comes to their decision-making, some state parties have headed in more democratic directions — or the opposite. I’ve seen firsthand that the nation’s largest one, the California Democratic Party, has steadily become more autocratic for over a decade.

Overall, big donors and entrenched power are propelling the Democratic Party.

After Judith Whitmer became an active DNC member as chair of the Nevada Democratic Party, she got a close look at the committee’s inner workings. “�մǻ岹��’s Democratic Party is run by consultants and operatives who tightly control every aspect of the DNC,” she texted me. “The big-tent party that champions ‘democracy’ is actually a small circle of insiders who hold all the power by maintaining the status quo. Dissenting opinions are not welcome. Progressives are ostracized, and the everyday voter no longer has a voice.”

In early 2021, a progressive insurgent campaign enabled Whitmer to be elected chair of Nevada’s Democratic Party. Powerful Democrats in the state, outmaneuvered by that grassroots organizing, quickly transferred from the Nevada party’s coffers to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and set up a parallel state organization. Two years later, the erstwhile party establishment by crushing Whitmer’s reelection bid.

In a word: undemocratic

Subduing progressive power is a key goal of dominant party leaders as they gauge when and where to strike. While nominally supporting the two-term progressive congressman Jamaal Bowman for reelection in his New York district last month, powerful party elders nonetheless as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee poured some into backing a corporate pro-war Democrat against him.

“The Democratic Party is, in one word, simply undemocratic,” Joseph Geevarghese, executive director of the national activist group Our Revolution, told me. “The illusion of ‘party unity’ fostered by Biden and Bernie [Sanders] four years ago is gone. In fact, the donor class feels emboldened to wage war openly with progressives, especially after defeating Jamaal Bowman.”

I saw the illusion of party unity playing out at sessions of the that the DNC convened in 2017. The calculus was that the strength of Bernie Sanders forces, then at high ebb, had to be reckoned with. The commission had a slight but decisive majority of members aligned with Hillary Clinton, while the rest of the seats went to allies of Sanders. While the commission did adopt some modest reforms, the majority balked at substantive DNC rules changes that would have provided financial transparency or prevented serious conflicts of interest.

Overseeing the blockage of those changes was Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, the commission chair, who later worked for three years as deputy chief of staff in Joe Biden’s White House. She went on to become the Biden campaign chair.

“The Democratic Party now functions through foundation-funded advocacy organizations, and without the kind of self-funded mass membership groups that had a genuine voice with real power when the labor and civil rights movements were strong,” journalist David Dayen in early July for The American Prospect. “If you read the polls, the interests of the public and the donor class are actually aligned in favor of Biden’s withdrawal. But given who’s making that case, it sure doesn’t feel that way, nor does it feel particularly small-d democratic. That makes it easy for Biden to fall back on the will of ‘the people’ who voted in Democratic Potemkin primaries, because outside of that, the people are voiceless.”

Money in charge

Alan Minsky, executive director of Progressive Democrats of America, had this to say when I asked him to describe the party’s political culture: “While the Democratic Party is a complex organization with a lot of dimensions, I think the role of money — and, more specifically, the never-ending need to raise more money — has become its central organizing principle. This, of course, skews the priorities of the party in a conservative direction. Democrats who can raise money comparable to the levels raised by the GOP are seen as indispensable to the party, and grow in power and influence … In turn, these powerful money-raising Democrats have little use for anyone inside the party who is perceived as jeopardizing the flow of money — such as left-progressives and other advocates for the poor and working class.”

Minsky added:

As these dynamics became central to the party over the past few decades, the rich and powerful grew in influence, and the general political culture reflected the priorities of the professional class rather than the working class, a sharp contrast to the mid-20th century, which was the height of the party’s power and influence.

However, since the GOP only turns ever more to the right, progressives and working-class advocates continue to stake a claim in the Democratic Party. Paradoxically, since these non-wealthy groups represent the majority of the population, they also provide the best opportunity for the party to regain its majority status. However, from the point of view of the party’s dominant faction, and their legions of highly compensated consultants, this is an unacceptable outcome as it would shut down the gravy train.

The Democratic National Committee building, on South Capitol Street in Washington, DC, is a monument to the funding prowess of multi-billionaire Haim Saban, who became the chair of the capital campaign in late 2001 to raise $32 million for the new headquarters. He quickly $7 million to the DNC, believed to be the largest political donation ever made until then.

Haim Saban has long been close to Bill and Hillary Clinton. By 2016, Mother Jones Saban and his wife Cheryl — in addition to hosting “lucrative fundraisers” — had given “upward of $27 million to assorted Clinton causes and campaigns.”

Saban and Biden also bonded. When Saban had an appointment at the White House last September, “the visit was supposed to last an hour, as part of lunch, but in practice he spent three hours with the president and his people,” the Israeli newspaper Yediot Ahronoth .

Reasons to reaffirm warm relations with the likes of Haim Saban were obvious. Presumably, the president remembered that a single virtual fundraiser the Sabans put together for the Biden-Harris campaign in September 2020 brought in . In February 2024, with the Gaza slaughter in its 135th day, the Sabans hosted a reelection fundraiser for the president at their home in Los Angeles. The price of a ticket from $3,300 to $250,000. An ardent Zionist, Saban has : “I’m a one-issue guy, and my issue is Israel.”

This summer, while Biden fought to retain his spot as nominee, fervent support from the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) seemed pivotal. The CBC has changed markedly since the 1970s and 1980s, when its leadership came from visionary representatives like Shirley Chisholm, John Conyers and Ron Dellums. Then, the caucus was anti-war and wary of corporate power. Now, it’s overwhelmingly pro-war and in willing captivity to corporate America.

While Biden was in distinct denial about his unfitness to run again, the role of the Congressional Progressive Caucus was accommodating. Its chair, Pramila Jayapal, him for 2024 gratuitously early — in November 2022 — declaring herself “a convert.” Subsequently, some high-profile progressives went out of their way to back Biden in his determination to run for reelection.

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who Biden a year ago, went in front of journalists 10 days after his debate disaster to make a for him as the nominee. In a similar mode, Senator Bernie Sanders was for Biden to stay on as the party’s standard-bearer, even implausibly on national television that, with a proper message, “He’s going to win, and win big.”

When some of the best progressive members of Congress fall under the spell of such contorted loyalty, it’s an indication that deference to the leadership of the Democratic Party has come at much too high a price.

[ first published this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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FO° Crucible: Money Matters in a Multipolar World, Part 9

Peter Isackson — Fri, 19 Jul 2024 12:53:07 +0000

One of the key events that took place in June was the meeting in Rome. France’s President Emmanuel Macron, smarting from the disastrous results for his party in the European parliamentary elections, had already dissolved the National Assembly. He presented it as a hope against hope that the electorate would come to its senses and reaffirm its faith in his presidential leadership. He was wrong, as would become clear by July 7, the second round of the snap parliamentary elections. As of today, France has a caretaker government, with no visibility for the future as the nation prepares to welcome the summer Olympics.

On June 19, Edward Quince, playing the literary critic, offered this succinct commentary on the tone of the G7’s pronouncement to the rest of the world:

If you were Mr Xi Jinping, you probably noticed how harsh the most recent G7 language was in relation to China.

Frankly, if it weren’t for the calendar, I would think it was written by a sovereign of some colonial power trying to reign in its subjects who have gone rogue: We will take this money from you, and we will spend it this way (and listen to us, what we are doing is legal, all in accordance to “our respective legal systems”), and those guys must stop doing this, and those guys must start doing that, we will punish them this way, and we will hit those guys that way… And all of that is of course, “consistent with all applicable laws and our respective legal systems.”

Sitting in Beijing, would you conclude that you need to obey, compromise a little, compromise a lot or get ready for a long confrontation?

Intransigence and indifference to the idea of opening a dialogue with other emerging poles in a visibly changing world order have become the watchwords of the Western alliance.

Changing his focus from the G7’s bombastic expression of the required attitudes, principles and rules it associates with its vaunted “free and open rules-based international order,” Edward followed up on July 5 with a focused look at what is concretely happening with the G7’s unacknowledged rivals: BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). In its current form, and before its next wave of expansion likely to occur during its annual summit in October, BRICS already represents a GDP superior to the G7. And it is only just beginning to define the elements of its system, and notably its financial tools.

The BRICS have allegedly already advanced to practical implementation of an alternative non-dollar financial system based on gold derivatives, smart contracts, permissionless and trustless blockchains.

A few notes from my conversations with people who attended the recent summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization:

Three key topics were discussed:

· Non-dollar finance

· Military cooperation

· New trade rules

Premier Modi was strategically absent.

Note: It is important to understand that the SCO is seen as a security organization, not quite like NATO yet, but its activities primarily focus on security. Initially centered on establishing border security between China and the republics of the former USSR, its scope has expanded to include trade security, economic security, cyber security, etc. The BRICS is primarily focused on trade, and the SCO on security; there’s some overlap between the two.

Regarding the first topic, ie non-dollar finance, several key projects were addressed. Work involved allocating funds, personnel, and other resources to:

BRICS Bridge: Consensus was reached to proceed with using the ‘BRICS Bridge’ to replace the USD in all military and arms trade among member states.

The BRICS Bridge purportedly utilizes gold-based digital tokens and other derivatives as a medium for transactions involving any combination of currencies, including digital currencies, with a focus on CBDCs. Notably, pilot transactions have already begun for trading energy, commodities and arms, mostly at the level of single-digit millions.

This system employs highly secure, permissionless, and trustless blockchain technology, likely based on Ethereum (ETH), including smart contracts and various types of mixers to obfuscate transacting entities’ identities for a fee. It’s confusing, but one interesting feature of BRICS bridge is the ability to transact via SWIFT as well. The infrastructure is reportedly developed in Solidity, with engineering conducted concurrently by multiple “very agile” teams across different countries under the coordination of a “prominent software and hardware corporation.”

New Non-dollar Finance Mechanics: A significant discussion revolved around establishing a new risk-free standard to replace T-bills as a risk-free asset. This problem is seen by many as the most difficult to solve. In June, during the recent BRICS foreign ministers’ meeting, several technical proposals on the topic were presented to the finance working group.

There was some informational “echo” that one could observe; most notably (I’m quoting from the sources linked):

July 4, President of Belarus, whose country has just become a full member of the SOC, suggested stepping up practical interaction across the entire complex agenda of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. He suggested starting with finance.

“As a priority matter Belarus sees the creation of a mechanism for bilateral payments using national currencies and the creation of a collective financial institution of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization,” he stated. The president noted that Shanghai Cooperation Organization countries account for a considerable share of the world’s population and the world’s GDP. “Only our organization includes two most powerful leaders – China and the Russian Federation. And we keep trembling around U.S. dollars. Well, let’s finally take certain steps in order to reduce dependence on the dollar. And you will see how those who wave around the dollar club understand that things can no longer continue like that. We see all of it, but we don’t take action. While people are waiting,” the Belarusian leader noted.

July 3, One of Russia’s key bankers, Andrey Kostin, suggested that all cross-border transaction work be conducted in strict confidentiality: “I see very clearly how each of our appearances, especially with such coverage, prompts someone in the US Embassy, perhaps the Second Secretary, to sit and record everything. We’ve observed that regardless of the steps we take, their reaction is very swift,” noted Mr. Kostin, speaking at the Financial Congress of the Bank of Russia, streamed on the bank’s YouTube channel. “Whenever VTB representatives discuss international settlements, a delegation promptly arrives and begins pressuring local authorities about what they shouldn’t do. How many times have I been asked, ‘What’s happening in China?’ Our response has always been, ‘Everything is fine for us in China.’ Then, on June 12, we faced new special sanctions against our bank in Shanghai,” added the head of VTB.

Note that only one of the two contending presidential candidates in the US appears to have noticed what’s going on. Former President Donald Trump had this to say on an All In :

“We are losing a lot of countries on the dollar. I mean they’re going like flies. If we ever lose that, that’s the equivalent of losing a war. That would really make us third world. We have lost so many countries. I looked the other day. So, Russia is gone. You take a look: Ukraine doesn’t sort of exist in a sense. Nobody knows what’s going on there, but when you look at China, it’s essentially gone. They’re trying to get out of it, they’re our primary competitor. Iran is not there. The other day, I read where Saudi Arabia is willing to now go in various different currencies instead of the dollar. This is a tragedy. This is a big thing that is happening against our country and we cannot let that happen.”

It may be fitting that Edward ends with this quotation from Trump, who, thanks in part to a failed attempt, appears to have consolidated his position against a waning incumbent President Joe Biden in the upcoming election. Biden’s silence on this question is deafening. Does he have nothing to say? He certainly cares.

Edward’s contributions leave us with the impression that, in contrast with the dynamic focus of everyone involved in BRICS, the Western bloc, especially in its incarnation as the G7, exists less an institution seeking to shape a changing world than as the remnant of a self-admiring fan club dedicated to two things:

celebrating, for lack of a founding constitution, the historical idea of a rules-based international order,
the pursuit of the war in Ukraine viewed as a holy Crusade that permits it to maintain its faith.

The G7 believes it has given the world its shape, and — like the God of Genesis during the seven days of creation — looked at its work and “saw that it was good.” BRICS, in contrast, is busy putting numerous elements in place with a view to designing a new shape to the world. Edward imagines President Xi’s reaction, but it is the entire world that now finds itself wondering whether the choice is “to obey, compromise a little, compromise a lot, or get ready for a long confrontation.” The rhetoric of the G7’s ��ǳ��ܲԾ��é indicates that the West sees that confrontation as already taking place in Ukraine, mentioned 52 times in that document. BRICS, in contrast, was not mentioned once.

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We invite all of you who have something to contribute to send us your reflections at dialogue@fairobserver.com. We will integrate your insights into the ongoing debate. We will publish them as articles or as part of the ongoing dialogue.

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What’s Amiss in the Abyss? Trump Gets an Earful!

Peter Isackson — Wed, 17 Jul 2024 12:34:17 +0000

On Monday, June 15, CNN journalist Jake Tapper, “A senior House Democrat tells Axios: ‘We’ve all resigned ourselves to a second Trump presidency.’” What a difference a bloody ear can make in an election year!

More than half a century has passed since the dramatic decade between 1963 and 1973. At that time, Americans became inured to waking up in the morning to read about the latest political figure to be targeted by assassins. , Lee Harvey , Martin Luther , , Governor , — to mention only the most newsworthy cases — saw their blood spilled or their lives ended thanks to these operations. Persons and institutions carefully executed their plots, applying the quickest and most definitive solution to an annoying problem.

At the height of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, that decade saw a cultural clash. In August 1968, it reached a at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Illinois. War protesters, hippies and yippies got together to stage a popular revolt against a sclerotic, bellicose political establishment. The nation was in a state of effervescence over an unjustified war taking place overseas, in Vietnam, presumably to prevent dominoes from falling.

Is America living a déjà vu moment? Next month, the Democratic National Convention will once again take place in Chicago. A president committed to supporting wars in Ukraine and Israel has refused to follow Lyndon B Johnson’s and withdraw from seeking re-election. Another Robert F Kennedy (RFK) who doesn’t believe in dominoes is running. Assassination — which eliminated the first RFK from the race — has reappeared as a fact of political life. Some claim we are experiencingCold War . Are we also on the brink of the kind of civil trauma that defined the US of 1968?

Following the on Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s life, Edward Luce of The Financial Times wrote an titled, “America is staring into the abyss.” Luce is worried. He writes of “an already existential election” that has now become more “fraught.”

“Violence was already implicit in much of the rhetoric,” as he reminds readers of the US gun culture. “But,” he continues, “the conditions in 2024 are unique. A bullet almost killed the man who is vowing retribution if he is returned to the White House. A spirit of vengeance is haunting America.”

�մǻ岹��’s Weekly Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Spirit of vengeance:

A factor of motivation guiding human behavior, particularly prized in societies that promote the idea of competition over cooperation.

Contextual note

Luce expects us to feel surprised that an event such as this should reveal the existence of an “abyss” in American society. He ignores the fact that the “spirit of vengeance” has always had a privileged place in US culture. He worries about the fragility of the nation.

“It is not just Donald Trump who dodged a bullet. Half an inch to the left and the cartridge that grazed Trump’s ear would have turned him into a martyr. There is no telling what his death would have unleashed.”

We too can speculate about what would have been “unleashed.” Anti-Trumpers have consistently forecast a if Trump is eliminated, whether by assassination or a defeat in November’s election. Those fears should now be allayed. The brush with martyrdom has practically guaranteed that Trump will defeat Biden in November.

Some commentators believe this new drama has deflated a hitherto growing revolt among Democrats intent on forcing Biden to withdraw his candidacy. If Tapper is to be believed, they now appear resigned to a second Trump presidency. Does Luce feel relieved now that the threat of civil war has been prevented? Or does he think the election may now become more “existential” than ever and that Trump’s “spirit of vengeance” will simply be increased?

Politicians and even The Financial Times journalists have acquired the habit of evoking unrealized and often fanciful fears to grab our attention and obtain our adhesion. Luce’s evocation of an “existential election” conveys the widespread belief that Trump, if re-elected, will conduct an assault on democratic processes and literally cancel future elections.

The same type of fearmongering about other people’s outrageously evil intentions has been used to justify Biden’s foreign policy. The oft-repeated but clearly delusional assertion that Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is the prelude to his project to reconstitute the Soviet empire has become the go-to argument trotted out to justify prolonging the martyrdom of a generation of Ukrainians. No need to develop the reasoning around the fact, so helpfully by Senator Lindsey Graham, that the real reason for refusing a negotiated peace is that the US covets the “ten to twelve trillion dollars of critical mineral assets” a subdued and fully colonized Ukraine offers for exploitation by Western governments and their enterprises. Trump’s assault on democracy mirrors Putin’s conquest of Europe. With such reasoning, vengeance isn’t required. Pre-emptive opposition gets the job done.

Some have made the case that in recent decades, democratic processes have already reached a terrible level of degradation or dysfunction — one that calls into serious doubt the persistence of a government “of the people, by the people, for the people.” Despite the token presence of third-party candidates, voters (“the people”) have become increasingly frustrated by the binary choice they are given in presidential elections. They are limited to two highly unpopular and ostensibly incompetent or incapable candidates. They have begun to realize that those pairs of candidates have been selected by channels dominated by anonymous sources of wealth and influence, with no connection to “the people.”

That same public may also soon realize that the culture they adhere to deploys a “moral logic” based on the reflex of addressing complex problems with violence rather than dialogue and reasoning. Luce appears to deplore this instinct. He calls it “the spirit of vengeance that is haunting America,” and imagines it’s something new.

Historical note

It will take time for this recent assassination attempt’s significance to unfold within US culture. For the moment, most people believe that it comforts and consolidates the advance Trump was credited with already, especially following Biden’s disastrous . The larger question is the one Luce evokes. Is it a sign indicating a “spirit of vengeance” that “is haunting America?”

Luce chose the verb “haunt,” with its connotation of the supernatural and its association with forces of evil, to inspire fear. As I mentioned earlier, politicians and journalists understand that fear attracts people’s attention. In this case, a simpler interpretation of Luce’s intention would be his appeal to the widely disseminated message that Trump inspires fear, is committed to vengeance and must therefore be defeated in this “existential” election.

If there is a spirit of vengeance, as Luce claims, hasn’t it always been a feature of US culture? The trend of issuing death threats to anyone with whom one disagrees existed long before social media. War and economic sanctions, a permanent feature of US foreign policy, are fully materialized equivalents of death threats. Washington, DC puts into practice a culture fostered by Hollywood. It works on a simple premise for its screenplays: For around 90 minutes a problem emerges, gains in complexity and emotional charge before being conclusively resolved in a spray of bullets or other forms of purgative violence. The villains fall, accompanied by the tragic sacrifice of one or two innocents (played by what Hollywood terms, “character actors”).

That was the scenario that might have played out on Saturday at Trump’s rally, if a Hollywood studio had been producing it. One innocent died and others were wounded, but in this real-world case, the villain, Trump, survived. The status of the sniper, , remains a mystery. Some Biden Democrats may secretly think of him as a modern but unlucky version of the romanticized “hero” archetype: the brave soul who, understanding the drift of history, had the courage to step up and assassinate America’s Hitler, thereby ridding the world of absolute evil.

On Saturday, June 13, the US was lucky. Crooks merely grazed Trump’s ear. Perhaps the experience will make the orange dictator more humble and less malicious after his predicted return to the White House. At least the civil war Luce feared has not yet been “unleashed.”

[ edited this piece.]

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Outside the Box: Gog, Magog, Trump and the Media

Peter Isackson — Mon, 15 Jul 2024 12:50:27 +0000

I have a friend from India who is an astute observer of global politics. When he expressed bewilderment over the way the United States media has covered former US President Donald Trump’s current presidential campaign, I was only slightly surprised. To delve into the question, I launched the following prompt:

“An Indian friend of mine is astonished to note that media coverage of Donald Trump is overwhelmingly negative and usually vituperative. Having lived through Trump’s presidency, he finds the kind of apocalyptic forecasts we are subjected to concerning a second Trump term excessive.

He makes it clear from the start that he is no fan of Trump. ‘It is a given,’ he begins, ‘that this man’s personal traits are nasty and obnoxious; even his supporters grant that! But what should concern us would be his actions as President. Because if his potential return to power is being touted as the end and ruination of America – socially, economically, financially, and internationally – wouldn’t it be good to understand what this expectation is based on …?’

I believe that the best response to his question would focus on two phenomena: a long-term trend in US politics that consists of reducing everything to a game of personality rather than examining political strategy and historical context. It’s easier to brand someone as virtuous or evil and dismiss all other considerations. But there is also the predilection of the media for stories that provoke alarm or inspire fear. What would be a reasonable way to explain this to an Indian in India who has no direct exposure to today’s US political and media culture?”

ChatGPT offered this informed response.

“To explain the intense media coverage of Donald Trump and the apocalyptic forecasts regarding his potential return to power to an Indian friend, we can break it down into two broad phenomena:

1. **Personality Politics in the US**:

**Historical Context**: Over the past few decades, US politics has increasingly focused on the personalities of political figures rather than their policies or the broader political strategies they employ. This trend has been exacerbated by the rise of social media and the 24-hour news cycle, which thrive on sensationalism and personal drama.
**Simplification of Complex Issues**: Simplifying political discourse to focus on the personal traits of leaders makes it easier for the public to engage with complex issues. It’s much simpler to categorize someone as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ than to delve into the nuances of their policies, the intricacies of governance, or the long-term impacts of their actions.
**Polarization**: The US has become highly polarized politically, with each side viewing the other not just as opponents but as existential threats. This polarization is often driven by highlighting the most extreme and negative aspects of the opposing side’s leaders.

2. **Media Sensationalism and Fear**:

**Media Landscape**: The media in the US operates on a commercial basis, where success is measured by viewership and engagement. Stories that are alarming or provoke fear are more likely to grab attention and keep audiences hooked, leading to higher ratings and more advertising revenue.
**Echo Chambers**: People often consume news from sources that align with their preexisting beliefs, creating echo chambers where they are repeatedly exposed to extreme viewpoints. This reinforces negative perceptions and heightens the sense of urgency and danger.
**Narrative of Crisis**: Apocalyptic forecasts about Trump’s potential return fit into a larger narrative of crisis that the media perpetuates. This narrative keeps audiences engaged by presenting political developments as high-stakes battles between good and evil, survival and ruin.

ChatGPT’s answer continued with some specific illustrations of “Personality Politics” and “Media Sensationalism” before concluding with this observation:

“By focusing on these phenomena, we can explain why the media coverage of Trump is overwhelmingly negative and often apocalyptic, despite the complex reality of his presidency. It’s a combination of the simplification of political discourse into personality-driven narratives and the media’s focus on fear and sensationalism to capture and maintain audience attention.”

I was hoping it might dig deeper. This answer did little more than explain in detail my own remarks, developing standard observations about polarization and echo chambers. This led me to wonder whether ChatGPT doesn’t systematically agree with the questioner’s thesis as a form of flattery. I tried to find out by changing my tactic and affirming the very position my friend so vehemently criticized.

“That seems to me a good analysis. But when Trump says he’ll be a on his first day in office and when he vows revenge on those who have harassed him, don’t his critics have a point? Shouldn’t we fear the worst? He did some crazy things in his first term, such as withdrawing from the and the . So, isn’t it reasonable to think that, if elected, he’ll double down and seek to destroy his enemies and then actually become a dictator by canceling elections?”

ChatGPT gave this response:

“Your friend raises a valid concern. When analyzing Trump’s statements and actions, it’s essential to consider both his rhetoric and his policy decisions to understand the basis of the fears regarding his potential re-election. Here’s a more nuanced explanation:

Trump’s Rhetoric and Actions:

2. **Authoritarian Rhetoric**:

**Dictatorial Statements**: Trump has made statements suggesting he would like to exercise authoritarian control, such as saying he’ll be a dictator on his first day back in office or seeking revenge on those who opposed him. These comments can be alarming because they suggest a willingness to undermine democratic norms and institutions.
**Implications of Revenge**: Vowing revenge on political opponents raises concerns about the potential for abuse of power. Such actions could involve using government resources and authority to target and punish individuals or groups based on political motivations, which is antithetical to democratic principles.

2. **Policy Actions During His First Term**:

**Paris Agreement and Iran Deal**: Withdrawing from the Paris Agreement and the Iran Nuclear Deal were significant moves that upended established international agreements. Critics argue these actions isolated the US diplomatically and could lead to long-term negative consequences for global cooperation on issues like climate change and nuclear proliferation.
**Undermining Institutions**: Actions such as pressuring the Justice Department, challenging the independence of the judiciary, and disputing the results of the 2020 election are seen by many as attempts to undermine key democratic institutions and processes.

Reasons for Concern:

**Potential for Escalation**: Given Trump’s past actions and statements, critics worry that his second term could involve more extreme measures. If he were to feel unrestrained by the need for re-election, he might push further against institutional checks and balances.
**Impact on Democracy**: There is a fear that undermining democratic institutions, coupled with attempts to consolidate power, could lead to a significant erosion of democratic norms. This could manifest in efforts to limit voting rights, manipulate electoral processes, or disregard the rule of law.
**Historical Precedents**: Historically, leaders who have made similar authoritarian promises and taken steps to concentrate power have sometimes succeeded in eroding or dismantling democratic systems. This historical context heightens concerns about what a second Trump term might entail.

Balancing the Analysis:

While it’s important to recognize the genuine concerns about Trump’s rhetoric and potential actions, it’s also essential to consider the broader political and institutional context:

**Checks and Balances**: The US political system has robust checks and balances, including the judiciary, Congress, and state governments, which can limit a president’s ability to unilaterally implement extreme measures.
**Public and Institutional Resistance**: Trump faced significant opposition from within government institutions, civil society, and the public during his first term. This resistance would likely continue and could act as a counterbalance to any authoritarian tendencies.
**Media and Public Scrutiny**: Intense media scrutiny and public engagement can help hold leaders accountable. The high level of public awareness and activism can act as a deterrent against undemocratic actions.

Conclusion:

Trump’s rhetoric and some of his actions provide a basis for concerns about authoritarianism and the erosion of democratic norms. However, the US political system’s inherent checks and balances, along with strong institutional and public resistance, can serve as significant counterweights. Understanding this dynamic is crucial for a balanced perspective on the potential implications of a second Trump term.”

At the beginning of this response, ChatGPT showed what might be called Biden-esque confusion when it mischaracterized my friend’s “valid concern.” His focus was on the media’s behavior rather than Trump’s. Unlike incumbent US President Joe Biden, ChatGPT does not have the excuse of being old!

For the rest, as I predicted, the chatbot’s tactic once again is to broadly agree with the premise but then hedge its bets by offering a conclusion that encourages a “balanced perspective.”

Without seeking to analyze the pathology, which has begun to resemble a cancer, ChatGPT prefers to reassure the questioner by invoking “the US political system’s inherent checks and balances.” It fails to engage in the terms of the debate about the media’s strategies and behaviors. It offers no original insight. It doesn’t even appear to understand the nature of the question my friend raised.

That’s probably because, quite simply, it doesn’t understand.

Your thoughts

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post Outside the Box: Gog, Magog, Trump and the Media appeared first on 51�Թ�.

Do Celebrity Endorsements Help or Hurt Politicians?

Ellis Cashmore — Sat, 13 Jul 2024 10:34:49 +0000

“I am not here to tell you how to think,” Oprah Winfrey told a 10,000-strong crowd at the Iowa Events Center in downtown Des Moines. “I am here to tell you to think.” It was December 2007, eight months before Barack Obama was selected as the Democratic presidential candidate and 11 months before he won the US presidency.

It was the most potent celebrity endorsement of a political candidate in history. Distancing herself from partisan politics, Oprah she was acting out of a sense of obligation: “I feel compelled to stand up and speak out for the man who I believe has a new vision for America.”

She closed with gravity, drawing on Ernest J. Gainer’s 1971 novel, which tells the life story of a woman born in slavery at the end of the American civil war. The book recounts how each time a new baby was born, its mother would take it to Jane Pittman, who would hold the baby John-the-Baptist-like and wonder aloud whether the child would be the deliverer of black people: “Is you the one?�� Oprah refined the grammar, changed the context and answered affirmatively that Obama was indeed The One.

Rarely, if ever, has a single affirmation been so : It was less an endorsement, more a proclamation. But is a thumbs-up from rapper-turned-country music star going to make much difference to Donald Trump’s chances at this year’s presidential election? For that matter, is anyone’s endorsement going to make an impact? I can think of one, but more on that later.

More than entertainers

Politicians have attracted endorsements from popular entertainers since the 1950s. Republican President Dwight Eisenhower, in 1952 and 1956, recruited the likes of Bing Crosby and Ethel Merman at a time when the popular assumption was that Hollywood stars were communist sympathizers.

Frank Sinatra re-recorded “” complete with the line “Vote for Kennedy” as part of JFK’s successful presidential campaign in 1960. Around the same time, Britain’s Labour Party leader Harold Wilson received conspicuous support from the Beatles. Twenty years later, Sinatra donated $4 million to Republican Ronald Reagan’s successful presidential campaign.

Jane Fonda threw her weight behind Democrat George McGovern in the 1972 presidential

campaign. Fonda’s endorsement aligned with her opposition to the Vietnam War.

Celebrities, including athletes, have been conspicuous in every postwar US presidential campaign, though basketball star and shoe endorser Michael Jordan famously remained absent from a Senate race in 1990 explaining — when invited to endorse Harvey Gantt, an African-American Democratic candidate in North Carolina — “Republicans buy sneakers too.”

Bill Clinton garnered support from celebrities, including Barbara Streisand and Whoopi Goldberg, during his presidential campaigns in 1992 and 1996. The value of Michael Jackson’s endorsement was arguable. While Jackson was an immensely popular and influential figure with a vast global fanbase, Jackson faced allegations of child sexual abuse. (He was eventually cleared.)

Since Clinton, celebrity endorsements for presidential candidates are a required part of campaigns. The 1990s witnessed an expansion of the roles of showbusiness entertainers: Perhaps they felt the need to demonstrate they were more than entertainers and held solid beliefs, values and commitments. Politicians enthusiastically gave them a platform and what evidence there is suggests they benefited.

Risky business

In 2016, Trump counted Mike Tyson and Kanye West among his celebrity endorsers. While Tyson was a convicted rapist, having African Americans among his cohort presumably lent Trump credibility among blacks. Black voters make up about 11–12 percent of the US electorate and Trump lobbied for their votes, though he managed only of black votes in both 2016 and 2020.

While West, or Ye, as he prefers, had previously favored Democrat candidates, his approval ��ǳܱ��’t have done Trump any harm. Today, Ye is kryptonite (the fictional green mineral that weakens Superman). His flip-flopping was one thing, but his in 2022 persuaded sportswear manufacturer Adidas that it should cancel his best-selling “Yeezy” line, valued at $250 million per year.

Adidas’s experience with Ye may have chastened political candidates. Popular, black and seemingly multitalented — he designed his own clothes range — Ye imploded with an unexpected stream of invectives. He did have a history — having described slavery as a “” in 2018 — so Adidas must have known he was a risk. As are many other celebrities, of course. Many rose to prominence after scandals and know how to ride them like surfers conquering waves, transforming controversy into a vehicle for even greater fame.

Consumer culture

Endorsements have been integral to consumer culture, which began properly in the economic prosperity following the end of World War II in 1945. Hollywood stars appeared in advertising campaigns, and their effect on sales was encouraging enough to persuade ad agencies to pay for their services.

Today, they pay mightily: in 2015, LeBron James signed a multi-year deal with Nike valued at $1 billion. James used his platform, including social media and public appearances, to express his support for Joe Biden and his running mate, Kamala Harris, in 2020. Political candidates don’t pay endorsers, of course.

The value of celebrities to advertisers is reflected in sales: Some individuals, including Oprah, Jordan, George Clooney and Jennifer Aniston, can pitch for almost anything and make it sell. On the other hand, didn’t work for Nivea, which dropped her in 2012. Often, the relationship is symbiotic, with celebrities enhancing their reputations by associating themselves with popular brands.

However, selling things, inanimate material objects, is one thing; selling living sentient beings is another. Politics, like every other aspect of society, has been penetrated by celebrity: Votes are cast as much for people as what those people stand for. Ideals, values, policies and commitments will always feature in the mix when voters decide. As will relatability: Politicians strive to make voters think they share their concerns, identify with their problems and understand their feelings. When they can’t do it, they hope their endorsers can.

Convictions or self-aggrandizement?

Oprah was so influential she shooed off disbelief. Her blessing was strong enough to convince, even empower voters. But she was extraordinary. Other celebs elicit a note of cynical perspicacity. Voters suspect them more than respect them.

I have only inference and extrapolation to back up my claim. A recent , in which I was involved, centered on sports fans’ reactions to athletes, clubs, sponsors or entire sports leagues that push boundaries and make pronouncements on causes, such as war, racism and LGBTQ+ issues. A swath of fans detected their sermonizing was largely self-aggrandizement, as if saying, “We want you to take us seriously and accept that we truly believe in this cause [whatever it is].” If their gestures and pronouncements do little else, they prove athletes know how to read the room: They are aware of voguish attitudes and values and adapt themselves to suit them.

It may be fallacious to use the same logic for voters. Or it may be instructive. If the latter, celebrities see elections as pretexts for posturing and, ever-eager to provide an illusion of depth to further their ambitions, they offer their support. In this sense, presidential elections offer painless opportunities to burnish any celebs’ profundity. At least, if we follow the logic. Joe Biden’s alarming performance in front of 51 million American viewers recently may give prospective endorsers for thought. How much burnish is there in associating with a faltering politician?

What about Taylor?

The endorsements ringing for Biden sound like cracked bells: Barbra Streisand, Julia Roberts, George Clooney (since retracted, however) and others, including Robert De Niro, have all made their allegiances known before. Apart from the aforementioned Kid Rock, Donald Trump has only a handful of celebs, most of pensionable age, in his corner.

The unique figure in modern cultural history is, of course, Taylor Swift. She bridges many gaps, between pop and art, poignancy and jubilation, intensity and matter-of-factness. Is the gap between entertainment and politics one she aims to traverse? With followers on Instagram, she’s not hard to imagine running for the presidency herself. There’s even a about her political ambitions. In the meantime, no human being has more

influence. Her endorsement would match Oprah’s.

Some celebs have genuine convictions and nail their colors to the mast without considering whether publicizing their political preferences will affect their careers. Others are primarily concerned with boosting their reputations. I sense that voters think they are all in the latter camp. So, why are politicians so keen on having them in their corner?

Oprah and Taylor are sui generis: They are both unique, albeit in their different ways and capacities to galvanize voters. No one else presently comes close and, while this year’s presidential candidates clearly welcome support from any quarter, the support of celebs is probably worthless and, if the message of our skeptical sports fans is any gauge, counterproductive.

[Ellis Cashmore’s latest book is, 3rd edition.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post Do Celebrity Endorsements Help or Hurt Politicians? appeared first on 51�Թ�.

FO° Crucible: Money Matters in a Multipolar World, Part 8

Peter Isackson — Fri, 12 Jul 2024 13:36:07 +0000

There can be little doubt that everything that is happening at the intersection of financial matters and geopolitics has become marked by a growing trend towards ambiguity and instability. The events of this past June radically increased the degree of both ambiguity and instability especially for Europe, but also the rest of the world. The month ended with what is still an ongoing psychodrama in the United States, as the nation the degree of mental instability and political ambiguity of its serving president, Joe Biden, who is set to run for re-election in November. Will Biden step down? The pressure is mounting for him to pass the baton, but the Biden family, led by Dr Jill and Hunter, is valorously resisting.

Europe is in an even more dramatic bind than the US. The ambiguity surrounding Biden himself means that the likelihood of a new Trump White House has never been greater, despite Trump being a convicted felon thanks to the of a criminal court that same June. Europeans are dreading the unpredictable consequences of a new Trump administration.

Even without that factor of ambiguity, Europe is immersed in its own problems. The major event of the month was the initiation of what may turn into a new French Revolution. Reacting to the disastrous showing of his coalition in the European parliamentary elections on June 9, President Emmanuel Macron, as soon as the results were announced, precipitously hatched his daring, potentially suicidal gambit. He called for new to “clarify” the balance of political forces in France. Already struggling to deal with the expense, uncertainty and disappointing evolution of NATO’s tragic war in Ukraine, Europe was thrown into a state of suspended animation as it awaited the outcomes of the British and French elections. Those took place in the first week of July.

On June 13, four days after Macron’s act of folly, Alex Gloy offered this “quick observation” based on the state of the global bond markets. He sees the unmistakable seeds of a European banking crisis.

“These are current 10-year government bond yields (except TYX, which is the US 30-yr). The focus here is on the difference, or spread, in yield between Germany and France. A week ago, that spread was 0.50%. It is rapidly widening, now at 0.71%. This is worrying. Why? You can purchase government bonds in the same currency but get different yields. This does not make sense unless there is a difference in default probability and / or exit from the Euro. Both of which would be catastrophic events for Europe.

Germany has fiscal deficit of 2.5% of GDP, while France is running at 5.5%. Germany has a debt-to-GDP ratio of 63.6%, while France stands at 111%.

Financial markets hate uncertainty, and the outcome of French elections is unknown, with the risk being a populist right-wing government ignoring the fiscal constraints of the Treaty of Maastricht (max 3% deficit, max 60% debt-to-GDP, both which are already being ignored).

France’s fiscal position is now worse than Spain (3.6% deficit, 108% debt-to-GDP). France should tighten its belt, but that would probably cause more social unrest.

The spread-widening in the government bond market has led to pressure on European bank stocks; BNP fell from EUR 72 to 60 and Deutsche Bank from 16.70 to 14.60. Banks usually have positions in government bonds. Another banking crisis is the last thing Europe needs now.

Still, it is worth mentioning that all Euro-members, including Greece, are currently paying less than the UK or the US.”

Money Matters: Revealing Who Is Holding Billions of US Banknotes

Our colleague Edward Quince offered his own reflections, provoked by another destabilizing event in the month of June: the presence of a Russian nuclear off the coast of the US.

“A��,

Mr. Putin ain’t dumb. The alarming part of his seemingly nonsensical attitude toward the USD is his informed confidence about what is to come next. Note that he almost always refers to the USD in the past tense. I’ll detail the not-so-secret weapon he has up his sleeve after I finish documenting the events surrounding the Russian nuclear submarine docking in Havana, Cuba today. The short answer, however, is ‘BRICS Bridge, blockchain, and gold derivatives.’

When I researched the work done by Russia and China since 2008 to establish a new, more equitable, and less risky finance and trade environment, BRICS emerged as the ultimate cooperation framework and platform. After having read a ton, it is apparent that a tremendous amount of very focused and deliberate work has been done since then. This 2015 Ufa Declaration the goals, the underlying strategy and some tactics behind the major finance and trade initiatives. The key framework there is the Contingent Reserves Arrangement. Nine years and several global crises later, Mr. Putin has told us just a tiny bit about what has been built on that foundation.

On a separate note, I’ve just finished re-reading Henry Kissinger’s ‘.’ The intricate political play that Kissinger orchestrated in the 70s and the 80s now looks like an elaborate short-term trap for China in the American long-term game against Russia. I can only imagine the depth of resentment and distrust towards the US in Beijing these days. Alternatively, it is possible that there has never been any such trust, and China played the long game knowing that one day the USA would inevitably turn adversarial once again. Nevertheless, since there is nobody resembling Mr. Kissinger in Washington now, there seems to be no going back to the status quo to which we all grew so accustomed.”

With the drama continuing to develop, on June 29, I offered my own testimony. I am a voter in the coming French election, and potentially the US election in November.

“As a dual citizen of two nations, each with a president clearly demonstrating suicidal behavior, I have to wonder about the continued political coherence and even institutional solidity of both. Tomorrow I will be voting in an election that in all probability will establish the contour of what promises to be twelve months of political and I expect even deeper cultural chaos. On July 8 France will most likely have a ‘hung by the rafters’ parliament and a situation of maneuvering that will take place as much on the streets as in the Assemblée Nationale.

The point of a presidential as opposed to a parliamentary regime is that at the core of government there is a human being who symbolizes the unity of the nation. Political wrangling is a permanent feature of all democracies, but there is always some kind of symbol that makes even the worst confrontations palatable. In the UK, the Netherlands, Belgium and even Spain, the monarchy plays its role in stabilizing the question of national identity. In presidential regimes, it can only be the president and the flag.

On Sunday, June 9, Emmanuel Macron miscalculated when, by announcing the the Assemblée, he effectively declared two things:

That any pretense of political unity for the nation was compromised beyond negotiable repair;
That the president, as a lame duck because of serving his second term, had now become a non-entity, deprived of the quasi-absolute power De Gaulle had defined for the office.

Macron hoped to address the first point but he was in denial about the reality of the second one, despite its being obvious to everyone else, including his own inner circle.

For three quarters of a century Europe has developed as a zone of relative peace and prosperity in the shadow of the US nuclear umbrella and the US dollar, despite the launch of the Euro. In the context of the war in Ukraine, it has now implicitly embraced the growth of what Dwight Eisenhower – alone among all modern presidents – had the temerity to : the military-industrial complex.

Europeans have long worried about the role of what President Giscard d’Estaing called the “exorbitant privilege” but accepted the floating dollar as a feature of the new world order. De Gaulle led the campaign against the dollar that eventually led to Nixon’s of the dollar and gold, creating a new global landscape supported by the petrodollar and the Eurodollar. De Gaulle also dared to counter the US by withdrawing from NATO’s central command structure, with the futile aim of achieving military autonomy.

Europe is still struggling mightily with these two issues. It will be interesting to see how this year’s elections influence those developments.”

Previous episodes of Money Matters are available here:

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We invite all of you who have something to contribute to send us your reflections at dialogue@fairobserver.com. We will integrate your insights into the ongoing debate. We will publish them as articles or as part of the ongoing dialogue.

[ edited this piece.]

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The Triumph of Negative Democracy, AKA Electoral Nihilism

Peter Isackson — Wed, 10 Jul 2024 14:08:28 +0000

The electorates’ responses to the initiatives of the British prime minister and the French president have been severe. They demonstrate the principle of that appears to be the dominant new trend in the West.

Rishi Sunak, the UK’s most recent Tory Prime Minister, understood that his party’s hold on power was weakening. So he thought he could catch his opponents off guard, forcing the electorate to cling to the idea of continuity in times of uncertainty. He provoked an unprecedented bloodbath that left the Tories with an abject minority in Parliament, and Labour with a crushing : 412 to 121!

Similarly, French President Emmanuel Macron had a panicked reaction to being handily distanced by Marine Le Pen’s far right National Rally in June’s European parliamentary elections. He called a snap election to take place exactly three weeks later, for the stated sake of “clarification.” The first round of that election confirmed the electorate’s massive rejection of Macron’s policies and even of the man himself.

The first round also allowed the electorate to “proclaim” its for the xenophobic right over “Macronisme.” The second round permitted voters to the left, leaving Macron stranded in a no man’s land: an undefined, powerless middle. Even though he has three years left to preside over the nation, Macron has become the lamest of lame ducks.

But the most obvious example of the negative democracy trend would be the last two United States presidential elections, along with the upcoming one. In 2016, pollsters revealed that both Hillary Clinton, who was nevertheless expected to win, and Donald Trump, the ultimate outsider, held the titles of the two most presidential candidates ever to face off in the modern era.

The 2020 election pitted the consistently unpopular Trump against an aging Democratic workhorse, Joe Biden, who was clearly past his prime. “Sleepy Joe” won the primaries not because he inspired voters, but because the party’s establishment, working in the background, pushed him through. Above all, they wished to nominating the much more popular Democrat: Bernie Sanders. In Negative Democracy, popular candidates are viewed as potential threats to their parties.

Biden was never popular but he had two redeeming factors: his association with former US President Barack Obama and his appearance as a politician who could conduct “business as usual.” He contrasted with the mercurial, unpredictable Trump. Was he villainous? No one was sure. But a majority of voters saw him as the lesser of two evils.

2024 offers a rematch between the already rejected Trump and — as polls seem to indicate — the soon-to-be rejected Biden. Both are now widely perceived as lacking any realistic awareness of the nation’s needs and an ability to address them; Trump because of his personality, Biden because of his age.

In short, the way politicians win elections today is not to prove that they deserve to govern. Rather, they persuade the public that their opponent deserves to be punished for their sins or obvious failings.

Analyzing the rather surprising landslide defeat of Britain’s Conservative Party after 14 years of continuous rule, The Guardian’s columnist Rafael Baer the result as the “imperative to punish the Tories for years of political malpractice.” He claims it “was palpable on the campaign trail in a way that exultant Starmer fandom was not.”

�մǻ岹��’s Weekly Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Imperative to punish:

A moral sentiment caused by the buildup of a population’s frustration with two things: its powerlessness to influence events and its growing understanding that every government it elects is destined to produce consistently disappointing results.

Contextual note

In theory, democracies hold elections to enable the most creative and constructive elements of the population to make up the governing structures that will ensure collective security and foster conditions of prosperity and well-being. The ideal, in most democracies, has been historically betrayed by the empowerment of parties and their associated factions that have eclipsed “the people” as sources of decision-making. Parties foster the creation of a protected political class whose interests become distinct from the population’s. The existence of a political class fosters the emergence of a courtier class, the myriad lobbyists who enforce the role of private interests over public welfare.

Elections have become the measure of two complementary forms of powerlessness. Democracy itself, as a method of governing designed to convey the “will of the people,” has lost any power it once had. This is compounded by the fact that the ruling elites appear powerless to do anything that doesn’t simply aggravate the existing instability of institutions and, of course, the economy.

Elections, instead of embodying the aspirations of the population, have thus become little more than tools of punishment. That may well be necessary when entire populations judge that their way of life is consistently going downhill and that their social, political and economic culture is becoming seriously degraded. That instinct for punishment could even be salutary, if punishment could be managed with a view to improvement rather than simple rejection.

Historical note

In a famous 1960 for The Atlantic titled, “The Imperative to Punish,” David Bazelon introduced the concept of restorative justice as an alternative to traditional punitive measures. Restorative justice focuses on repairing the harm caused by crime and involving all stakeholders — victims, offenders and the community — in the process of justice. In the context of the 1960s, a period of creative reform symbolized by the civil rights , the on Poverty and US President Lyndon B Johnson’s “,” the idea of restorative justice as an alternative to punishment made sense. But history moved in a different direction.

Concurrently with the reforms, Johnson prosecuted a in Southeast Asia designed to punish Vietnamese nationalists who might be tempted by socialism or communism as an alternative to the US model of god-fearing capitalism. If foreign policy could be based on punishment, why shouldn’t domestic policy follow the same logic? President Nixon and later Reagan pursued that notion. The taste to punish became the driving force in policy-making, foreign or domestic.

This worked out well for the evolving contours of US political parties. Democrats could seek to punish Republicans for being racist and Republicans could insist on punishing Democrats for “over-regulating” and thereby robbing them of their basic freedoms. Namely, the freedom to use any business practices that weren’t outright assassination or theft to get things done. Polluting the environment, for example, should be allowed when required for commercial success. Those who seek to regulate should be punished.

Starting with the premise of civil rights, Democrats began evolving the rules that ended up defining the “identity culture” that established the practices of “cancel culture.” This became an informal system of social punishment that could include getting people fired from their jobs or simply being inundated with death threats on social media.

No one should be surprised that the “satisfaction” of punishing those you disagree with has taken center stage in the psychology of politics in our modern democracies. The “imperative to punish” cited in Baer’s description of the Tory defeat reminds us of the Kantian concept of the “.” Kant’s ethics that define moral principles as categorical — meaning they admit of no exceptions and leave no room to discuss, examine, negotiate, debate and seek “restorative” solutions — has come to dominate Western thinking, especially in the domain of politics. The case can be made that it has perverted the concept and practice of democracy.

We continue to see its nefarious effects in the field of foreign policy. The now well-documented adamant refusal of Biden’s State Department to consider, let alone engage in, negotiations in any of its provoked wars provides perfect examples of the categorical imperative’s misapplication. The cost so far can be measured in hundreds of thousands of lives in and . But it could reach the hundreds of millions as we move closer to creating the conditions in which a spark can ignite conflagration. Armageddon would be the final application of our most cherished “categorical imperative.”

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post The Triumph of Negative Democracy, AKA Electoral Nihilism appeared first on 51�Թ�.

Has Joe Biden Chopped Down the Cherry Tree?

Peter Isackson — Wed, 03 Jul 2024 11:32:39 +0000

When I was a child in elementary school, during one of our rare, random forays into history, we learned an amusing story about our first president. One day during his youth, George Washington ventured out into the family’s orchard, hatchet in hand, and chopped down his father’s favorite cherry tree. Not many of us at Castle Heights Elementary School in Los Angeles, California had cherry trees. The idea that Washington’s father might not only have a cherry orchard but also a favorite tree seemed absurd to me. But the whole point of teaching history in early school years is to prepare children to accept a world in which what adults think and do is often absurd.

For us, young George did something none of us would have dared to do: engage in an act of unprovoked aggression against our father. In such cases, we would expect some grave punishment. Instead, when his father managed to assess the damage, he summoned his son and asked, “Who did this?” George famously replied: “I cannot tell a lie.”

I had to wait until adulthood to learn the story was apocryphal, by a certain Pastor Mason Locke Weems not long after Washington’s death. A century and a half later, our teacher made sure we all understand that great presidents don’t lie and neither should we. The other lesson only became clear to me much later: that fiction presented as history would be a permanent feature of our way of life.

I can only speculate that current US President Joe Biden may have had a similar experience at school and that he too learned the legend was invented, according to, because “Weems was motivated by profit, and knew readers would be curious about Washington’s private virtues, including his relationship with his father.” The story seems to have left a trace in Biden’s memory. Following the debacle of last week’s debate against former President Donald Trump, a confirmed liar, Biden humbly defended himself with the following:

“Folks, I don’t walk as easy as I used to. I don’t speak as smoothly as I used to. I don’t debate as well as I used to. But I know what I do know: I know how to tell the truth.”

�մǻ岹��’s Weekly Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Tell the truth:

In the great American tradition as practiced by preachers and presidents, the act of explaining things in a way that sounds so inspiring the public is likely to believe they are factual, even if they are not.

Contextual note

What Biden really meant was that the number of lies he tells cannot compare to Trump’s, who has made outrageous lying part of his brand. By contrast, Biden has cultivated the science of telling lies that appear on the surface to be true, despite scores of documented cases of Biden flagrantly bending the truth. That includes a British politician’s biographical narrative in 1988. More recently, who can forget the 40 he claimed to have seen proof of following the Hamas revolt on October 7, 2023?

The Democratic Party is in a dither about retaining a faltering Biden as their presidential candidate. But it’s not just the party stressing. The Biden family itself appears divided, as The New York Times. “One of the strongest voices imploring Mr. Biden to resist pressure to drop out was his son Hunter Biden, whom the president has long leaned on for advice.”

Hunter Biden is the author of a book titled, Beautiful Things. It recounts, apparently truthfully and sincerely, the endless series of wrong decisions he tends to make. Why would someone as honest and truthful as Joe look to Hunter for advice? As CNN, Beautiful Things is full of “ugly truths.” An obsession with truth seems to run in the family. George Washington himself would be proud.

When Pontius Pilate responded to his prisoner’s claim to “bear witness unto the truth” (), he asked Jesus the most basic epistemological question: “What is truth?” While Biden himself believes that he knows “how to tell the truth,” he hasn’t revealed with any clarity how he accesses it. George W Bush once to get it directly from God the Father, like Jesus himself. The Biden administration appears obsessed with accusing anyone who publicly challenges official doctrine on foreign policy or Covid mandates of spreading “disinformation.” We must therefore assume that Biden has sources of truth not available to the rest of us. At least we now know that Hunter is one of them.

Historical note

By the time I was old enough to determine that Weems’s story of the cherry tree was creative fiction, I had already read most of the works of psychologist Sigmund Freud. Thinking back to my early intuition that the tale might have been too absurd to be true, it occurred to me that the tale may conceive a deeper lesson than simply to follow Washington’s example and avoid telling lies.

It occurred to me that Weems may have eerily anticipated the insights of the founder of psychoanalysis. Perhaps in the depths of his unconscious, and therefore unbeknownst to himself, the pastor was articulating an authentically “true” interpretation of the significance of the legend he himself created. After exploring that intuition, this is what I discovered.

The father’s “favorite cherry tree” is not just a tree but a stand-in for George’s father’s phallus. The future president, even at the age of six, unconsciously assaulted his father’s genitals, the source of his own creation. Chopping down the cherry tree correlates perfectly with the Freudian of the male child’s wish to castrate his father.

But Weems’s account doesn’t actually use the verb, “to chop.” to Weems, young George “unluckily tried the edge of his hatchet on the body of a beautiful young English cherry-tree, which he barked so terribly, that I don’t believe the tree ever got the better of it.” For Weems, George effectively rendered the tree incapable of producing fruit, which is the whole point of castration.

But our symbolic reading becomes more complex. He “tried the edge of his hatchet on the body of a beautiful” object suggests that the tree, which for one moment is the father’s phallus, is also the “body” that the father uses to bear fruit — in other words, his wife, George’s mother. What Weems describes is the boy’s attempt to commit Oedipal incest with his mother. The fact that it was specifically a cherry tree adds more credibility to this interpretation.

Weems reports that George was six years old at the time of the castration. Freud claims that age marks the culmination of the of development, which lasts from the ages of three to six. The oral and anal stage precede the phallic stage, which is followed by latency, in which sexual feelings are repressed.

To my knowledge, Freud never tried to analyze this legend. I believe the good doctor, had he been aware of it, would find it as intriguing as the plot of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, which Freud analyzed similarly. And just as Hamlet is a story with both a political and psychoanalytical dimension, the cherry tree story fits perfectly with Washington’s future political vocation.

George’s symbolic aggression against his father’s phallus perfectly prefigures his successful military campaign against a father-figure, the English king, whose name also happens to be George: George III. The symbolism is complete.

Freud was right when he said “a cigar is sometimes a cigar,” which can also be taken to mean that a cherry tree is sometimes the father’s phallus. Washington’s historical vocation consisted of unseating and replacing the symbolic father, the king of England. And of course, all Americans remember Washington as “the father of his country.”

Joe Biden undoubtedly thinks of himself as something more than just the father of Hunter Biden, even if he puts all his trust in his son’s wisdom. Just as his son put all his trust in his father’s name (and title as vice president) to get his cushy on the board of Burisma Holdings’s directors in Ukraine.

Some people will claim that everything above is disinformation. But I think not only Freud, but even Pontius Pilate might have accepted this as truth.

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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Outside the Box: The New York Times Dismisses a President

Peter Isackson — Mon, 01 Jul 2024 13:08:26 +0000

Last week, Joe Biden, by being true to himself, finally convinced the pillars of the Democratic party that their champion was no longer capable of defending their colors. Among those taken by surprise was the Gray Lady, The New York Times (NYT). I immediately shared my impressions with ChatGPT.

“The New York Times editorial board has lost confidence in the candidacy of incumbent President Joe Biden. It insisted that he abandon the race in favor of a candidate with a better chance of beating Donald Trump in November. It this particular point of concern with regard to Trump: ‘If he is returned to office, he has vowed to be a different kind of president, unrestrained by the checks on power built into the American political system.’”

This is undoubtedly true, but how can NYT’s editorial board not have noticed that all recent presidents, and especially Biden, have acted in a manner “unrestrained” by America’s traditional checks and balances? Biden is the latest in a series of presidents who have involved the US deeply in expensive wars without respecting the provision in the (Article One, Section Eight) that empowers Congress — not the executive — to declare war.

The issue is even more complex than the declaration of war. It should also call into question the right of the executive to control with total opacity a covert army, which is what the CIA became shortly after its creation. Shouldn’t anyone truly interested in the respect of democracy’s checks and balances also be concerned about that historically significant erosion of checks that Biden is currently exploiting, in defiance of public opinion itself?”

I expected this complex question to provoke a lengthy, carefully reasoned response. I wasn’t disappointed. ChatGPT acknowledges a trend that has not only reduced the authority of the Constitution and undermined democracy itself, but also significantly weakened the standing of the US, long considered the “leader of the free world.” Here it is in full:

“The New York Times editorial board’s concern about Donald Trump’s potential return to the presidency reflects a broader anxiety about the erosion of checks and balances in American governance. However, as you’ve pointed out, this erosion is not unique to Trump. In fact, recent presidencies, including Joe Biden’s, have also displayed tendencies to bypass or stretch traditional checks and balances, particularly in the realm of foreign policy and military engagement.

The Broader Erosion of Checks and Balances:

1. **Presidential War Powers:**

**Article One, Section Eight** of the U.S. Constitution explicitly grants Congress the power to declare war. However, since World War II, presidents from both parties have increasingly engaged in military actions without formal declarations of war by Congress.
**Biden’s Military Actions**: President Biden’s decision to continue supporting Ukraine amidst the Russian invasion and engaging in conflicts in the Middle East, largely without formal Congressional approval, exemplifies this trend. The U.S. involvement in these areas is often justified under broad and somewhat vague authorizations like the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) passed after 9/11, which many argue have been used beyond their intended scope.

2. **Expansion of Executive Power:**

**Historical Context**: The trend toward greater executive authority isn’t new. It has been escalating over decades with presidents using executive orders, military interventions, and intelligence operations to expand their power.
**CIA and Covert Actions**: The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has often been used for covert operations without direct Congressional oversight or public transparency, contributing to the executive branch’s unchecked power. This practice dates back to the Cold War and has continued through various administrations.

3. **Legislative and Judicial Responses:**

**Congressional Abdication**: Congress has often ceded its war-declaring powers to the executive branch, either through broad authorizations or by failing to assert its constitutional role effectively.
**Judicial Review**: Courts have occasionally challenged executive overreach, but often deference to the executive in matters of national security limits the judiciary’s ability to enforce checks on presidential power.

The Specific Case of Biden:

**Ukraine and Middle East**: Biden’s administration has committed significant military and financial resources to Ukraine without explicit Congressional approval, relying instead on previous authorizations and budgetary allocations. Similarly, Biden’s handling of the ongoing conflicts in the Middle East demonstrates the executive’s continued latitude in military affairs.
**Public Opinion**: Polls and public sentiment have shown mixed reactions to these engagements. Some Americans support these actions as necessary for global stability and U.S. interests, while others view them as overreach and prefer a more restrained foreign policy.

Addressing the Editorial Board’s Perspective:

The New York Times editorial board’s criticism of Trump for his potential future unrestrained actions is valid, especially considering Trump’s previous disregard for institutional norms. However, their argument could be seen as somewhat narrow if it does not also address the broader trend of executive overreach that spans multiple administrations.

Key Points of Reflection:

**Consistency in Critique**: Any discussion about checks and balances should consistently address the actions of all recent presidents, including Biden. Highlighting Trump’s potential threats without acknowledging Biden’s and previous presidents’ actions could seem partisan or selective.
**Long-term Trends**: The erosion of checks and balances is a systemic issue that requires attention beyond the tenure of any single president. The editorial should consider the historical context and the cumulative impact of these actions.
**Policy and Public Debate**: The question of executive power and its limits should be a central topic in public and political discourse. Encouraging a bipartisan and comprehensive debate on the appropriate scope of presidential authority could foster more effective checks and balances.

Conclusion:

The New York Times editorial board raises important concerns about the potential dangers of a Trump presidency. However, a nuanced and comprehensive analysis would also acknowledge that the problem of executive overreach is not confined to Trump alone but is a broader issue affecting the integrity of the American political system. To truly uphold the system of checks and balances, it’s crucial to scrutinize and address the actions of all presidents who have expanded executive power at the expense of Congressional authority.”

The NYT has never shown a serious interest in these fundamental questions concerning the integrity of democratic institutions. It prefers focusing on the one issue that all proponents of establishment culture agree on: Trump’s obvious failings and his exaggerated propensity for telling untruths. One of those failings, in the eyes of the editorial board, has been his reluctance to intervene in wars abroad. The NYT typically supports any military initiative made by the Democratic presidents it systematically endorses. But it signs onto wars launched by non-Trump Republicans with equal enthusiasm.

The Gray Lady did more than any other US media to justify George W Bush’s invasion of Iraq in 2003. It did so by publishing every carefully fabricated CIA lie “fit to print.” We might also ourselves that a certain Joe Biden, as the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee at the time, “played a critical role in ensuring America’s involvement in the most disastrous foreign policy venture of the 21st century.” In other words, the NYT and Biden have typically been on the same side of the issues. That is why it is truly embarrassing for Biden to lose the support of the NYT five months before his planned re-election.

Joe Biden’s commitment to belligerence in both Ukraine and the Middle East have caused a serious deterioration of US prestige across the globe. His visible cognitive decline that was on display in last week’s debate provides the clearest illustration of the decay. And not just of the man’s cognitive faculties or even of the office of the presidency, but of something much more historically significant: the accelerating collapse of both US hard and soft power.

The unprecedented success of US soft power in the aftermath of World War II drew its energy from the image projected by its dynamic democratic institutions and its economic might. Those institutions were led and symbolized by presidents who projected — though sometimes deceptively — a sense of moral power. Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Carter and Reagan, even when they made mistakes, seemed to embody values that earned the world’s respect. Even Nixon left an impression of strength. The two presidents on stage last Thursday encapsulate what the world now sees as the inexorable decline into irrelevance of US soft power.

Even the NYT seems finally to be aware of the symptoms, if not the reality of that decline. In contrast, ChatGPT appears capable of discerning the historical and institutional paradoxes the NYT prefers to ignore.

Your thoughts

[ edited this piece.]

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The Truth About Why RFK Jr. Will Not Be Debating Tonight

Scott Bennett — Thu, 27 Jun 2024 11:42:01 +0000

US President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump excluded Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (RFK Jr.) from today’s televised presidential debate. That is, I believe, the most logical explanation for why RFK Jr. won’t be appearing on stage with the major party candidates this Thursday.

Last Thursday was the final deadline to meet broadcaster CNN’s requirements. Kennedy came up short. The barriers to inclusion were borrowed from the now-defunct Commission on Presidential Debates (that organization itself has always had a crippling two-party bias because it has always been stacked entirely with powerful political figures exclusively from the two major parties). Kennedy in a statement, “My exclusion by Presidents Biden and Trump from the debate is undemocratic, un-American, and cowardly. Americans want an independent leader who will break apart the two-party duopoly.” He is right.

CNN’s debate qualifications are designed to exclude third-party alternatives

The debate were as follows:

The candidate must be 35 years old and a native-born US citizen (they got those from the constitution, naturally).
The candidate must have polling data that shows 15% support in at least 4 separate surveys from “respected” pollsters.
The candidate must be on enough state ballots to win 270 electoral votes.

No one has any objection to the constitutional criteria, of course. However, these other barriers were dreamt up to exclude RFK Jr. and he is right to object to this unfair treatment.

RFK Jr. needed to surpass CNN’s arbitrary 15 percent threshold in at least four national polls. He got . So close! Busted on a technicality. Never mind that Kennedy is polling higher than any third-party candidate since Ross Perot in the early 1990s. That Kennedy could come so close to this arbitrary goal and be excluded is clear proof of bias against him.

But what about the Electoral College? Doesn’t it make sense to exclude any candidate who is unable to clear 270 Electoral Votes? Not in June! There are still months to go before the final ballot deadlines in sooo many states.

Right now, Kennedy is on the ballot in only 10 states, but if you visit his , you can see how much time and how many signatures are needed in every state. Arizona, 42,303 by August 17. Virginia, 5,000 signatures by August 23. Wisconsin requires only 2,000 signatures and the window to submit won’t even open until July 1. Do you want 30 more examples of why this metric is unfair? Go ahead and visit Kennedy’s website.

Kennedy’s team has delayed submitting signatures as part of an intentional strategy because the major parties are actively trying to prevent him from winning ballot access in all 50 states. Not only are the major parties throwing up roadblocks at a state level using lawsuits and other pressure to keep Kennedy off the ballot, Biden has gone so far as to a Super PAC called Clear Choice, entirely financed by the rich, to keep third-party challengers away from doddering old Grandpa Joe. This is all part of a coordinated strategy coming from both major parties to keep third-party threats out of the discussion.

Now, if we were being objective about who’s on the ballot in enough states to win, RFK Jr. is not the only one. Neither major party has held their conventions yet… therefore, neither candidate has been officially selected as their party’s standard bearer, therefore neither should currently be on enough ballots to win. I mean, if we’re going on technicalities like that, it works both ways.

The system is this way because it serves the two major parties

Here’s the truth that somehow our mainstream political press is neglecting to mention as they blindly go along with excluding RFK Jr. from the debates without objection: Allowing Robert Kennedy to participate in the debates confers legitimacy on his candidacy and makes him an even bigger threat to the major parties.

On June 15, CNN some of the debate rules that Biden and Trump agreed upon. They agreed on two commercial breaks, they agreed on podiums, they agreed to mute one another’s microphones while the other was speaking.

They also agreed, perhaps without even a wink or a nudge, that bringing Kennedy on stage was a deal breaker.

When it comes to having a third-party challenger in the race for president, allowing Kennedy on stage at the debate is about the only thing Trump or Biden can control. It’s simple: Refuse to participate if he is there. And I’m quite certain they both did. He is a threat to both of their chances.

RFK Jr. is right there at the cutoff line, so he’s not allowed to debate. And CNN takes the heat for the blatant, arbitrary metrics being used against him. But make no mistake. It is, in fact, Biden and Trump coordinating to exclude him.

Here we have an election with two of the most hated politicians on earth. Here we have a two-party duopoly continually reinforcing the message that a vote for anyone but either of them is “throwing your vote away.” Another way of saying that is: If you don’t vote for a Democrat or Republican, your votes will never count. And the one person in the world who may have a chance to upset that balance is excluded.

This is not democracy. Like it or not, RFK Jr. is a contender. Hailing from the highest social circles in American history. Nephew of an Arthur reborn in our own American version of Camelot. Son of another slain prince. Blessed by almighty what-have-you to spend summers summering at Hyannis Port.

But mainstream media somehow sees no romance in this story. The prince who was promised. John F-ing Snow. Emerging at the moment when the American public is being asked to choose between two candidates almost no one seems to want.

Boring! The mainstream press never talks about Kennedy like that. (Just notice: If our major media wasn’t completely in the tank for the establishment, they would never tire of such a story. More proof that the American propaganda system only allows you to see what it wants you to see.)

All that said, RFK Jr. is not even my preferred choice. Dr. Cornel West, Claudia De la Cruz and Jill Stein are all superior in my view. They get the class war. They are against the genocide in Gaza. RFK can only ever be an elite. (Psst, Bobby, you are running to represent us — so represent us!)

And yet, RFK Jr. is not Trump and he is not Biden… which, come November 5, is probably enough to get my vote. It might be enough to get yours as well. And that, brothers and sisters, is why RFK Jr. won’t be at the presidential debate tonight.

[ first published this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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Hunter Biden’s Past Makes Him Look Stupid, but Not Unusual

Andrew Morrow — Wed, 05 Jun 2024 13:39:05 +0000

Hunter Biden, the not-so-prodigal son of US President Joe Biden, is currently facing criminal charges for illegal handgun possession in Delaware. Prosecutors allege that he failed to disclose his drug addictions when applying for a license.This is just the latest episode for the scandal-prone scion of the Biden family. As always, pundits and clickbait writers love extreme accusations. Commentators on my side of the aisle have called Hunter everything from a to a . They like to cast him as a larger-than-life Machiavellian evildoer.

I’m unconvinced that he fits the profile. Here’s why. Joe’s favorite son was , who died at the age of 46. Hunter is the classic wayward second son, the playboy prince, whose education was neglected for another. Joe’s favor fell to the darling elder son, whom he believed was destined for greatness. When that golden boy was tragically laid low before his time, the second son, who was never meant for much, had to fill his massive shoes. In a good fairy tale, the younger son rises to the occasion. Hunter, however, has failed to live up to Beau’s intended legacy.

Make no mistake, Hunter is no saint. Hunter’s sexual dalliances are legendary. He raised money for his own ends using an art . He had an with his brother’s widow and fathered a child with a stripper — something that Joe for years. Hunter is not a good person. But these misdeeds do not make him a supervillain; just an indolent, degenerate rake like any other.

Hunter attracts legal issues like rotten meat attracts flies, but to me, those only prove that he’s guilty of the same corruption that is endemic in our leadership caste. Still, to stay abreast of the headlines, you should understand some of the notable cases.

Hunter’s suspicious business with foreign organizations

Like any apparatchik, Hunter has served on the boards of numerous profitable companies and influential organizations. The two most famous are , a Chinese private equity firm that Hunter co-founded in 2013, and , a Ukrainian energy company that Hunter administered from 2014 to 2019. BHR has fingers in all sorts of troubling operations, from heavy that devastates Australia’s environment to continually the US automotive industry.

If you find it interesting that the son of the current president, who was then the son of a former vice president, had transnational business interests in these two dubious organizations… Well, if you know what’s good for your professional reputation, you should probably stop finding it interesting.

But if you’re willing to risk looking further into it, you might wonder: What did Hunter bring to these board memberships? His academic are a Bachelor of Arts degree in History from Georgetown University, a law degree from Yale University and a of “consulting” and “lobbying” at various banks and government-adjacent think tanks. Clearly, he did not provide BHR or Burisma with intricate knowledge of coal drilling or assembly line operation. No; Hunter brought his particular skill of “access” to the table. What is access? His dad, that’s what.

The House Committee on Oversight and Accountability has that Joe interacted with almost every foreign business partner Hunter collaborated with. To quote the report: “President Biden spoke by phone, attended dinners and meetings, and had coffee with his son’s foreign business associates. These individuals include Russian and Kazakhstani oligarchs, a Burisma executive, and Chinese nationals who collectively funneled millions to his son.” It’s shocking how, , claims of corruption are “unsubstantiated.” With evidence like this, what more could you possibly need?

The dystopian response to Hunter’s laptop story

You may recall a tiny, little from 2020 about Hunter’s laptop. In October 2020, Hunter left his laptop at a repair shop and never retrieved it. One can only guess if such shoddy operational security is standard practice in the ruling class, or if this was a special case. Since he failed to reclaim his property, the shop’s , John Paul Mac Isaac, had a right to do as he pleased with it. So he did what any American would: He made money off it. After contacting the FBI, he copied the hard drive and attempted to share the disturbing information found within.

As is usually the case, the scandal here isn’t so much the event itself, but the reaction to it. When The New York Post ran an detailing what the laptop appeared to reveal of shady dealings with Burisma, drug use and sexual escapades, the intelligentsia’s response was swift and terrible. A collection of esteemed intelligence operatives said outright that the laptop was fake, Russian . Every social media platform agreed to censor and the story.

The regime surely believed the laptop story to be massively damaging. And they would have been right, had the story been allowed to circulate. Everyone involved knew that the laptop was from the beginning. Hunter recently to sue Fox News over a miniseries involving the laptop story; quite interesting, since one of the elements of defamation is that things said about a person must be false to be defamatory, and it’s now very clear the laptop story was all true from the beginning.

One might conclude that, based on the intensity of the response, the worst may be true. But, so what? That was four years ago. It’s ancient history now — might as well be about the Pharaohs as far as our news cycle and political system are concerned. Who cares that the entire government works together to pressure social media companies into suppressing its unflattering truths? And that these moguls fall in line with little persuasion? Certainly not me. I love the overlords who filter our information for their own ends.

Still, someone who doesn’t love them might ask: What else could get this treatment? What other signals could get the reverse and be boosted for no reason beyond political power?

Hunter’s tax and gun charges

The final legal issue to discuss is the ongoing tax and gun that have been plaguing Hunter on and off since 2018. The thing about being a rich idiot is that you waste your money on stupid things while keeping poor track of your spending. Doing this while obtaining your funds from vague sources will inevitably draw the government’s attention, even when Daddy Joe is nominally in charge. If you hide your taxes, the IRS will consign you and your whole family to a pauper’s grave. Last April, Hunter was with a few tax-related charges: two misdemeanor counts for failure to file his taxes and one felony count of tax evasion.

Hunter has also caught a gun charge for a firearm when he was blitzed on cocaine. To buy a gun in the US, one must fill out a federal background check, and the forms require an attestation that the customer is clean of substances. So, sweeping that intoxication under the rug is a federal .

Hunter is currently facing trial before a federal court in Wilmington, Delaware. I doubt we will see a conviction come out of it, though. As always, some slippery trick will bail him out. We’ll soon see if I’m right.

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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Bibi’s Problem Is Now Biden’s Problem

Peter Isackson — Wed, 29 May 2024 13:07:54 +0000

In a highly instructive article teasing out the multiple threads of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s current political quandary, former diplomat and 51�Թ� board member Gary Grappo describes the growing pressure that directly threatens Bibi’s hold on power. Not only are members of his own team on the cusp of revolt, but even the faltering senior citizen now occupying the White House, known for his patient indulgence in the face of Israel’s most egregious excesses, now appears to be chafing at the bit over Bibi’s failure to reign in his ministers’ enthusiasm for genocidal acts carried out in the name of self-defense.

US President Joe Biden has never ceased aligning the adjectives that proclaim his nation’s unwavering, unbreakable, unreserved, iron-clad support for Israel. Earlier this month, however, he wavered ever so slightly — and only briefly —�� when he chose to his regular delivery of the 2,000-pound bombs Israel needs in its quest to establish Greater Israel as a unified ethno-supremacist Jewish state.

In the meantime, the International Criminal Court prosecutor has requested an arrest warrant for Netanyahu as a war criminal. The International Court of Justice followed suit days later when it Israel to halt its military operations on the town of Rafah which the IDF had previously designated as the last safe zone from Israeli bombing.

Grappo reveals the prevailing change of tone in Washington today. “Biden is fed up with Bibi’s resistance to addressing the Gaza humanitarian crisis satisfactorily (though matters have improved since early April), with his insistence on an all-out assault on Rafah, where refugees are still holed up, and with his refusal to articulate an effective plan for governance and security in Gaza after the war.”

�մǻ岹��’s Weekly Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Satisfactorily:

To an extent that pleases someone in a position in power, who imposes standards of levels of acceptability even on concepts such as genocide.

Contextual note

The parenthetical remark “though matters have improved since early April” helps us to understand what the adverb “satisfactorily” means in this context. The usual version of political ethics in Washington appeals to a binary distinction between what is lawful or unlawful, good or evil. The qualifier “satisfactory” suggest the possibility of a gradation of nuance added to the usual Manichean moral framework. There may be a “more satisfactory” way of committing genocide.

This method of introducing a third term to soften the sharp edge of binary logic is not new. When I was in school in California in the 1960s, our teachers applied a ternary system to assess our behavior and work habits. The three terms were: E (Excellent), S (Satisfactory) and U (Unsatisfactory). Students capable of a minimum of self-control, some luck in having a captivating teacher worth listening to and a modicum of carefully managed flattery could earn an “E.” It wasn’t essential to strive for it, but it felt good when you got it. Most of us were reasonably happy with an S since either an E or an S put you on the right side of the law, shielding you from opprobrium. U alone branded you as a misfit.

Israel’s behavior before April was so bad that most reasonable people other than fanatical Zionists would have given it a U. As a nation, it had clearly become a misfit. The world’s international courts, NGOs specialized in human rights and quite a lot of neutral observers concurred. The UN’s International Court of Justice solemnly declared genocide a “plausible” description of Israel’s conduct of the war, another way of saying it was “unsatisfactory.”

Grappo’s term “satisfactorily” correctly helps us to understand the moral system shared by a tiny group of people in an enclave called “the ,” known for its flexible ethics The starting point for Beltway reasoning is, of course, the distinction between good and evil. Things that favor peace, stability and US economic interests are good. Things that tend towards conflict, instability or that challenge the US idea of “freedom” are evil. When Russia unlawfully invaded Ukraine it immediately proved itself guilty of irrevocably unsatisfactory behavior. No need to explore why Putin may have had such an outlandish idea.

Manichean systems make life and moral judgment easy. Especially if you tend to think of everyone as a potential enemy. France, for example, earned a U in 2003 when it refused to join the Bush administration’s ethically motivated invasion of Iraq. A traditional, nearly “iron-clad” ally instantly became an adversary through its display of “unsatisfactory” behavior. That’s when French fries, in the White House cantine, were canceled and rebranded “freedom fries.”

For some reason, Washington’s relationship with Israel belongs to another ethical dimension. If friends like France can instantly become adversaries, there is also at least one friend that can never become an adversary, however outrageous its behavior. “,” by the way, is the adjective Joe Biden chose to qualify the International Criminal Court’s decision to call Bibi’s behavior unsatisfactory!

Historical note

The current conflicts that dominate the headlines, despite the horrors they have produced, have the merit of raising the public’s awareness of an interesting historical trend. In our current conception of democracy, we have traditionally assumed that, because elected officials are deemed to be “representative,” the policies enacted by our governments correlate with the popular will. Most people aligned with the idea that the government was doing its best to respond to the wants and needs of its people. That belief has radically eroded in recent years.

�մǻ岹��’s pro-Palestinian protest movements on college campuses in the US are one obvious indication of that disconnect. But that is an isolated issue that reveals a lot but remains exceptional. At a deeper level, thanks to a 2014 of how democratic politics works in the US, we can understand that US democracy has, in its depth, become a de facto oligarchy. The study demonstrated that the policies legislated, enacted and enforced by elected officials in their grand majority reflect the wishes of a wealthy, corporate elite, often in direct opposition to what used to be called “the will of the people.”

Back in 2014, the publication of the study had little impact. Mainstream media paid no attention to it. In times of peace, people tend to prefer to ignore the kind of bad news that requires reflection and the effort of remedying “unsatisfactory” behavior. In times of conflict, however, especially when serious moral questions are raised, the public’s awareness of what’s going on in the depths grows and can even become acute.

Everything that is happening in the world points in the direction of rethinking old relationships. It also implies calling into question the supposed majoritarian orientation of democratic societies. Fragmentation has become the new norm. This year’s presidential election in the US may end up electing Biden the Democrat or Trump the Republican, but the presence and attraction of third parties will have a major effect on the result. And neither Biden nor Trump truly represents a unified party that can pretend to represent a majority of the American people. Both major parties are irrevocably fractured. Traditionally, either a strong leader or a strong ideology — and ideally both — could unify a party. Nothing and no one appears to be capable of taking on that task.

Grappo tells us that “the majority of Israelis … want to see their leadership work more cooperatively with Washington and Israel’s moderate neighbors to confront the true existential threat to the Jewish state, Iran.” This vague formulation may contain some truth, but, even in this traumatized nation that wants in its vast majority to achieve security by eliminating Hamas, this is a particularly difficult time to get any clear idea of what an identifiable majority of Israelis want. Yes, security is the absolute priority. But I doubt that any pollster could find a consensus on the practical means of achieving that.

The EU parliamentary elections, only days away, are likely to demonstrate a similar trend in Europe’s democracies. While governments struggle to find satisfactory responses to questions of war and failing economies, their electors increasingly judge their governments’ conduct unsatisfactory.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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Arsenal of Genocide: This Is What the US Is Supplying Israel

Medea Benjamin — Wed, 15 May 2024 13:24:40 +0000

On May 8, 2024, as Israel escalated its brutal assault on Rafah, US President Joe Biden that he had “paused” a delivery of 1,700 500-pound and 1,800 2,000-pound bombs to the country. Biden threatened to withhold more shipments if Israel went ahead with its full-scale invasion of Rafah.

The move elicited an from Israeli officials — National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir “Hamas ❤️Biden” — as well as , staunch anti-Palestinian and pro-Israel . Republicans immediately prepared a bill entitled the Israel Security Assistance Support to prohibit the administration from withholding military aid to Israel.

Many people have been asking the US to halt weapons to Israel for seven months, and of course, Biden’s move comes too late for Palestinians who have been killed in Gaza, mainly, as we will see, by American weapons.

Lest one think the administration is truly changing its position, two days after announcing the pause, the State Department released a convoluted saying that, although it is reasonable to “assess” that US weapons have been used by Israeli forces in Gaza in ways that are “inconsistent” with international humanitarian law, and although Israel has indeed delayed or had a negative effect on the delivery of aid to Gaza (which is illegal under US law), Israel’s assurances regarding humanitarian aid and compliance with international humanitarian law are “credible and reliable.”

By this absurd conclusion, the Biden administration has given itself the green light to keep sending weapons and Israel a flashing one to keep committing war crimes with them.

In any event, as Colonel Joe Bicino, a retired US artillery officer, the BBC, Israel can “level” Rafah with the weapons it already has. The paused shipment is “somewhat inconsequential,” Bicino said, “a little bit of a political play for people in the United States who are… concerned about this.” A US official likewise to The Washington Post that Israel has enough weapons already supplied by the US and other allies to go ahead with the Rafah operation if it chooses to ignore US qualms.

The paused shipment really has to be seen in the context of the arsenal with which the US has equipped its Middle Eastern proxy over many decades.

A deluge of American bombs

During World War II, the United States proudly called itself the “Arsenal of Democracy,” as its munitions factories and shipyards produced an endless supply of weapons to fight the genocidal government of Germany. Today, the United States is instead, shamefully, the Arsenal of Genocide, providing of the imported weapons Israel is using to obliterate Gaza and massacre its people.

As Israel assaults Rafah, home to displaced people including at least 600,000 children, most of the warplanes dropping bombs on them are F-16s, originally designed and manufactured by General Dynamics, but now produced by Lockheed Martin in Greenville, South Carolina. Israel’s 224 F-16s have long been its for bombing militants and civilians in Gaza, Lebanon and Syria.

Israel also 86 Boeing F-15s, which can drop heavier bombs, and 39 of the latest, most expensive fighter-bombers ever, Lockheed Martin’s nuclear-capable F-35s, with another 36 on order. The F-35 is built in Fort Worth, Texas, but components are manufactured all over the US and in allied countries, including Israel. Israel was the first country to attack other countries with F-35s, in violation of US arms export control laws, using them to bomb Syria, Egypt and Sudan.

As these fleets of US-made warplanes began bombing Gaza in October 2023, their major assault since 2008, the US began rushing in new weapons. By December 1, 2023, it had 15,000 bombs and 57,000 artillery shells.��

The US supplies Israel with all sizes and types of bombs, including 285-pound GBU-39 small diameter glide bombs, 500-pound Mk 82s, 2,000-pound Mk 84s and BLU-109 “bunker busters,” and even massive 5,000-pound GBU-28 bunker-busters, which Israel used in Gaza in 2009.

General Dynamics is the largest US bomb manufacturer, making all these models of bombs. Most of them can be used as “precision” guided bombs by attaching Raytheon and Lockheed Martin’s Paveway laser guidance system or Boeing’s JDAM (Joint Direct Attack Munitions) GPS-based targeting system.

Slightly more than of the bombs Israel has dropped on Gaza have been “precision” ones, because, as targeting officers explained to +972 Magazine, their Lavender AI system generates thousands of targets who are just suspected rank-and-file militants, not senior commanders. Israel does not consider it worth “wasting” expensive precision munitions to kill these people, so it uses only “dumb” bombs to kill them in their homes — obliterating their families and neighbors in the process.

In order to threaten and bomb its more distant neighbors, such as Iran, Israel depends on its seven Lockheed Martin KC-130H and seven Boeing 707 in-air refueling tankers, with four new, state-of-the-art Boeing KC46A tankers to be in late 2025 for over $220 million each.

Ground force weapons

Israel’s 48 Boeing Apache AH64 attack helicopters, armed with Lockheed Martin’s infamous Hellfire missiles, General Dynamics’ Hydra 70 rockets and Northrop Grumman’s 30 mm machine guns, are another weapon of choice for killing Palestinians. Israel also used its Apaches to kill a number of Israelis on October 7.

Israel’s main artillery weapons are its 600 Paladin M109A5 155 mm self-propelled howitzers, which are manufactured by BAE Systems in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. To the layman, a self-propelled howitzer looks like a tank, but it has a bigger, 155 mm gun to fire at longer range.

Israel assembles its 155 mm artillery shells from US-made components. One of the first two US arms that the administration notified Congress about after October 7 was to resupply Israel with artillery shell components valued at $147.5 million.

Israel also has 48 M270 multiple rocket launchers. They are a tracked version of the HIMARS rocket launchers the US has sent to Ukraine, and they fire the same rockets, made by Lockheed Martin. US Marines used the same in coordination with US airstrikes to devastate Mosul, the second largest city in Iraq, in 2017. M270 launchers are no longer in production, but BEA Systems still has the facilities to produce them.

Israel makes its own Merkava tanks, which fire US-made tank shells. The US State Department on December 9, 2023, that it had notified Congress of an “emergency” shipment of 14,000 120 mm tank shells worth $106 million to Israel.��

US shipments of artillery and tank shells, and dozens of smaller shipments that it did not report to Congress (because each shipment was carefully calibrated to fall below the statutory reporting limit of $100 million), were paid for out of the $3.8 billion in military aid that the United States gives Israel each year.

In April, Congress passed a new war-funding bill that about $14 billion for additional weapons. Israel could afford to pay for these weapons itself, but then it could shop around for them, which might erode the US monopoly on supplying so much of its war machine. That lucrative monopoly for US merchants of death is clearly more important to members of Congress than fully funding Head Start program for children in low-income families or other domestic anti-poverty programs, which they routinely underfund to pay for weapons and wars.

Israel has 500 FMC-built M113 armored personnel carriers and over 2,000 Humvees, manufactured by AM General in Mishawaka, Indiana. Its ground forces are armed with several different types of US grenade launchers, Browning machine guns, AR-15 assault rifles, and SR-25 and M24 SWS sniper rifles, all made in the USA, as is the ammunition for them.

For many years, Israel’s three Sa’ar 5 corvettes were its largest warships, about the size of frigates. They were built in the 1990s by Ingalls Shipbuilding in Pascagoula, Mississippi, but Israel has recently taken delivery of four larger, more heavily armed, German-built Sa’ar 6 corvettes, with 76 mm main guns and new surface-to-surface missiles.

Gaza encampments take on the merchants of death

The United States has a long and record of providing weapons to repressive regimes that use them to kill their own people or attack their neighbors. Martin Luther King called the US government “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world,” and that has not changed since he in 1967, a year to the day before his assassination.

Many of the huge US factories that produce all these weapons are the largest employers in their regions or even their . As President Dwight Eisenhower the public in his farewell address in 1960, “This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry” has led to “the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.”

So, in addition to demanding a ceasefire, an end to US military aid and weapons sales to Israel, and a restoration of humanitarian aid to Gaza, the students occupying college campuses across our country are right to on their institutions to divest from these merchants of death, as well as from Israeli companies.��

The corporate media has adopted the line that divestment would be too complicated and costly for the universities to do. But when students set up an encampment at in Dublin, in Ireland, and called on it to divest from Israeli companies, the college quickly agreed to their demands. Problem solved, without police violence or trying to muzzle free speech. Students have also won commitments to consider divestment from US institutions, including Brown, Northwestern, Evergreen State, Rutgers and the Universities of Minnesota and Wisconsin.

While decades of even deadlier US war-making in the greater Middle East failed to provoke a sustained mass protest movement, the genocide in Gaza has opened the eyes of many thousands of young people to the need to rise up against the US war machine.��

The gradual expulsion and emigration of Palestinians from their homeland has created a huge diaspora of young Palestinians who have played a leading role in organizing solidarity campaigns on college campuses through groups like for Justice in Palestine (SJP). Their close links with extended families in Palestine have given them a visceral grasp of the US role in this genocide and an authentic voice that is persuasive and inspiring to other young Americans.

Now it is up to Americans of all ages to follow our young leaders and demand not just an end to the genocide in Palestine, but also a path out of our country’s military madness and the clutches of its deeply entrenched military-industrial-congressional-intelligence-media-academia-think tank complex, which has inflicted so much death, pain and desolation on so many of our neighbors for so long, from Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan to Vietnam and Latin America.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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Young People Rise Up for the Climate in NYC

India Nye Wenner — Sun, 28 Apr 2024 10:21:44 +0000

On April 19, a rainbow deluge of over a thousand protesters marched across the Brooklyn Bridge, singing “The people are gonna rise like the water.” They carried flame-colored banners, omens of our scorching future. A mother in a helmet and leather jacket pushed her two young sons in a yellow wheelbarrow. The younger boy was no more than four years old.

(FFF), an international youth-led climate movement, organized a series of strikes across the country on April 19. They were in a fighting mood. A 17-year-old student who attends the Manhattan Center for Science and Mathematics told me that, if US President Joe Biden “wants us to show up to vote for him in the polls, he needs to take action.” A few paces away from her, another girl held a sign in the air like Neptune with his trident that said, “I didn’t vote for fires and floods.”

Coordinated demonstrations across the country

Four days earlier, I had spoken with Keanu Arpels-Josiah, a 19-year-old student at Little Red School House and Elisabeth Irwin High School. Keanu was one of the lead organizers of the march. He had told me that the strike was “part of a broader of 200 actions around the country.”

Keanu described the process of organizing people to show up to strike. “We have a network of different people who are school ambassadors, and a lot of it is just texting friends we know at other schools and seeing if they know someone who’d be interested in getting a group to go.” He told me that the central purpose of the marches and the strikes was to get Biden to declare a climate emergency.

Keanu told me, “This is a president who ran for president saying, ‘I will end fossil fuels.’ What we’ve seen him do is quite the opposite.”

Four days later, the marchers gathered in Foley Square in downtown New York City. They chanted, “Keep it in the ground, just keep it in the ground.” They were referring to fossil fuels, particularly oil.

Fighting for nature and for justice

Fittingly, Foley Square sits atop the grave of Collect Pond, a natural spring that the city smothered with pavement in the 1920s. Further beneath where Collect Pond used to gurgle a nearly 300-year-old African burial ground. Thousands of men, women and children rest beneath Foley Square.

The FFF protesters marched across the Brooklyn Bridge, stepping further and further into the cage of cables that holds the structure up. The bridge is an industrial caricature of a tree-canopy. When its construction was in 1883, the bridge became the longest suspension bridge ever built and was regarded as a miracle of modern engineering. Now, it has become a reminder of the fossil-fuel-guzzling industry that underpins the modern global economy.

“Love your mother,” one teenage girl’s sign read. She had drawn a water-colored earth on this square cardboard sign. She was alluding to Mother Earth, as Earth Day was soon to follow on April 22.

“When the climate is under attack, what do we do?” shouted one girl into a megaphone. “Stand up, fight back!” the crowd cried back with fervor. “When the air we breathe is under attack, what do we do?” “Stand up, fight back!” The slogans went beyond the environment. “When the Palestinians are under attack, what do we do?” “Stand up, fight back!”

“Climate justice is intersectional: Free Gaza,” said another sign in thick sharpie. Another woman held up a Palestinian flag above her like a torch. She was wearing an indigo backpack stamped with the words “” below a butterfly with wings like tapestries. To her right, a teenage boy clutched a rainbow sign with the words “queer climate justice.”

In front of me strode a short indigenous woman, wearing a straw hat and robed like a preacher in yellow and blue monarch butterfly wings. Her name was Gabina Santamaria. She was 50 years old and lived in Staten Island. “I hope our president hears us and does something for climate change,” she told me, “especially because I have kids.” “My kids’ futures…” she pleads. She wrapped me in her butterfly wings.

“I hear the voice of my great-granddaughter singing, ‘Climate Justice Now,’” the congregation of protestors chorused.I pulled aside the 17-year-old leading the song, and asked her why she was there. “I am worried. I’m not just worried for my children’s futures, I’m worried for my future. My future is getting destroyed by Biden’s actions.” I notice another sign, held in front of another young girl like a desperate soldier. “What future are you studying for?”

Indigenous leadership and a child’s concern

I observed some motifs in the outfits of the youth. Wide-leg jeans, colored sunglasses, copious amounts of peace signs — a style reminiscent of the student protests of the 1960s. The march stopped at Borough Hall, a Greek Revival edifice completed in 1848. With a backtrack of Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” the demonstrators assembled on and in front of the Tuckahoe marble stairs.

Borough Hall borders Columbus Park, anchored by a statue of the abolitionist orator Henry Ward Beecher and named for Christopher Columbus, trailblazer of the Americas and of indigenous lands. The indigenous women that led the line are battling the same displacement begun centuries ago by Columbus.��

One by one, numerous speakers up to the podium and delivered speeches. Lena Goings, a 16-year-old organizer with FFF,�� instructed the crowd to remember that the climate movement was started by indigenous leadership. Shirley Krenak, an indigenous activist from Brazil, attending with the Black and Indigenous Liberation , directed everyone to repeat after her. “When we speak the same language Mother Earth listens,” she proclaimed.��

She declared, “Today, you are my people.” We chanted in her tongue, bending down and up, down and up, and crooning soft hymns like mothers. Then she told us to scream. A guttural scream, like a war cry, rose out of the crowd as the people’s anger, betrayal and hope unified into one roar for change.

As the rally subsided, Joni Mitchell’s “Paved Paradise” bid us farewell: “They paved paradise, put up a parking lot.” A little boy, tiny in an orange puffer coat, stood next to his mother. They were part of . The six-year-old Jasper told me that he is scared for the planet. “What if climate companies don’t do anything about it?” he asked me in a quavering voice. “What if they don’t stop?”

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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Can Biden Clean Up Trump’s Iran Nuclear Deal Mess Now?

Bob Dreyfuss — Fri, 26 Apr 2024 09:28:18 +0000

One man, erratic and often unhinged, blew up the US–Iran accord that was the landmark foreign policy achievement of US President Barack Obama’s second term. He then ordered the assassination of a top Iranian general visiting Iraq, dramatically raising tensions in the region. The other man is a traditional advocate of American exceptionalism, a supporter of the US–Iran agreement who promised to restore it upon taking office, only to ham-handedly bungle the job, while placating Israel.

In November, of course, American voters get to choose which of the two they’d trust with handling ongoing explosive tensions with Tehran across a Middle East now in crisis. The war in Gaza has already intensified the danger of an Iran-Israel conflict — with the recent devastating Israeli on an Iranian consulate in Syria and the Iranian of drones and missiles dispatched against Israel only upping the odds. In addition, Iran’s “axis of resistance” — including Hamas, Lebanon’s Hezbollah, the Houthis in Yemen and militias in Iraq and Syria — has been challenging American hegemony throughout the Middle East, while drawing lethal US counterstrikes in Iraq, Syria and Yemen.

It was President Donald Trump, of course, who condemned the US–Iran agreement, known as the Joint Comprehensive of Action (JCPOA) while running in 2016. With his team of fervent anti-Iran hawks, including Secretary of State and National Security Advisor , he took a wrecking ball to relations with Iran. Six years ago, Trump withdrew the US from the JCPOA and, in what he called a campaign of “maximum pressure,” reinstituted, then redoubled political and economic sanctions against Tehran. Characteristically, he maintained a consistently belligerent policy toward the Islamic Republic, its very existence and warning that he could “” Iran.

Joe Biden had been a supporter of the accord, negotiated while he was Obama’s vice president. During his 2020 presidential campaign, he promised to rejoin it. In the end, though, he kept Trump’s onerous sanctions in place and months of negotiations went nowhere. While he put out to Tehran, crises erupting in 2022 and 2023, including the invasion of Israel by Hamas, placed huge obstacles in the way of tangible progress toward rebooting the JCPOA.

Worse yet, still reeling from the collapse of the 2015 agreement and ruled by a hardline government deeply suspicious of Washington, Iran is in no mood to trust another American diplomatic venture. In fact, during the earlier talks, it distinctly its hand, demanding far more than Biden could conceivably offer.

Meanwhile, Iran has accelerated its nuclear research and its potential production facilities, amassing large stockpiles of uranium that, as The Washington Post , “could be converted to weapons-grade fuel for at least three bombs in a time frame ranging from a few days to a few weeks.”

Trump’s anti-Iran jihad

While the US and Iran weren’t exactly at peace when Trump took office in January 2017, the JCPOA had at least created the foundation for what many hoped would be a new era in their relations.

Iran had to drastically limit the scale and scope of its uranium enrichment program, reduce the number of centrifuges it could operate, curtail its production of low-enriched uranium suitable for fueling a power plant and ship nearly all of its enriched uranium stockpile out of the country. It closed and disabled its Arak plutonium reactor while agreeing to a stringent regime in which the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) would monitor every aspect of its nuclear program.

In exchange, the US, the EU and the UN agreed to remove an array of economic sanctions, which, until then, had arguably made Iran the sanctioned country in the world.

Free of some of them, its economy began to recover, while its oil exports, its economic lifeblood, nearly . According to How Sanctions Work, a new from Stanford University Press, Iran absorbed a windfall of $11 billion in foreign investment, gained access to $55 billion in assets frozen in Western banks and saw its inflation rate fall from 45% to 8%.

But Trump acted forcefully to undermine it all. In October 2017, he “” Iran’s compliance with the accord, amid false charges that it had violated the agreement. (Both the EU and the IAEA agreed that it .)

Many observers feared that Trump was creating an environment in which Washington could launch an Iraq-style war of aggression. In a New York Times , Larry Wilkerson, chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell at the time of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, suggested that Trump was repeating the pattern of unproven allegations that President George W. Bush had relied on: “The Trump administration is using much the same playbook to create a false impression that war is the only way to address the threats posed by Iran.”

Finally, on May 8, 2018, Trump the JCPOA, and sanctions on Iran were back in place. Relentlessly, he and Secretary of the Treasury Steve Mnuchin piled on ever more of them in what they called a campaign of “.” The administration reactivated old sanctions were reactivated and added hundreds of new ones targeting Iran’s banking and oil industries, its shipping industry, its metal and petrochemical firms and, finally, its construction, mining, manufacturing and textile sectors. The administration also targeted countless individual officials and businessmen, along with dozens of companies worldwide that dealt, however tangentially, with Iran’s sanctioned firms.

It was, Mnuchin Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, “a maximum pressure campaign for sanctions … We will continue to ramp up, more, more, more.” At one point, in a gesture both meaningless and insulting, the Trump administration even sanctioned Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, a move moderate President Hassan Rouhani “outrageous and idiotic,” adding that Trump was “afflicted by mental retardation.”

Then, in 2019, Trump took the unprecedented of labeling the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), Iran’s chief military arm, a “foreign terrorist organization.” He put a violent exclamation point on that when he ordered the of Iran’s premier military leader, General , during his visit to Baghdad.

Administration officials made it clear that the goal was the regime and that they hoped the sanctions would provoke an uprising to overthrow the government. Iranians did, in fact, rise up in , including most recently 2023’s “” movement, partly thanks to tougher economic times due to the sanctions. The government’s response, however, was a brutal crackdown. Meanwhile, on the nuclear front, having painstakingly complied with the JCPOA until 2018, instead of being even more conciliatory, Iran its program, enriching far more uranium than was necessary to fuel a power plant. And militarily, it initiated a series of with US naval forces in the Persian Gulf, or foreign-operated oil tankers, a US drone in the Straits of Hormuz and launched drones meant to Saudi Arabia’s huge oil industry.

“The American withdrawal from the JCPOA and the severity of the sanctions that followed were seen by Iran as an attempt to break the back of the Islamic Republic or, worse, to completely destroy it,” , a veteran analyst at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and one of the authors of How Sanctions Work, told me. “So, they circled the wagons. Iran became far more securitized, and it handed more and more power to the IRGC and the security forces.”

Biden’s reign of (unforced) error

Having long supported a deal with Iran —�� in , as of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and, in , in a speech to Jewish leaders — Joe Biden Trump’s decision to quit the JCPOA a “self-inflicted disaster.” But on entering the Oval Office, Biden failed to simply rejoin it.

Instead, he let months go by, while in a quest to somehow improve it. Even though the JCPOA had been working quite well, the Biden team insisted it a “longer and stronger agreement” and that Iran first had to return to compliance with the agreement, even though it was the US that had pulled out of the deal.

Consider that an unforced error. “Early in 2021 there was one last chance to restore the agreement,” , an expert on Iran and executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, told me. “He could have just come back to the JCPOA by issuing an executive order, but he didn’t do anything for what turned out to be the ten most critical weeks.”

It was critical because the Iranian administration of President Rouhani and Foreign Minister Javad Zarif, responsible for negotiating the original accord, was expiring and new elections were scheduled for June 2021. “One of the major mistakes Biden made is that he delayed the nuclear talks into April,” Seyed Hossein Mousavian, Princeton University scholar and a former top Iranian official who was part of its nuclear negotiating team from 2005 to 2007. “This was a golden opportunity to negotiate with the Rouhani team, but he delayed until a month before the Iranian elections. He could have finished the deal by May.”

When the talks finally did resume in April — “gingerly,” to The New York Times — they were further complicated because, just days earlier, a covert Israeli operation had devastated one of Iran’s top nuclear research facilities with an enormous . Iran responded by pledging to take the purity of its enriched uranium from , which didn’t exactly help the talks, nor did Biden’s unwillingness to condemn Israel for a provocation clearly designed to wreck them.

That June, Iranians a new president, Ebrahim Raisi, a hardline cleric and militant supporter of the “axis of resistance.” He took office in August, spent months assembling his administration and appointed a new team to lead the nuclear talks. By July, according to American officials, those talks on a new version of the JCPOA had “near complete agreement,” only to fall apart when the Iranian side backed out.

It was also clear that the Biden administration didn’t prioritize the Iran talks, being less than eager to deal with bitter opposition from Israel and its allies on Capitol Hill. “Biden’s view was that he’d go along with reviving the JCPOA only if he felt it was absolutely necessary and to do it at the least political cost,” Parsi points out. “And it looked like he’d only do it if it were acceptable to Israel.”

Over the next two years, the US and Iran engaged in an unproductive series of negotiations that seemed to come tantalizingly close to an agreement only to stop short. By the summer of 2022, the nuclear talks once again appeared to be making progress, only to fail yet again.�� “After 15 months of intense, constructive negotiations in Vienna and countless interactions with the JCPOA participants and the US, I have concluded that the space for additional significant compromises has been exhausted,” Josep Borrell Fontelles, the foreign policy chief for the EU.

By the end of 2022, Biden declared the Iran deal “dead” and his chief negotiator insisted he wouldn’t “waste time” trying to revive it. As Mousavian told me, Iran’s crackdown on the Woman, Life, Freedom revolt in the wake of its “morality police” torturing and killing a young woman, , arrested on the streets of Tehran without a veil and increased concern about Iranian being delivered to Russia for its war in Ukraine soured Biden on even talking to Iran.

Nonetheless, in 2023, yet another round of talks — helped, perhaps, by a between the US and Iran, including an agreement to $6 billion in Iranian oil revenues – resulted in a tentative, informal accord that Iranian officials as a “political ceasefire.” to The Times of Israel, “the understandings would see Tehran pledge not to enrich uranium beyond its current level of 60 percent purity, to better cooperate with U.N. nuclear inspectors, to stop its proxy terror groups from attacking U.S. contractors in Iraq and Syria, to avoid providing Russia with ballistic missiles and to release three American-Iranians held in the Islamic Republic.”

But even that informal agreement was consigned to the dustbin of history after �Ჹ��’s October 7 doomed any rapprochement between the US and Iran.

The question remains: Could some version of the JCPOA be salvaged in 2025?

Certainly not if, as now seems increasingly possible, a shooting war breaks out involving the US, Iran and Israel, a catastrophic crisis with unforeseeable consequences. And certainly not if Trump is reelected, which would plunge the US and Iran deeper into their cold (if not a devastatingly hot) war.

What do the experts say? Against the possibility of a revived accord, according to Vali Nasr, Iran has concluded that Washington is an utterly untrustworthy negotiating partner whose word is worthless. “Iran has decided that there is no difference between Democrats and Republicans and they decided to escalate tensions further in order to gain what they hope is additional leverage ��-à-�� �²��󾱲Բ��ٴǲ�.”

“Biden’s intention was to revive the deal,” says Hossein Mousavian. “He did take some practical steps to do so and at least he tried to deescalate the situation.” Iran was, however, less willing to move forward because Biden insisted on maintaining the sanctions Trump had imposed.

The Quincy Institute’s Trita Parsi, however, catches the full pessimism of a moment in which Iran and Israel (backed remarkably fully by Washington) are at the edge of actual war. Given the rising tensions in the region, not to speak of actual clashes, he says gloomily, “The best that we can hope for is that nothing happens. There is no hope for anything more.”

And that’s where hope is today in a Middle East that seems to be heading for hell in a handbasket.

[ first published this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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Iran and Israel: In Conclusion, There’s No Conclusion

Peter Isackson — Wed, 17 Apr 2024 13:50:28 +0000

Iran’s retaliation for Israel’s murderous attack on its consulate in Damascus two weeks ago took the form of a swarm of more than 300 drones and missiles fired at Israel. Reports that possibly 99% of the weapons were intercepted before reaching their targets. Iran apparently designed the operation to avoid casualties. It nevertheless raised immediate fears of an imminent escalation that would turn the Gaza conflict into a regional war.

Iran sought to reassure the rest of the world by defining the entire exercise, not as an act of war, but as a calculated response to Israel’s provocation. Iran the following message to the United Nations.

In the statement posted on social media platform X, Iran’s UN mission argued that the attack was conducted under Article 51 of the UN Charter, which pertains to legitimate defense, and that the matter could be “deemed concluded.”

�մǻ岹��’s Weekly Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Deemed concluded:

Paid in full, in the interest of allowing life to carry on as usual, though in today’s Middle East a debt paid in full appears to have the curious characteristic of continuing to accrue interest.

Contextual note

The reigning equilibrium in the Middle East was already a murderous game in which Israel has conducted a wide range of isolated covert operations, including targeted assassinations of government officials and scientists. The events of April that began with the of the Iranian consulate in Damascus have changed the nature of that game. For the moment, the contest resembles a 19th-century duel rather than, say, a boxing match. But that may change in the coming days.

The world is now left to speculate nervously about Israel’s next move. Governments that most enthusiastically support Israel — notably the US and Germany — have already begun taking what appear to be serious steps to restrain Netanyahu’s right wing government from succumbing to the same spirit of vengeance against Iran that it so enthusiastically manifested against the population of Gaza following �Ჹ��’s assault on October 7.

In other words, Israel refuses to deem the game concluded. In contrast, the rest of the world appears ready to align with US President Joe Biden, who recommended to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu to “take the win” and get back to his principal business: completing his campaign of genocide.

There remains nevertheless a nagging problem. Even if Israel could decide to do something purely symbolic designed to avoid provoking a more lethal response from Iran, many informed observers, such as Al Jazeera’s senior political analyst Marwan Bishara, that Bibi’s goal — whether for personal or political reasons — is to provoke a regional war in which the US will become fatally involved. Bibi’s first concern is to remain at the helm and avoid being cast into prison as a common criminal.

Consequently, the world is on the brink and everyone’s nerves are on edge. Since all that is left to us at this point is creative speculation, let’s try to understand how the US might react if Israel does opt for serious provocation. We know Biden has his “ironclad” commitment to Israel’s defense. He has also insisted on his “devotion” to the Israeli cause. “Devotion” is a religious term that indicates faith in a superior power and submission to that power. That language alone should give us pause.

Hedging his bets, Biden has also refused to participate in any offensive move Israel may make against Iran. But this is potentially contradictory. Does his “ironclad” commitment to Israel’s defense leave him any room to wiggle out of a commitment to supporting Israel if effectively provokes a war with Iran?

Given the recent history of “forever wars” in the Middle East, many of us are left wondering whether this isn’t the sign of an addiction. The behavior of the US increasingly resembles that of an addict with a dealer. There are only two standard solutions to heroin addiction: a managed methodone treatment — relief without the kick — or what junkies call “cold turkey.” Biden’s problem is that turkey day in the US — Thanksgiving — will occur three weeks after this year’s presidential election in which he is hoping against hope to defeat his nemesis, Donald Trump.

Historical note

Most of the media have chosen to grace Iran’s assault with the epithet “unprecedented.” This is, after all, the first time in at least two millennia that Persians have attacked an independent Jewish nation. Something like this has not occurred since the geopolitical predecessor of the Persian Empire, Assyria, took the kingdom of Israel into all the way back in 732 BC.

Iran clearly designed its attack to appear as a forceful but essentially symbolic retaliation for the murder of two of its leading military commanders and eleven other people in Israel’s attack on its consulate in Damascus. Given the fact that Iran had neighboring countries some 72 hours in advance that its retaliatory strike in response to Israel’s April 1 attack was imminent, there was no legitimate reason to revert to the habit of calling it “unprovoked.” This had become the standard epithet used by the media and politicians to describe Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and �Ჹ��’s October 7 assault. Instead, everyone seemed to agree that “unprecedented” was a reasonable substitute that, like “unprovoked,” suggested the innocence of the victim.

House Majority Leader Steve Scalise nevertheless diverged from the consensus. He maintained what has now become the conditioned Pavlovian reflex of dismissing the facts of history as irrelevant. NPR his assertion that, “The House of Representatives stands strongly with Israel, and there must be consequences for this unprovoked attack.”

To any other than the obtusely ignorant, Iran’s attack was obviously not “unprovoked.” And yet, not only did Scalise use this term, NPR in its reporting neglected to highlight the absurdity of Scalise’s claim, which should be recognized as a clear case of disinformation. The media appears increasingly intent on proving its incapacity to notice the obvious and to comment on it.

An by Jeremy Scahill and Ryan Grim that appeared this week on The Intercept may help us to understand how today’s media can fail to notice or react to the obvious. The title of the article is: “LEAKED NYT GAZA MEMO TELLS JOURNALISTS TO AVOID WORDS “GENOCIDE,” “ETHNIC CLEANSING,” AND “OCCUPIED TERRITORY.”

The article confirms that The New York Times uses language not to inform, but to create a system of belief for its readers. That means cultivating their readers’ indifference to how language is used. This may seem odd in an era in which everyone seems obsessed with rooting out “disinformation.”

Mainstream media now identifies with the mission of “fact-checking.” If the facts cited in an article are verifiable, the article is deemed trustworthy. But for NYT some facts are better not mentioned. In January, the International Court of Justice deemed plausible case the description of Israel’s behavior in Gaza as genocide. That does not mean genocide is a fact. But it does mean that the accusation of genocide by South Africa and others is a fact not contradicted by any other facts. But NYT has identified some facts as too inconvenient to be “fit for print.” Such facts might have the disturbing characteristic of inciting people to think critically about the events the paper reports.

After citing Scalise, NPR sees no reason to critique this obviously false claim. In the website’s defense, it is sticking to the facts by simply quoting what Scalise actually said. It might, however, have noted that what he says is not factual. The second reason is that American politicians and the media have been conditioned to call any aggressive action by a party considered to be an adversary “unprovoked.”

This is all part of a “moral system” shared in the West. Evil people (e.g., Russians, Iranians, Hamas) exist to commit evil acts. Good people are incapable of provoking those evil acts. Consequently, whenever an evil act occurs, by definition it must be unprovoked.

NPR’s article concludes by quoting a series of quotes by legislators insisting on the importance of providing financial support to the victims of all the unprovoked evil acts by parties identified as evil enemies. In such circumstances, no conflict will ever be deemed concluded, until we achieve the total annihilation of those who provoke without ever being provoked. That helps to explain why negotiation will always be rejected as an inadequate and inappropriate solution.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post Iran and Israel: In Conclusion, There’s No Conclusion appeared first on 51�Թ�.

My “Children” Say They Won’t Vote for Biden

Rebecca Gordon — Tue, 02 Apr 2024 08:53:47 +0000

Recently, my partner and I had brunch with some old comrades, folks I first met in the 1996 fight to stop the state of California from outlawing affirmative action. Sadly, we lost that one and, almost three decades later, we continue to lose affirmative action programs to a Supreme Court rearranged or, more accurately, deranged by one Donald J. Trump.

It was pure joy to hang out with them and remember that political struggle during which, as my partner and I like to say, we taught a generation of young people to ask, “Can you kick in a dollar to help with the campaign?” For a couple of old white lesbians who, in the words of a beloved Catherine Koetter poster, “ to have children,” those still-committed organizers and activists are the closest thing to offspring we’ve got. And their kids, including one now in college, who were willing to hang out with their parents’ old buddies, are the closest we’ll ever have to grandchildren.

As people whose lives have long been tangled up in politics will do, we soon started talking about the state of the world: the wars in Ukraine, Gaza, and Sudan, the pain on this country’s border with Mexico, and of course the looming 2024 election campaign. It was then that the college student told us he wouldn’t be voting for Joe Biden — and that none of his friends would either. The president’s initial support of, and later far too-tepid objections to, the genocidal horror transpiring in Gaza were simply too much for him. That Biden has managed to use his executive powers to cancel in student debt didn’t outweigh the repugnance he and his friends feel for the president’s largely unquestioning support of Israel’s destruction of that 25-mile strip of land on the Mediterranean Sea. To vote for Biden would be like taking a knife to his conscience. And I do understand.

Vote your conscience?

This year, I wonder whether only people who live in California and other dependably “blue” states can afford that kind of conscience. I’m not objecting to voting “uncommitted” in a Democratic Party primary as so many citizens of and have done. If I lived in one of those states, I’d have done the same. In fact, I didn’t vote for Biden in Super Tuesday’s California primary either and, in truth, I wouldn’t even have to vote for him in November, because in this state my vote isn’t needed to ensure his victory, which is essentially guaranteed. But God save the world if voters in Arizona, Nevada, Pennsylvania, or other swing states follow that example.

I’m less sure, however, what I’d do if, like thousands of Arab-American voters in Michigan, I had friends and family in Gaza, the West Bank, or indeed among the millions of Palestinian refugees living in Lebanon or Jordan. Would I be able to mark my ballot for Joe? And if I wouldn’t, then how could I ask anyone else to do so?

In the end I would have to vote for him because, however terrible for that part of the world another four years of the Biden administration might be, a second Trump presidency would be even worse. (Trump’s recent about Gaza aimed at Israeli forces ��ǳܱ��’t have been blunter: “You’ve got to finish the problem.”) At least, unlike Trump, Biden isn’t beholden to the of the evangelical right, who long to gather all the world’s Jews into the state of Israel, as a precondition for the return to Earth of Jesus Christ. (The fate of those Jews afterward is, of course, of little concern to those “Christians.”)

What we’ve seen already

At an educators’ conference I attended last month, a panelist discussing what Trump’s re-election would mean for those of us in the teaching profession inadvertently referred to his “first term.” Another panelist gently reminded her that the period from 2017 to 2021 had, in fact, been Trump’s only term and that we need to keep it that way. In preparation for this article, I looked back at some of my writings during that first (and God willing, only) term of his, to remind myself just how bad it was. I was surprised to find that I’d almost 30 pieces then about living in Trumpland.

There’s so much to remember about the first Trump term, and so much I’d forgotten. And that’s hardly surprising, given the speed with which, then as now, one unspeakable and previously unimaginable Trumpian horror follows the next. There’s simply no way to keep up. Here’s what I , for instance, about living in Trumpworld in 2018:

“There’s speed and then there’s Trump speed: the dizzying, careening way that the president drives the car of state. Just when we’ve started to adjust to one outrage — say, the ripping of migrant children from their mothers’ arms (a procedure that to this day, despite court prohibition) — here comes another down the track. This time it’s the construction in Texas of a to house immigrant children. No, wait. That was the last lap. Now, it’s the mustering of almost 6,000 troops on the border, to use lethal force ‘if they have to’ against people desperately fleeing in their own countries.”

And he’s still at it. Not satisfied with labeling migrants as the moment he came down that infamous escalator to enter the presidential campaign in 2015, he’s now them to Hannibal Lecter, the fictional murderer and cannibal in Silence of the Lambs, that horror film about a serial killer who skins his female victims.

Certain of Trump’s greatest hits do still linger in the collective American consciousness. Who could forget his pronouncement that “some fine people on both sides” attended the 2017 Unite the Right march in Charlottesville, Virginia, where counter-protester Heather Heyer was murdered when a white supremacist drove his car into her? (We’re less likely to remember that other moment a couple of years later when the president , while hailing Confederate leader Robert E. Lee as “a great general,” by explaining that he still stood by his “very fine people” statement.)

Then there was the suggestion made in one of his daily press briefings during the Covid pandemic that, in addition to taking the anti-malarial drug chloroquine with no proven for Covid, sufferers might want to consider injecting into their bodies since it did such a good job of killing the virus on hard surfaces.

You’ve probably forgotten, as I had, that back in the days when he was still a first-time candidate, he was already advocating the commission of genuine war crimes. As I in 2016:

He declared himself ready to truly hit the Islamic State where it hurts. “The other thing with the terrorists,” he Fox News, “is you have to take out their families, when you get these terrorists, you have to take out their families. They care about their lives, don’t kid yourself. When they say they don’t care about their lives, you have to take out their families.” Because it’s a well-known fact — in Trumpland at least — that nothing makes people less likely to behave violently than murdering their parents and children. And it certainly doesn’t matter, when Trump advocates it, that murder is a crime.

For me, however, some of Trump’s worst crimes were epistemological ones — crimes, that is, against knowledge. By subjecting us all to a , he undermined people’s belief that we can ever know if anything is true. You don’t like things the way you find them? Well, in the of Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s former campaign manager and senior counselor as president, just turn to “alternative facts.” The intentional distortion of reality is a classic authoritarian trick, designed to convince masses of people that, as Hannah Arendt wrote , nothing is true and everything is possible.

Worse than déjà vu

“Déjà vu” is French for “already seen” and it describes that sense of experiencing something all over again. We indeed already saw and heard too much that was unnerving, not to say frightening, during the four years of Trump’s presidency. The only thing that kept him from doing even more harm was his chaotic and lazy way of working. His attention span was notoriously short, and he could be easily distracted by any shiny object. Much of his daily schedule was to “executive time,” an apparent euphemism for watching cable TV and responding on Twitter to whatever he saw there.

A second Trump term would be very different if the forces gathering around him have anything to say about it. Carlos Lozada of The New York Times has by reading and digesting all 887 pages of the plan the Heritage Foundation has produced for the next Republican presidency, Mandate for Leadership. That document details the step-by-step process necessary to transform the presidency into something resembling a monarchy, where vestigial versions of the legislative and judicial branches would serve the agenda of a , led by an autocratic president and backed by the US military. Given that someone else has done all the work to make him a king, Trump is very likely to adopt some version of that foundation’s plan. As Lozada explains:

“There is plenty here that one would expect from a contemporary conservative agenda: calls for lower corporate taxes and against abortion rights; criticism of diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives and the ‘climate fanaticism’ of the Biden administration; and plans to militarize the southern border and target the ‘administrative state,’ which is depicted here as a powerful and unmanageable federal bureaucracy bent on left-wing social engineering.”

The Mandate calls for infusing all aspects of government, including its scientific functions, with “biblical” values and, from the military to the Environmental Protection Agency, excluding any taint of diversity, equity, or inclusion. More disturbing yet is its commitment to consolidating power in the hands of a single executive, or ruler, if you like. Those planners aren’t small-government conservatives like anti-tax activist Grover Norquist who , “I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.”

Yes, the Heritage program includes inevitable tax cuts for the wealthy and the like, but, as Lozada observes, “The main conservative promise here is to wield the state as a tool for concentrating power and entrenching ideology.”

If Mandate for Leadership is the theory, then the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 is the practice. As The New York Times reports, it’s “a presidential transition operation that is preparing policies, personnel lists and transition plans to recommend to any Republican who may win the 2024 election.” Its success depends in large part on replacing tens of thousands of federal civil servants with political appointees loyal to the president. Donald Trump tried this late in his presidency, when he used an to institute a new “schedule” or list of appointees to the civil service, exempting all “career positions in the Federal service of a confidential, policy-determining, policy-making, or policy-advocating character” from competitive hiring. Immediately rescinded by President Biden, this “Schedule F” would be reinstated under Project 2025, allowing Trump to replace up to 50,000 career civil servants with his own faithful minions committed to his — or rather Heritage’s — program. (Trump himself doesn’t actually care about “entrenching ideology,” although he’s definitely a fan of “concentrating power” in his own hands.)

But, but Biden?

The news from Gaza seems to grow more dire by the day. Even so, I’ve concluded that we can’t afford to use a vote for Trump, or a refusal to vote for anyone, as a way to punish Joe Biden. His toleration of genocide is unforgiveable; his atavistic American instinct to offer a military response to any challenge is more of the arrogant Cold-War-era stance that was so much a part of his earlier political life. Witness, for example, how his use of missiles to “send a message” to the Houthis in Yemen is only driving them to attack more ships in the Red Sea. (Meanwhile, enemies that can’t be bombed into submission like climate change and drought have daily traffic by nearly 40% in an even more important international waterway, the Panama Canal.)

Nor has the United States under Biden stepped back from its general role as the “indispensable” arbiter of events in the Americas, or indeed in any of the or more countries where it continues to have a military presence. I hold no brief for an imperial United States under Biden or anyone else. Nevertheless, I do believe that the world can’t afford another presidency by the man who suggests that he will a day-one “dictatorship” in order to “drill, drill, drill.”

Remember, this is the guy who, the last time around, pulled the United States out of the Paris climate accords. Now, the world has just lived through the February on record (something that’s been true of every month since May 2023!), one in which wildfires raged not only in the , where it is, after all, summer, but in , burning well more than a million acres there.

This is the man who cheered on the government of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, as it presided over murderous on the Amazon. This is the man who is still cheering as his Republican Party its support for Ukraine in favor of Vladimir Putin’s Russia. This is the man who called for the of his opponent in 2016, and exacerbated relations with Iran (with reverberations felt to this day) by ordering the of Iranian general Qasem Soleimani.

This is the man who, while he fails to understand how NATO actually works, has that the United States will not come to the defense of “delinquent” member nations, but instead “would encourage [the Russians] to do whatever the hell they want” to such countries.

Oh, and lest we forget, this is the man who tried once before to end American democracy. It would be true madness to give him a second chance.

[ first published this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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The Red Wrath of MAGA

John Elliott — Mon, 25 Mar 2024 19:07:39 +0000

The post The Red Wrath of MAGA appeared first on 51�Թ�.

Joe Biden - 51�Թ�

FO° Talks: From MAGA to Gaza — How Trump Changed US–Israel Relations Forever

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A troubling future for US–Israel relations

The Foreign Policy Game: Cruz Talks, Carlson Scores

In the game:

Contextual note

Historical note

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Europe’s Reckoning: Genocide in Plain Sight, Diplomacy in Disguise

Legitimate request:

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Does the US Really Want to Annex the Vatican?

American pope:

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Gray Ladies, Yellow Journalism and the Hidden Truth of Ukraine

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Outside the Box: AI Is Not of Our World

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Your thoughts

Trump Turns in His Chessboard for a Deck of Cards

Cards to play:

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Outside the Box: AI’s Honest Take on Europe’s Ambiguity, Part 2

Final Thoughts: Can Europe Chart a Different Course?

Some lessons about ChatGPT raised by this dialogue

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Is This the Beginning or the End of a New Cold War?

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The dissolution of European peacemaking

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A chance for change

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Lucifer, The New York Times and a Debrief on 2024

Investigation:

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Everyone (Sort of) Loves a Disrupter

Burning bridges with China

Back to the wall

Remapping the Middle East

Looking ahead (or do I mean behind?)

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Israel’s Wars Repeat the 1980s on Steroids

Biden failed where Reagan succeeded

Historic destruction may only increase

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For the US in Syria, Is It About Principle or Interest?

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Requiem for an Empire: How America’s Strongman Will Hasten the Decline of US Global Power

Making the original prediction

The global rise of the strongman

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US allies

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A silent US recessional

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